Yeah, I totally agree. Everything is washed out and kind of dull, which is a fine aesthetic on its own but uninspiring when employed in support of what is ostensibly an epic high fantasy where the world will be reshaped by magic.
Also, the modular approach to component design is cool in theory, but so far everything ends up looking samey and generic, regardless of which supposedly distinct race/faction it belongs to. The unit faces, poses, and backgrounds, with only a handful of exceptions, are awkward, incongruent, and often (sorry to say it) ugly.
I understand that all of this stuff can be modded, but echoing Mark’s concerns I want it to look beautiful and play well out of the gate. I don’t want to wait a year hoping that modders will address glaring aesthetic and gameplay issues.
I have been a bit hesitant to criticize the art in Elemental, because all I’ve really seen are stills and not the game in motion, but yeah, the stills are so generic and uninspiring. Nothing I’ve seen sparks my imagination.
I want to see exaggeration in the art, an overriding theme at work. Instead I see an attempt at realistic-looking medieval and fantastic characters without any discernible style behind them. I want to see more in the faces, in their features – stretch them a bit. I want to see glares and beatific smiles and the agony of the damned in their expressions. I want malevolence and heroics. I feel like I’m getting mug shots instead.
Anyway, take this for what it is, an outsider not in the beta, occasionally looking in. I have no doubt the game looks and feels differently when playing it.
I agree, it’s a fear I share regarding Elemental. I do think that if it’s not the game I hope it to be in a month, it will be (or close to it) in 6-12 months. We’ll see.
Yeah, that’s possible. But the thing with NWN is that I probably did miss on a lot of excellent mods. I may miss on a lot of excellent Elemental mods too. Most of us play the release game and then move on. Stardock gets one chance with the majority of us.
Razgon
1685
yeah, I’ve been saying that for months now, and I really hope my fears are put to shame!
Mark Asher’s input was particularly helpful in steering my thoughts on spells and such.
Plus, the Random House content is starting to get integrated (starting this week and for the next week or so) which is obviously going to result in a pretty dramatic shift in the writing from the placeholders currently in beta 4.
A good toolset is not enough to have a strong modding community. You need also a very good game, from the base. It’s my belief that modders are a very small % of the playerbase, let’s say 0.1%. The game will have a certain playerbase, the better the game, the higher the playerbase. That’s why you a good game that generates a high playerbase, so that 0.1% means a good amount of people in absolute numbers. 0.1% of 500.000 is more than 0.1% of 120.000.
You do realize that this is why companies are so secretive with their products right to release right?
We release a lot of screenshots and put a lot of content up and have open betas and thus people get to see a lot of “warts”.
The Elemental art style is based on an illustrative look. We like it. Not everyone will like it of course but we do. I do wish they’d put up more recent screenshots but that’s something that’ll have to get sorted out.
I’m in CA this week showing the internal build that often gets referred to of beta 4 (has a different UI and such). I’ll leave it with them on what impression they received of it.
I do like this screenshot:
http://www.elementalgame.com/images/Screenshots/Elemental_1277752757.jpg
The game itself looked (and still looks) promising in and of itself, but the toolset indicates to me that the game will have legs among the player community, should it garner even a moderate following. The best times I had playing NWN were with player-made modules, and I see the same potential in Elemental. Is it a guaranteed bet? No, but it’s one I’ll be willing to make when the game is released.
You’re a bad, bad man … with a good sense of humor ;)
Well, at least I can say that Elemental Beta 4 is at least 100x better than Black & White, so there’s that.
KevinC
1693
Let me be up front in that I’m generally an optimistic person, I’m a glass half full kind of guy. With that being said, the listed changes that Brad mentions in his latest update sound terrific. The changes to the technology trees make them sound more interesting. A poster earlier in the thread (perhaps Naeblis?) had complained about the Times New Romanish generic font, and that poster will be happy to know that the font used throughout the betas was a placeholder.
Anyway, here’s the scoop from the Elemental site:
The high level changes are:
The finalized Game UI
The finalized Empire Tree (ala Sins of a Solar Empire)
Finalized City and Unit UI
Finalized Tactical Battle UI
Finalized Font Display (i.e. the replacement of the placeholder fonts with the final game fonts)
The Finalized Technology Tree
Civilization, Warfare techs are fairly similar to what they are now except there’s a few more of them.
Adventure allows players to uncover rare resources, world awareness, and a number of other things.
Diplomacy uncovers various levels of recruitable units that you can train – i.e. make friends with special races that you can then train at associated settlement.
Magic tree lets players magnify the power of their spells if they have the appropriate shard (i.e. Morrigan’s Hammer does N damage normally but if you control an earth shard it does 2N damage, Maelstrom will do 1 tile of harm normally but do N radius out for every air shard you control. Moreover, the Magic tree will allow players to discover the special abilities within their own champions beyond their inherent ones i.e. You’ll be able to see what they are in NPCs as well as your existing ones suddenly discovering theirs).
Zillions of other tweaks and refinements.
Random House descriptions replacing placeholder text.
The Finalized Tactical Battle System
Number of Action points a spell takes to cast is based on the caster’s wisdom.
Tons of other changes too long to list.
The Final Quest and Notification System implemented
Basically nearly all the quests and notable locations from the beta are gone, replaced with the final ones we’ve been working on.
Hundreds of other game play tweaks and changes.
And of course bug fixes galore, especially on memory (this got fixed in beta 5, I was quite concerned on this one, but thanks to users helping us, we were able to track this down to our effects system not deallocating properly and on certain newer ATI cards on 64-bit windows it could lose 100 megabytes per turn).
The Campaign which is made entirely with the mod tools.
So in the next week or so the “gold” version will go out to manufactu
. A poster earlier in the thread (perhaps Naeblis?) had complained about the Times New Romanish generic font
Nope, not me. But i am happy because they seem to be fixing one of my complaints, the imbalance between tree technologies (more exactly, they are doing more stuff to magic, adventure and diplomacy).
Oooh. I like this idea.
Magic tree lets players magnify the power of their spells if they have the appropriate shard (i.e. Morrigan’s Hammer does N damage normally but if you control an earth shard it does 2N damage, Maelstrom will do 1 tile of harm normally but do N radius out for every air shard you control. Moreover, the Magic tree will allow players to discover the special abilities within their own champions beyond their inherent ones i.e. You’ll be able to see what they are in NPCs as well as your existing ones suddenly discovering theirs).
That could really change things during the middle of the game.
Fingers crossed. Are we getting that update today, by any chance?
KevinC
1697
No, we won’t be seeing another update until release.
Are you sure? The journal mentions a Beta 5, and I assumed that would mean an update before release?
I’m just hoping you’re wrong and that a new update was released 5 minutes ago :)
KevinC
1700
Unless something changed, Beta 5 was going to remain internal. Beta 4 was the last public release according to comments I’ve read and their beta schedule. I’d love to be wrong, though!
