3641

My thought exactly. Especially well done considering it was written during the fight that this thread turned into. Nice work, Tom.

3642

1up review:

http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3181116&p=1

Caution, it is written by Eric Neigher who has been featured in the bad journalism thread a few times. He wrote the horrible 1up Yakuza 3 review.

This part is particularly funny:

So, is it all a disaster? Well, the A.I. problems are fixed to some degree by the robust multiplayer

emphasis mine.

3643

Tom’s review was very good, it mirrors my feelings of the game pretty well. It also goes to show why he gets paid to type words and I do not.

3644

Other than this misstep, the reviews is a good text. Maybe that line was not added by the original author? Is weird.

I expect worse reviews for Elementals, because the problems with the game make it very not accessible. And with today generation of gamers (and reviewers) accessibility is the most important factor in a game.

…

I miss some people talking about the “Oh, this is cool!” factor of the game, the integrated tools to make more stuff (maps, mods, factions…) and the integrated system to download these things (like downloading new maps). This is very cool, and very 2010 gaming. It accounts for something, but most reviewers seems to ignore that.

3645

Well, I agree that the “review” is well written and very polite, I have to say that as a “review” it’d be a stinker, as too little is revealed about the actual game and too much time is spend with nostalgia about GalCiv2 manual creation days.

But Tom himself has put the word review in quotes, and the “review” is only part of the game diary, so all is well. :)

Edit: Can somebody confirm that AoE3 was as buggy as Elemental back when it was first released?
Cause I cannot remember that being the case at all…

rezaf

3646

What’s wrong with calling the multiplayer robust? Multiplayer was enabled during the early betas so you were able to see how everything worked.

Edit: AoE3 definately wasn’t as buggy as Elemental. It had some balance issues and some bugs but everything else worked just fine at least for me.

3647

AoE3 wasn’t buggy. Rise of Legends was. So buggy, in fact, that the auto-patcher won’t install the final patch, because it’s bugged.

3648

That is new to me and other people. The way is written, make it look like is robust now, that is something no one knows, since is disabled.

Networking is another complicated feature of a engine (like rendering) and has to deal with broken routers and broken’s ISP (that shape traffic, often doing something horrible with the trafic) … The day the system is open for everyone, there will be problems. Maybe with the new features added after testing networking.

3649

So? The betas were practically a different game. Multiplayer is not enabled in the final version. There is no way to tell how ‘robust’ the multiplayer is, and certainly no excuse for using it in the review.

As for Tom’s review, it’s excellent as long as you’ve read the diaries. If not, you’d struggle to glean any information about the game besides a feeling of disappointment and a canned history of Tom’s relationship with Stardock.

3650

Tom’s review is excellent. And while he opens by saying that he’s not sure whether he can write an impartial review, I do think that he has written an honest and illuminating one. I’ll take that over impartiality any day of the week.

And JM, in the context of the blog format in which it lives, I think treating the review as a final-word summary, without going into all the gameplay examples that he already gave in his previous posts, is perfectly fine. Those posts are still there (and linked in the body of the review) for anyone that’s interested. It’s a different format than the traditional magazine review, but it’s running in a different format than a magazine, so I’m fine with that.

Re: 1Up review: MoM’s major misstep was that it tried to do too much? I’d argue the exact opposite: MoM had a highly focused design; its only misstep was shipping with so many bugs and bad AI. Following a line that implies that MoM allowed you to win the game through diplomacy, I’m sort of inclined to wonder how much MoM he’s actually played.

3651

Sure. But when we’re told to not treat Tom’s diaries as reviews, it’s a little confusing when those diaries then provide almost the entire context for the review he does put up :)

3652

Yeah, I’m a bit confused by the mention of AoE3 in Tom’s review. AoE3 at launch was stable and none of the systems in the game were a mystery. Elemental, on the other hand, is still crash-happy and there are whole sections of the game that make little sense.

3653

And the only problem Empire Total War had (which wasn’t a problem for me) was the poor AI, while Elemental has poor AI and a hundred other problems. Empire Total War was Blizzard-polished compared to Elemental.

3654

Excellent review. I like how Tom doesn’t pretend to be unbiased, and I like his unique perspective on the game’s (really Stardock’s) key shortcoming. In my opinion that shortcoming runs even deeper than he seems to think, and consequently I do not share his hope that Elemental might someday get a magic patch that gives it an actual design, let alone a good design, but I can see where he’s coming from.

I don’t think the diaries are necessary to provide context for the review post, by the way. They are necessary if you want more details about the game, details that are usually present in game reviews, but such details rarely amount to a comprehensive coverage of game features any more, and I generally find them to be pretty useless. All I really get from a review like 1up’s is that even a hack game journalist can tell the game is a disaster. Sorry, but checking Fidgit from time to time is about all the games “journalism” I can stomach any more. That’s not being a Tom Chick fanboi, that’s damning with faint praise.

My favorite thing about the 1up review, other than the reference to robust multiplayer, is the two “screenshots” from long gone alpha/beta versions of Elemental (there are many more in the full list of screenshots). What are they trying to do, make the review look better by picking better looking images, regardless of what they represent? Personally, I kind of doubt that the one showing the tactical battle was made in any version of the game’s engine. In any case, the reviewer admits to never fighting a tactical battle anyway. Sigh.

3655

Why do people say silly things like this? Are you telling me that if Stardock releases a new game in 2 -3 years that blows everyone away and gets amazing reviews, you won’t buy it?

3656

There are TWO screenshots of tactical battles attached to that review, and neither one of them are from the shipping game. Or the pre-patch gold game, or even from any of the beta versions that I ever saw. Much like the robust multiplayer, they are illusory phantoms. In fact, there aren’t any screenshots of the finished game on 1Up. The most recent one in their screenshot list is dated 6/1/10. Did the reviewer not bother to snap any screens of the game? Seriously?

Tangentially, I would really like to know what happened to this interface. Because it looks worlds better than the one that’s in the game now. And those unit cards also look worlds better. Why aren’t those backgrounds available? The ones that you actually get to choose from now are dark and contrast-y and ugly, and they make it hard to read the unit cards.

3657

I wonder if 1up stands behind that “review” as much as KG stands behind RPS’s piece of sensationalism. It does read as though the reviewer scanned through some forum posts pro/con list and used that as a foundation for information on the game.

3658

Dear Internet pedant: The correct way to interpret my statement is indeed that I won’t preorder Stardock games anymore, or otherwise buy them before such a pile of amazing reviews arrives; and also that I consider the chances of the latter happening very low. That is in fact what people almost always mean when they say silly things like that.

3659

Except for the part where he says:

I pre-ordered Elemental way back in the day, and then had to pre-order it again when the credit card I had used expired because they missed the original launch window. I tried the beta, but was never able to get the map to load. And I have yet to start the game for myself, because, frankly, I’ve spent most of my time trying to keep up with this thread and it’s own war of the Titans.

I’ll probably dive in this weekend. If the game turns out to be half as incomplete as it’s reported to be, then it’s inexcusable for Stardock to have released it to the paying public, regardless of the potential for patches or mods. Personally, though, I feel like that if I’ve waited this long, it won’t hurt to wait a little longer. I just feel bad for all of those who have come to the release version fresh and haven’t been slowly, subtly inured to the pain.

3660

I think he pretty much reveals all there is to know about the game. He basically said Stardock’s yet to patch in an actual design with understandable and coherent mechanics and this was true too of Galciv at first. Elemental might get there as he thinks Galciv did, but then again who knows.