I really think that people need to stop making excuses for Stardock.  It's not doing Stardock any good and its not doing its customers any good.  I agree that anything less than constructive criticism is unwelcome and unnecessary, but the bottom line is that Stardock released a game, for whatever reasons, that was not ready.  It doesn't matter what other industry standards are like and it doesn't matter what conspiracy theories we have about game reviewing sites.  The bottom line is that Elemental is neither up to the standards we expect and it isn't up to the standards that Stardock has set for itself. 

Do most of us still admire the company?  Yes.  Do most of us think they will improve and fix the game?  Certainly.  But until Brad and his firm recognize their "whoops," we can expect more Stardock games in the future to be prone to the very same problems that Elemental is having right now.   

I think that you are right, but only because non Stardock fans will be gone pretty fast.

Like I said earlier, this reminds me a lot of Demigod's release.  There were a lot of people saying the same stuff that you and other SD apologists were saying.  They thought that that game would be fine and it was all going to turn out OK.  They were wrong.  That game died a horrible death.

Now single player games are always going to be a lot more resiliant.  But word has already spread pretty quickly that this game is not to be bought right now (but check it out again in a few months).  Thats not from supposedly biased review sites, but from users themselves on forums.  Since the reviews for this game are going to be pretty harsh IMO, I dont think that you will see too much negativity on this game from the community for long simply because its not going to be bought by many people who arent big SD fans already.  And thats probably not a good scenario for SD.

I would like to remind people that Stardock didn't make Demigod or Sins of a solar empire.  They published them.

If you want to measure Stardock as a developer, you have to look at Galciv2.

This is what I find unsatisfying. I've been reading the dev journals for a long time and that's where my expectations were formed. I was very much looking forward to this because of what I had been reading here. All of a sudden, before we got to see anything approaching a well designed, functional beta, the plug was pulled and we went from beta 2,3,4 in like a month and then release is the first time any of us had seen what the game might be like. Now it's up to the review magazines to do the beta testing! Grreat.

What could have happened that made releasing an unfinished, nay, undesigned shadow of a game the better choice than waiting until February? Ugh. If the day comes that Elemental can be considered a good game I will see it, but right now I'm not happy with the flow of events.

Feb 2010 was the first release date, IIRC. It got pushed back, not forward.

I'm not worried about it following the path of Demigod because Demigod is a MP focused game. You need other people around to make it work. Elemental is a SP focused game, you need the AI to make it work.

Demigod wound up getting worse over time as the community shrank, whereas Elemental will get better as the AI improves and bugs are fixed.

It probably won't.  However, get ready to wait for awhile.  As far as my personal gaming experience is concerned, Elemental's tragic early release won't effect me one bit.  If they had waited to release it, I'd be waiting 'till about February 2011 to enjoy it.  Now?  Well, I'll probably have to wait about 6 months anyway.  Unfortunately, Stardock shot themselves in the foot on this one, so it'll be more difficult for them to make and sell games in the future.

I have not been able to finish one single game, apart from the campaign.

I wouldn't mind to crash every few hours, but the further a game is the more likely it is to crash. The sessions end after 10 minutes at most.

On the pro side, once those crashes get fixed this will be a good foundation for a very awesome game, but so far it's mostly frustrating, sorry.

I can understand the reviewer point of view; I haven't the game yet, but I've seen many in-game videos: the game feels really unpolished.

I compare Elemental to the first Age Of Wonder, my favourite one in the genre. AoW isn't as sophisticated like EWoM wants to be, but each functionality the game offers to the user is simple, clear and appealing. On the other side there EWoM, that (at the moment) looks like a Excel sheet to fill up to obtain a result

A stupid example:

- In AoW you click on a unit to select it, then click on a tile to set as destination for the movement, and a colorful (and well visible) trail of arrows show you the path and how many turns the unit will take to reach the destination; the amount of path the unit will walk in the current turn is indicated by gold arrows, the leftover is grey. As expected, if you deselect and reselect the unit the arrows trail will be visible again.

- EWoM you click on a unit and you barely know it is selected (have you selected a unit or a land tile?). You click on a destination point and an ugly X appears on the target tile. The unit will make its way to the destination but you won't know the path it will follow or the time it will take to reach it. Deselect and reselect the unit, and you'll barely find the previously designated target tile.

Now multiply this "feature comparison" for every feature of the game, and you can easily understand the headaches the common users will have.

I'm a WEB developer, at work I would say "this web page misses a good CSS".

I was waiting for this game to come out. But now that it's out, I'll just follow the future developments as I've done in the last 2 years, and wait till the game will be ready (from my point of view) before buying it.

I'm sure it'll be a great game, it is an ambitious project but I know you'll make a good job with it. I'll love it, I know

Yeah I really wish there had been a public beta 5 for mechanics and balance stuff. (and ATI crashes apparently, though it didn't do that to me in beta 4 and I'm on ATI hardware. Maybe my drivers are too new since this is a brand new machine.)

I'm not trying to say this was a good date, but the alternative date was just as bad for another set of reasons. If delaying 1 month instead of 6 was an option, they IMO would have been a lot more likely to take it.

This is patently untrue. Some games with horrid releases go on to be massive successes, the most famous being WoW - their release was a real stinker, but the game was fun and addictive once they solved all the server issues and inital game-breaking bugs. While other games that release without any problems go on to be failures because at the core they aren't very fun or have any lasting appeal and replayability or a whole host of other reasons.

Oh, I'm not nearly as pessimistic as that.  I think Elemental will be a long-term success for Stardock.

Yeah gamers usually forget botched launches these days.  HL2 was a complete disaster on steam, nothing bust post of people wanting to burn down valva studios, then there was the Oblivion launch with big technical issues for ATI and NVIDIA and the Fallout3 jefferson memorial crash. MOO and MOM got crappy reviews when they came out, it was only a decade later that those 2 games would be considered hall of fame like games.  

It's like a movie, as long as you wow them in the end no one cares how it begins.