Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[forsaken1111]

Quoting myself. I am able to play for about an hour before it crashes. Certainly annoying, but something I can live with... for a few days.

The single player campaign seems like it's a lot of fun, feels very polished (no difficulty setting?  ). So far it has been a straight path, no real choices to make. Just started, though.

You can change the difficulty of each opponent just before starting the game.

As for no real choices, are you nuts?! I don't know what to focus on first.

[Heavenfall]

Talking about the single player campaign! I don't get to choose research or spells, they just get handed to me (definitely won't prepare me for custom games heh)

[nenjin]

Quoting myself. I am able to play for about an hour before it crashes.

Seems on par with what I've experienced from a lot of other games.

[forsaken1111]

Talking about the single player campaign! I don't get to choose research or spells, they just get handed to me (definitely won't prepare me for custom games heh)

Ahh, I haven't even touched the campaign yet. I have been playing a large custom game.

Blasting mountains is fun!

[Fishbreath]

Yeah. Unfortunately, it's about what I expected—a lot of wasted potential. It's going to get bad reviews (worse than a metacritic 70%, I'm pretty sure), and take a lot of unfavorable comparisons to Master of Magic (which, if I'm going to be honest with myself, is still more fun).

The simple fact is that the game was obviously rushed out the door, and that it's not ready for primetime yet. This isn't going to be a Demigod, where the game was solid but initially marred by technical problems, this is going to be a disaster of a game that deserves most of the criticism it gets.

Edit: And I'm really, really sad about it. There's so much here that could have been, but Stardock chose an end of summer release instead of holding off on it until next year (as they said was an option) for reasons unknown to me. With another five or six months of development time Elemental could have been an enduring classic of the genre; as it is now, I'm probably just going to go back to GalCiv2 after a mere few tens of hours with it.

[nenjin]

Well, played for about an hour with zero issues, so I'm happy for that.

But I'm in total agreement this feels rushed as hell. It lacks even a basic tutorial in the campaign, and believe me, the game warrants one. Not because it has so much depth, but just because there's many menus and sub-items to click through on the UI.

The very first NPC I got in the campaign MAY have died in the very first battle with some spiders. I can't tell because he was standing at the end of the battle, but has now magically disappeared from the game. Yet I still get messages from him.

I didn't like the UI to begin with, and that hasn't changed since I've actually played it. It's just a pastel mess.

The controls aren't explained. MAJOR things like building on resource points, not explained. I went 50 turns before I figured that out myself, and I've been reading the beta journals. The story is bland and feels very generic so far, but I knew that going in. There's a roughness to everything that sort of undercuts what's supposed to be the charm of these little RPG vignettes. The pacing is kind of abrupt and weird things like, the tool tip for the bandits blocking my way saying "Bandits, it would surely be death to confront them now", and then I crush them without a whole lot of surprises. In the initial stages of the game, you expect a lot of obvious prompts to get you going, but so far the game just kind of kicks you out there, drops a character saying something uninspired on you, then lets you figure it out. The "game" itself doesn't talk to you at all. Again, needs a real tutorial. 

The writing? Sorry Frogboy and Random, you didn't get the "grab me in the first 10 minutes." The only drama I've felt came from the opening cut scene. Some of the dialog so far is....well, it reads like amateur fantasy. Also, why am I dropping the new capital of an empire down when ostensibly I'm supposed to be venturing to other kingdoms to warn of the impending danger? I know they need to get you started, but it just doesn't jive that well, especially because the story is off to begin with. "Hi I'm a bard. Hi, I'm a farmer. Let's make a kingdom! Yyeeaaaaaahhh."

Their sound effects are pretty limited from what I can tell as well. Like, spiders have the same death gurgles as wolves. The unit sounds aren't that great either...and I'm not joking when I say that when you add one group of guys to another to form a large group of dudes, the unit sound is very similar to a gay man about to enter into an orgy. I shit you you not.

I'll hold off on game play for the moment, since everything is dolled out slowly in the campaign. And I'm being supportive for the fact, hey, it's Stardock and they'll probably work on this for another two years easily. It will get better.

But as I said over on their forums, this should be a cautionary tale about what happens when you fall in love with your own IP and it overrides your sense of judgment or timing. They had the chance to push back, and were so happy with what they had (and probably a lot of glowing praise from fans) that they decided to move ahead. It was a bad call in my book. The deal with Random seemed like an overly eager response to begin with, and now it looks really misguided next to the state of the game.

This game could have benefited from another couple months of polish, feedback and idea generation. Magic particularly. But hey, again, it's Stardock, and they play by their own rules. They have no problem with releasing games at a point where they believe they're playable, but still need work to get a cohesive experience. That's one thing that sets them apart from a lot of other devs, indie or AAA, for better or for worse. Thinking about what I got for buying into Mount and Blade years after the purchase, I'm sure I'll get my money's worth. I'm not at all a fan of the setting or the visual aesthetic of the game though.

It's also worth nothing, there's no day zero stuff here, this is the pre-order release only.

[Lap]

Worse than 70% eh? I was thinking like 70-72%, but everything I'm hearing from nonfanboys is making me reevaluate that. I think you're right fishbreath, it will probably stabilize under 70%, possibly going all the way to the 50's. I was watching some streams and all I saw was constant disappointment. I totally agree with you that this won't be like Demigod. That was fun to beta and had solid gameplay testing.

Prior to today I was giving the devs the benefit of the doubt. The lead dev has said multiple times this weekend that this was the most solid game they've ever released.  You're totally right nen, they fell in love with their own IP and got blinded. All it would have taken is one outside gamer to play the retail version for a few hours to tell them it wasn't close to ready. You just get the feeling that things are terribly wrong all over the game.

Throughout all of alpha and beta they kept assuring us that the fun stuff would always come later. Even in the last beta they said that most of the content wasn't in. I'm beginning to think the 'fun' just wasn't there.

Looking back on the betas I don't think there was a single aspect I've liked. I've been part of alphas, beta, and game design before so I expect terrible bugs, imbalanced stuff, and crashes, but I also expect that there should be some 'fun' hidden underneath all that. I've never, ever, seen a game I've beta'ed miraculously go from unfun-fun on release. It also seemed like the forum fanboys were a bit too strong and would always cite "It's a beta it's not supposed to be fun".  I watched the devs radically changing things like economy and production all the way until the end, without doing enough testing of them. I saw them ignore a lot of good advice and I tend to disagree with just about every direction they went.

-Splitting 'Adevnturing' into it's own tech is absolutely awful.
-The whole dynasty aspect has always seemed terrible to me and even though I like similar dynasty systems in other games (like Total War), I hate this one.
-There was way too much focus on customizing pointless shit like unit appearances and other useless cosmetic details instead of actual gameplay.
-Every step they took away from MOM ended up being a misstep. I can't currently recommend this game to anyone and I would rather recommend playing Leylines, AoW2:SM, any of the HOMM series or even Civ mods.
-The UI is bad as are the hint/tooltips...and I have very low standards for these.
-The whole 1/3 MOM, 1/3 Populous, 1/3 X-Com thing was always bullshit. It was never any X-Com or Populous. It was only MoM with a few changes which are probably for the worst.
-Last minute removal of good features that was in the beta (like nation creation).

The worst part is that we know they had a choice to delay the game until next cycle and that they ignored and criticized players who said otherwise.

/extreme disappointment

Check out this post a player just wrote about all the things he's noticed already (http://forums.elementalgame.com/391385). All sorts of stuff from crazy AI quirks, spells not having sound effects, etc. My favorite is "why are my spells missing when being cast on my own units, from 1 tile away, 4 times in a row. Does my spearman just really hate being healed?"

[forsaken1111]

The idea behind adventuring as a tech tree is that they are rediscovering lost journals and lore which reveal new adventuring locations and resources across the map.

[Lap]

The idea behind adventuring as a tech tree is that they are rediscovering lost journals and lore which reveal new adventuring locations and resources across the map.

I know and understand the idea behind it and I think that having to make the choice to research that versus anything else is a terrible game design decision.

[forsaken1111]

The idea behind adventuring as a tech tree is that they are rediscovering lost journals and lore which reveal new adventuring locations and resources across the map.

I know and understand the idea behind it and I think that having to make the choice to research that versus anything else is a terrible game design decision.

Why? I think it works very well, having spend the last several hours playing. You don't want to research the adventuring techs too quickly or you will be overrun with deadly monsters and the sites that show up will be far beyond your ability to attack. They also lead to the master quest, one of the victory conditions. I won't spoil it.

[getter77]

Well, as I recall, the issue was Retail slot space...in that if they didn't release now, they wouldn't have the next slot opening until I think Feb 2011.  Given that, by their own figures, Stardock wares tend to be stronger at Retail than DD----it isn't amazing to me that they released at this point but it does strike me as a far from optimal situation.   

I still think the game will "get there" in many respects eventually, though that also has the effect of my not intending to interact with my pre-order until around that point, eventually...

[Lap]

They could have and should have waited until next year. They already did the hardest work of getting their own engine mostly up and developing all the mod tools. If they had waited until Feb they could have had something truly epic. They already had a budget to support the game after release so it's not like they are totally broke. The damage the initial reviews are going to do will probably be irreparable and will really hurt Stardock's reputation and that of the Elemental IP (which they put a lot of time into apparently). I preordered this game because I like Stardock and how they've done things in the past. Gameplay first, graphics seconds, no DRM bs. I bought Demigod and Sins knowing that I wouldn't end up playing much of either of them, but I ordered them anyways because I like supporting Stardock. After this...yea I don't know about that.

Somewhat related note...I have a feeling that all the hype about amazing storyline and such will end up just like Gas Powered Games saying that since they hired these great writers that Supreme Commander 2 would have an epic single player story (which was absolutely laughable).

[Errol]

Sounds like I'll just have to buy CIV 5 and come back to this one six months later.

[Lap]

Sounds like I'll just have to buy CIV 5 and come back to this one six months later.

Hi five to that plan.

[nenjin]

I'm enjoying myself more as I'm playing, now that I have a clue wtf is going on. Campaign story continues to be haphazardly making its way along, and large leaps forward in game play get dropped on you with little to no warning or explanation. Designing some units, getting a second city and starting to build up, I'm starting to see the fun. It might just be better to dive straight into a sand box game. Other than a few bugs, I do agree with Frogboy, it's "stable." Having no problems, and the bugs seem fairly trivial (tool tip sensors being too small or in weird places.)

Although I'm starting to really wonder wth is with the SP campaign. They just opened up a basic range of equipment and my guys in leather armor and short swords are ripping up everything they come across. (Read as: my army combat rating = 150 with 6 guys. The little enemies they're leaving along the campaign trail...15.)

I mean, it's cool I already have guys in full armor with cloaks and shields and shiz...but again, it's making for a pretty humdrum campaign.