Elemental all-purpose thread

[Count_Batman]

Bras has said repeatedly that they will work on Elemental: War of Magic for a year into the future.

[KevinC]

Bras has said repeatedly that they will work on Elemental: War of Magic for a year into the future.

And the game was supposed to be awesomeamazingsauce at release as well, but look how that panned out.

At the end of the day Brad has a business to run and employees to pay. Right now there’s a possibility to salvage some of their rep, even if Elemental is a loss. But that only goes so far.

[Jarmo]

Re: Patch 1.08 availability

[quote=“Brad Wardell @ Elemental forum,
September 14, 2010 11 AM”]
It’s supposed to be submitted to QA this afternoon.

After that there are 3 possibilities:

1. It’ll pass and it’ll go up in the next 48 hours.
2. It’ll fail and go back to Dev for fixing at which point you’re talking a week.
3. It’ll pass but with required fixes before it can be released at which point you’re looking at 48 to 72 hours.
   [/quote]

Original thread.

[Count_Batman]

And the game was supposed to be awesomeamazingsauce at release as well, but look how that panned out.

At the end of the day Brad has a business to run and employees to pay. Right now there’s a possibility to salvage some of their rep, even if Elemental is a loss. But that only goes so far.

But Brad allegedly thought it was awesomeamazingsauce at release (This is not a real word i’d rather not see it on these boards again). Working on something for one year is much more difficult to get out of with a simple excuse.

[kerzain]

Be sure to vote in the latest poll:
http://www.elementalgame.com/journals

Stardock is asking “What area would you like to see us focus on first?”:
Multiplayer features
Tactical Battles
The Magic System
The Computer AI
The general Combat System
More Quests
Additional Campaigns
Performance (How fast things work)
Stability (Technical issues)

[Jarmo]

Wardell continues from the post Oghier linked:

A lot of the design beefs many people have had with Elemental v1.0 is that the RPG and Strategy components are not well integrated. It’s a muddle in places and this really shows up in the tactical battles and the magic system.

Clearly, one lesson to be learned here is that you can’t just pick and choose systems and throw them together. You have to integrate the two together seamlessly. Hindsight is 20/20 but luckily, we’ll be able to deal with this in Elemental 1.x and not some future sequel or what have you.

Original post.

[Count_Batman]

Brad seems to have grown a lot as a person since August.

[JM1]

Well, that’s Game Design 101. It would be a little less alarming if this didn’t sound like a big surprise to them.

[TurinTur]

Damn, i have problems even with the polls!

The first area to improve isn’t in the options. It should be better differentation of factions, with two unique units and two buildings for every faction and one special global perk for each one, like winning morale every time you kill a monster, or perhaps trade routes that gives you mana, or little but very different stuff like that. And of course everything following a consistent flavor for that faction.

After, the magic system.

After, tactical battles.

After more and more involving quests.

After, AI.

And well, obviously the perfomance and stability are also important, it should be worked by the engine programmers while the rest do the previous stuff.

[Jarmo]

As the on the one hand admirably direct Stardock way of communicating means topical information is given out piecemeal in random posts and the Elemental forums do not seem to support showing the latest posts* of a person here is the Google search string I created to more easily find the latest Wardell posts:

site:forums.elementalgame.com +“Member No.1” +“september 14” +2010

It is not perfect and it will find non-Elemental stuff but it works a whole lot better than the forum search.

*In Stardockspeak “latest posts” means “latest threads started by this person”. There is no latest posts option. Might this point to one source of the demonstrated miscommunication with Stardock: an insular community with their own vocabulary and way of doing things with no regard to the outside standard way. Folks, if you’re not Microsoft this does not and will not work.

[lordkosc]

Well I voted magic… For a game with Magic in the title, my wars are not very Magic filled. :(

Stupid fireball missing the target :(

[steve]

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

If you outsource all of your art to China or Russia—or in the case of King’s Bounty, you do all of your development there—you can generate more assets for your dollar. To do the same amount of art in North America or Europe, you’re probably looking at 2-3 times the costs.

I have no idea what the budget was for King’s Bounty, but it’s maybe a $6-$8 million dollar game from a US developer. For those guys? It may be as little as $2-$3 million.

[RepoMan]

Well, that’s Game Design 101. It would be a little less alarming if this didn’t sound like a big surprise to them.

This is all actually making me wonder whether Stardock has ever had any game designers. GalCiv was first written in 1993 for OS/2, for fuck’s sake! It had a looooong time to go through many many iterations, and it started in a very feature-poor version that got new features added in incrementally, with lots of gameplay testing along the way.

Elemental is really the first clean-sheet-of-paper game Stardock has ever done. (Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire don’t count; in both cases those games were not designed by Stardock.)

I think Brad must not have been paying attention to how Gas Powered Games or Ironclad were doing their design work, or at least he wasn’t at all revising his thinking on how to design a game. In fact, it sounds like he didn’t think designing a game is even necessary.

I really feel deeply disappointed by this, and my preorder money was comprehensively wasted. I paid that money so they would have the time to design the game and beta it before shipping it, not after.

Calling this “Game Design 101” is exactly right, and Brad gets an F for Elemental 1.0. I still won’t go for a refund, but I also will never buy another Wardell-designed game; I had no idea he didn’t believe in game design :-(

[arakyd]

Gratuitous self quote:

He’s said himself that “I’m not a game designer. Not really. I’m a gamer who happens to make games.” … It’s possible that Brad was the only person at Stardock who actually looked at the game as a whole, and possibly the only person who even really cared to do so. And he says himself that he’s not really a game designer, and it’s pretty clear by now that he’s right.

[kerzain]

If you outsource all of your art to China or Russia—or in the case of King’s Bounty, you do all of your development there—you can generate more assets for your dollar. To do the same amount of art in North America or Europe, you’re probably looking at 2-3 times the costs.

I have no idea what the budget was for King’s Bounty, but it’s maybe a $6-$8 million dollar game from a US developer. For those guys? It may be as little as $2-$3 million.

I knew King’s Bounty was created outside the U.S., and was curious about the dev costs because of that. I don’t remember King’s Bounty ever being priced at $49.99 for the base game though (I also don’t know if there were expensive ‘Limited Editions’ that we see with Elemental). Also, because I’ve bought all my King’s Bounty stuff online, I don’t even know if there are boxed copies of the game out there.

In the case of King’s Bounty The Legend, AP, and Crossroads use so many of the same Art assets it looks like whatever extra investment they did put into their creation might easily have doubly paid off.

[RepoMan]

Arakyd, I thought that was a good observation at the time, and it’s now comprehensively corroborated.

I wish I’d known this back when I preordered :-(

[dtolman]

Elemental is really the first clean-sheet-of-paper game Stardock has ever done. (Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire don’t count; in both cases those games were not designed by Stardock.)

My copy of the Political Machine would like to have a word with you… not to mention Corporate Machine/Entrepreneur

This is not their first time designing a concept from scratch in-house.

[Alstein]

Well I voted magic… For a game with Magic in the title, my wars are not very Magic filled. :(

Stupid fireball missing the target :(

Voted general combat, as that is the one thing I think is completely borked.

magic would be my 2nd pick, and those are clear 1-2.

[lordkosc]

I also will never buy another Wardell-designed game :-(

I wouldn’t go as far as that, but I would wait for the next Stardock Developed game to be out on the market ,reviewed / tested / and have a demo to try before buying it.

[steve]

I knew King’s Bounty was created outside the U.S., and was curious about the dev costs because of that.

I think King’s Bounty was a $40 game, and I’m not sure about its retail presence as I also bought it and AP/Crossroads on Steam.

Russian development costs are still lower than NA/Euro costs, which is why a lot of niche-y PC stuff comes from that region. They aren’t looking to recoup $10-$20 budgets; with $2-$3 budgets and similar production values, they give players the “big game” feel yet don’t need to sell zillions of copies.

In the case of King’s Bounty The Legend, AP, and Crossroads use so many of the same Art assets it looks like whatever extra investment they did put into their creation might easily have doubly paid off.

Yeah, if you’re really smart you can do expansions/add-ons very cheaply, yet still deliver lots of new and fun stuff.

(Though I think Armored Princess lost a bit of the batshit insane-ness of the first, er, re-make. Haven’t dug into Crossroads yet.)