Currently in Beta something, due the 24th of August, or 2nd of February if it needs to be pushed back.
If you're a fan of 4x games, and Stardock games like GalCiv, you should be checking this out.
It's another 4x from Stardock set in a high-fantasy world. You play a powerful sorcerer that aims to build a kingdom and conquer the land.
There's so much to this game that calling it a 4x doesn't really scratch the surface. It's a 4x game, with all the trappings Stardock normally does like research and city building, diplomacy....meets Heroes of Might and Magic, with heroes and NPCs that do your bidding, meets a God game, where you can alter terrain, cast spells that affect entire regions ect.
On top of all that, you'll be able to customize your sovereign at game start, found dynasties and marry your children off to create alliances...or have them serve in your kingdom, customize every detail of military units, dungeons...*catches a breath* and more.
And the best part...FULL MOD support.They've already demoed their map maker and it's drool worthy. You'll be able to create custom tiles, animations, custom spells, tech trees, races, and again, more.
Visually, I love this game. It's got a very old skool D&D feel to it. When you zoom the map all the way out, it turns into a 2d cloth map with chess pieces representing players. It's inspired by Magic the Gathering too. I remember when I started MtG, I envisioned two wizards standing on hills facing each other across an open plain. When they played cards like land, it changed the world around them as they fought.
It's like Stardock reached into my head and pulled that image out and made a game of it.
chmod said:
I don't want to live in a world where there are no consequences for being stupid. A few thousand years ago these users would have been eaten by lions.
Stardock has to be the best game company nobody has ever heard of. GalCiv, Sins of a Solar Empire (producer), and this one sounds fantastic. I'll definitely pick it up. These guys do some quality work.
I like how openly critical Wardell is of his own games. If you went into their forums spewing your worst complaints about GalCiv or SoSE, he'd probably be the first to agree with many of them. Three weeks out from release, and he's still saying stuff like "Spells are BORING. They need to be more interesting."
Pretty gutsy, but you gotta admire that kind of transparency in the dev process. Of course, having read some of the spells, they are boring, and standard. But he's gotten my money just by keeping me interested and informed through the course of development. Compare that to, like, what Blizzard says about Diablo 3, and the worst comment they'll make on their own game "it's an iteration we decided not to go with" or some such dissembling answer.
I dunno about their publishing deal though, Elemental looks and feel pretty generic in that regard. Not sure I'd pay money to read the novelization of a video game.
Most interesting thing from those videos I didn't already know: roaming monster spawns behave dynamically. They preferentially avoid hanging out within a kingdom's territory. The result is that as the world gets more populated, monsters get concentrated in number as they are driven into unexplored and unclaimed territories.
Well, after having played MoM (and MoO) since damned near the beginning of time, and watching the genre degrade into a "RTS" hybrid, this gives me so much joy it is hard to convey. If I had known about the open Beta, I would have pre-ordered months ago.
Here's to hoping it doesn't suck, like MoO3 did. I know Stardock generally puts out a quality game, but even good studios can flop. JINX!
Well, after having played MoM (and MoO) since damned near the beginning of time, and watching the genre degrade into a "RTS" hybrid, this gives me so much joy it is hard to convey. If I had known about the open Beta, I would have pre-ordered months ago.
Here's to hoping it doesn't suck, like MoO3 did. I know Stardock generally puts out a quality game, but even good studios can flop. JINX!
They really dedicate themselves to fixing things that don't work well and with previous experience on GalCiv I expect a great game out of this one.
The mod tools look incredible. I hope the community is large enough to grow some really great mods and total conversions.
Stardock's formula for strategy RPG games has remained largely the same for a long time. Mostly their games turn out to be sand boxy, and the difficulty you set for yourself determines how quickly you get sick of them. So I'm pretty confident I know what to expect out of the game, and it should be fairly good.
My only complaints with some Stardock games, and the model overall, is that cities are really a dime dozen. There's nothing that stops them from all mostly looking the same and having the same important features even when you try to specialize them. Units also tend to be really bland in these kinds of games (MoM, Heroes of Might and Magic, Gal Civ...), and Gal Civ had some really, really boring ship mechanics.
Taken as a whole, the games are satisfying, but the mechanics of individual parts can end up feeling shallow in a macroview, when you've conquered half the galaxy/land and stop to reflect if you actually need another city/unit/victory...or whether you've essentially been beating a dead horse for the last 300 turns.
So I hope those aspects get punched up in Elemental, and some appear to be. At least units seem to have some real depth, but we'll see. What will ultimately make or break this game for me is the quality of the magic system. I want some real variety in spells and effects. Too many people pay lip service to magic as a gameplay item, and then relegate it to Fireballs and "Protection from XXXX". At least I know making volcanoes is in.
They're going to take some flak for this one. About 2 hours in and well...there's a lot of polish missing for a $50 game. No tutorial to speak of, so while they ease you into game, nothing is explained and that's adding to feeling like this was rushed out.
Of course, you're buying into long-term support with Elemental, and lord knows they have a lot of work to do, so your disappointments may vary. That said, I find the setting to be very bland, the UI to be fugly with that pastel obsession (knew those going in) the writing to be noticeable bad (read as: first attempt at fantasy) and the game play to be pretty awkwardly delivered. There's some cool stuff going on, and the campaign dolls out the game play very slowly, so I'm holding off. But you can tell they're new at a lot of this, despite having a lot of elements from games they've made that they're familiar with.
I guess I was expecting a little more polish than this though...and boy, are they going to take some **** for going with an earlier release date given how unpolished the game is coming across as. I could have waited another 6 months for them to really address some of the issues I'm seeing. Magic is looking downright boring and stereotypical, like an after thought. Pretty big problem considering the name of the game, despite the fact you can make volcanoes, or something.
And I find myself pretty annoyed by how in love they are with the game itself, and the book deal and stuff, considering the core game has some really glaring issues, and more than a few features have been pushed out of the release into "later." I think they really should have had a nice extended open beta, because I think your average gamer would have pointed all this out to them. Fan input is great. Only getting fan input means you're not getting all the criticism you need.
Haven't picked it up yet. No time. But I've been checking in on it. It looks like they've already pushed through a ton of fixes and more are on the way. Stardock always has great support for their products. I can't wait until I have some time off.
Here's my review I put up on their forum, with all the "in the next six months" stuff taken out.
Nenjin said:
Overall: Mechanically and technically, the game shows a lot of promise, and is a solid base on which to build a truly epic game. It doesn't deliver on several key selling points however, or under delivers. Thematically, I don't enjoy Elemental but I guess that's to taste.
Campaign: Since I'm not a fan of the story or the writing per se, the campaign was pretty underwhelming for me. I don't consider it what people should play first if they want an accurate representation of the game's depth. The new tutorial hints and such are helping it feel more fleshed out, but for a game that thrives on choices, randomness and control, the campaign offers none of these. It really only delivers the story, which again, you may or may not care about. It feels like a first-time attempt at an RTS campaign, and coupled with some other problems, results in a pretty bad presentation. That's about all I have to say on it, lest it get too nit picky and negative. I will only say that after playing the campaign for 4 hours, I was pretty disappointed and fearing the worst. Luckily the sandbox is much better.
Sandbox: Overall, the sandbox has delivered an epic game experience because the maps are huge, there is a lot of stuff to do, and the pacing feels about right. There are lots of choices to make, things to explore and the monsters add a lot of dynamism to your turn-by-turn decisions.
On specific features
AI: I'll start here because I have the least exposure to it. On a normal game, the AI has been passive except for one repeatedly approaching me for treaties. (Shouldn't he take a hint at some point, or like me less because I rebuff him?) The AI has almost managed to kill off one player, who I've not seen because they're on the other side of the world. In comparison to my forces, the one AI I do see isn't intelligently building units or building armies strong enough to stop me. Nothing else much to say, other than it seems semi-random whether the monster AI chooses to attack you or not. They do seem to have a preference for caravans though.
Magic: This is where I'm afraid I'm going to get pretty negative. The magic in Elemental sucks, there's just no two ways about it. What should have been a focus in development feels like an after thought, from how spells are named, to how they're presented, to what they do, to what the core of the system actually is. After 6 hours of a sandbox game, I've yet to see the spells that supposedly make this game awesome. No volcanoes, no storms, no earthquakes, not even especially impressive summons..and I started 1.01 as as summoner.
There are handfuls of exceedingly generic spells, and having spell damage range be almost 100% means you often plink guys for damage one round, then explode them for max damage the next. Neither tactical nor strategy spells really have any oomph. Strategy spells are especially underwhelming. There's no creativity in them, they don't scale in power compared to what you start with, and they don't even have visual effects. How much of this is still in the pipeline, and how much has been completely overlooked, I don't know. Read down if you want constructive criticism on magic. But I had to get this off my chest. Do not release a game with Magic in the title then under deliver on it like this.
City mechanics: Overall I'm pleased here. Elemental still does not get away from "all cities tend to be a like", but the process of building cities and watching them grow is enjoyable, and all the mechanics and strategies that revolve around cities works. What I don't like is the Food Mechanic. Available fertile land dictates city placement way too heavily, as it's hard to grow a city in decent order without it. I like that I don't have to worry about starving populations, and that recruiting for my military seems to have a negligible impact on my population....but since it all ties back to the rate of city growth, and city growth is so important...I feel like Food needs another role than just how many homes you can build, or whether you have the 1 food available to build a trade center or something. Going back to magic, it doesn't provide (at least that I saw) much way to compensate for what you lack in the environment. I've seen the +1 food, +1 materials enchants, but little else...and again, I STARTED as an enchanter.
Tactical battles: They're about standard for 4x fantasy game tactical battles, now that some patches have gone in. I won't comment on the actual combat mechanics, since those seem to be in a great deal of flux. I don't have much to really say about tactical battles, since how fun it is is driven by a lot of other things...but since magic and some units are underwhelming, tactical battles have the tendency to feel that way too. It would be nice if terrain was more important, and more random. Also I have units that sometimes start the battle in the middle of the field, way ahead of my army, for no earthly reason.
Unit customization and gear: This is an especially good part of the game. Building units and equipping them and champions adds a lot of depth. Equipment however feels overemphasized in terms of effectiivess. Levels don't mean squat without the gear to back it up, for both heroes and regular troops. I have suggestions below. Overall, this is a great start, but equipment DOES lack quite a bit of content once you've played a single game. With only 4 sets of armor, a handful of weapon types with 1 to 2 levels of quality, and only a few trade offs between them, it's more of a sliding power scale than a real tactical choice.It's cool that I can have shirtless berzerkers with axes and Stones of Rage...but they'll never be "good."
Items: As I said above, it's a good start. I love that I can make troops with magic items. But like a lot of this game, there needs to be more, and more thoughtfully designed items. Suggestions below.
Champions: As people have mentioned around the forum, heroes have a lot of short comings. Even if I have them in every single battle I fight, without the right equipment, they're no better than high HP peasants. If I give them equipment, they're all "Fighters" of a generic sort. If they're not spellcasters, they aren't army leaders, in my book, since a 3x3 nuke in tactical battles is pretty much a winner. And those without combat special abilities at least seem especially worthless, the true baseline, uninteresting fighter. I have suggestions below
UI: I have to hate again a little. I'm not a fan of Elemental's windows or UI. The color scheme is god awful in my eyes, I don't find pastels to be an engaging or evocative set of colors. So much has been packed into that bottom tool bar as well that it's overloaded. More suggestions below, but is it possible to get away from the peaches, the mauves, the baby blues and the limes? When I see pastel, I think bland, inoffensive, somewhat childish. When half your game is that color, half your game gives that impression. The font in quest windows seems thrown in there, as well.
Bottomline
A good start. I feel you guys jumped the gun on release though, and I say that as an avid gamer who can't wait to get their hands on stuff. I avoided participating in beta because I wanted to experience Elemental as a polished product...and I feel like I'm getting the beta experience none the less. In the future, I suggest Stardock reigns in their own excitement with their title, and seeks non-fan, non-beta tester feedback before they launch. As an indie developer, I thought the benefit was control over the release process, but Elemental's initial offering really seems like someone was breathing down your necks for a release. And for the truly hardcore Stardock fans, answering that modding will solve all of this, that's not a response that works for anyone but die-hard fans.
Having played GalCiv 2, I feel like I know what to expect from the future of Elemental, and I hope continued support from Stardock takes the game up the several notches it's capable of, from average, troubled 4x game with great concepts to great 4x game with fully realized concepts. Given the amount of thread nuking of late around here, I hope these criticisms are ones you'll leave stand.
Maybe it's the fact everyone is dumping on Brad's fiction so hard, but that's a pretty ugly response from the head of a dev house to randominternetassholeposter#59.
I have to side with the developers. People have far too much sense of entitlement. It's not their fault that Blizzard has the ability to put out a "Beta" that is essentially a finished game with a year of polish. The game will get to where it needs to be. But it can't be held back forever. They have a budget to stick to.
Oh, and here's this little tidbit. Seems the media is playing a little loose with the facts.
There was an article posted earlier today on PC Gamer UK outlining some of the frustrations that the reviewer had with the pre-day 0 version of the game as well as a problem he was having with tactical battles.
In the article, he quoted an inflammatory forum posting I made on a site I participate in called Quarter to Three. This is a site I’ve been a participant in for many years and many of the people I discuss things on there are personal friends of mine.
During one such exchange with my friend Ben Sones, I angrily responded with a statement “Ben, please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”
This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel. Ben’s a friend of mine and his comment that the game felt like a “beta” to him upset me and I responded inappropriately. I post a lot on many forums and unfortunately, sometimes the things I say are inappropriate or inflammatory.
As the CEO of Stardock, I want to be clear that my comments on the Quarter to Three forums do not reflect my team at large. They were words spoken out of frustration and sleep deprivation and I am truly sorry. We stand behind what we feel is a great product, one that we will continue to support for a number of years.
With regards to a post on Rock Paper Shot Gun, which picked up the PC Gamer UK story, they erroneously point to a 2+ year old URL to a Stardock news item that is no longer active (we switched news systems a year or so ago). Their article falsely implies that we have stepped away from our commitment to the Gamer’s Bill of Rights.
The site, www.gamersbillofrights.org was set up and is run by Stardock. We stand by it. It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is.
However, it also became clear that the pre-day 0 version of the game was problematic as outlined in the PC Gamer UK article. The official day 0 version of the game, what is available right now, should address most, if not all the issues that have been described. That said, as is our long-standing policy, we will continue to release updates and improvements Elemental just as we do for the other titles we develop.
I anticipate us putting out regular updates for Elemental for months or years to come based on player feedback, suggestions, and yes, bug reports.
I hope this offers some explanation as to the events that have come up. I sincerely apologize and feel terrible for the effect my forum posting on Qt3 may have had not just on our fans but also my team that has worked incredibly hard over the past 3 years to produce what we hope, is a game that you will enjoy for years to come.
Yeah, I dunno what is up with the gaming media, but they seriously seem like they have it in for Stardock. PCGamer officially warning gamers not to buy the game because it's not finished? That's about as far out there as you can get in the gaming media. But Stardock has no real clout. They're not EA and can't threaten to pull support or anything.
Plus Brad kind of has a big mouth when it comes to his gaming principles, and I think the media was more than happy to try and take him down a peg.
Still, Brad listed two possible release dates. The one we got, and February 2011 (iirc.) He chose the prior. Why he chose that date, we can only speculate (everyone guesses that they didn't want to compete with Civ5), but based on the state of the game, he must have "my work is so ****ing awesome" goggles on, because it was not polished. Maybe he was counting on Stardock's rep for releasing games in a soso state and fixing them later to soften the blow. But all the signs point to him believing Elemental to be their magnum opus (christ, he used it as a chance to foist his own fantasy novel on people).
If I were doing my magnum opus, you bet I'd take every last minute I needed to make sure I was presenting it right. They had control over the release date. They had the chance to say "not ready, trust us the wait will be worth it." But they didn't. Beta testers were kissing their ass while Stardock was adding features right up until the last phase of beta. Magic didn't even go in until midway through the process.
They own all the criticism they're getting, because they had all the power (and apparently the time) to do it differently. The only thing I'm kicking myself for is not being there for a prior Stardock release, so I could have known what to expect. Because I was honestly shocked at the lack of polish when I played it, and absolutely ****ing dumbfounded at how trite and boring magic was. Holy ****, if nothing else should earn them some criticism, that should.
Yea, I've had a chance to play maybe a half hour but, even with that, man is it a let down. I honestly expected more from Stardock so this release is a bit shocking.
I've found the goodness in the sandbox game, once it gets rolling.
But stay far, far away from the campaign. It's unfun for the most part, and rather embarrassing when you consider someone thought it was good.
It's almost like half of this game was someone going "So this works right?" and others going "Oh yeah, it's fantastic boss! (I don't want to be unemployed.)"
Off-topic, but does anyone know how to get Impulse to quit setting itself to run on start up once I launch it? I've already told it to **** off in the settings.
The expectation that one is to receive a usable product after paying an expensive fee is considered "entitlement?" Are we naught but donors now?
It is usuable. People were mostly complaining about a pre-day 0 build of it (or stuff that Stardock has specifically said sucks right now but they're working on it). Stardock released the game earlier than the release date so online customers wouldn't be shafted because the retail stores sold it early. And people are complaining it's not up to speed? Considering how shitty some of the triple A titles are out of the box I just don't understand the level of complaints. The Total War series has been getting worse and worse out of the box every new release. I got all of a few days out of Empire before I put it down while waiting for mods to come out. Of course Creative Assembly never released the mod tools so they pretty much ruined that one.
I'm about 7 hours into the game and finally think I have a handle on the gameplay. About the only thing I haven't seen so far is marrying off one of my offspring to see the diplomatic effects. Soon, though! One of my 4 daughters has to be getting close to "of age" -- I can't find a way to check, though.
Off-topic, but does anyone know how to get Impulse to quit setting itself to run on start up once I launch it? I've already told it to **** off in the settings.
I would think you could look in msconfig and turn off whatever is running on startup.
I'm about 7 hours into the game and finally think I have a handle on the gameplay. About the only thing I haven't seen so far is marrying off one of my offspring to see the diplomatic effects. Soon, though! One of my 4 daughters has to be getting close to "of age" -- I can't find a way to check, though.
If you select the babies in the dynasty window it will tell you their age. They become playable adults at either 20 or 21.
There doesn't seem to be much point to marrying off daughters, though. You give a channeler to the other side and don't get much of anything in return. Sons are where the action is.
Edit: Oof, today's patch invalidated my saved game. No warning, either.
I'm also pretty disappointed so far...I just haven't found the game to be compelling in any way yet, in either campaign or sandbox. I have faith that they'll make it right, though, so...time will tell.
- - - Amadan, Rizona, et al. - Argent Dawn
Amadan - Tunare (ret.) ...or much better yet, tell me something dangerous and true...
If you select the babies in the dynasty window it will tell you their age. They become playable adults at either 20 or 21.
There doesn't seem to be much point to marrying off daughters, though. You give a channeler to the other side and don't get much of anything in return. Sons are where the action is.
Edit: Oof, today's patch invalidated my saved game. No warning, either.
I figured that out last night. Also, save game was invalidated, so I had to start over.
I am having fun, though. It's been a while since I had a game I could sink my teeth into.
I'm actually getting into it pretty good now, on my 3rd real game. Custom faction, a great world position, weaker opponents already culled from the game, and I've barely opened up any of the adventuring stuff yet. The game continues to improve. I just hope content doesn't trickle in, or fail to arrive at all.
And that's the point to diplomatic marriages, anyways? Is it just another bargaining chip to get them to sign treaties? And what's the difference between sons and daughters? As far as I can tell, gender only really limits you in that you need the opposite sex available in the Kingdom you want to work with.
You can't arrange dowries, so you can't do any direct bargaining when marrying off your children. Instead it gives a bonus to your relations with the other faction for future deals.
Unless you're really worried about a neighbor attacking you, I think the best thing to do is keep an eye out for one of the others to have a daughter who will make a useful champion. Stats on the children range from pathetic to game-breaking. I think they've since fixed the problems with the Snathi, back when their sovereign was a drake all his offspring would have combat ratings in the thousands, but when I got tired of my first game I sent out my half-dragon daughter-in-law to solo the master quest (never did actually finish it and win, the hand-in location disappeared off the map).
Ah. I was wondering how you're supposed to negotiate a peace treaty when they value it at 4x what you do. Considering one of my opponents is only living off my sufferance at this point, I was wondering how you're supposed to bring them to the negotiating table.
Screw that though, I'm not gonna bribe him for his own life.
See I bought Galactic Civ when it came out, so I learned my lesson and wait 6months or so before I buy one of their games. They are great once polished though. Till then, I'll keep playing Europa Universalis III.
I was playing Saturday, and had my Soveriegn, and 3 of my best heroes killed in a single spell from a random wandering monster. It did from 40 to 96 damage to each of them...while my best spells did from 0-14 damage.
I had researched tier 9 spells and had an Int of 26 btw.
Like Gal Civ 2, in six months this game will be fully playable and have enough content to satisfy just about everyone.
I'd advise anyone still remotely interested in it to wait at two months.
The game is OK now, but it can only be better once SD moves on to actually assembling and balancing the game....because this release is literally half the features of the game thrown into one package and held together with twist ties so it looks like a game.
That was more in-line with what I think most people expected out of SD when the initial reviews were starting to come in. It does a good deal for my hopes for the next 6 months of development.
