3341

They have dinosaurs in Elemental cool, first thing that has made want to buy the game. Does anybody else think the dinosaur looks to friendly and not scary enough.

I am also impressed with thread, I bet there are more posts than buyers of Elemental, and it brought a lurker and inspired him to make 5 post in one day.

3342

To my knowledge Stardock offers customers their money back if the customer decides the game doesn’t function adequatly. They are (I believe) the only major publisher that does this.

I’m surprised this isn’t a part of the larger story. Stardock believes the game is ready, Stardock is fixing reported issues, but if a customer isn’t happy with their purchase they can return the game. Stardock stands behind their product.

You can fault Stardock if the game isn’t playable for you, but you can’t fault their commitment both in working to resolve issues and their commitment to return your money if you aren’t happy. That’s pretty remarkable in my mind. It’s not sensational, it doesn’t make for a good headline. But its notable that the side taking the risk is Stardock, not the consumer.

3343

I pre-ordered Elemental and I’m not sure I necessarily regret the purchase, but I think I might table it for a little while. I’ve played around with it for several hours, and I think that there might be a pretty decent game in there, but it is doing its damnedest to obscure it from me. There is always a certain amount of learning curve to any 4x game, but it doesn’t have to be this onerous. I recently purchased Dominions 3, which I’m not sure is a 4x game, but I’m still too much a noob at it to say and I really only picked it up because I lurked on these boards too much, and while I have found that game has a learning curve like the CERN LHC, any time I have a question, the answer is somewhere in the documentation somewhere. Elemental, on the other hand, I feel like I have to intuit my way through that learning curve. The day-0 patch was a pretty good start, but it’s not quite there yet.

As an aside, I registered on these boards because I enjoyed he general tenor of the discussions and yet I make my first post in this thread. Probably a mistake.

3344

3345

Except they dont if you made the mistake of pre-ordering the game.

3346

Is that really the position they are taking? Because if so then that’s the article RPS needs to write about when it wants to question Stardock’s committment to their “Gamer’s Bill of Rights.”

3347

Do you know this for sure? Because I seem to remember seeing some threads where Stardock did exactly that.

Anyways - this thread is probably the saddest thing I’ve seen on these forums. People really take themselves way to seriously.

Its a game, its a guy, its a forum. The sun will keep shining, the moon will keep…eh…whatever it does, and no-one will really care nor remember in a short while.

I know no-one listens to what I say because I dont curse, work in the industry, nor have a zillion posts there or is Miss California but if you were to take my advice, then just leave this mess be, and go try the game, and lets talk about that instead.

As for the game itself - I have played it a bit, and it does have that “one-more-turn” feeling for me, but there are still a lot of stuff missing, a lot of errors, and some rather boring stuff.

I think that the game will be rather great, but it will take some time.

3348

I… I… I don’t have words.

Am i alone in thinking that what Braid said in the famous quote wasn’t so bad?
He basically said: “Well, if the game isn’t good enough for you/you think it’s bad, then don’t buy it”. At least that was the meaning.

Which is common sense. Total truth. It can be applied (and it is applied, everyday, by everyone) to every consumer and every game.
It’s just we aren’t accostumed to see a CEO/PR saying “if you don’t like the fucking game, don’t fucking buy it”.

So people should go back to the game, and comment how mediocre is the:
perfomance, bugs, crashes, special effects, ai, campaign, multiplayer, documentation, interface, in game help, variety in races, units and monsters, unbalanced spells, problems with heroes, problems with stacks of units, too much weight in random factors in the “die rolls”, tactical combat, etc etc.

It’s not like there are no areas to choose.

3349

Dammitall, the enemy king keeps suiciding against a 12-stack of Great Dukes in a city I recently conquered from him, thus destroying his own empire and preventing me from conquering the rest of his cities one by one. Suicidal monarchs forcing me to load autosaves to try to avoid killing them >.<

3350

I know two people who have tried to return the game for a refund and have had Stardock refuse them because they had pre-ordered.

3351

Unfortunately, when you decided to phrase your very appropriate appeal to treat a struggling man with charity in various obscene insults, you became part of the problem as well, and in pretty much the same way, too. Everybody struggles with vice – some with anger, some with greed for sensation and gossip, some with vanity and pride. Unless somebody makes a start and treats the failings of others as he wants his own failings be treated, with patience and charity, the cess pool will only grow bigger.

3352

I thought the PCG article was a good article until it quoted Brad’s unfortunate comment. As a reader I found it helpful. The writer was basing it on playing the game himself and his initial reaction to it was that readers should stay away until Stardock worked on the game some more. He even praised Stardock as a developer. I just wish he hadn’t dragged in that quote from Brad.

The RPS article was just sort of dumb. You can boil it down to, “We haven’t played Elemental yet but some people on an internet message board don’t like it. Oh, and their CEO got mad and said something stupid.” I really doubt they would have even bothered if they didn’t have that juicy quote from Brad to highlight.

3353

Even the thread about that article on the Stardock forums seems to have plenty of posters who agree the piece was fair in terms of actual game criticisms.

That’s the thing about this whole controversy - most of the media has been critical of the status of the game, including Tom. The debate is really over how Stardock handled the launch, Brad’s comments here, and how some media has covered Brad’s comments.

3354

And that’s kind of the key thing here, isn’t it? Brad said something dumb. How is that not newsworthy? I’m puzzled at all the bile.

3355

Try reading the GiantBomb article. It reads “We haven’t played the game yet, but another gaming website, PCGamer has. They don’t like it. We will now quote PCGamer’s website verbatim on their assessment of the game.” It’s just bizarre that instead of GiantBomb trying the game themselves and telling us what they think from their own first hand experience, instead they are reporting what a different gaming website thinks about the game.

It’s like Roger Ebert saying that he hasn’t actually watched a movie himself, but he will now write an article reporting what some random movie critic says about the movie.

3356

It’s newsworthy in a “The Examiner” / “The National Enquirer” / “Supermarket Tabloid – lets look at what Movie Stars do when they lose their cool” kind of way.

3357

Let’s not get too carried away - Brad Wardell is no superstar, even among game developers.

The reason this is news to some sites is because Brad has been so visible in promoting the “Gamer Bill of Rights.” Anything he does that is viewed as being inconsistent with that public stance is going to draw criticism.

3358

I didn’t mean to imply that he is. I’m claiming that the fact that some game developer got upset and said something they regret is mostly only newsworthy in the same way that reporting some actor got drunk and did something stupid, or that Lindsey Lohan went to jail, or that those TLC baby-people got a divorce is. Sure you can argue that stuff is news, and I suppose at some level if what they do is reprehensible enough it might effect your movie watching or music purchasing behavior. But I think most of us realize that People Magazine is hardly the height of journalism.

If PCGamer or GiantBomb wants to be The National Enquirer of game journalists, that’s their choice. But let’s be clear on what they are doing. They are only reporting things that are “news” at the level that a Supermarket Tabloid can claim to be reporting news.

If he made an official announcement as Stardock CEO then yes. What happened here is he was in a place which is an informal environment – Tom likes to talk about this as his living room (e.g., “don’t do something here you wouldn’t do in my living room”) – and he made a statement he shouldn’t have. This wasn’t an official announcement and it wasn’t an official change of policy. Reporting on it before an official statement is made is largely bullshit.

3359

So, only worthy of a passing reference in a blog post, then?

3360

If your blog wants to be the equivalent of a celebrity-watching Supermarket tabloid then yes. Otherwise no. IMO writing that “someone lost their cool in an online forum post” and treating it as if it is news is really just kind of stupid – blog post or not. It’s just cheap trashy journalism.