Why should a customer burned on "Elemental - War of Magic" trust you this time with "Elemental Reforged"?

Greetings,

Once upon a time I "bought" (what counts is paying with my spare time not the money) into a vision called "Elemental - War of Magic" which was the vision of Brad Wardell who also stood for a philosophy that I thought at the time was not often to be found in the games/software industry. He left an impression on me that lead to me buying some tools and several other games from Stardock.

I had a lot of fun with the earlier GalCivs and Sins of a Solar Empire and loved some of the Windows tools Stardock had developed and also always was happy with the quality. So much to be honest, that I never thought much about it. Therefore I was even more shocked about the quality of the first release of "Elemental - War of Magic". I was impressed however when Stardock later on in the process of further developing the game tried to make good on their promises, by giving customers of it free copies of the follow ups they developed. I still believed in Stardock enough at that time to also buy into GalCiv 3 very early on. However, over the following years I had the impression that both games never reached a state where I thought they where of a good enough quality for me to invest more of my spare time into, at least as long as I followed them, about 10 years ago. So came a day when I just felt burned on Elemental and GalCiv 3 and Stardock in general and looked elsewhere for visions and entertainment and never looked back.

Until a few days ago when to my surprise by chance I saw that there was a new Elemental game released into early access. I got curious and looked into a few gameplay videos and to my surprise I didn't see much difference between the new Elemental and "Elemental - Fallen Enchantress". On first look this seemed to be a scheme to sell the same old game once more to a new generation of gamers. But my curiosity was awakened enough and so I had a look into this forum and read what Brad said about the new philosophy behind the new Elemental game and again like back in the day liked what I read but asked myself if I really could trust you this time and should again invest time into this game (the money doesn't matter)? Maybe it's a stupid question and I should just wait until release.

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It's a fair criticism.

Brad has always been upfront in my opinion. I've been burned a few times by Stardock with lifetime accounts (Gal Civ III, Star Control), in my opinion. I really liked Sorcerer King and I was fond of Fallen Enchantress.

From my point of view, I never felt like there was ever was ill intent. Perhaps there was a hope that the vision will work out. Sometimes it doesn't.

So I like the vision being explained to me. You can tell he really loves the game and that enough for me to be optimistic. Plus they aren't asking for $60 upfront.

I recently bought Europa Uniiverslis V, and I don't like it as much as IV. But I have faith they'll make it better for passion reasons more than financial.

I feel the same here. If it doesn't work out it won't be because they don't care.

That's my reason for supporting Stardock and will continue as long as they have a passion.

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I'm not saying there is or was ill intent in play either. Nevertheless, right now playing the old "Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes" (vanilla) the game still has bugs that lead to it sometimes crashing and other things. Even though they had the resources to release several add-ons and a follow up game besides other things they never committed the resources to fix the bugs in the base game. I at least question the decisions made. From the standpoint of a customer this is difficult to understand and stomach. So much at least for me, that till this day I haven't bought anymore software from Stardock in the last 10 years. And I never read a believable explanation from anyone at Stardock why they weren't able to fix the bugs or have I missed something?

Releasing the Reforge early access I read from Brad on Steam that the reason why they had so many issues with earlier Elemental games was because he says that 64 bit computing wasn't available at the time and they therefore had to struggle with 2MB of address space. But this is difficult to believe because first the Athlon 64bit processor was released already in 2003 and the Intel Pentium 4 one year later. And by the way with 32bit you can address 4GB not just 2GB! Further with 2GB address space he has to refer to 16 bit computing and that was definitely not what most gamers had in the early 2000's! 32bit machines with 4GB of RAM were normal at that time for gamers and 2010 64 bit computing was starting to bloom with the release of Windows 7.

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