BTW, if you think WOM v1.4 is "worthless" I can tell you right now that you will find FE worthless too.  So if that's really your opinion, you should go find a different game.  Heroes VI is out and so is Sword of the Stars II, you might want to check them out.

He does mention WoM 1.4, which is a fair amount better than WoM 1.0.  He's not saying that WoM 1.0 was really worth playing.

Whoa now. I liked E.T. on Atari.

There is a reason there are few...very few indie PC games of significant scope being made anymore.

It's very very difficult to make them.  And it's even harder to release them.  Civ V had a budget that was 9 TIMES that of War of Magic and it was able to make use of Civ IV's source code and a pretty solid existing design.  If it weren't a Civ game, you wouldn't be able to justify spending that kind of money developing it. 

I'm sure it makes the griefers of the world smile when they see a Stardock or a Paradox or a Kerebos stumble. But if you want significant scope PC strategy games, you better hope they succeed because nobody else is making them.  Frankly, if FE isn't well received, I'm retiring from PC game development. I've got better things to do with my time. Certainly more profitable things.  And by well received, I don't even mean financially successful. I mean critically acclaimed by gamers and critics alike.  

E:FE will be good. It's being made with that special ingredient after all.

Frog legs maybe, but I think we'll still need the rest of him.

Frogboy, it makes no-one happy to see Paradox, Kerberos or Stardock stumble. We just aren't emotionally attached to the games you develop before they win us over. I don't envy your position, but I hope you know in your heart that most of us care about Stardock quite a lot.

It makes me sad to see the state of EWOM, Stronghold 3 and Sword of the Stars II at release. I might buy SotS later after much patching and at a reduced price. If it was a quality release, I would gladly buy at full price. Anyways, I am among those who bought EOWM in 2010 and hopefully I will love FE. I am looking for a GAME and not fancy graphics, intros and such. Replayability, ramdomization and fun is what I want. There still is some hope for the future:

Fallen Enchantress - lets all hope

Crusader Kings II

Kings Bounty: Warriors of the North (the Kings Bounty series is the best thing in gaming since CIV IV)

Seems like the Skyrim release is pretty solid compared to the bad launches of late. I might try that one too.

I definitely want to see the little guys, indies and the middle market companies to survive and thrive.

My 3 favourite companies are Paradox Interactive, Runic Games and Stardock.

I am quite confident that E:FE is going to be great and I will do my part in helping make it a success. Whether that be through beta testing,

buying a copy for my brother and perhaps another friend and generally getting the word out.

Of course, E:FE still has to deliver the goods.

Steam has been good for PC gaming. In fact, if it were for DD, PC gaming would already be dead IMO.

Indeed. It does not. You will almost certainly not like FE if you find WOM "boring" at this point.

There are lots of people who find GalCiv and Sins boring too.  It doesn't make them wrong. To them, they are boring.  FE will probably be boring for a lot of people as well.

HOMM VI isn't buggy. I listed the two most recent TBS games released. 

It all depends on what you find is fun or not.

My problems with WOM ,with the benefit of hindsight, include:

1. It was buggy and unpolished
2. The terrain was largely meaningless and mostly empty
3. The AI was not competitive
4. The tactical battles were not very tactical
5. The spells in the game had little impact on the outcome
6. Each game played mostly the same as the other.

And?

People are under the misconception that Stardock has to make PC games. It doesn't. I said it last year with WOM (And clearly it's true), even if our games made $0, it wouldn't have a lot of impact on Stardock as a whole (it would on the games team obviously).  That means, if FE fails, the reasons are irrelevant because we will be done.  I will have, at the point, done everything within my capability to produce a quality PC game. 

Now, having made PC games for decades, I think I'm a pretty good judge of what makes a good game, especially if I'm not working 100+ hours a week for months at a time (if you want to talk about the single point of failure on WOM, that is the biggie, one can lose any sense of objectivity and be unaware of it).

I can't promise that you will like FE.  In fact, I am pretty sure you won't.  But I can promise you that *I* will like FE.  

This is not entirely true.

I have a large quantity of Varoa mites and elecromagnetic radiation stockpiled for the event that Stardock decides to stop making strategy games. Should that happen, they will be released into the environment which will precipitate massive colony collapse throughout the Michigan region of America, depriving Stardock of their primary recreational activity. Let's just hope that it never comes to that.

All your bees are belong to us.

Frankly, the game looks very good at this point. It seems to have (almost) all the features people were expecting from EWoM before its release (I mean that in a good way).

Reception is hard to predict though. I assume a good chunk of the people who are into this kind of games already bought EWoM at the time, so they're going to get FE for free. Sure they can voice their (likely, I repeat, at this point) appreciation but they're not going to "vote with their wallets".  Also word of mouth can even generate phenomenons, but it's never really all about pure quality of the items: there are other factors like surprise effect, hitting the right moment, raw chance...

Basically what I'm saying is that even FE's "reception" will have to be judged with detachment, when the dust has settled. The game could be great and still not receive an immediate, enthusiastic reaction. But if the game is good, it will get its credit eventually.