I'm already wasting more time playing Beta 4 than anything else. To be honest if they just fixed the memory leak I'd be happy with it as is

I'm guessing that now that my earlier view has been widely adopted (face it, the game is getting slammed across the net, even indie friendly RPS are being negative, and if they're not the target audience, then I don't know who is).

 

So, maybe we can have a more sensible discussion. When is the game likely to be ready. You know, fully featured, and stable. As I don't want to invest lots of time in a game that's changing every few days. I'd rather wait until the game is "good" and the get lost in it for ages Sure, I could play it just now, but it would be a subpar 4X game (as, surely Elemental just now is nowhere near as good as the (heavily patched) Civ4 (+FfH2), GalCiv2, Sins, etc.

 

So, is there a rough time line for Elemental? Check back after the new year?

 

 

It's worth playing now, please take your trolling ways to another forum thanks.

Edit: For the love of goodness Stardock et al why do you let these trolls continue to flood this forum with their obvious trolling posts to just in yer face you now?

Ban them or move them please as I'd rather read the posts of those enjoying the game and what they are finding and yes even ideas for added enjoyment but not tearing the game down in every other thread or post.

I have seen your posts you are pretty trollish yourself FYI.

RAT

 

The game is definitely NOT ready to be played right now.  I pre-ordered the game based on the great concepts that were promised, unfortunately they are not delivered as of the latest 1.05 patch.  I highly recommend waiting at least a month and checking back here before purchasing this game, it seriously feels like a clunky beta test right now.

Lol way to go Brad that'll teach him to mess with you. ;))

You're wrong...next overreacting player please?

And yet another troll shows his sour syntax adding nothing to the thread as usual. Has a good name for it though RAT! hahahah

THe game is very playable and extremely fun right now. I say pick it up right now, the game is epic and addicting as hell.

only issue I have with the game is the slowodwn in the later rounds. Other then that, no crashes and just have had a veyr fun time.

You know, that whole "It'll never be finished" thing just doesn't make sense to me. When you stop working on something, stop putting out patches and new content, and start working on something else or it's sequel, whatever you stopped working on is "finished". Gal Civ 2 turned out to be an Awesome game. It's my Favorite Space 4X game now, even taking the place of MoO2. As a player though, I consider Gal Civ 2 to be a "Finished game". Unless Stardock is going to make another expansion or put out a patch before they start Gal Civ 3 then it's done. I don't see a logic that can argue that.

 

Having a ton of fun right now a few hours in (Time flew fast!).  The criticism about it being hard to learn is true, I'm still learning a ton of new things and wondering how to do others.

That's a tough one, I don't necessarily agree. Black Isle closed down many years ago, and Interplay is now defunct. But there are patches to get Planescape Torment working at higher resolutions with a larger interface and text, restoration projects for a great many things that were in the original game code, etc. Fans of games will sometimes go to great lengths to ensure that they have the ability to play their old favorites well past the time the original developers have stopped working on the game. So even once Stardock moves on and stops producing official Elemental expansions and begins work on their next project, there will be a lot of people still trying to get their own campaigns together. Once the mod community makes enough gems, even if Stardock wasn't going to be releasing patches to keep their games running on the latest OS and on the newest hardware, I'm sure others would. But a bird once taught me to never say never, so I just don't know what to think.

I can't wait for a big old box of tools to mod the snot out of Elemental.

 

And games for Stardock have been like Babies.  Everyone loves a newborn baby, but as awesome as a new baby is, they only get better and better.  GalCiv2 is pretty much an adult now, in my metaphor.  If you only like fully grown games (and be late to the party, more like as not) then I say give it 2 years.

Me?  I don't mind of Baby Elemental pukes on me a lil bit, it is a joy 

This isn't Hearts of Iron 3 or most other paradox games where the answer is usually around a year after release. I think there are a few issues, namely the white screen problem and other ctd's, which will probably be resolved in less than a month. Other issues like a more robust random map generator, probably 2-4 months. I am playing it now and having fun but for you it sounds like you probably would be better off waiting a month or two.

rossanderson seems to think anyone who doesn't claim Elemental is the best game ever is a troll. Methinks he needs to hit the books and look up the definition of a troll. I must warn him that he may only find his own picture on that page!

 

I intend right now to sit down and play through another game of Elemental. I'm going to play on a large map, jack up the AI difficulty to maximum and see what happens.

 

My main gripes with the game currently are it just isn't interesting to me. The cities feel dead and unimportant. They don't feel interconnected to me at all. I'd like to see some kind of character given to cities. I'd like the channelers to feel more special. I get the feeling that they are intended to be. Not everyone can use magic, and those few who can ought to be very influential.

 

You do have to sort through what just doesn't work well and what are design decisions. X Y and Z might make the game awesome in your eyes but maybe they're just not part of the world of Elemental. That happens too. Radioactive dragons *might* have been cool in Fallout but the writers behind the series decided it wasn't what they wanted. You know?

 

Tactical battles feel stale to me and the only reason I play them is because it gives me a break from the monotony of hitting end turn. Research also feels somewhat flat. There's just something about it that didn't really pull me in. It works better in other games because it unlocks special abilities or units and the effect just doesn't feel as pronounced in this game right now.

 

I've piled on a lot of bad here so I think I should also mention what I do like. I love the art style. I love the idea of having this magic wielding guy as the head of your society of survivors. I do like the questing aspect of it to a degree. I'm not a huge fan of it but I don't hate it either. I think the game captures the feeling of living in a desolate post cataclysmic world well, I just don't think the mechanics behind rebuilding that world are fully fleshed out yet. I don't feel like I'm rebuilding a world and that makes me sad.

 

That's true of course, totally agree, but, those are "community mods" or what can be called "fan-made mods". Elemental is a unique case because it auto hosts created content through Stardock's Servers or players can do it the old fashioned way. Those other games though, like the old Black Isle games we all know and love, aren't "officially supported" anymore. To the company that made it, the project had a start and a finish and now it's done. I love community mods that extend the life of a game as much as the next guy, but I don't count them as "Official".

Well, as a guy who has been waiting for this since the late 80's (Masters of Magic by Micropprose) for the updated version, I can wait a bit longer for them to enhance and spruce it up a bit.  I was looking forward to it, and I like what I see so far.  Being able to customize many many things is very desirable.  The only negative drawback is the slowing down of the game as I progress to the point where I have to save it and quit the game.  Then do something else, like I'm doing now, to see if they have any updated patches. 

 

I give Stardock kudos for putting out PC games when they are becoming more and more rare with the mindless console game players who need the instant gratification rather than the building of an empire.  I don't want to hear them shelving this game due to the bad launch according to all the reports I've read.

 

Give em some time, play Civ 5 in a couple of weeks and revisit this bad boy when they have had a chance to work out the bugs.

While you're waiting for Elemental to be finished/polished, play Age of Wonders : Shadow Magic.  It's an excellent game.  And to me seems a lot more similar in spirit to MOM than EWOM is/will be.  While the technology trees are a neat concept, they feel completely out of place in a game which was supposed to have been MOM2.

I'm playing and having fun, but I won't be encouraging friends and neighbors to pick it up for one month, maybe two. It has that "late beta" vibe still, but I can tell it will be an excellent product when it's released.

Kettle called. It wants its colour back. Please go back to the WoW forums; you'll fit right in.

RAT

Ok, judging by some of the crazy defensive stances people are taking, I'll be left waiting a while before exploring Elemental. This is not me trolling, etc. I'm just acknowledging that I have limited free time in which to play games, and so want to use it as best I can. Helping Stardock find bugs and balance issues is not my idea of fun. The game is clearly unbalanced, and with immature AI, as otherwise it wouldn't of been patched 3 times in 3 days. This is not to say some won't find it fun, and I can appreciate why some people would find it fun, I probably would too if i had more free time. But as it is, I don't want all the rules and strategies to keep changing as I learn the game! Like with Sins, LRM frigates used to be overpowered, and now, a couple of years later, they're not. And the game is a lot more balanced (I only really enjoyed Sins once Entrenchment was released, I found the vanilla game lacking a bit somehow. but now with Entrenchment + Diplomacy, it's probably my joint fav strategy game, up with Civ4).

[/quote]

I was thinking the same thing about YOU Ross.

You come to threads made by people who obviously WANT to love this game and have legitimate concerns.  Then proceed to tell them they're wrong, stupid, trolls, etc.  Does this help in any way?

The game has some charm now, and even has the "one more turn" vibe so it's worth playing around with, but IMO it's broken in a lot of ways and needs quite a bit of work.  The AI is very rough in some areas.  Balance is way off.  Magic is borked.  UI has issues.  Way too many crashes.  Etc.

I would say 1-3 months of intense development/polish to "finish" it, although no game is ever truly finished, there's always something you could tweak or add, and this is especially true for Stardock games, becaus they always continue to polish AI and add new stuff for free long after release.

So to get the game feature complete for what the game contains now, to properly test and balance everything, to fix UI problems, etc, I'd say 1-3 months solid.  SD tends to do huge volumes of work in short amounts of time so it's really hard to say if they're pushing hard.

My problem is that, given that SD *will* essentially freely expand the game for a long time after release (meaning they are not strapped for cash and forced to release unfinished dookie like some companies), why couldn't they have just polished for a few months before releasing the game and had a much cleaner launch of a much more quality product?  It doesn't make any sense to me.

If beta testers had access to the release version of the game (which is basically still a beta version) and had pounded on it for a while, the outcry would've been much more contained and ultimately the game would've been so much better at release.  Very sad, IMO.

 

August 24, 2010

 

Well thought out reply. Adds a lot to the discussion and proves your point so succinctly. Thanks.

 

 

 

For my part I think SD has made great strides this week but realistically we are just now entering the "real beta". Betas 1-4 were basically Alphas. Another 3-4 months of balancing, adding basic features, and final polish and the game will be ready for people who just want to play a finished game rather than participating in out Gameplay Beta.