IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview

[RegnorVex]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

Demigod wasn't developped by Stardock.

Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with the whole history of the product, GPG's role and the 3rd party P2P layer. Stardock just isn't a very smart company. The way they handled the Demigod fiasco was extremely disappointing and illustrated pretty conclusively (to me, at least) that they had no idea what they were doing as they continually posted embarassing messages claiming they'd solved the problem.

I get the feeling that they rely too much on Impulse as a quick turn-around patcher and it causes them to publish builds first and test later. The fact that they are developing this product in-house does not inspire me with confidence.

[LDiCesare]

Originally Posted by RegnorVex

I get the feeling that they rely too much on Impulse as a quick turn-around patcher and it causes them to publish builds first and test later. The fact that they are developing this product in-house does not inspire me with confidence.

Indeed their uusal development policy is to publish beta builds and have them tested by the public. They were unable to adapt to the more usual way Demigod was developped and still behaved as if the product was in beta when in fact it was not. They developped GalCiv and Galciv2 the way they develop Elemental and the end products were solid.
It's also much easier to develop a product you know than sending people who don't know a code base and have them fix problems in this unknown code. The latter often causes as many bugs as it solves since developers must first learn what the code really does. I doubt it tales less than one month to get accustomed to any code base of significant size, so the first month of patching by Stardock people would probably have hurt as much as it helped. This shouldn't be the case with something entirely develeopped by them.

I'm still wary about the multiplayer part but I don't care much for it, ad I think an Elemental MP game would be tedious if the game's anything like MoM or Civilization. It'll be even more than tedious with tactical battles being played between other players in real-time, basically making anything more than a duel uninteresting to me.