3941

That’s been Stardock’s pattern. This is an important game to them. I expect they will put a lot of sweat into it going forward. I’ll be surprised if they don’t do a good job of improving it.

My main concerns aren’t bug fixes, which I expect to happen, and balancing, which I also expect to happen, but the criticism by some of the game being bland, of it being a combination of parts that don’t always form a cohesive whole. That can be a bit harder to address. That’s one of those vision things.

3942

Obviously, either Stardock disagrees with your idea of “reasonable level of performance” or they disagree with your idea of a “reasonable amount of time.”

:/

3943

Yeah, beats me. It’s incomprehensible and frankly unethical that they refuse refunds on betas in progress and then hit you on the way out by saying because you paid to get in the beta, it’s been too long to give you a refund now that the game’s out.

What the hell?

3944

I have this problem too. This doesn’t stop me from creating new games, and churning through them until I hit turns 200-300 before my system slows down to an unbearable crawl and I ‘run out of memory’ and repeatedly crash out, but it would be nice to complete a game without worrying about trying to do it in 200 turns, and feeling forced to play on maps no larger than ‘tiny’, and with no more than just a couple AI enemies, for a change.

3945

FWIW, Stardock refunded the price I paid (minus the shipping charge for the physical copy, which I think is entirely reasonable), and refunded it to my Credit Card.

And I pre-ordered in September of 2009.

3946

Bad releases and rushed products are part of the business now, and I can accept that. But you don’t expect (nor should you accept) being abused by the CEO on a public forum for providing him exactly what he asked for. And then to be banned for commenting on a “purely PR and damage control” update is beyond acceptable.

I asked last night one of the Stardock people who is still posting why I’d been banned, but haven’t had a reply.

3947

Having put in alot of time in the last few days its no where near as bad as I was some say. Its not polished by any means but I like it. I to wish they would of kept it another 6 months, and I like all the art but the people, they look bad.

But for whats its worth the only time I have crashed was alt tabbing out to check to see if anyone was on LoL.

The state its in now I would give it a 7 and i hope in a few months that can be a 9. Glad I did spend the money on it.

3948

In a few months the industry as a whole will have forgotten about Elemental and moved on. You fuck up a release week, you fuck up the future of that game. The only ones that will see this “fantastic great game” will be the ones that actively decide to stick around. Most will move onto the next shiny thing.

3949

Link? I’d be interested to read that exchange.

3950

Certainly interesting Dave, thanks. I haven’t heard a peep from them in 4 days now, so I guess I might reference your example and send them another email asking for my refund for their crap product.

3951

Just got my LE box today on the east coast.

3952

I’m with yea, very dumb of them to release it the way they did. I guess I’m more forgivng then some. I’m sure if they had to do it again they would wait.

3953

The internal build is so much better. The graphics will be much better at release. Etc, etc, etc. He’s a regular poster on this forum, so I expect a number of people feel vaguely insulted that a lot of the things he said turned out to be logical inexactitudes on this scale. If he intended to mislead or not is another story, of course. Also, it’s awfully easy for people to be internet tough guys.

I’d have forgiven this episode as an unfortunate oopsie woopsie (Things happen) if they’d let me return the game as per their Gamer’s Bill of Rights. I’d have repurchased it down the road if it was converted into a good game. I haven’t heard back from sales@stardock yet, but if they tell me what they told Mazuo, then they’ve lost a customer for life. This will probably be the last Stardock game I purchase and I will never buy anything through Impulse again.

3954

Actually, I don’t think this is true. It’s a 4X fantasy game and it was always going to be something of a niche title aimed at devotees of that kind of game.

Going way, way back Simtex released very buggy games. It took until the 1.31 version of both MOO and MOM before they produced a reasonably good experience. MOM was really a mess and in a lot of ways is a mess that never really got fixed, yet it’s a game people love.

So will this hurt sales? Of course. But in the long run if Stardock does a good job on post-release development of the game, it can be a money-maker for them.

3955

To be fair, you did have their Hulk jammed, scrammed, and webbed.

3956

I’m not so sure Mark. Look at Demigod. It suffered mostly from atrocious netcode and even though it had a fairly fun game underneath that mess it died months after release. It’s comical how few players have stuck by it and are still playing.

Now we have a game that doesn’t even have netcode as far as we know. Is anyone going to be surprised if Stardock’s claim of simply needing to turn on the MP servers turns out to be a larger problem than they say? On top of that you have a game that generously is not unanimously fun or competent.

It doesn’t look good to me for its lasting appeal.

3957

Not a personal attack on my part, just my personal opinion of him, not every person on this planet has similar personalities to one another. Like I said, I am still a fan of his games, and tend to strongly agree in his gaming taste and the type of game he wants to build.

It is also hard to not tie Brad and his games together, as his personality is the driving force behind his marketing for most stardock game. He takes a very personal approach in his involvement in the marketing of the product, and responds to people about his games on his forums. He’s done this for years. He is the face of his company, and the face of his games. So like him or not, when you talk about a stardock game, you talk about Brad Wardell and his personality because the two go hand in hand.

Anyway, to repeat, I preordered almost as soon as it was announced that we could pre-order, fully aware I was helping finance the development of the game that could just turn out horrible or not. The reason I have not installed the game is there have been extensive previews and commentary about the game by multiple sources. I frequently follow gaming news and sites for years, and I am pretty confident in my knowledge of how my opinions line up with certain reviewers and communities opinions of a game. By now I can make pretty accurate judgments about games before playing them, and I know if I try elemental right now, I’ll hate it, and it’ll collect dust, regardless of future patches.

So I’m letting it rest, and in my head, my preorder I put in many months ago is still the same, the game isn’t released, and I’ll wait for it until it is done. Just from following the journals and forum posts about the game, it is enough to see that there isn’t anything to draw me into the world of elemental, but I know given time it might be there.

I really do not know why they chose to release at this point or what they expected to happen in the press. I know in the elemental journals, the writing there is often talking as though they are an indie developer, and takes the same approach many indies do, but here they sell their game along side the big boys, and they have to realize that their game will be measured along side the multi-million dollar crowd, whether it is supposed to be there or not.

Anyway, I wanted to mostly comment to DaleKent that years ago I had a similar forum experience with Brad, and I find it funny to see the same things still going down. At the end of the day I don’t know if its worth it or not to get tangled up in forum drama about your products. I do find it refreshing at least that he doesn’t hide too deeply behind marketing speak and pr spin, but sometimes a little restraint might go the extra mile.

For myself, I will continue checking back on the elemental site to see where development is taking it, and hopefully it’ll find a place on my harddrive.

3958

I preordered, but waited until the 1.06 patch to truly start playing. Mainly due to time issues. However, I am enjoying the game. There is one big caveat though in the design itself I don’t care for, and that is the return attack system.

If a combatant has so many action points, why are they allowed to retaliatory strike every single strike against them? I can surround a creature with knights. Next round, the creature might get two attacks on my knights, then my turn I get 2-3attacks * my knights. However, the creature gets to return an attack for every one of those.

In most tabletop style wargames, you might get one retaliation strike, you definitely don’t get one for every combat action against you.

Outside of this one quibble though, I am enjoying the game. Looking forward to more enhancements though, especially with the magic system. My rating would probably be about a 7 at this time. I think it might be worth more to the correct audience, but generally, the tutorial and esoteric interface might make it a challenge to get into and start understanding the mechanisms at play.

3959

Sure. And then in nine months when they release an expansion pack, everyone will be all, “Oh, that’s that game that looked interesting but reviews said wasn’t done yet,” and all the reviews will be (if all goes well for Stardock) about how much better the game is now and how the glaring faults have been addressed and so on, and a bunch of people will buy it. Only for $29 by then, but still. That happened with GalCiv, it happened with NWN2 to some extent, and there’s every reason to think it’ll happen with Elemental.

At this point, what they have to do is make sure that when the expansion comes out, the reviewers are able to say nice things.

3960

Multiplayer games tend to have a short shelf life, other than a few exceptions. Players get the game and even if they enjoy it, unless it’s a big hit, they tend to move on to the next cool game. When you log on and fewer and fewer players are playing, chances are you will log on more infrequently too.

I’m not saying I’m optimistic about the eventual shape that Elemental will be in, but I do expect Stardock to continue to work on the game, and I think it will improve over the current state. There are people like me who will buy it once we hear more good reports. And I think TBS 4X fans tend to be a niche audience who follows the scene, so if the word is Elemental has become an improved game, many will give a demo a shot. I mean, what else is going to be out there besides Civ 5? There aren’t a lot of these games being made.