War of Magic or TBS Construction Set

Enquiring on the future of EWOM

from Elemental Forums

I'm starting to get a bit worried.  I've been flipping back through the old beta board, looking at the various timelines and feature lists, and what I'm seeing is that there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the game that was announced to the press and advertised on the front page and what the developers were actually shooting for.  Part of my disappointment with the game (and I suspect others as well) is that the feature set is technically complete but not nearly as robust as I was expecting.  Yes you can cast spells, but the spell list is short and lacks variety.  Ditto unit design, city building, diplomacy, etc.  But all of the team's design goals were met.  They have a magic system, they have a unit design system, etc. And perhaps more importantly to the dev team, they have all the modding tools ready to allow users to expand on those systems.

This takes me back to a game I used to have as a kid on my old C64: The Adventure Construction Set.  It was a toolkit for creating tile based RPGs in the Ultima/Wastelands mode as were popular at the time, with utilities for creating maps, NPCs, items, sprites and a crude menu-based scripting engine for tying it all together into an actual game.  It was clunky and took a lot of work, but with dedication you could make nearly professional (for the time) level adventure games.  It came packaged with an adventure made with it, a short game based around the epic of Gilgamesh called Rivers of Light.  It was a fun little game, and a great way to show off what the ACS could do, but it wasn't a full product like Ultima or Wasteland.

This is what worries me: The more I play it the more the game we have feels to me like Rivers of Light.  It's a great example of what someone can build with the Turn Based Strategy Construction Set, but it's not a full game.  The abbreviated spell list, the lack of unit building options and city upgrades, etc: The more I play with them the more they seem like samples, like examples of what a single modder could put together for his game if he really wanted to.  That's cool and all, but it doesn't interest me much.  I didn't buy the Turn Based Strategy Construction Set.  I bought Elemental: War of Magic.  Modding is just a single bullet point on the feature list, and for me it's a bonus that I might play around with when I have the time once I've gotten bored with the regular game, not the primary draw.

So here's my question for StarDock: Is there still significant 'fleshing out' of Elemental left as part of the initial "patch yourselves out of trouble" phase of the release, or do you consider the game as shipped feature- and content-complete barring the first full fledged expansion (free or otherwise).

Please note: It's a fools errand to ask something like this, I know, but please: feedback, suggestions, counters and even flames are fine, but unless you're part of the dev team or have a specific quote from them, your assurances as to the direction they intend to take the game will do nothing to salve my concerns.  And if your feedback is "Well I enjoy it just fine, you must just suck", please give specifics.  I want to love the game as much as you do, but expressing the superiority of your experience without giving some kind of guidance doesn't help anyone.

elemental
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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Brad made a post today on just what he was doing...should answer all your questions.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Does not answer any of those questions in the least, actually.

To sum up: big patch in September making big vague changes with just "character creation" and "shared mana pools" specified, grudgingly making a tutorial (I'd settle for a real manual and help system, honest!), expansion pack will be a freebie update instead, new gold master of the updated code, taking a break to work hard on AI and asking reviewers to review the release patch rather than the current one for fairness.

Absolutely nothing there about content, just revamping underlying game systems.

Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

It's the fact that half the features are broken/disfunctional/useless that the game seems like a shell. When the update in September is released, I'm pretty sure you'll find the game is much more a full game and not what it is now.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

To be honest, I would prefer that Brad save his time and skip the tutorial and just write up a decent manual that explains everything.  If a tutorial breaks into the time and effort spent on content, I'll take content any day.

 

Tutorials are overrated anyway.  I think most of us were satisfied with Master of Magic's thick manual explaining everything we didn't understand, rather than a hold-you-by-the-nose tutorial.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting GaelicVigil, reply 4
To be honest, I would prefer that Brad save his time and skip the tutorial and just write up a decent manual that explains everything.  If a tutorial breaks into the time and effort spent on content, I'll take content any day.

 

Tutorials are overrated anyway.  I think most of us were satisfied with Master of Magic's thick manual explaining everything we didn't understand, rather than a hold-you-by-the-nose tutorial.
End of GaelicVigil's quote

 

I would rather he did neither and spent time fleshing out the skeletal features of the game and fixing the AI.

 

After that I am happy to figure out the intricacies of a wildly varied game. I won't bother until then though.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting AlixeniusTheGreat, reply 3
It's the fact that half the features are broken/disfunctional/useless that the game seems like a shell. When the update in September is released, I'm pretty sure you'll find the game is much more a full game and not what it is now.
End of AlixeniusTheGreat's quote

I'd argue that the features themselves are actually fairly complete, if buggy.  It's things to do with those features we're lacking.  I can build cities, design and recruit armies, research technologies and spells, go on quests and pillage huts, make trades and treaties with other empires and conquer their cities.  But there's little real choice in what to build in those cities, army design is mostly just upgrading to the newest axe/mace/sword, the spell lists are tiny and only contain a handfull of real effects, and the goodie huts contain nothing I can't buy back in town.

The underlying systems definitely need work, don't get me wrong, but it's pretty clear those are going to get worked on.. the content side is less clear.  The main thrust of the beta seems to have been getting the basic systems working as quickly as possible, without a lot of attention paid to the content those systems were meant to enable.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

The main thrust of the beta seems to have been getting the basic systems working as quickly as possible, without a lot of attention paid to the content those systems were meant to enable.
End of quote

The main thrust of beta was making sure the shell of the game worked enough to pass the lowest possible scrutiny test at release. Elemental released a point where other dev houses, indie or big commericial ones, would have moved on to an open beta to test how all the features interacted. SD just opted to go straight to release.

I swear, there are times it seems like Elemental was dev'd and released on an MMO model rather than a SP model. Slotting in features, releasing with promises of "more", when 6 months would have been plenty of time to add that content, test it, polish and then release. These are things MMOs do, not traditional SP games. But I guess that's just how SD rolls.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

One of the biggest things that keeps coming up in reviews (and in threads here) is that a lot of people simply have no idea what to do when playing. A tutorial provides guidance and gets people started, so when they open up a sandbox game for the first time they're not totally lost.

That's pretty important, and something worth doing. (And I say that as someone whose first experience with a Stardock published game was the tutorial in the Sins demo. )

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm optimistic about the game. From experience, SD has never given anything but dedicated support to their games, and continued, community interaction, timely improvements far in excess of what you'd find from almost any other developer.  They have never been anything but above and beyond the call of duty in that regard.  The game has all the basic building blocks in place of the game I want to play.

 

That said, I don't think the game will really be the game it is supposed to be, until after the first paid expansion and a few complete systems overhauls, probably a year from now. There is just too much work to do before the game really comes into it's own.  That's about when Gal Civ 2 *really* started to shine.

 

Doesn't bother me, because it's not like tons of other people are making games exactly like this, and the game has never been anything other than a paid beta for me, having pre ordered as soon as I was able. There's no difference for *me* between this week, and a month ago, other than how much better the game has gotten in that time.  But I completely understand why it would distress people who bought it retail.

 

All I can do, as someone who went through the entire Gal Civ 2 development lifetime, is assure you they mean what they say, and the game will make drastic, timely improvements over the coming months, both in terms of performance and bug fixes, but *also* in terms of new content and gameplay making their way into the game.  I understand that that doesn't make you feel better right now, nor does it excuse the early launch window of the game. But you can bank on the improvement to come.