Elemental all-purpose thread

[Charles]

At its heart, it’s a simple disagreement here. You don’t think the quote was relevant to the story. I do. And I don’t believe for a second that there’s no quote from a developer here you wouldn’t use as a story. Let’s say Charles started a thread explaining why he really hated Assassin’s Creed or something. You’d link to that. I don’t believe you if you say you wouldn’t. And - perhaps just as importantly - if you still say you wouldn’t do it, you’re 100% wrong. It’s about as newsy as videogame news gets.

Charles wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that.

edit: Also, if I was dumb enough to do that, you doing so would guarantee that I never post again on the internet under my real name, as well as guaranteeing a cockpunch if I were to ever encounter you IRL.

[ElGuapo]

I really want to address this, however:

. . .

The bottom line is that I have never used a developer quote from Qt3 without contacting the developer to clear it with him. The tone of this forum is that important to me.

I can vouch for this. I’m not a developer but Tom contacted me to ask if he could use something I posted here on Fidget.

[Neuromancer]

By the way – and here’s that prickly context issue again – wasn’t Brad’s post in response to him getting tangled up in some P&R conversation? I don’t know and I guess I don’t really care. I wouldn’t hold him to it any more than I’d hold someone to a post in which he says he’s leaving the forum and never posting again. We’re all human here. We all put ourselves into these posts.

Then this may be a good time to bring up that I’m leaving the forum and never posting again.

[Andre_Costa]

Bye, can i have you epic–oh wait, wrong game.

[Dan_Lawrence]

I think Quinns/RPS use of the original “Brad Quote” was a little better than the PC Gamer/Pentadact usage since RPS actually provided a tiny bit more context around it. Though overall they probably blew it more by chucking in that ‘Rescind Bill of Rights’ angle which was later withdrawn.

I don’t actually think its using a quote from QT3 was really the main problem. There are probably several ways you could write an article using what Brad said and framing it in a more representative context, like including a summary of the hostile back and forth in the thread, or perhaps you could have got a response from Brad to run along side the original quote. Anything that would have given a more fair impression that Brad wasn’t solely raging against his customers. There were several fairly classy quotes from him earlier in the thread for example (Thinking of the “don’t go easy on the game for Stardock being indie when we are asking $50 type of thing”) and a few saying they were concerned about crash bugs and working hard to get them fixed.

I’m not surprised that it happened like it did though, this is game journalism as it is now, often the snappier and more controversial sounding a line is the better. There was an interesting series of recent articles on the famous Bobby Kotick quotes that revealed how much some of them had been trimmed down into sound bites, and how, with the original context restored he sounds about fifty percent less villainous.

I hope Tom C, Tom F and Kieron can properly make up and be best friends again after this little contretemps because really, between the bunch of them, they control about 75% of the PC Game journalism worth reading and it’ll be a bit sad for my happy place world view if they don’t get along. Spend your energy hating on the real villains!

[Oghier]

I’m not positive, but I’m starting to get the impression that perhaps ATI video card users are having more problems than nVidia users. FWIW.

The Elemental forums talk about a memory leak with ATI cards and Win64.

I play on two rigs. One has an ATI 5870, and the other is a laptop with an Nvidia 330m. I have had zero crashes, other than alt-tab issues. I tend to play in 30 - 60 minute increments, though, so perhaps I am not giving the memory leak time to develop.

[KieronGillen]

Charles wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that.

edit: Also, if I was dumb enough to do that, you doing so would guarantee that I never post again on the internet under my real name, as well as guaranteeing a cockpunch if I were to ever encounter you IRL.

I’m not worried. If you were dumb enough to do it, you’d probably cockpunch yourself instead.

KG

[Dave_Weinstein]

I run under the operating assumption that if I were to post under a pseudonym or handle, anything I said that would be problematic would be traced back to being from me anyway.

[JM1]

There are probably several ways you could write an article using what Brad said and framing it in a more representative context, like including a summary of the hostile back and forth in the thread

There was no hostile back and forth in this thread that involved Brad. There was a lot of criticism of his product and a few idiots who Brad already knows are people who have a personal dislike of him.

The summary would be “Brad snaps over posts about his new game that are highly critical”. Which is pretty much how his post reads without the representative context.

[Richard_Holt]

So slight change of topic.

I’m pretty much finished with Elemental at this juncture, it has some things to recommend it, but I just find it too bland and fiddly to play much more of in it’s current form.

A lot of people have compared it to Master of Magic games. Do these games still stand up? Should I give them a shot? Which one do people recommend starting with?

[KevinC]

There’s only one Master of Magic. As much as I love it for nostalgia sake, the game doesn’t exactly hold up to modern standards. Extremely poor AI, horribly unbalanced, but oh so fun.

If you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend giving Age of Wonders a go. Someone mentioned it was coming to Steam.

[frank_austin]

For reference, I called Stardock to follow up on my refund request, and 30 seconds later they told me they were processing my refund, and I uninstalled the game from my system.

So any objections I had are dealt with. I tried it, I didn’t like it, and they gave me money back.

Just in case you missed my PM:

How long ago did you preorder this? I just got told over the phone with Stardock that any credit card transaction more than 90 days old can’t be processed as a return, so I won’t be getting anything but store credit.

They really, really go out of their way to make sure your pre-orders stay locked in. I won’t be pre-purchasing anything from Impulse again.

[Scotch_Lufkin]

So slight change of topic.

I’m pretty much finished with Elemental at this juncture, it has some things to recommend it, but I just find it too bland and fiddly to play much more of in it’s current form.

A lot of people have compared it to Master of Magic games. Do these games still stand up? Should I give them a shot? Which one do people recommend starting with?

I heartily recommend MoM from GOG.com (play it in a Window though by doing the Alt+Enter keystroke). I had a LOT of fun playing AoW2 Shadow Magic online with a buddy of mine in some comp-stomps - we ended up playing almost 8 games and had a BLAST, so much so that AoW2 is a large part of the reason behind Elemental sort of letting me down a little. AoW2 is the best TB fantasy strategy in my opinion at this point.

[JM1]

Dave preordered a year ago I think.

[Dan_Lawrence]

The summary would be “Brad snaps over posts about his new game that are highly critical”. Which is pretty much how his post reads without the representative context.

I would put the summary of Brad’s involvement more like “Brad was initially helpful and responsive to most criticism, despite several openly hostile posters, before snapping at one particular user who had posted some reasonable criticism”. Even if Brad didn’t engage directly with the Matt Gallant’s in the thread they were still ‘internet shouting’ at him. Quibbles, though eh?

[Dave_Weinstein]

I pre-ordered in August of 2009.

Because they had already shipped the boxed copy to me, they were unable to refund the $10 shipping fee (which I find entirely reasonable – anyone in the Seattle area who didn’t order one want a shiny box + disc?).

[Oghier]

A lot of people have compared it to Master of Magic games. Do these games still stand up? Should I give them a shot? Which one do people recommend starting with?

MoM does not hold up well. The interface, graphics and AI are a mess. If you want a modern fantasy 4x tbs, you should consider the Fall from Heaven II mod for Civ 4. It’s a remarkable piece of work.

[frank_austin]

I pre-ordered in August of 2009.

Because they had already shipped the boxed copy to me, they were unable to refund the $10 shipping fee (which I find entirely reasonable – anyone in the Seattle area who didn’t order one want a shiny box + disc?).

Well, what the fuck, then. Do you remember who you talked to at Stardock?

[Richard_Holt]

I heartily recommend MoM from GOG.com (play it in a Window though by doing the Alt+Enter keystroke). I had a LOT of fun playing AoW2 Shadow Magic online with a buddy of mine in some comp-stomps - we ended up playing almost 8 games and had a BLAST, so much so that AoW2 is a large part of the reason behind Elemental sort of letting me down a little. AoW2 is the best TB fantasy strategy in my opinion at this point.

I seem to remember playing a demo of the first Age of Wonders game, I don’t think I got on with it. Don’t remember why though. Maybe I should check out AoW2.

[Dave_Weinstein]

Well, what the fuck, then. Do you remember who you talked to at Stardock?

I opened a ticket yesterday, and then called and spoke with Elisa today.