I’ll be going into much greater detail of Beta 3 as we get closer. It’s scheduled for next week.

Let me first assure you that Beta 3 will NOT be very fun. I keep trying to warn people that there is a reason why Stardock betas are outlawed by the Geneva conventions. Survivors of previous Stardock betas can attest to this. The reason why our final games end up doing so well is because the beta process forces us to jettison weak and bad ideas prior to the game being unleashed on the public.

But if it makes you feel better, WE at Stardock are having a lot of fun. When the modding beta comes out, you guys will get to see why. Frankly, the modding tools in Elemental are dangerous, evil, and simply put, should be illegal.

But here are some highlights of what we plan to have in the public build of beta 3:

• The Empires. The Empires will finally be in. That’s 5 new factions, 4 of which are made up of other races (non-men).  As one person observed, it’s not so much Kindoms vs. Empires but rather Men vs. Fantasy races.
• All tech trees enabled. That means Diplomacy, Magic, Warfare, Civilization, Adventure, Imperium, Conquest, Sorcery, Domination, and Cooperation.
• The HUD will be in. This is something we’ve been playing around with for awhile but didn’t want to put it in the public builds lest beta testers let us off the hook. We don’t want to use the HUD as a crutch to get us out of having to make the game visually intuitive.
• Lots of new content will be in.
• NPC AI will start to go in.
• Monster AI will start to go in. 
• Neutral Cities will be in.
• Game Mechanic Changes. The Sovereign will be able to found a kingdom (1 city) but after that, only pioneers can build new cities. We definitely did not like the idea of your most powerful unit (sovereign) who can also scout also being able to found cities. It cheapens it and takes away the strategic danger of it. In short, we hated it.

Player suggested ideas going in:

We’re reading the forums and already some cool ideas have come up including Enchantment slots, Champion ability trees, Equipping UIs, etc.  How many of these will make it into Beta 3 versus Beta 3-A remain to be seen.

Regarding performance

One thing we are keeping an eye on is performance and memory. I.e. the more “stuff” we put in, the more CPU it’ll use and the more memory it’ll use. Thus, it is important for people to follow THE BETA GUIDE for reporting so we can get an idea of what thresholds we’re hitting.

BETA 4 not far behind

The only difference between beta 3 and beta 4 is opening up the modding tools and we are very anxious to do that sooner rather than later. So expect Beta 3 to be short and Beta 4 to be longer as a result.

We may (key word: may) allow users to create quests and submit them to be included with the game. Some of you may have noticed that user suggested NPCs are now in Beta 2-B.

STANDARD WARNING

Elemental is probably the first game we’ve had a beta of that was well known before the game was released. With Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations the beta testers were more “hard core” and I remember how those betas went (my team of therapists keep trying to get me to “move on”). Suffice to say, by the time we close the beta, MOST users will NOT be happy with it.  With Sins and GalCiv, terms like “broken”, “flop”, “suck”, “pink pony refuse” (I have no idea what that means but it sounded bad), “fail” were used.

In the first Galactic Civilizations beta (2003), the starbases were suggested by beta testers and didn’t make it into the public beta (imagine GalCiv without starbases). We ended up loving the idea so much we put a picture of a starbase on the box and implemented them after the public beta closed.

My point is, these betas aren’t here as demos or early access to “the game”. The betas exist to help make sure the final game is really good.