Elemental all-purpose thread

[PapaSmurf]

Yep, and believe it or not there are still people out there who do not have a high speed internet connection. These folks are stuck playing the version of Elemental that came in the box. :x

The game should be reviewed as is.

Brother, please. So many games have Day 0 or Day 1 or Week 1 patches now, and those are usually the versions that get reviewed. Moreover, you’re doing a disservice to the majority of gamers who do have broadband and would see the game in its patched state.

[Talorc]

I must say I am quite torn on this game. It pushes all my “ooo shiny” buttons with the fantasy setting, customisable units, magic spells, tech tree and general 4X gameplay.

The one thing that both RPS and Tom agree on is that the game at release is at the very least not quite up to par. “A bit shoddy” and “Elemental is a mess” are not glowing endorsements.

I think it is going to take a hefty v1.1 or v1.2 patch and a sale to move me to purchase, which is a shame as I was very nearly a day one purchaser on the game premise and the game blogs on the main elemental site.

[Cubit]

Brother, please. So many games have Day 0 or Day 1 or Week 1 patches now, and those are usually the versions that get reviewed. Moreover, you’re doing a disservice to the majority of gamers who do have broadband and would see the game in its patched state.

As Telefrog also asked, what is the cutoff date? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month?

[Teiman]

Just come across awesome bug. So my sovereign stack takes an enemy city, that only has one defender, wins. Next turn, I own the city, but my sov stack has vanished, to be replaced by the opponents sov stack, in that same city. Wierd.

Seems a race condition to me. One caused by multithreading.

Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript and Mozilla’s chief technical officer, has made his position on this issue clear:†

 You must be [as tall as an NBA player] to hack on threaded systems, and that means
 most programmers should run away crying. But they don’t. Instead, as with most other
 sharp tools, the temptation is to show how big one is by picking up the nearest single-
 threaded code and jamming it into a multi-threaded embedding, or tempting race-
 condition fate otherwise. Occasionally the results are infamous, but too often, with only
 virtual fingers and limbs lost, no one learns.
 Threads violate abstractions six ways to Sunday. Mainly by creating race conditions,
 deadlock hazards, and pessimistic locking overhead. And still they don’t scale up to
 handle the megacore teraflop future.
 So my default answer to questions such as, “When will you add threads to JavaScript?”
 is: “over your dead body!”

[Disconnected]

Just come across awesome bug. So my sovereign stack takes an enemy city, that only has one defender, wins. Next turn, I own the city, but my sov stack has vanished, to be replaced by the opponents sov stack, in that same city. Wierd.

Happened to me too. Quicksaving (ctrl+s) before combat & redoing it pretty much always works. But remember to restart the game (as in: exit out of it completely) before loading any kind of save. If you don’t, chances are very good the game will bug out in some way, usually by eating some of your playing pieces.

[PapaSmurf]

As Telefrog also asked, what is the cutoff date? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month?

The cutoff date is when the reviewer gets around to picking the game up.

Why does there have to be some sort of broad, single cutoff date for a review? Since when do reviews have to be in before a certain emotionally satisfactory for you deadline where they can “punish” the company that dared to send an unfinished gold master to print?

Maybe it’s of benefit to gamers to have someone review a game six months after release? You know, some guy who says “wow, SimCity Societies no longer sucks big fact donkey balls like people said it did on release”, and then people who bought the game and had it collecting dust hear about its better state through the review and play it.

Sheesh.

[Bossman]

Brother, please. So many games have Day 0 or Day 1 or Week 1 patches now, and those are usually the versions that get reviewed. Moreover, you’re doing a disservice to the majority of gamers who do have broadband and would see the game in its patched state.

Yeah, but those day 0 patches for other games are usually small and only fix a couple bugs and nothing else. They don’t add tons of new features and make the game playable.

[Telefrog]

Brother, please. So many games have Day 0 or Day 1 or Week 1 patches now, and those are usually the versions that get reviewed. Moreover, you’re doing a disservice to the majority of gamers who do have broadband and would see the game in its patched state.

So which version should the sites review? The Day 0 version or the Week 1 version? Elemental has already had a couple of patches, if you don’t count the hotfixes. Also, should reviewers wait for the multiplayer to get released or should they review now and warn people that multiplayer isn’t present in the “shipped” version?

It seems to me that the easiest and fairest standard is to review the game that shipped.

[Cubit]

Why does there have to be some sort of broad, single cutoff date for a review? Since when do reviews have to be in before a certain emotionally satisfactory for you deadline where they can “punish” the company that dared to send an unfinished gold master to print?

Maybe it’s of benefit to gamers to have someone review a game six months after release? You know, some guy who says “wow, SimCity Societies no longer sucks big fact donkey balls like people said it did on release”, and then people who bought the game and had it collecting dust hear about its better state through the review and play it.

A game reviewed 6 months after release would get so little traffic it would barely be worth it.

[Acosta]

As Telefrog also asked, what is the cutoff date? 1 day? 1 week? 1 month?

I suggest letting each reviewer make his call on that.

[Telefrog]

Maybe it’s of benefit to gamers to have someone review a game six months after release? You know, some guy who says “wow, SimCity Societies no longer sucks big fact donkey balls like people said it did on release”, and then people who bought the game and had it collecting dust hear about its better state through the review and play it.

Shouldn’t that be a re-review at that point? I mean, if the intent is the “benefit of gamers” then shouldn’t reviewers warn them away for the first six months?

[Mazuo]

Not to mention it’s rather silly to expect people to buy the game and wait six months for the review to see if the end product is now a functional and fun use of their time.

You can quibble over gold, day-0, day 2, whatever, but reviews need to be out near the time the majority of purchasers are able to do just that…purchase. Else, what’s the point? ‘We choose to not review this product so sometime in the nebulous future we can be kind to it and everyone who doesn’t care any more and is playing other things may go track it down in the bargain bin.’

[Acosta]

Shouldn’t that be a re-review at that point? I mean, if the intent is the “benefit of gamers” then shouldn’t reviewers warn them away for the first six months?

Normally, re-reviews come with expansions as there is a good excuse to check the game again. Reviewing is not free, takes time and some effort, so you can’t expect to have professionals re-reviewing the game each six months. Same policy with MMOs.

[Oghier]

In Elemental’s case, Brad said…

I hear you, but I don’t care what Brad said. Exposing him as a hypocrite, evildoer or whatever simply holds no interest for me. Reviewers may have a function in keeping developers’ feet to the fire, but I just want to know what the game is like if I buy it. For that purpose, the reviewer should look at the latest version available when they played the game. Given that most games have a patch within a week of release, my ideal reviewer would play through them then.

[aganazer]

I sure hope some more reviews drop soon detailing what was actually given to us. Hell, there are fans so wrapped up in this for whatever reason that I’m being told elsewhere I must have pirated the game because the patches have already brought the game to full working order.

Unbelievable.

What I find unbelievable is that anyone would care about the version of the game that shipped. Even my friends in the Peace Corp and the ones teaching in various low income areas of third world nations have internet connections.

As far as I’m concerned they could have shipped a gold copy of Impulse that you install and then download the game from.

And I certainly wouldn’t find any value at all in a review of 1.00. As a potential buyer of a game, I don’t care what the game looked like when it was released, instead I want to know what its like at the time I plan on purchasing it. That is much more relevant to my decision making process.

[PapaSmurf]

A game reviewed 6 months after release would get so little traffic it would barely be worth it.

Yup, but that’s the editor’s call.

Not yours.

Sorry bro, just because you want to see developers get punished for releasing unfinished games and then patching them on day 1 or week 1, doesn’t mean that the editors agree.

[PapaSmurf]

Shouldn’t that be a re-review at that point? I mean, if the intent is the “benefit of gamers” then shouldn’t reviewers warn them away for the first six months?

Why?

Reviews make the most traffic in the first few days of a game’s release. I’m certain that a 6 month old review or re-review will do less in traffic. This may be offset by mitigating circumstances (like an expansion pack or big patch), but I suspect just as often it’s a writer or editor who’s played the game in its patched state who says “hey, it actually turned out really good. Let’s give it some press.” Or perhaps a developer asks really nice for a re-review. I’m not sure how the internal decision making is made, but I’m quite certain there’s a reason sites don’t offer re-reviews as standard material for their audiences.

[Cubit]

Sorry bro

I’m not your bro, chief.

[Oghier]

Yep, and believe it or not there are still people out there who do not have a high speed internet connection.

How many? I suspect the number of gamers within the demographic for turn-based, 4x strat, PC-only titles contains quite a small percentage of people without access to a reasonable internet connection. This is not a casual gamer title. For the vast majority of people who would actually buy a Stardock product, the in-the-box version will be fairly unimportant. Why should a reviewer cater to a tiny sliver of their audience?

[Telefrog]

Why?

Reviews make the most traffic in the first few days of a game’s release. I’m certain that a 6 month old review or re-review will do less in traffic. This may be offset by mitigating circumstances (like an expansion pack or big patch), but I suspect just as often it’s a writer or editor who’s played the game in its patched state who says “hey, it actually turned out really good. Let’s give it some press.” Or perhaps a developer asks really nice for a re-review. I’m not sure how the internal decision making is made, but I’m quite certain there’s a reason sites don’t offer re-reviews as standard material for their audiences.

Hell man, as far as I’m concerned, they could never look at it again. I only suggested a re-review in response to the idea that a site should give a pass to a game like Sim Cities Societies because the game sucked at first, then got better after a massive patch a few months later.

Personally, I think everyone was right to slag Societies right out of the gate because that’s the game that shipped.