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

from Stardock Forums

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.

elemental game series
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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

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.

Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top

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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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I am especially concerned with their march 17th release date. It is nowhere near ready yet. 

Reply #4 from SorcererKing Forums Top

Hey guys, thanks for the interest in Elemental: Reforged.
First to address latest comment - I understand Hakinaro's concern, as the beta versions of the game had bugs and crashes. But that's why it was early access. In our newest internal build, we are far further down the development, and recent patch has addressed many of such bugs and crashes, making the game stable on most of machines. And we have more coming.

To address OP's concerns - Reforged does not try to be a new game, but instead it's all 3 Elemental games packed into one, thanks to 64 bit support, along with upgraded graphics. If you feel sceptical about those, watching some videos on release is the best plan I can recommend. In the end, it's always a personal decision. 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Fair question, but I think the history actually speaks in Stardock's favor here. War of Magic had a rough launch, no argument there. But WoM owners got Fallen Enchantress for free, and that was a genuinely good game. Then they got Legendary Heroes for free too, which was even better. Not a lot of studios would do that.

 

Reforged isn't really a new game...t's a remaster. It takes all three Elemental games and brings them into a single 64-bit package with updated graphics. Nobody's trying to sell you the same game under a different name, it literally is the same game, just modernized. That's what a remaster is.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Xiskio, reply 2

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.
I would distinct between the "random" crashes and the other bugs here. The "random" crashes can be "excused" with incompetence(*), some of the other bugs not really. Like the movement overlay bug from FELH is still present in Sorcerer Kings: Rivals. And both games have(**) lots of other bugs which at least in part are known to the public and in part fixed by the public. Why doesnt Stardock fix those bugs in their games???? (3 extra question marks, I really would like to know why they dont)

(*) This is from my (not game programmer) POV. Game programmers generally are less educated and less paid than what I am/was accustomed to. However I can say that where I used to work the level of quality in those games would not have been acceptable. Standards in game industry apparently are much lower than in certain other industries where safety & security are more important and customers are big companies and not end users.

(**) Not sure about 3.x versions of FELH as I didnt play them enough. Latest GOG version of Sorcerer King:Rivals however is the only one I played so whatever I wrote above applies to it.

Quoting Xiskio, reply 2
From the standpoint of a customer this is difficult to understand and stomach.
Yes. And its not like this cant be done, just look at other developers like Crate (Grim Dawn) or probably Triumph Studios (Age of Wonders 3 probably, dont know about #4 as I didnt like it).

Quoting Xiskio, reply 2
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?
Excuses about address space limitation. Which in no way explains gameplay bugs or bad AI. If they dont have competent willing developer or are reliant (due to questionable decisions in the past) on external software that they cant touch this can kind of explain the crashes. Like one software I use from a big company, they decided (in their utter foolishness) to use (interpreted Sun/Oracle) java and they cant make it stable enough to not require restarts. Which matches my own experiences with java, I used to be foolish also, however I learned from it.

Quoting Xiskio, reply 2
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!
This is about software limitations not hardware ones. In principle under some circumstances this is a partially valid complaint for some things. Not at all for not fixing bugs unrelated to this though.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Oh, there are still bugs. Even some tooltips/UI elements are bugged, outdated or misleading. But from my point of view after all these years there is a game that delivers on the original promise. It's quite fun, and the crashes aren't all that common. It even takes turns quite rapidly, which wasn't the case the last time I played all these years ago. So it looks surprisingly good compared to the predecessors.

Of course, some things are still rough and could use some love. Also AI could be definitely better - for example I've had long wars where no enemy army even neared my undefended cities; also roving monsters seem to move mostly randomly, so the sneaking ability on scouts seems superfluous and garrisoning cities is mostly unnecessary - but all in all it is a surprisingly fun game from the start. A bit more polish and it truly could be sold as a late-date miracle. ;)

If only we could mod game runs on the fly, then I would be nearly ecstatic. I had to restart my first game because I forgot that there was this unintuitive limit to building logging camps and piers (a.k.a. city snaking), so I had to mod it in and restart.