6241

Yeah, the lack of rivers has always bothered me since they removed them rather than fixing them.

6242

Details on new expansion announced.

“In Fallen Enchantress players will be able to explore the world of Elemental and discover a wide range of unique locations, including dangerous wild lands that can’t be settled until they are conquered. There are areas like the Bhinadmi Fissure, a massive chasm that spawns demons and earth elementals, until a player goes to the edge and challenges the elemental lord that dwells within. These undiscovered lands contain new characters and creatures: from the tragic Butchermen who wander the lands around Red Springs trying to pass their curse off to another victim, to Morian the Ruin of Summer, who was once a powerful nature elemental who has been driven mad by the Cataclysm and the destruction of his forests.”

Sounds kind of cool. I still refuse to play Elemental until something is done about the generic quests.

6243

Kael said in the Design posts that he was working on quests personally for the expansion- so I expect a revamp by then if not before.

6244

Hmm. So, I’m assuming they’ve washed their hands of the vanilla campaign? I guess that’s understandable. Short of scrapping it and starting over, I have no idea how that thing could’ve been saved.

In other news…

http://news.bigdownload.com/2011/01/07/interview-stardocks-ceo-talks-about-elemental-and-other-topics/

6245

They’re having a contest for players to design their own quests too. Players can win a video card, or gift certificates for Impulse.

My problem with contests like this (with other games anyway) is that all of my ideas end up being beyond the scope of what the developers want to do with their game. Sure, the game might have certain capabilities built into the engine, but getting quest devs to consider implementing anything other than fetch quests always seems like a wasted effort.

6246

“I’ve got this idea about a quest where you end up paddling down a river…”

“Let me stop you there, son.”

6247

Rivers were removed from game :p

I wish they would just do a decent single player story with this game, i mean between the written book and the lore, how can they not have enough content?

6248

That’s the joke.jpg

6249

kerzain, you and HRose would get along smashingly.

6250

I said the same thing six months ago on my blog.

6251

Raife needs to say something remarkable/noteworthy enough so I can blog about her too. Where should I create my blog?

6252

There is definitely a balance between making interesting quests and a reasonable development time. The same exists for spells. And in the end we try to get as much bang for the buck for the development time we spend. Many of the spells in 1.1 weren’t possible in earlier versions. We have to develop systems to do those things. It will be the same with quests.

For me quests are cool if they offer an interesting strategic choice, or they cause something cool to happen. Those don’t always require a high dev time. Or the dev time can be used in various places. I cant afford to have a dev work for 2 days on a function that will be used in one quest (an the support and qa that requires), but if they can spend some time on a function that I can use in different ways in a dozen quests, it begins to make sense. I dont want a dozen identical quests so I also need creative way to use the quest functions.

Even the community quests that wont make it into the finals are good to read to see what players want, what players imagine quests to be, and a lot simply trigger ideas and thoughts with the designers. There were a lot of spells that we liked some part of, but not the way it was implemented in the spells and the spell design contest had a good impact on the spells in Fallen Enchantress, it made them more varied and interesting because they were the result of hundreds of peoples ideas instead of just a handful.

6253

I was thinking along the lines of taking advantage of certain engine features in game (like the terraforming currently available through the use of spells) to result in an Atlantis-like city ruin (or node/resource/area of interest/unleashing of some hoarde etc) being raised from the depths of the ocean during the culmination of a quest, or have portions of a quest require the Hero to lower terrain in certain areas to locate hidden ruins/super nodes/points of interest, or creating doppelganger troops/heroes/armies for some quest-driven battle blah blah blah.

My original point was as much a confession about my inability to reign things in a bit when it comes to stuff like this (I don’t always have a good grasp about where the line would be, from a players standpoint, for devs to implement ideas/suggestions), as it was about past experiences with other rpgs/mmos that sought similar feedback like this from the community. I have no problems with the idea of quest suggestions (especially because of the type of feedback it does generate, I’ve just always been a bit let down that (in other games) the end results ended up being stuff like fetch/kill quests, light on story, lighter on impact and resonance.

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One thing I’d like to see is NPC adventurers do quests themselves, and occasionally fail them, leading to chaos.

6255

I want AoW-style dungeons & such.

I want randomly generated quests. For example: one table with quest providers/pre-requisites, one with locations, one with location layouts, one with encounters, one with loss conditions, one with win conditions - with quests being the sum of a random combination of entries on all of those tables.

I want quests linked across tiers. For example, don’t let me do the tier 2 “What’s Eating All The Horsies?” quest, unless someone has done the tier 1 “Resolving This Quest Unleashes Something Hungry On The Plains” quest.

I want quests to change the world noticeably, and I want redundant outcomes kilt with fire. E:WoM is not a RPG, it’s a 4X. A magic sword (or whatever) is something I should produce myself, by pursuing the correct combination of infrastructure & research. Rewarding me with stuff I can produce is inherently crap for gameplay reasons (either the quest isn’t worth my time, or my empire isn’t), and it is hugely unsatisfying. “Something Hungry Eats All The Horsies” is a hugely noticeable outcome, whether or not I happen to use horses as a resource.

…

To be perfectly honest, what I really want is to see you toss out all of the systems design currently in the game, and use any one or combination of the alternatives I’ve seen on your forums. I have little confidence Elemental will ever be entertaining, unless that happens. The best quests in the world, for example, wouldn’t be able to carry the rest of the game as it is right now.

6256

Been playing some Elemental, its fun enough at times now :) However I’d like to see a few things, speed up combat, its a bit slow, and also I guess its gonna be revamped as currently combat is a bit odd…

I don’t get why things should retaliate…you have attacks, enemy has attacks, retaliation should be maybe at best a special ability.

6257

Looking through the submissions, the thing that jumped out at me is the wide variety of quest triggers. Looking back, it seems very odd that at present quests only happen when you visit a goody hut. Lots of interesting ideas for alternate triggers, although I’m not sure how feasible they are in the context of the game engine.

Also and very quickly, is anyone else having the issue that the text of the longer quest submissions goes off the page above and below and won’t display properly? I’m curious what’s hidden up (and down) there.

Final thought: I submitted an idea, and noticed when it was posted that a variable I mentioned had just been deleted (along the lines of ‘<player name here>’, in both the title and the main body of the text). Both now read quite oddly due to the deletion. As variables in square brackets were fine, it might be worth adding a warning note to avoid using ‘<>’ in submissions.

6258

Reading this thread just made me decide to reinstall FfH

6259

The press release said something of note: Apparently the expansion is smartly (to get better reviews) being released as a stand-alone game. I think this is a real smart move by SD, as Elemental 1.11 would get decent reviews now as is if it was released as a new game, so the expansion should do better.

Edit: They’re discounting it heavily if you buy the game now, so you won’t get hosed if you buy the game before the expansion comes out.

If you bought before 12/31, you get it free, so no worries.

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Some details of said expansion