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[Cthulhu]

So is Elemental up to anything resembling a playable state yet?  I was kind of excited about it until it came out and turned out to be unplayable, so I haven't checked it out.

[Jehdin]

So is Elemental up to anything resembling a playable state yet?  I was kind of excited about it until it came out and turned out to be unplayable, so I haven't checked it out.

It's somewhat playable, but content-wise it is in a sadly barren state and it still crashes and slows down immensely after 500 turns or so.

Edit: Fallen Enchantress, a new game.

It also says the next entry in the Elemental world will be standalone. Free for those who bought Elemental before November 2010 and discounted for those who own the previous games.

[Lap]

Oh yea, after that last gem I'm all ready to buy another one!

Someone let me know when there are enough super mods and patches that this game is worth playing.

[inteuniso]

Same here. I preordered this... game, I guess you could call it.

It just doesn't have the motivation of fun that GCII did.

EDIT: Thank god: "It just takes time and optimization (i.e. budget) which has been allocated for Fallen Enchantress so that we can get our roads, rivers, and randomly generated land masses." THat will improve the game SOMEWHAT.

[forsaken1111]

So, stuff that was supposed to work correctly in the original game will be in the expansion a year later? Yay...?

[inteuniso]

Yay because I (think I) get it free.

[alway]

Played another game of E:WoM today (v1.19c). It is certainly improving and may actually qualify as 'fun' now. Or at least, it would if not for the Out of Memory CTDs which are still occurring only a couple hundred turns into a large map.

[RF]

How did this game fail so utterly, anyway?

[EuchreJack]

Cause Stardock sucks.

[alway]

A combination of bad code and being about as well polished as a piece of old cobblestone. It was rushed out the door much MUCH too early. Stardock had developed a new game engine on which it was built, the Kumquat Engine they called it. So in addition to just all around bad polish, they were dealing with debugging an entirely new engine, all in a tiny period of time. The first beta for the game which actually used their game engine with the features enabled wasn't until June; they released the game in August. They were planning on releasing a 64 bit native version, which has yet to materialize (but IIRC is in the works still), and so apparently the dev team said to themselves: "Memory management? Bah! Who cares, we will have infinite memory to use!" or something. According to their forums and my own experimentation, the game can only use about 1gb of memory before 'out of memory exception' CTD due to them not even bothering to turn on the LargeAddressAware flag on the executable. As far as I know, the easiest way to do this is to use the visual studio command line to edit the exe itself, as this is the solution which Stardock themselves tell you to do. Overall, it just gives the impression of devs doing things half-assed and expecting the customer to pick up the pieces. Seriously, when was the last time a developer required you to edit the exe for the game just to keep it from crashing every few hours? >_<

[Bluerobin]

Cause Stardock sucks.

That's... productive.

I'm pretty sure it was a combination of three things. The game was really hyped by... a lot of people, including the main Stardock person reporting on the development of the game. Hype leads to letdown, almost universally, simply because you can't possibly live up to everyone's highest expectations. The game didn't release with everything that was promised and the parts that did get in didn't feel very fleshed out. This kind of goes together with the hype, but it just makes it that much more of a letdown. The game also released in a pretty buggy state which, while relatively normal, shouldn't have been the case with the size of the beta test they had going.

Really if they hadn't talked it up as much and had focused the features a bit more they probably could have had a minor hit on their hands. I think they like having relatively large, relatively public alphas/betas, but I'm not sure they really understand how to get the most out of them.

[inteuniso]

Stardock doesn't suck, they made both GalCivs. They just had a good idea that was poorly executed. I guess I was expecting Ice Cream and got a non-dairy confection.

[Fishbreath]

I think they like having relatively large, relatively public alphas/betas, but I'm not sure they really understand how to get the most out of them.

There's almost always a much smaller, invite-only sort of alpha and beta process going on at the same time. My understanding is that those testers identified a lot of the problems people had with the game, but were told they'd be fixed in later releases. Then the game was released.

[ductape]

is the game getting any better over time?

[Levi]

Cause Stardock sucks.

I kind of agree to be honest.  They built up that whole "Gamers bill of Rights" as a publicity stunt and then completely ignored it when people started to ask for refunds due to the overwhelming technical issues.  I pretty much lost all respect for them.