There is a new article up on Rock, Paper, Shotgun noting that the gamer's bill of rights is no longer found on its website. I'm not sure if this has anything to do with what some would call a premature release of Elemental but they seem to think so.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/08/25/stardock-rescind-own-bill-of-rights/
I think what bothers me the most is that the harsher critics of Elemental are basically lying about the state of the game at the moment. I'd say that any outstanding issues as of the 1.05 patch are minor at worst, yet you have people out there saying that the game is practically unplayable.
Well maybe it is for them.
Did you ever stop to think that you're not the only one with a computer running the game? Because honestly, you really come off as though you think that because you're happy with it, and it doesn't crash too much for you, that everyone else should have the same experience.
Clearly that's a ridiculous position to take.
And I can name a bunch of games I've recently played to completion where I didn't encounter 1 single game stopping bug (game stopping being a crash, quest not functioning like it should, etc). That being said, Stardock is getting some bad press about this release. Somewhere between Stardock's feigned innocence and the outcries of the gaming community in general is the truth
Look at the support forum. Nobody is complaining that the game is outright unplayable.
Either we're looking at different support forum or your definition of unplayable differs from mine. (your being more literal as in game not staring or something along those lines)
The most active topic right now is about very bad performance (=5 fps), others include OOMs and CTDs.
How much more gamebreaking bugs do you want?
Be glad that it works for you and don't assume that's the general state of affairs please.
Really makes me wonder how much Titan Quest-itis is going on... how many complaints (post-patch, anyway) are relevant, and how many are from pirates who can only access the buggy, unfinished version and are outraged the game they spent all that time and bandwidth downloading doesn't work right...
As for the current problems, I'm surprised... as of 1.05 I still had a few CTDs, OOM and sudden decline in performance.
As of 1.051 I've had no problems except for a wierd bug where my sound wasn't playing during tac battles.
Was the gamers' bill of rights changed?
ppl are quoting it as "2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state."
but right now it says "2. gamers shall have the right that games they purchase shall function as designed without technical defects that would materially affect the player experience. this determination shall be made by the player."
The articles in question were all written a couple days ago, when the day zero patch that fixed some of it was either not out, or had just come out. Before that it was a lot worse.
Today it doesn't crash as much. But an article from tuesday written about the version people were playing monday? That version was a total mess, and reporting on it wasn't wrong.
This is a fair point, but recall that alot of the initial reaction was not to 1.05. Some people took the 'unfinished' release more seriously than others, and clearly not all CTD type bugs get ironed out (well ever...) in the first few patches either.
Improvement, we knew was coming, and would come quickly, but, that wasn't the major thrust of many peoples discontent. I think a lot of 'issues' were 'hidden' in the beta, behind the 'this isn't supposed to be fun' line, and unfortunately some of those issues could have been resolved had they actually been made visible to the beta crowd.
Anyway, it is what it is, and in another week or so this will all settle down. For SDs sake I hope the damage they did to their rep isn't permanent, but it's clear that their rep took a hit from this. Deservedly or not doesn't matter.
I guess Stardock felt it needed more wiggle room. I don't remember this change being announced.
From my 24 hours of playing:
I haven't been able to get past 20 turns before the game crashes. All of my drivers are up to date, and I have downloaded the patch. I have to agree with all of the harsh critics, because this retarded, unfinished game cost $50. That's a nice chunk of change.
The game should have been completed before it was released. Period. I am excited to play this game when it is completed. But, right now I feel like a sucker for buying a $50 game that should have rightfully been free as a beta. I think it's sort of pathetic how much everyone is defending Stardock... You sound like fanboys.
"Professional" is pushing it when it comes to the game review industry. In terms of reviews praising games that you think suck, that's not really new. The movie industry is incredibly bad for having a group of critics that are widely disconnected from what the buying public actually likes. As with anything else, find a reviewer or two that you trust who seems to agree with you more often then not, and listen to them.
The article writer didn't point out any of the good aspects of Elemental, not one. All he said was that Elemental was buggy and people should stay away from it. If you ask me maybe he should have tried playing the game on decent PC instead of whatever piece of shit he tried to play it with. If the bugs were really all as bad as he's saying there would be way more of us here on the forums running into them. I just think his article was completely unfair. He didn't point out all the hard work the Devs have done. All the long hours they've put in. The fact that things had to be pushed up ahead of schedule to make the release date, and then it was compounded and made even worse by the street date being broke. Stardock got screwed over here, big time, and no one is taking that into account except for a few of us here on the forums. That guy's article rode Elemental harder than a 15 year old Bangkok prostitute. That kind of bad press can tank a good game before it even gets off the ground. Plus having worked on Elemental I feel attached to it and want to see it succeed, so maybe I am a little biased. I just don't think he told the whole story and made it appear Elemental would act that way for everyone, which it obviously doesn't or there wouldn't be people out there like me who are having a good time and not running into a lot of bugs.
Yep, the article was really harsh. But it's not a review. It's effectively a blogger saying "hey this is buggy, don't buy it right now."
In some ways he was kind. He *restarted* doing his actual review when the patch came out. There's zero reviews on metacritic right now, he could have had the first one (which means hits and $$). But instead he started over with the new version. This sounds like someone who was looking forward to the game and got torched by the early problems then someone who was just out to get Stardock (he's actually a fan).
As for bugs, I've encountered the crash bug, the alt+tab crash bug, the memory leak performance slowdown, and the AI sitting in its town and not doing anything. So if you're not seeing anything, we're doing something different (or you've got an nvidia video card, which is better behaved). So there's no way I can sit here and say it's a bug free experience. I've been running WoW, Starcraft 2, Borderlands, and a few other things without any issues on this machine since I got it, so I'm pretty sure it's not a hardware problem.
It'll be interesting to see what his review says when it comes out.
That's an awful lot of words.
That's true. I also am running a NVidia card. I built this system as a gaming system first and foremost. Even being almost right at 2 years old now, I haven't encountered anything yet that causes the system to slow down or chug even on the highest of settings. In fact I think I've still got another 2, maybe even 3, years before I'll have to worry about upgrading again and even then it will probably just be the graphics card that needs upgrading. You'll probably remember my system specs from the thread we had going on about it a long time ago (granted that thread was on the old forums).
Intel Quad Core i7 920 @2.67GHz
NVidia GeForce GTX 280 1Gb video memory
4GB Ram
OS Win7 64 Pro
It's really stable and great for gaming. I don't know if you're into the TW games but the Empire TW launch had way more people than here on their support forums who flat out couldn't run the game at all or had all kinds of video issues. Everything from white screen errors, black screen errors, even dreaded Blue screen CTD's of doom. I didn't have any of those issues nor did I have the funky AI behavior that a Lot of people complained about on the forums. For me it ran smooth and didn't lag or have random CTDs. The only thing I had that others did was the "Alt-Tab CTD" so to avoid it I just didn't Alt-Tab while I was playing. It reminds me of that joke where the guy goes to the doctor's office and says "Hey Doc, my arm hurts when I raise it like this." and the doc saying "Well don't raise your arm like that, stupid."...LoL.
Obviously I can't argue that Elemental has it's share of problems for a lot of people and still has the random game-play bugs to be worked out still. I don't know if it's because I scripted my own faction or what, but my last game where I conquered a large map I didn't have the normal teleport spell. It just wasn't in my spell book at all until I got to the mid/late game version that's a mass teleport. I don't know if that was a bug or if it's something I did when scripting. I also ran into a bug I mentioned where I couldn't draft darklings, so, the game does have some minor game-play issues to be worked out. It's nothing near as serious as the article writer went on and on about though which is mainly why his article pisses me off. I know there are Tons of power gamers out there with systems just as good and often better than mine and on those systems they have to be getting at least the same performance I'm getting or better. If he's a reviewer writing up real reviews for a decent sized web site he needs to have the proper hardware to do his job. Notice he Doesn't mention his system specs at all, not once. I wonder if that's possibly because he's trying to run the game on some sub-par P.o.s. that has no business trying to run games. I know Brad wanted to make a game that would run on a Notebook, but, I'd honestly hate to try to play this on a Notebook.
I'm looking forward to his actual review my-self as well to see if he Really gives Elemental a Fair review. If he does he will have earned a tad bit of respect back in my eyes. If he doesn't write a honest fair review I'll probably sign up and leave a nice long comment on My experiences with the game on a Real gaming system and inform people on at least some of the many Good Aspects of the game. It would be hard for me to do that without sounding at least a little bit like a fanboy though. I do think the game is awesome. It's fun, it's incredibly moddable, it's deep and engrossing and has that classic "just one more turn" pull that draws me deep into a game. Granted, over-all, I think sadly we all have to admit this hasn't been a very good launch "publicity wise" for Stardock. They've gotten screwed pretty hard on a lot of gaming sites for the last few days and I just don't think it's fair at all. Half of them out there are just flat out lying about the game's current performance saying it's a completely unplayable mess which just isn't true at all even if you are playing on an older system or with a ATI card. I'd just like to see the game and the Team get credit where credit is due. In the end Elemental is going to be THE PC Fantasy strategy game of our generation I think, just as many consider GalCiv 2 to be for the Space strategy genre. It really is an incredible achievement for Stardock and I wish more people would see that instead of listening to the "Bad Hype" that a lot of these sites are putting out.
I have to agree with "It'll be interesting to see what his review says when it comes out.". I really want to see what he has to say then or in 6 months from now.
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