5361

I think you’ve misunderstood his question entirely. Read it in the context of the rest of the post: Are you implying that you annoyed brad personally so he gave you your money back and told you to fuck off?. He’s asking about how the refund occurred.

Regardless of that, it doesn’t change the fact that given your posting history in this thread there are Korean rice farmers who know that you had asked for a refund and were getting nowhere. It’s why people are mean to you and why your dancing around a straight answer when you finally got what you wanted is just a teensy bit annoying.

5362

If you honestly don’t understand why people are reacting the way they are to your posts, and isnt just simply trolling , then I suggest you try reading your posts again, and the responses, and consider if there might not be something off in how you communicate here.

5363

So now it’s a matter of post style? If I’m fucked off, people will know when I’m fucked off. I wanted to yell from the tree tops what Brad Wardell did, and hence threaten their customers off buying Elemental.

At the end of the day, it appears the squeaky wheel gets oiled, since as I believe from other people’s comments in this thread, no one else outside the 90 day window has received a 100% refund. Say what you will about what I’ve said and done in this thread, but I got what I came here for. If I pissed off a few people so what, it’s the internet, deal with it. As long as I get what I wanted, which I did. ;)

5364

You guys all know that the ignore button is awesome, right?

5365

It’s a computer game. Nobody (at Stardock) did you or your loved ones bodily harm. Your single purpose here appears to be ‘yelling from the treetops,’ and it gets old. If you’re this enraged over a disappointing computer game, I would hate to be near you if something important went wrong.

In your offline life, do you know anyone who spends most of their time complaining? Do you like being around that person?

5366

Dave Weinstein preordered a year ago and got a refund. The problem is they’re utterly inconsistent.

5367

Post from Brad over at the Elemental forums this weekend:

Our original plan, for what it’s worth, was for the expanded E team to go do a sequel to one of our existing titles and have the other half create a new RPG title using the underlying engine elements (the quest system in Elemental is very VERY powerful, just woefully underutilized right now).

However, since Elemental launched in such a deplorable state, that has all changed. Now the plan is for the E team to stay on Elemental for the next 20 months to redeem Elemental in the minds of our customers.

That has to be done on multiple fronts:

  1. The Kumquat engine will need to be fully matured. I realize that there’s plenty of criticism on some of our design choices (which beta testers were very vocal about but we didn’t listen to well enough) but what really did Elemental’s launch in for day 0 was the state of the Kumquat engine. Absolute compatibility/performance/stability has to be achieved before Stardock can really do anything else because everything going forward is going to be based on this engine (think of Kumquat as the strategy game equivalent of Valve’s “Source” engine).

  2. The magic system in Elemental needs to be overhauled and, over time brought more in line to its original inspiration - MOM. There are a lot of practical reasons that I think users can think of as to why we didn’t just copy the MOM magic system for a 2010 game (same as to why we wouldn’t have dozens of radically different races – think: cost of low resolution sprites vs. fully realized 3D models). But I think we’re just going to have to bite the bullet on this.

  3. The combat system in Elemental needs to be overhauled as well. We are in the process of eliminating action points from tactical combat in the free expansion and instead combat speed will determine initiative and so units will move based on that (rather than attacker side then defender side, the turns will be in order of combat speed and the faster the combat speed of a unit, the faster your unit is, the more turns he gets during a given round.

  4. And of course, the AI needs to keep evolving to deal with this kind of thing.

This is by no means, a complete list but gives you an idea of what we’re going to be doing over the course of the next several weeks, going on months to the basic game mechanics.

I don’t think you’ll see the battles become like Total War though. If we were going to do that, we’d release it as a separate game or something otherwise it’s a bit of “bait and switch”.

The thing is, we, and by we I mean PC gamers, need a game to fill this niche. Especially with Civ V’s radical design changes (which I think are going to be pretty cool – I’m a panzer general guy but it’s a pretty radical change from Civ IV). A 4X fantasy game with army groups and magic and the like is a need to be filled just like space strategy (turn and real-time), first person shooters, fantasy role playing, sci-fi role playing, etc. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too do games.

Twenty additional months of development from the full team seems like more than sufficient time and resources to re-work the many things that need it. Let’s hope their process is a bit less insular and more prone to iterations this time.

Also… they were making an RPG? That’s interesting. I wonder if they’ll get to that now? That seems like a pretty crowded field to enter, as opposed to 4x Fantasy TBS.

5368

I didn’t do anyone at Stardock bodily harm. So what of it? Is there a point? And I think you are mistaking being “enraged” with being “demanding”.

And I work in IT, I know LOTS of people who complain most of the time. Some of them are really good people and friends. :)

5369
  1. The magic system in Elemental needs to be overhauled and, over time brought more in line to its original inspiration - MOM. There are a lot of practical reasons that I think users can think of as to why we didn’t just copy the MOM magic system for a 2010 game (same as to why we wouldn’t have dozens of radically different races – think: cost of low resolution sprites vs. fully realized 3D models). But I think we’re just going to have to bite the bullet on this.

You GOTTA be kidding.
A building block system not unlike that of GalCiv2 (only with moving parts) or that of Spore (albeit quite a bit more simple) would have done the trick.

rezaf

5370

No, he is right, to work in 3D (to model, texture, rig, and animate) and make dozens of different creatures (including different types of creatures, from a eagle to a dragon to an humanoid to a horse to a troll, etc, it’s not only make a generic 3d human model) is much more work than drawing sprites in 2d.

Thing is, if he didn’t have the budget to do it, the production of the game should never been greenlighted, as is a too important part of a fantasy 4x game. Their first mistake in the development of Elemental was that, not even in the middle of development but in the pre-production phase: to choose to make a 3d fantasy game, which have different needs of a 3d space 4x game, and think they would be ok even if they make a fantasy game with subdued fantasy aspects.

In GalCiv 2 they didn’t have to make terrain with features, it was all empty space as a background. Random generation of maps was much easier thanks to that. Units? Designing some generic spaceships require much less creative and technical talent than an organic creatures, and it doesn’t need animations to move or fight!.
A Master of Magic circa 2010? It needs much more in comparison.

edit: And Rezaf, i don’t think the piece system of GalCiv 2 can be applied to an organic, animated creature. And the Spore system needed millions of $ and years of development with a crack l33t team of coders. It’s why it hasn’t been done before, or after Spore.

edit 2: Also, i remember Brad defending their decision saying that user could always mod every type of race they wanted into the game… yeah, except in real terms is very expensive for them, but somehow an user would be do it in his free time?

5371

Ok, I was mainly coming from the angle of playable, humanoid creatures, where it would have been a tad more complicated than the GalCiv2 ship builder, but completely doable.

I remember, way back in the early days of 3D, developers were actually citing the simplicity of creating content for 3D vs. 2D as a major advantage - while in 2D artists had to draw actual sprites from multiple directions, and if the same dude should be copied with a different piece of armor or holding an axe instead of a sword, the complete set of sprites would have to be redrawn, whereas in 3D, these modifications would be very simple.

Every technology has it’s advantages and disadvantages, no doubt about it, and especially for a wide array of summons, a large amount of modelling would have to be done, but still - non-professionals do this all the time for non-profit modding projects, so I can’t say I’m willing to accept that as an excuse. Heck, they might have even outsourced part of the whole thing to modders in the first place by allowing imported models in the early betas and taking the best community-created-from-scratch models straight into the game.

It’s the same as the discussion with Brad himself a couple of dozen pages back about magic, where he said it was too hard to teach the AI to use more elaborate spells, so there wouldn’t be any in Elemental.

That ain’t the correct approach, in my book.
As you wrote yourself - if you’re not up to the task of filling your “Strategy variant of the Source engine” with content for your flagship title, maybe you shouldn’t develop it in the first place.

Edit: Essentially, it’s - like multiple people have pointed out in this very thread - an inherent problem of Brad’s approach, thinking creating an engine would take 95% of the development time and everything else would then quickly fall into place.
Even if you gave the source engine - finished as it is - to a small studio, but stripped bare of all textures, animations, models, sounds etc., I’m sure it would take them quite a while to make a decent FPS with it, despite the engine being finished from the get-go.

rezaf

5372

I got a 100% refund. They did not refund the shipping costs of the boxed game (man am I glad I didn’t upgrade to the LE), but they gave me 100% of the game costs ($49.95 US) within three days of my requesting it.

I filed a request ticket one day. I followed up with a telephone call to sales support the next day, and they immediately applied the refund to my credit card.

And I pre-ordered in mid-September of 2009.

5373

Back in the early days when 3D modeling and animation was literally nothing but a collection of vertices, key frames and a single texture that was likely true. Now with skeletal animations, skinning, interpolation, maps and shaders of all sorts the process has become quite a bit more complicated while the 2D sprite world has pretty much remained the same.

Also, there are of ways of creating sprites so that you don’t have to redraw every frame of animation just to support a different weapon or outfit.

5374

So… we should expect what everyone expected (and encouraged to expect) of the game to be released sometime within the next 20 months?

I guess I’ll just have to rationalize my LE purchase as a pre-order for the “we promise it’ll be what we promised” expansion. Oh, with early alpha-beta access, of course.

5375

That is if they really work only on it for the next 20 months. I don’t really see it happening.

5376

No, being mean to some random person because you didn’t get what you wanted or some such doesn’t make sense to me.

Anyway, I’m dropping it, no point in discussing it further.

5377

Random thought: I wonder what the budget was for King’s Bounty and all of its 3d models and textures.

I often get the feeling that crowd sourcing was part of the plan to get content into the game. That the modders would all do what the developers could not afford. I always felt like the hand of the community was being forced to embrace such a concept, instead of allowing it to grow and flourish naturally, based off a love for the game, rather than an urge to fix it (or a calculated push from Stardock to flesh it out). I almost feel that modding was so heavily emphasized, because free labor was a key part of the design.

5378

It’ll be interesting to see how all this plays out. On the one hand, Stardock does have a good track record for supporting its games. On the other, they’re going to need revenue. So what happens when they release an expansion 12 or even 24 months down the road? If it’s 12 months, many of the player-base will tear them apart (and perhaps rightfully so) for releasing an expansion on a game that they may feel is unfinished (even at that point). An expansion after 24 months won’t generate quite the level of vitriol, but there will be claims of “they held the good fixes for the expansion”. And can Stardock go financially without releasing an expansion for that long anyway?

5379

I hope you get your refund DaleKent.

5380

They may just have to bite the bullet on this one and take a loss, which I think Brad mentioned. Perhaps it’s worth it to try to salvage something of their reputation, considering they have the institutional side to keep things afloat in the meantime.

It’ll be interesting to see if they stick to their guns, fix the game, and try to win customers back or if they cut their losses a few months down the line and move on to something less… damaged.