1901

Well, everyone have quests and heroes to go on these quests, so i don’t see the problem.

1902

Right, also if I’d be annoyed by another player getting something too powerful from a quest - I’d be annoyed by an AI player doing the same, I suspect.

1903

This is true, Brad, Civ doesn’t have stuff like that. I realize there’s a bit of apples to oranges going on, and part of that is my admitted ignorance to exactly what’s being restricted from the MP experience.

But, if I may address your question (even if it was perhaps rhetorical)… yes, going on quests and finding special, magical items in MP sounds like fun. But I should say that I don’t play TBS games in a competitive versus mode, I feel like RTS is a better format for that. I typically play TBS cooperatively with my friends, against AI set to a very high difficulty.

If I focused on empire building while my friend roamed around searching for powerful artifacts and he finds one that turns the tide of the battle, that’d be cool!

Look, you’ve got firsthand experience with all this while I’m just theorizing based on what information I have available to me, so I freely admit I could be way off (and I’ll be happy to eat crow on release day if I am :)). But at the end of the day, I’d like the option to play this awesome, full featured game you’ve developed with my friends.

1904

Endorsed. This is exactly me as well.

1905

Yeah, I’d like the option. One of the things that sets Elemental APART from Civ, is quests. But by taking them out and making the MP experience more ‘generic’, we might as well go play Civ IV Fall from Heaven 2 MP.

Again, we are ALL just theorizing since we haven’t played MP yet. I’ll trust your internal testing for that. I’ve pre-ordered since before beta even started, so I am looking forward to this creation.

Jorune

ps. Demigod Rules

1906

Understandable, though that particular desire puts you in a tiny niche of the 4x TBS gaming world.

True, and I didn’t debate that. Stardock has focused their multiplayer efforts on a more streamlined version. I’m saying it’s not worth Stardock’s time to do BOTH their multiplayer vision and the “option” people have mentioned.

Treating multiplayer as a separate experience from single player is the norm. Shooters in multiplayer are nothing like single player. Most RTS games, the multiplayer has nothing to do with the single player. Most RPG’ish games that have multiplayer usually end up making that look like a shooter (see Bioshock). The things required to make a multiplayer game fun vs. the single player aren’t exclusive to those genres and I’m not surprised it’s happening in Elemental as well.

I understand your feeling, I do, but I understand why things are shaping up the way they are.

1907

A lot of the decisions made came down to things that made the internal beta group angry.

Some things literally pissed people off to the point where they had a very negative opinion of the overall game as a result.

The two top things that came up were:

  1. Quest items (the “other” guy managed to get 3 midnight stones and get a nasty sword while they got the rats in the ruins quest)

and

  1. Waiting for someone to finish a tactical battle.

It’s one of those, we’re going to get maimed no matter how we do it.

So in my view, because Elemental is a brand new franchise, we have literally years to perfect this kind of stuff. Better to see what works and doesn’t over the coming weeks, months, years and provide that to players.

For instance, I’m an ex-Magic the Gathering addict. I think there’s a lot of potential for stand-alone tactical battles where players pre-choose their “decks” (spells and resources) and play 1 on 1 this way.

At the risk of losing sales, I would much prefer players know what things the game is good at (single player) and what things are weak for the game at release (the MP “fun”).

If I were to go around touting out awesome MP is, I would be lying and when we add something that really does make MP special, I think people would rightly be skeptical.

After Demigod, our #1 goal with MP was making it bullet proof and in that area, we’ve succeeded (basically we simply spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in setting up world wide servers to host the games for people). But the benefit is that those servers are there. We can expand what they do.

As you guys on Qt3 know, we (you guys and I) are classic gamers for the most part. We can come up with cool stuff and put them in. There’s not some “marketing arm” or something to get all this filtered through. We’ll think of cool stuff to do together and then implement it.

We’re not even making a new game for 2011. It’s all Elemental. Heck, I had to kick people out of the building today because they’re still working crazy hours even though we went gold last week. Once I get them “unaddicted” to coding on the game, they’ll be ready to start putting in fresh new ideas from players.

There’s a lot of cool stuff in the gold version that I think people will really appreciate. The Hiergamenon stuff (and you can thank Tom Chick for this because he is the one who really turned me on to the importance of making data easily available) is really advanced in the gold version.

1908

This reasoning makes sense, especially number 2, for now. However, I still wonder - isn’t number 1 an issue really in single player as well? What is different about an AI getting 3 midnight stones and I only get rat quests? That feels more like an overall balance issue than a gameplay mode issue, to me?

1909

Yes, they’ve been working so hard it should be the weekend.

Say… Sunday.

When you’ll be turning the floodgates live for the beta contingent.

Yes, it definitely feels like Sunday evening to me.

I think a lot of people here would agree.

1910

That is exactly what I said. But for whatever reason, the beta testers felt that when it was a human being (versus an AI) it was simply “different”.

You can imagine the amount of work that went into making quests work over MP so it wasn’t a feature we gladly removed by any means.

The ONLY feature that was nastier to remove and redo was the continuous turns tactical battles which were, I think, kind of slick but ultimately were frustrating to play. In hindsight, it was a dumb idea on my part to have tactical battles try to play differently (continuous / quasi-RTS) than the regular game. But that really deserves a separate discussion on my idiocy as a designer that I didn’t recognize that people would find turn-based strategic and continuous turn tactical as “bait and switch”. If we get flamed or marked down on tactical battles, it’ll be purely my fault for tossing out the entire tactical battle engine for a turn-based one.

Luckily, and I sincerely mean this, the beta feedback on emphasizing special abilities by monsters and NPCs, were something we got in exchange and that is something I think has made the tactical battles fun in the release version versus beta 4 where tactical battles were just horribly boring and pointless IMO.

1911

In a multiplayer game, a big early advantage means someone is going to kick the ass of some other human making someone mad. In a single player game, there’s a good chance that AI is going to bang on some other AI and you won’t even notice until well later when you discover kingdom X is your main rival. You don’t know that happened because of the midnight stones and you really don’t care much and by the time you meet them, you’re on par. If they happened to find you really early, quitting the game and restarting isn’t that big a deal (people restart single player games all the time when the starting spot isn’t great).

Thus, an “unbalanced” situation in multiplayer doesn’t typically mean a bad experience in single player, but it’d really piss someone off almost instantly in multiplayer.

1912

I remain unconvinced, but I see no reason to not be optimistic. Time will tell, eh? :)

1913

First of all, Brad, I know How busy you guys must be with release just around the corner, so thanks for taking the time to respond. I do understand your reasoning behind the decisions you made. That being said, what are my options going to look like for Modding in this area? Can I mod stuff back into MP like tactical battles and quests, or would that require a patch / expansion on Stardocks part?

I don’t mind doing the work, I just want to be able to play the game the way I desired.

1914

It says there is a 1.0 update for elemental as of about 1 minute ago, but it says my registration is invalid. Freaking out right now :)

1915

^downloading 1.0 now

1916

Same here with the registration :\

1917

Wow, it’s actually in my “no longer beta” set of download options in Impulse! I know Brad mentioned it might hit early, but I’m really surprised. I wasn’t even going to look until Sunday.

8%
…
15%
…

go go go go go.

1918

Judging from the official forums, a bunch of people is having that problem right now (myself included). I don’t know how Kerzain is managing to download it, but I’m guessing it’ll be sorted out over the weekend.

1919

Might be a mistake. I went to the Elemental icon on my list, didn’t install and stopped to check version number, and it disappeared from my list. Accidental release they are trying to halt, maybe?

Edit: Damn, it really seems to be gone for now, can’t seem to get it back.

1920

As a guy who dislikes RTS’ with a passion, this would have been a “no buy” for me…