Elemental Coming Soon!!

Eh. Civ5 has other mechanics that interest me.

Elemental just seems to try to cram too many features into a 4x game for my taste.

Well not to open the kettle of fish which is Steam, but yeah, many fans of SD are way down on civ5 due to that marketing decision (blunder in my opinion, but whatever).

Anyway, I wonder how many of them will change their tune upon realizing just how far from 'good' Elemental really is. Of course we'll see how 'good' Civ5 is right off the bat.

So since I can't bring myself to buy Elemental right now, though I followed the development/release pretty closely, I've come over here to try the fantasy mods for civ4 which I didn't really get into much before.

Can't say I'm really jonesing for elemental at this moment, considering the amazing work being done right here ;)
 
Yeah, February at least would've been a much better time to release Elemental. As for Civ and Steam, it's a decision resulting in the opposite: tons of launch sales, while Elemental going the other way.
 
Yeah, February at least would've been a much better time to release Elemental. As for Civ and Steam, it's a decision resulting in the opposite: tons of launch sales, while Elemental going the other way.

Why do you say elemental is going the other way? The game has sold well enough as far as I can tell. That it is not 'finished' is another issue altogether. As I said, we don't know how 'finished' civ5 will be day0 either (though I would guess it will be a smoother release than that of Elemental).

For my money, I'm skipping Civ5 on release as well, though that's more of a promise I made to myself for any game. Of course the Steam thing also factors against civ5 for me as well, but we'll see what it looks like after a couple months and then I'll decide just how much I want it.

Anyway, SD is very good at post release support, too good in someways I think, as they then release stuff early because they 'are going to fix it'. It's a mixed blessing as a philosophy I suppose. I imagine that by February Elemental will be worth it.
 
These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release. I will probably start playing Elemental near the time that Civ 5 comes out, even though I've been dieing to get my hands on both.

I bought Elemental the day it came out and was expecting it to be a little hollow, but...


Wow, seriously, the more time I spent with it, and also read the update logs on the website - the more I realized this game wasn't just released 1 month sooner than it should have been... Closer to 3-5 months.

A sandbox game where the technical difficulties practically make it unplayable, the AI is nearly non existent, magic is almost unusable and pointless, the vanilla options for customization (like with nearly every Stardock game) ranges from ugly to uglier.

As a long time customer of Star dock I was expecting bad in the beginning, while this exceeded my deepest expectations of crappiness.

Looks like I'm playing Civ 4 and Fall From Heaven for another handful of months before moving onto another bandwagon.

Though there is no doubt that they will both become great games.

I wonder however; game pre-releases are mostly due to the constant increase of 3D graphics, Elemental actually took a huge step back to cell shaded, old school graphics (which really I don't mind at all.) So what was their excuse?


It's unfortunate really that games aren't sold for higher prices. I would have happily bought Civ 4 with it's Beyond The Sword expansion for a $150 without a second thought. A game you play for years at even that price is the cheapest form of entertainment a person could ever possibly hope for.

But I'm sick of paying $40-65 for a over hyped game I play for about a week and get tired of, never coming back to it again.

Even if it did rate 8 or 9 out of 10 on the review sites.

It's time to very significantly raise the price we pay for games.
That we can finally, once again hold game companies to a real standard of quality.
Instead of having to give an "A" for effort.

I've been a avid player for many years. Almost in my mid twenties now and I remember starting out on the Atari.
Feels so overdue for something to come along that reinvents the whole genre. Turns the whole scene upside down
and makes it a new frontier yet again. Like the single genius behind mario brothers, sonic the hedgehog, donkey kong,
and many other titles to his name. Then we had breakthroughs with the tactical strategy, then 3D rpg with Squaresoft.


While in the middle of these great games and legendary moments in the history of gaming, everything else is filler -
just copies of what came before, to keep us busy while we wait for the real innovation.

I believe it will happen soon. Because 3D gaming can't keep marching up the slippery slope it's been struggling on
for so long. It now has no where else to go except into places that have never been reached for.
 
These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release. I will probably start playing Elemental near the time that Civ 5 comes out, even though I've been dieing to get my hands on both.

I bought Elemental the day it came out and was expecting it to be a little hollow, but...


Wow, seriously, the more time I spent with it, and also read the update logs on the website - the more I realized this game wasn't just released 1 month sooner than it should have been... Closer to 3-5 months.

A sandbox game where the technical difficulties practically make it unplayable, the AI is nearly non existent, magic is almost unusable and pointless, the vanilla options for customization (like with nearly every Stardock game) ranges from ugly to uglier.

As a long time customer of Star dock I was expecting bad in the beginning, while this exceeded my deepest expectations of crappiness.

Looks like I'm playing Civ 4 and Fall From Heaven for another handful of months before moving onto another bandwagon.

Though there is no doubt that they will both become great games.

I wonder however; game pre-releases are mostly due to the constant increase of 3D graphics, Elemental actually took a huge step back to cell shaded, old school graphics (which really I don't mind at all.) So what was their excuse?


It's unfortunate really that games aren't sold for higher prices. I would have happily bought Civ 4 with it's Beyond The Sword expansion for a $150 without a second thought. A game you play for years at even that price is the cheapest form of entertainment a person could ever possibly hope for.

But I'm sick of paying $40-65 for a over hyped game I play for about a week and get tired of, never coming back to it again.

Even if it did rate 8 or 9 out of 10 on the review sites.

It's time to very significantly raise the price we pay for games.
That we can finally, once again hold game companies to a real standard of quality.
Instead of having to give an "A" for effort.

Even if Civ does provide more value (aka bang for the buck), they'd not make many sales if pricing it accordingly. Many people who buy it don't get that much time from it anyway, they're just casuals. And casuals is where the money is. Plus a great game that you play with storyline for a week and a sandbox game you play for months don't necessarily differ so much in the time they take to make, if both on similar levels of polish and balance.
 
These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release. I will probably start playing Elemental near the time that Civ 5 comes out, even though I've been dieing to get my hands on both.
Games should - at a bare minimum - be released in a playable state. Stardock even says so themselves in their "Gamers' Bill Of Rights" and still they violated article #2 and #5 of their own bloody bill with Elemental.
My advice: check ebay for 1$ opportunities and wait a year until it's playable.


I bought Elemental the day it came out and was expecting it to be a little hollow, but...


Wow, seriously, the more time I spent with it, and also read the update logs on the website - the more I realized this game wasn't just released 1 month sooner than it should have been... Closer to 3-5 months.
I started with 1.06 (which kinda implicates the existence of 1.01, 1.02, 1.03, 1.04, 1.05) and it's still in a basically unplayable state.
Closer to 1 year early, I'd say.

A sandbox game where the technical difficulties practically make it unplayable, the AI is nearly non existent, magic is almost unusable and pointless, the vanilla options for customization (like with nearly every Stardock game) ranges from ugly to uglier.

As a long time customer of Star dock I was expecting bad in the beginning, while this exceeded my deepest expectations of crappiness.

Looks like I'm playing Civ 4 and Fall From Heaven for another handful of months before moving onto another bandwagon.

Though there is no doubt that they will both become great games.
AI doesn't really describe the automatons posing as opponents.
And it's not like magic in itself is unusable - it's just completely unbalanced and way too strong!
By the time your regular expensive units have 10 hit points out of the box with decent battle strength, your mages fling area effect spells dealing even more damage like that.
And by the time you can barely build a unit with :strength:6 and :health:6 your summons are twice as strong. not to mention random drops that allow you to summon golems thrice that strong. since it's all about magic I can't really object, though, but it still seems unbalanced.

Ugly describes it well, too, although I don't refer to the artwork or the graphics style.
The map is hideous, with plenty of clipping, and the special effects (spell animations e.g.) are primitive. Think Donkey Kong without the smooth frame rate.

I wonder however; game pre-releases are mostly due to the constant increase of 3D graphics, Elemental actually took a huge step back to cell shaded, old school graphics (which really I don't mind at all.) So what was their excuse?
Incompetence in project planning?

Even if it did rate 8 or 9 out of 10 on the review sites.
There is no conceivable way this bug-ridden horsehockeyfest could honestly have earned such a high score.
The reviewers who did either didn't play the game longer than half an hour (if at all) or the were suspect to coorporate bribes (in the scale of 'if you give us a good review you can have this game for free').

It's time to very significantly raise the price we pay for games.
That we can finally, once again hold game companies to a real standard of quality.
Instead of having to give an "A" for effort.
er ... no.
 
As a long time customer of Star dock I was expecting bad in the beginning
You're not the first person to say this or something very similar. Buying a game that you expect to be bad just encourages developers to release bad games.

These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release.
If no one bought those unplayable and underdeveloped games then game companies would be forced to produce better ones. Elemental had a beta period, and there were lots of people testing it. If everyone in the beta had been warning people that Elemental was not yet worth buying, then the publisher might have rethought their plan to release it before it was ready.

It's unfortunate really that games aren't sold for higher prices. I would have happily bought Civ 4 with it's Beyond The Sword expansion for a $150 without a second thought. A game you play for years at even that price is the cheapest form of entertainment a person could ever possibly hope for.
It's easy to look at a game you've enjoyed for many hours and agree that it would have been worth more than you paid for it. It's much more difficult to look at a game you've never played sitting on a store rack with a $150 price tag and conclude that you're willing to gamble that much on the hope that the game will turn out to be good. Of course people with larger entertainment budgets won't be put off by a high price as much as those with smaller ones - but generally speaking the most a company will sell to any one person is one copy of the game, no matter how large that person's entertainment budget may be. They have to price their games low enough so that the "little guys" are willing to buy it too, otherwise they won't have enough sales to cover their costs. My point is that it's not just a matter of jacking up the price to make more money, because a higher price can actually earn the company less money due to lost sales.

But I'm sick of paying $40-65 for a over hyped game I play for about a week and get tired of, never coming back to it again.
Imagine how sick you'd be if you'd paid $150 for that game. It's hard to tell before you play a game whether you will really enjoy it for months or years to come, so there's no way to eliminate this problem entirely. Not buying games based on hype is a good start, though. I've bought some bad games, and some games I've just not gotten into. That money was wasted, but also is made up for by the games that I've played for years. Honestly, I think MoO2 has cost me less than 1¢/hr, which is a very low price for quality entertainment (as you mentioned). I think we can afford to buy an occasional dud to get to the gems, as long as we don't get so complacent that we will buy anything.

It's time to very significantly raise the price we pay for games.
That we can finally, once again hold game companies to a real standard of quality.
Instead of having to give an "A" for effort.
Simply throwing more money at game companies will never force them to make better games.

Paying more money for something doesn't necessarily mean that the product will be better. Profit is the ultimate goal, and someone selling a product will gladly increase the price they charge without a corresponding increase in the quality of that product. That vendor will only increase the quality of their product when the market forces that increase. The way to force vendors to provide higher-quality products is to refuse to buy, at any price, products that are of inadequate quality. Then, in order to stay in business, those vendors will have to provide products that are of sufficient quality.

If bad games didn't sell then game companies would be forced to make good ones. Of course, the cost of doing so would be higher, and likely we would have to pay more for our games - but this would be a consequence of a change in the market, not the impetus for that change.

The most important step you can take to encourage game companies to make better games is to not pre-order them. Buying anything sight-unseen is almost never a good idea, and it sends game companies the message that we will buy anything. Instead, wait for the game to come out, check out the reviews, try a demo, read the forums, and then buy the game if its quality meets your approval.
 
These days it's almost a given that a game will be nearly unplayable and underdeveloped on the day of release. I will probably start playing Elemental near the time that Civ 5 comes out, even though I've been dieing to get my hands on both.

I bought Elemental the day it came out and was expecting it to be a little hollow, but...

That should not be a given. Why in the hell should an unfinished, bug-ridden game be released in stores?

Better, why would anyone ever say "Oh, Stardock games are always like that at first! They'll make it better....". If they are capable of producing a good game, then they should do so BEFORE releasing it. The game should be playable before it ever hits the shelves.
 
That should not be a given. Why in the hell should an unfinished, bug-ridden game be released in stores?

Better, why would anyone ever say "Oh, Stardock games are always like that at first! They'll make it better....". If they are capable of producing a good game, then they should do so BEFORE releasing it. The game should be playable before it ever hits the shelves.

I agree with the sentiment, but the reality seems to be that there is no good QA in place for most games, and the designers are horrible at determining balance. So, you can either have a beta of a 'finished' game, or you can release the game and have a beta of the unfinished game.

Many companies do the latter (though they don't admit it), with Paradox being 1st on the list for releasing awesome games in concept which utterly fail to be worth anything until after enough players have thrashed the mechanics and other balance issues to death.

SD also works by that metric, but even with gal civ 2 I felt they dropped the ball. Of course they have enough of a rabid fan base that people pre-order to have access to the beta, but then SD runs a half assed beta where they close it well before final features are implemented and give themselves a month to polish and add whatever other crap they want to add. Oh, and then that mess goes gold, relatively untested.

I really want to be a fan of SD and their games, but at this point... meh, they just keep on making the same mistakes they say they learned to avoid. You know the saying. fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. Well I'm not getting fooled again (thanks Roger Daltrey), so I'm not buying any games, no matter the publisher, until at least a month after they have been out.

Of course if everyone did that the game publishers would be pretty screwed, but then again they'd have to release an early demo with near complete features to get people to be willing to shell out the money on day zero.
 
That should not be a given. Why in the hell should an unfinished, bug-ridden game be released in stores?

Better, why would anyone ever say "Oh, Stardock games are always like that at first! They'll make it better....". If they are capable of producing a good game, then they should do so BEFORE releasing it. The game should be playable before it ever hits the shelves.

Yeah, there's a lot of good games which start good. Stardock just love to get money earlier than they deserve, I've learned it a hard way. But it's not the thing that bugs me... The shallow game content and the lack of atmosphere is what killed Elemental for me. I honestly expected it to be at least atmospheric and fun in a few areas. Maybe the fact that 70% of stuff is either bugged or not working as intended (I don't overstate, more than 60% of racial traits are not working for example, and the major game mechanic, "shards", is not working at all) killed it for me. Well, and the fact that you cannot upgrade units.

Minor bugs never bug me (sorry for the pun :P), but major issues are there, you have to be a fanboy or a person who has never played old good games like Age of Wonders, MoM or Heroes3 not to notice it.

P.S. I am not really sad though. I've played elemental... and now I am back to FFH2. That game made me to play FFH2 again, so it has good sides :).

P.P.S. And don't think that I am bashing the game. I am bashing developers. They basically sold an early beta for the full price. And it is already on all torrents with all updates so it's not a DRM. They are just greedy.
Also they promise only 1 year of free updates, that's the main thing I am worried about.
Spoiler :
11bj3wx.png


And the book is meh :P.

The game may become a gem with time. At least I hope so :).
 
Well one year of free updates means that the expansion doesn't come out for a year, but you get all the content they can add/fix during that time.

*shrugs* this is how SD operates, I trust them to make massive improvements to the game, I just don't want to bother with the game until that time.
 
That's the thing that kills me... The "This is how SD operates" line.

No game company should operate that way. It's different for mods, as they are developed for free, in spare time, but for actual purchased games? In no way should a game developer ever be excused for selling an unfinished, bug-ridden product, simply because "We'll make it better".

If they can make it better, do so before you sell the game. Blizzard has it right, there; They delayed SC2 massively, but in doing so they worked out the vast majority of it's kinks.
 
That's the thing that kills me... The "This is how SD operates" line.

No game company should operate that way. It's different for mods, as they are developed for free, in spare time, but for actual purchased games? In no way should a game developer ever be excused for selling an unfinished, bug-ridden product, simply because "We'll make it better".

If they can make it better, do so before you sell the game. Blizzard has it right, there; They delayed SC2 massively, but in doing so they worked out the vast majority of it's kinks.

Yep, you're right. I'm not defending them, just stating the fact. I'm done getting their stuff until it's ready. But clearly others are still willing to wade through the muck.
 
i think you give the game a too harsh treating. while it is surely disappointing to 4x veterans like us. for younger and more casual players (who don't know the glory of master of magic, age of wonders, ffh) it is probably an enjoyable game.
 
Yeah, I am sure casual players will continue to play a game that frequently crashes, has missing features, and an abomination of a UI to it.
 
If you bought each expansion when it came out, you did pay 150$ for Civ4, or there abouts. But at least prior to the 2nd and 3rd installments you knew it was worth it to you to do so. $150 up front would be a different story.
I've no opinion on Elemental yet, not really being able to afford it at the moment. I'm thinking that's probably a good thing, though, which is a shame, the more good games get made the better. But I never got excited playing gal civs, so I wasn't watching this one too closely.
 
I'm just laughing at the "abomination of a UI" thing. I preordered this game because GalCiv 2 is really the only game ever made with a decent AI, and after a year of beta I still can't see what the problem is. As far as bugs go, the only thing I get are memory leaks. Annoying, but not a problem especially since you can disable the intro. Then again, maybe Hearts of Iron III desensitized me to bugs, or Victoria to terrible UIs.

Actually, never mind. "Better than Paradox" is a terrible launch standard. Unless you're Creative Assembly. Or Illwinter.

...Why do all good games start out horribly? :(
 
i think you give the game a too harsh treating. while it is surely disappointing to 4x veterans like us. for younger and more casual players (who don't know the glory of master of magic, age of wonders, ffh) it is probably an enjoyable game.

Well, us old 4x farts are usually more forgiving when it comes to technical inadequacies than the young ones, who expect better graphics and fluent gameplay.
Elemental in it's current form is agonizingly slow after a few turns and - independend from the cell shaded artwork - is butt-ugly.
The overland map is slow and ugly. Think 'pea soup' for grass terrain textures. And it's crawling to a stop as soon as you get more than a few units out there.
The overland cloth map is fast and does a good job of providing a comprehensive view of the world ... but it's too ugly for playing in.
The combat is slow and ugly. The combat and walk animations take much too long and you are forced to wait until the animation finishes before you can issue a new order. And while some animations (melee mostly) look really good, the special effects of a minor gameplay feature called magic are so bad you'd need a patch before you could call them primitive.

So much for younger and casual players.

And for older and focused players Stardock provided a braindead AI, thoroughly uninspired city building and even worse: no strategic depth whatsoever (you can build every unit in every city at the same speed everywhere, provided you researched the tech).

This game is for all intents and purposes still in early beta and the gameplay is completely unbalanced.

The good news: By the time the game is playable it will be availably in the budget bin for €10 or so.
 
I agree that it's not a problem of "casual gameplay", read above, most of "harsh treating posts" say nothing too bad about the game but rather about devs and their inability to deliver a finished project.

And yeah, this game is qute casual in many ways (I mean there's no competition), but it may be moddable, and with better AI in the future (I am sure someone like Sephi will show up and fix it) it may become much better.

If you bought each expansion when it came out, you did pay 150$ for Civ4
I didn't know there're such big price differences between countries. In russia you would pay 150 roubles for each expansion which is 5$, which makes it 15$ total :/. If you get the "gold" version, it costs 10$.
 
for younger and more casual players (who don't know the glory of master of magic, age of wonders, ffh) it is probably an enjoyable game.

I doubt that casual gamers would enjoy this game at all. The game is confusing and has way too many moving parts that are inadequately explained and not really tied together in any meaningful way.

It is improving with each patch, but I still don't find it very fun. I played for about half an hour last night before suiciding into a neighbor's city (though of course I didn't realize it was suicide - usually my king reappears in my city when he is defeated, though I guess this was different since I was fighting another player? Hell if I know). Anyway, I quit Elemental and played Dwarf Fortress instead, so that should tell you something.
 
Top Bottom