Was wondering if anyone who’s purchased already and is playing the beta can tell me if they think this is worth $31.
Never purchased the original Elemental. Gamersgate has Fallen Enchantress on sale for $15 now, minus my holiday sale ****-up discount, making it $12…which gets me half-off LE.
So, the question is…is this going to be worth it? Is this beta looking any better than the original Elemental (it would be hard not to, from what I saw of it…)
It’s a very good game. I enjoy it a lot. Of course, whether you should spend money on it all depends on whether it’s your kind of game. It’s got some quirks, but each patch is improving the overall experience. Think of the game as a fantasy squad-based TBS with RPG elements. Kind of an unusual mash-up, but it works. I’d like a longer tech tree, but I’m weird that way (it’s still decent-sized). The artwork is unusual for the genre, but it does have some very nice touches (try zooming into a city sometime). The combat is getting better as well, which is a nice change (it had been too bland in the past). The AI is getting better, too. I’d say get it if you think this all sounds interesting to you. There have been some significant changes going from FE to LH, which are for the better imho. I like FE as well, but kept finding little ways that I thought it could be better. By and large, those are being adopted.
The game is by no means perfect - the AI can still use a little work, a couple of bugs pop up every now and then (it’s in beta, after all), and some have stated that the victory conditions still need some work. But it’s good. There’s very little voice work, so if that matters a bunch to you then be prepared (if you’ve played Civ V, there’s much more to be found there). Oh, and seriously throw out any opinion based upon the original Elemental: WoM. LH is almost a totally different game. FE is a much better barometer to whether you’ll like this or not. Legendary Heroes is a better game than Fallen Enchantress, but they have far more in common with each other than either does with the original.
edit - After purchasing Fallen Enchantress at Gamersgate, I think you may have to register it at Stardock in order to get Legendary Heroes at the discounted price. Stardock provides a Steam key when you finally get it there.
What a pointless thread.
From the WoM and FE threads, it seems the clear concensus is that there is no concensus.
Basically, there seem to be two camps, one that will tell you (like Dan_Theman just did) that it’s a great game now worth playing and the other which has a more negative opinion.
In my eyes, WoM is a deeply flawed game - fundamentally flawed - and while tremendous effort was made to improve the state of affairs in FE, there’s only so much even Kael can do.
Whether or not it can be a good game for you depends on your ability to accept the flaws.
So, if you already waited this long before playing, why not just wait a little longer, pick up FE at a sale and see whether or not that’s the case?
rezaf
I don’t think my post said it was a great game, but indeed the point is valid that some like it and others don’t.
That’s splitting hairs, great vs. very good, but I didn’t mean to belittle your opinion - I was just trying to say that it’s just not a game for everyone.
rezaf
That much, I can agree with :)
I think rezaf is a bit on the minority camp here, I think there are more people that likes it than people who doesn’t. LH beta reception on the official forums has been really good, also.
It’s better than the original Elemental, but it’s roughly the same or a hair worse than Fallen Enchantress. Unless they suddenly add piles of content later I’ve seen free patches that change things up more. On top of that one of the changes makes it so heroes end up being more vanilla since they level up via skilltrees instead of letting the player select from 5 randomly drawn abilities at each level up like in FE. It’s a matter of taste if you prefer one over the other, but I thought the system in FE was more interesting since there was an element of luck involved. If you originally intended to make that hero a tank and a powerful wizard skill shows up you might change your plan.
Then the new tactical maps are no big shakes. They made them smaller and tried sticking a few chokepoints in them to make them more interesting than the boxes of FE, but the tactical combat system is basic enough it doesn’t really help. There aren’t positions to put units to avoid spells or ranged attacks (There’s no line of sight at all, archers can shoot through buildings and mountains), there aren’t positions that give additional defensive bonuses, there aren’t tiles that slow movement down. It’s just a bunch of spaces to shove units forward until they mash into the enemy and hopefully win. I’m not bitching about the variety of tactical maps here since they did mention they intend to add more later, but I’m bitching about everything else about them since I doubt these aspects will change.
Also worth mentioning that FE’s tactical maps weren’t much better and were largely a square full of squares.
Then there are the graphical upgrades which mean absolutely nothing. First two screenshots are FE, second two are LH.
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867215320846755876/E50772A829A0714C8A479FA11187B8E8324CC83F/
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867215320846757782/EE6C761AF238D93CE0897AE041BBC35CC758A16B/
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867215320846689366/7FE6B5BD9AAF9A20523CD166C21537E49AB35672/
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/867215320846796140/869F48A8894E2477470EBF467531E07CD432E8D4/
Then you’ve got the new huge map size, which I guess may be a good thing if you like playing on massive maps. Was never my cup of tea so I haven’t even looked at it.
And then finally you’ve got something like 10 new monsters added to the game. Skeletons and spider men and liches and… Something. If you want to eyeball the changes and what they’ve been patching it’s over here. http://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_updates&appids=228260
Got my copy of LH from a buddy who preordered WoM and after FE decided to stop messing with these and I can’t really blame him. I was surprised at LH so far and would’ve been pretty pissed if I spent $20 on it. If you haven’t bought Fallen Enchantress yet then you’re probably alright buying FE or LH but I wouldn’t recommend both at all. I’m not much of a fan of FE but it’s tolerable if you’re dying for some fantasy strategy, though the soon to be released Eador may or may not be better. Might be worth waiting to see how that shapes up. Most of my complaints about LH are because it doesn’t add/improve/change enough from FE to warrant a $20 price tag in my eyes. So if you really want some Elemental you’re probably in decent shape picking up FE for $12-ish or buying LH through someone who already owns FE on Steam for $20, but be warned. BE WAAAAAAAARNED!
fwiw, those screen pics must be from an early version of LH as they don’t have shadows and the water has changed. That said, I’ll certainly agree that the graphics upgrade wasn’t terribly huge from FE and certainly not a reason to upgrade.
I’d get it for the large map alone.
And hoping for a x64 client so it can be even larger :)
Man, I hope that Dan’s right about the old version here, because the LH graphics look way worse than the FE ones; very muddy, insubstantial, and ill-defined. I mean, don’t get me wrong: the cartoonish, almost garish visuals in FE (holdovers from some very, very dumb decisions in the development of WoM) have never been GOOD, but they’re better than the bland, muddy stuff on display in the LH shots :-/
He’s right in that those screenshots were taken a version or two back, but that WAS with the shadows running. For the hell of it I fired LH up and snapped a picture with the current version, and I’m inclined to say the water looks worse than FE or previous LH (Transparency is fine for some games, but in this it just shows how the waterfall continues falling after it hit the water, and the slight shininess just makes it even more dull than the obvious water texture before). And if you’re curious, the second picture for FE and LH was showing them with “Stylized lighting” disabled.
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/864964469379810800/0B0E1AE9C80BA8596F3334425069301664E67B11/
Yay, they finally fixed rivers.
For some reason it really bugs me that in all Squee’s pictures you can see they clearly just had the river texture keep going down the wall instead of putting in a waterfall graphic.
I think Fallen Enchantress is one of the great fantasy strategy games you can play, and it has enough of a unique identity and distinctive gameplay that it stands apart from Eador and Warlock, which are also great fantasy strategy games.
As for Legendary Heroes, I played a beta a while ago and it convinced me that I don’t want to go back to vanilla Fallen Enchantress. There’s enough new stuff, including some reworked fundamentals, that I would say you’re not fully playing Fallen Enchantress unless you’re playing with the Legendary Heroes add-on.
As for whether it’s worth $32, that’s between you and your wallet.
-TomIn Stardock’s defense they did add a particle effect to the waterfalls in the latest version. I’m not sure why it wasn’t in the screenshot, maybe it doesn’t trigger until you move the camera (Since all those pictures were taken at the default game-start camera position to be uniform) 'cause I did notice it after I took it. Unfortunately the waterfall effect happens at the top of the waterfall and not the bottom, so the splashing happens as it goes over the edge and then it smoothly slides into (And under) the ocean.
Thanks Squee for a more in-depth “analysis” of this.
For me - and TurinTur might be right in that I’m part of a minority - it really boils down to: Why am I playing this if Master of Magic, a game almost 20 years old, is still way more fun, and if I really have to play something modern, Kael’s very own FFH for Civ4 is also more fun? (I even prefer MoM’s ancient pixel art to WoM/FE’s art style - I clearly am a little odd.)
FE is now very much playable, but - on me - it just doesn’t have that magic “one more turn” effect. I get annoyed or bored quickly, and that’s about it.
rezaf
Didn’t like Elemental when my brother bought it when it first came. When I was playing it on my brother’s PC, it was broken and an obvious money grab to bilk Stardock’s fans. I then bought FE, and despite all the work Kael put it, something felt off. Then me being silly, upgraded to LH. LH also felt like there was something wrong. I just couldn’t put my finger on what makes the games so unpalatable to me. Kael and his team deserve a lot of props for making FE playable from the broken carcass of Elemental, FE came a long way from the steaming pile of turd called Elemental that I played on my brother’s PC.
Does a part of me regret buying FE and then doubling down to the LH upgrade? Not really, I just chalked up the money I threw away as a thank you to Kael for his Fall from Heaven mod.
I gave Elemental a miss after the well-reported issues. As I understood it, FE was supposed to be the version to get, all fixed up and reworked by Kael etc. I picked it up not knowing about Legendary Heroes and was a bit annoyed when I found out. So LH is the reworked version of FE, which was itself the reworked version of Elemental? Seems a bit too much like a third bite of the cherry to me.
You get a discount price (or even free) if you got one of the previous games. I got it free, because I preordered Elemental ages ago.