So much going on this week and at the same time, so little. A lot of vacations here at Stardock pop up in June since this is one of the prime months here in terms of weather.
On a sad note, Trent (Mittens) had his last day today. He’s off to Salt Lake City to take a position as a designer at a new game studio. We’ll miss him. Combined with the people on vacation, the studio area feels like a ghost town.
My executive planner and marketing manager gave me a “CEO make over” today with a bunch of new clothes. I guess trade show shirts and ratty shorts just aren’t good enough anymore.
Right now, we’re looking at dozens of issues that need to be addressed before we can even do the alpha build of the game. Everything from the fonts looking crummy to setting priority on what should be on the setup.
For instance, if someone wants to create a custom civilization and in there choose “good” or “evil” that’s fine. But I’m having them get rid of being able to have pre-existing factions be good or evil because it would literally double the writing involved for each faction’s back story. While that’s interesting to have, I would rather have more depth per faction rather than half the depth but a mirror universe version of each one.
The screen you see here will likely be significantly altered between now and release. But this gives you an idea of how iterative the process is. I’ll probably eliminate the appearance area and put that into the custom race area. Right now, “design your race” is the only option. There isn’t a formal “choose your faction” area. Elemental comes with 2 built in races and 12 factions but we plan to let people create their own races and factions as well, but that should be a separate area that is a lot richer. If you try to mash too much stuff together, it’s confusing to new players but still too weak for experienced users.
Holy carp, he posted! He posted! *rips hair out*
Phew, good thing it was his.
('carp' intentional)
Again, good stuff; nice information. Keep it up Frogboy.
You the man!
Beat me by less then a minute!
I agree with Annatar again. "Fallen" doesn't exactly scream "good" to me. But there's lots of shades of good and evil. I mean a society of pacifists is good. A society of crusading Paladins is also good, but they're nothing like the pacifists at all (and if they get crazy enough, not that far away from evil).
From that screenshot, it doesn't look like there will be neutral races for the player. Maybe that'll change.
Perhaps this is an odd question, but what is the effect of being either "good" or "evil" in Elemental, if there is one (for the custom race-factions)? Is it purely a plot point that certain race-factions are good and others evil for the pre-made sets? It sounds like there was going to be the ability to choose, but I think the idea described earlier about having your actions determine your "alignment" might be a better way to go. You can have a single back story but allow the choices the player makes "in the future" dictate the alignment through the game. It solves the difficulty with the writing (you still create a single back story) but allows the player more freedom, taking their faction down whatever path they choose.
Is that too complex, needing to put alignment-shifting events into the game?
They haven't said yet. The speculation about spells is probably right though, I doubt we'd see stuff like necromancy on the good side. Don't know what else it does at this point.
Alignment events existed in GalCiv 2. You could pick your alignment permanently after you researched something. Your natural alignment was free, and going something else cost money depending on how far away you were from it. In that case the races had starting alignments too, though. So your decisions moved you from where you started, but you didn't always start neutral.
The issue with it there is that the evil choices were almost always clearly better.
Good luck Mittens!
More info FTW!
Even with the "Remove" label, that screen cap doesn't leave me much hope that we'll see a Neutral alignment in Elemental.
Still, I'd like to be proven wrong by a faction or two on both the human and Fallen sides that have nearly as much in common with each other as they do with 'their side.' Don't even have to call it Neutral and carve out a third set of alignment-dependent functions. All we really need is some backstory and a few AI behavior patterns to put the "big tent" problem in the game. Or am I thinking too much like a guy who used to teach US Gov't?
haha not my government teacher. He was a jerk. Also, it was interesting to be in a US government class during the 2000 recount debacle.
Looking forward to the alpha. Thanks for the post!
Mittens, nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Best of luck at your new job, can you spill any details?
See ya on IRC!
Interesting, how customizable is the crest and population I wonder? Also, is that suppose to be a picture of the Channeler or peasant? Whoever He is he looks like a push over.
I'm surprised people haven't said anything about the crest editor, there were a lot of people really excited about being able to create their own crest a while back. It's nice to see that it's a planned feature.
And that is the channeler. It's the same character as in the screenie in this dev journal. Hopefully we'll be able to customize our channeler's looks!
Boy, mittens must have really been pissed off if he was willing to take a job in Utah...
A small detail about the alignment selector. (i know it will be probably removed, but it also applies to other options). Do not use a checkbox if you want to have people select one of the two. A radiobutton is clearer. Because this suggest that you can uncheck both evil and good. (would that make it neutral?) If you also want a neutral option, use 3 radiobuttons. or a dropdown list with the alignments.
This kind of bothers me. Life is full of shades of gray, different philosophies, all sorts of points of view, with paths dependent on the choices we make.
Gal Civ is an interesting example of a way to let players choose which side they want to take based on game interaction. A clear-cut Good or Evil dulls game immersion IMO.
I'd say that no player-chosen faction (at least) is inherently good or evil. While the player builds an empire, there could be quests to take or choices to make that would have the player eventually receive advantages/disadvantages based on good / neutral / evil paths.
Maybe the standard factions will have fixed aligment but custom ones would be able to switch during skirmish/sandbox games. And for some, life is only about black and white anyways.
Personally I'd say that the side you pick may be inherently predisposed to either good or evil, (ie. in their technology and magic) but that their actual behavior in the world would be dictated by the will of their channeler. (ie. the player)
In other words: The fallen side you pick might want to set fire to orphanages and kick puppies, but if the guy with the "of DOOM!" spellcasting says no, they obey. (for health related issues)
Also, maybe the only reason you have a huge army of the walking dead is because you believe it would be wrong to risk the lives of your living population.
Can't make undeaders out of thin air though, so a whole mess of people have to die first!
When you do that, what you end up with is a system where experienced players know what the advantages are, and just play towards them. I'm not picking evil because I happened to choose something evil during a moral dilemma. I'm picking evil because it gives the +2 tax collection bonus in conquered land (or whatever it does). Now that I know that's what I want to end up at, I'll just make whatever choices are necessary to get there.
It gets more problematic when you throw in spells. If a pestilence spell to destroy crops and city food supplies is meant to be evil only, at what point am I evil enough to be able to learn it? Do I unlearn it if I stop being evil?
Accidents happen.
Would have to be a pretty big accident to give enough corpses for an undead army
"No, guys, I swear, I totally didn't know that volcano that's been spewing for the last few months was going to blow and wipe out the 5 towns around it. Honest!"
I prefer to think of it as "early retirement".
Of the forced kind!
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