Jon Shafer joins Stardock to work on elemental

The_J

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After the lead designer of Civilization 5, Jon Shafer, has left Firaxis in December, new informations have reached us (thanks to Zanzibar, who mentioned it first): Stardock, the producers of Elemental and Galactic Civilizations, have hired Jon Shafer for the Elemental team.

From the news:
In a major hiring coup for Stardock, the developer of the Galactic Civilizations series and more recently Elemental: War of Magic has revealed exclusively to Big Download that it has hired Jon Shafer to its team. Shafer recently left Firaxis Games where he served as the lead designer behind the studio's most recent game Civilization V. In his new role, Shafer will be helping with the design and increasing mod support for Elemental. At some point in the future he will also be leading his own team at Stardock on an unnanounced new stand alone game for the developer.

Please discuss with your fellow civfanatics in the related thread in the forum.
 

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Great news. Stardock will have a superteam now. I have great respect for the Frog, Shafer and Kael as game makers/designers of turn based strategy. This is world class league. Oh holy cow, these three guys developing Galactic Civilizations 3 together would be dynamite!
 
Jon = Kael?

Have they ever been spotted in the same room at the same time?
 
So that's two ostensibly good designers who for whatever reason have left games in a state of neglected ruin. Good luck with that, Stardock.
 
Great news. Stardock will have a superteam now. I have great respect for the Frog, Shafer and Kael as game makers/designers of turn based strategy. This is world class league. Oh holy cow, these three guys developing Galactic Civilizations 3 together would be dynamite!

And they support their games way better than the 3 and 4 week delays Civ5 has experienced. I have always loved GC. I have every version. This is, as you said, great news indeed.
 
And they support their games way better than the 3 and 4 week delays Civ5 has experienced. I have always loved GC. I have every version. This is, as you said, great news indeed.

Stardock's out of the box performance has a poor track record, however.

"Out of the fry pan, into the fire."
 
They all go over to Stardock eventually. Better than working for EA games.
 
Well thats it for Galactic Civilisations then...another great game about to be ruined by one of the most untalented designers in the history of gaming!
 
Well thats it for Galactic Civilisations then...another great game about to be ruined by one of the most untalented designers in the history of gaming!

I think you can assign a lot more of the blame to 2K Games then you can to Jon Shafer.
The 2K suits and their investors wanted a streamlined game for the mass market. I'm sure that wasn't Jon Shafer's vision for the game.

Jon Shafer will thrive at Stardock. Totally different situation from Firaxis.
 
All I have to say is,

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Stardock is a bad joke. Elemental is an embarrassing product. Shafer belongs at Stardock.

I'd have to disagree with you there. Stardock are one of my favourate games companies for the simple reason that they give long term support to their games in terms of patches and free content updates.

I'm far from being a CiV fan, but like a lot of others am more inclined to believe that a lot of the "streamlined" gameplay was the result of Firaxis chasing big sales numbers rather than Shafer being useless at his job. Hell, even if he was useless at his job you should still be blaming Firaxis / 2K for giving it to him in the first place as you can't blame a young guy for grabbing an opportunity like he was given.
 
I always thought him to be relatively old, like Sid, or something. He looks like one of my students!
 
Two weeks before the Kennedy assassination, there were anti-Castro pigeons seen drinking in bars in Dallas. Someone overheard them saying "coup! coup!"
 
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