The team working on Elemental: Reforged is essentially the same team (plus some new faces) that worked on Elemental: War of Magic 16 years ago in 2009. Back then, my colleagues were mostly associate-level developers and artists, right out of college. Today, of course, they’re leads and normally distributed amongst various projects. It’s unusual for a project of this size to have multiple senior or lead developers on it, but we all desired the opportunity to show what we wanted to do with the game, but couldn’t, in 2010.
One thing that has changed significantly from 2010 is the concept of Early Access. We previously used Early Access to get player feedback on design, balance, or other issues so that the final game was much more polished. While Early Access was a great tool from 2010 to 2015, but today, not so much.
Early Access should not be a glorified demo
We used Early Access heavily from 2010 to 2015 to tune balance and test design. It was never about outsourcing QA to the community as internal QA discovers about 90% of the actual bugs that are addressed. What QA can’t decide is whether a spell should deal +5 or +6 fire damage, which is where player feedback matters. Today, though, Early Access is often treated as a marketing beat. Players have certain expectations for Early Access and review the game accordingly, and if the game is using Early Access as intended (a Beta), that can wreck the game’s release chances.
Why the caution
Reforged is not just Fallen Enchantress in 64-bit with new visuals. It plays a lot like a new game and Early Access would let us test real changes. For example, removing free pop-up Champions in favor of recruiting them from the world. Good idea? Maybe. Maybe not. That’s where community feedback comes in. Feedback meaning a post of ideas on a forum or Discord, not a negative Steam review to punish us for trying out a new idea.
Roadmap
If we do Early Access, here’s what it would look like:
Month | Release | Details |
|---|
October 2025 | Initial Early Access [Beta 1] | 64-bit conversion of core War of Magic / Fallen Enchantress / Sorcerer King systems Visual uplift of 2009 art assets (source art was much higher fidelity) DirectX 9 => DirectX 11 conversion Disabled: Campaigns Disabled: Modding Fallen Enchantress core base Crafting from SK added Global Inventory from SK added Updated UI
|
November 2025 | Beta 2 | |
December 2025 | Beta 3 | War of Magic campaign added Fallen Enchantress campaign added Sorcerer King campaign added Player feedback from Beta 2 added Modding UI added Steam Workshop added
|
After that, we would see what the sentiment on the game is and we would be very transparent on how things are going. Games like Age of Wonders 4 have sold something like a million copies. The first Endless Legends did even better. So obviously, there is a market for fantasy strategy games and we’re happy to increase scope and do as much as players want provided there is demand. That’ll be up to you guys.
The Proposal
So, there’s a post: Elemental Early Access? Yay or Nay :: Elemental: Reforged General Discussions. We want to hear from you on this with the hope that if we do Early Access that enough of the player base will understand that this is a BETA and not some demo.
Here’s an example:
This UI and character needs more stats:
Spell Mastery
Resistances (merge Spell Resist into a bunch of other resistances and have a tooltip),
Critical Hit %
The blank area under the portrait needs to have additional information like race and specialization. That is what we are looking for in an Early Access.
And as a community, we will conclude when the game is “done” (Because a lot of people, like me, won’t play early access games) and then we can talk about what comes next. Let us know what you think!
