Any comment on when you received your review copy, Adam B?
Tyjenks
4522
I don’t have a single person on ignore. It turns out, I can actually ignore those folks without using a forum feature. Or even read their responses and not respond in kind.
Hey, I’m the guy you need to be watching out for.
You also need to report everyone who doesn’t also report, don’t forget!
farfrael
4526
http://forums.elementalgame.com/394855/
some pretty amazing replies from Brad on pages 4-6 if you missed them
As far as acts of contrition go, that’s pretty good. Remains to see what practical results come out of this in the future but IMHO it’s hard not to 1) give Stardock the benefit of the doubt 2) be fairly positive about the long-term quality of Elemental
Although, they need to gas the elemental forums … some people in these threads are just … stupid.
Yup. Most mature people can.
From Brad:
When I worked with Tom Chick on GalCiv II, he could give me feedback and it was to me. If he didn’t like something it was no skin off my back because I wasn’t coding it. I would just pass it on and make adjustments. But on Elemental, because I was personally coding (i.e. personally spending 2am mornings coding) a “suggestion” carried a different emotional context.
It doesn’t change the fact that I was an idiot or whether Stardock’s games unit got filled with “group think”. The issue is the result. At the end of the day, gamers shouldn’t care WHY a launch failed. But rather what the heck the company that just charged you $50 for said game is gonna do about it.
To be honest I feel that makes sense. It’s like a writer when he has just finished a piece and feels that it is perfect. Then just don’t look at it for a week or so, get some distance and come back to it, and finds it fill with errors. When you are too deep on it it’s hard to watch the whole.
That doesn’t excuse the problems Stardock is having, but goes a long way towards explaining them, and it feels sincere on Brad’s part.
Edit: plus he has announced that the first expansion pack will be FREE for people who bought Elemental. That seems like doing right for the costumers.
Oh, boo hoo. I’ll save my blood pressure, thanks.
I was amused just now when adding a new member to my ignore list (yay, P&R!) that over half of the 12 names on there have been since banned. Good times.
To clarify, he said Book 2 will be free. Color me skeptical. I believe he’ll make it free, but having seen Book 1, I have doubts that getting Book 2 for free will really help make things better.
The core game needs work.
Oh, and since TPL asked about when I got review code, I got it a few days in advance of launch with Tom and Troy and everyone else. I hope I’m not a Bad Critic ™ for not deciding that the game was garbage before playing it when Stardock (through their PR lady) said that they wanted reviewers to play the launch version, since they’d been cranking on it and felt that it made substantive improvements.
JM1
4532
I can’t believe they had the nerve to call Book 1 the campaign in the released game.
OK then, so I guess the story is that only the PR lady knew that the shipping game was janky? Maybe she should have told Brad? Poor Brad.
What? Seriously, dude, get off the cross.
Seriously dude, Brad was in this very thread saying that he was kicking developers out of the office after the game went gold. He said they were addicted to working on the game! He obviously had no idea that “substantive improvements” were being “cranked on” for the benefit of the reviewers. If only the PR lady had told him, he wouldn’t have made a statement that in retrospect seemed like a big fat lie.
Me either. When I realised I was more than a bit tempted to fire up HoMM3, count the “campaigns” it originally came with & post something less-than-kind on the Elemental forums.
… Then I realised HoMM3 didn’t have a broken mini-tutorial :D
Joking aside, sort of, I guess there’s essentially two ways to make an Elemental campaign: either as a series of non-random maps with specific victory conditions, or as a series of quests.
Stardock evidently decided to do the latter, and to redefine “minimalist” in the process. And while I disagree with that decision, especially the latter part of it, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think they were surprisingly good at pulling it off. I mean, my own “huh, that’s it? Really?” reaction on finishing the campaign seems to be the norm.
But honestly, I doubt anyone bought the game for the campaign.
I am less disappointed than many in the game, but I was annoyed when after a week of playing and finally winning, the video plays like crap.:(
I stand corrected, thank you. The idea that he meant the book instead of an expansion pack never really crossed my mind, and it… confuses me. From what I’ve read, not really a favor to the costumers, that.
Otagan
4539
I wouldn’t be so sure about that.
Book 1 is the campaign in the game right now.
Giving away copies of a sequel to Destiny’s Embers would be a crime.
