IGN: Elemental: War Of Magic - Preview

[Calahan]

I think half the people on this thread are talking about Elemental, and the other half talking about King's Bounty. Since it appears most of the posts referring to the (lack of) multi-player and map-editing features are in relation to King's Bounty.

[RegnorVex]

I know that Stardock tends to get a lot of kudos from players, but in my experience they've been *awful* as a company. I finally gave up on Demigod, which could have been a great game, because of the extraordinarily bad problems they've had with their online play.

Still, to this date, after months of poorly timed announcements claiming they'd fix the problems and blaming customers for any remaining problems, their forums are populated by unhappy users who can't get Demigod working properly. Brad Wardell has not helped the situation at all, insulting the people for whom the game still does not work (like me) and treating us like haters instead of customers who would like to enjoy the game they've paid for.

There are enough players who *are* working and who keep propping up the company that Stardock appears to have considered their work done and have moved on to the Elemental project. So I will remain quite wary of this title until I read reviews.

And don't get me started on Impulse. I tried installing Europa Universalis III on Vista 64 using Impulse and it made a mess of my computer, installing game files on my root drive and leaving bizarre, incomprehensible messages. I received zero support from Stardock, despite posts explaining in polite detail the problems. Not a single response. Their Impulse forums are scary with unanswered complaints. I finally had to download a patch available from the game developer, extract it myself, and figure out which directories to install its files into in order to get my Impulse product to even run. Last time I buy anything from Impulse.

Elemental sounds truly exciting and, like many here, I look forward to trying it out when it's shipped. And I have been quite happy with most Stardock products in the past. But you have to judge a company not by how they respond to things going smoothly, but by how they respond when things don't go well. I will be far more careful spending any money on a Stardock product next time around.

[LDiCesare]

Demigod wasn't developped by Stardock. They published it and used some programing resources scheduled for Elemental to woek on Demigod to fix what was crappy software in the first place.
On the other hand, I can't say I like Impulse very much, it's been quite unstable.
I am mostly afraid that the Demigod debacle made Stardock afraid of the multiplayer aspect and it looks like they won't provide the ability to play LAN but all multiplayer will have to go through their network for Elemental. What with some upload speed limits making MP unavailable for many players. All this because Demigod used P2P while Elemental has no reason to and will probably be a classical client/server.

[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.

[NTJedi]

Originally Posted by LDiCesare

I am mostly afraid that the Demigod debacle made Stardock afraid of the multiplayer aspect and it looks like they won't provide the ability to play LAN but all multiplayer will have to go through their network for Elemental.

Yes, I literally feel that Stardock fears multiplayer as much as the goblins feared the Balrog. I hope others here on these forums such as myself will be contacting Stardock or posting on the Stardock forums requesting LAN, Hotseat and PBEM. Stardock will become more and more experienced with multiplayer stability each time they attack this demon.

[DonCorazon]

this just doesn't get the epic fantasy juices flowing...but i won't give up hope yet

[vfb]

See? Complain about sexual exploitation in the Dom3 ads, and that's what you get.

[Sombre]

Man Eddie from the Munsters is looking rough these days.

[Meglobob]

Is that average joe pretending to be a adventurer? Or just a miner?

Doesn't exactly get the fantasy juices flowing...