I think this article at PCGamer is a little slanderous and overtly malicious. Gratefully the problems he complains about I don't even experience myself. And I have usually been a skeptic here. Articles like this one are only designed to hurt and not help. The article is disguised to help buyers by steering people away through blown out of proportion accusations and statements. I believe the game needs work but not on par with the writers complaints. I don't believe its a disastrous launch. That statement is overblown and an outright a lie in my opinion. I am not a fanboy but I know a good game with potential when I play it. It just saddens me that there are players out there with chips on their shoulders or vendettas.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/25/elementals-disastrous-launch-stay-well-away/
i felt the same basically until last night a lot of my issues were fixed before that we were playing a prerelease build anyway..we cant say much since we werent suppose to have it...still has a way to go but it is in no way unplayable like your putting off..the 0 day patch has a few hick ups and they will get fixed...tons of games have patches mess some things up.i can understand the thing with your friends..i have said the same to mine because they arent very understanding and expect everything to be perfect in there games so i said hold off til it is.as of now its still enjoyable..
People should not be standing for this. The last 5 or so years too many games have been coming out like this. And now the norm is “well its 0 day release patches are normal, it will get better”, that use to not be the norm. Shit before you use to get a game and it worked, no downloading some patch or anything shit just worked, it was complete. Gamers standards have just gone downhill and we all should not have do be dealing with it enough of the excuses. Everything is a rush now to make a profit, companies have just gotten sloppy.
I'm sure in hindsight Stardock wishes they had held off on the early release and waited until the Day 0 patch was ready. I think a statement like, "Sorry, guys, I know Best Buy has released the game early, but we want to make sure you get the best game possible on your first day playing it, so we're going to stick to our originally planned release date when we'll have the first patch ready. I hope you understand" would have satisfied most of us us.
As they say, hindsight is 20-20.
I hate to say this, but I agree 100% with PCGamer. Let me preface this by saying I love Stardock and REALLY wanted to like this game.
As a long time beta tester and gamer (over ten years with each) it's pretty clear that this game was not ready for its release. You can't release a title with disabled online multiplayer and buggy single player and expect favorable reviews. In the campaign, I'm currently trapped in Act 6, looking for a survivor who (I think) is in a desert nowhere to be found. There are no waypoints or suggestions of where to look (as there should be) just footprints in the ground that tell me I'm looking in the wrong direction. That's not the only issue. I've currently played over 450 turns in the single player campaign, allowing me to buy several of the top tier units with little difficulty, making my sovereign useless. Why level my main hero and increase his hit points by 5 when I can just buy 7 Royal Guard armies with 80 HP each? Additionally, the lack of cutscenes or voice acting during the acts is making for an incredibly dry and difficult to follow story for me.There are plenty of other issues I can bring up regarding the campaign, including invisible walls and no clear direction of what to do, but for the goal of brevity I'll stop here.
And that's all just in the campaign. The skirmish mode has some pretty significant flaws as well. Granted, they're getting fixed, but I am also of the opinion that this game needed a few more months of development. I don't say this as a biased anti-Stardock hater, I've bought all their games in the past and liked them (even Demigod) it's just that thus far I'm not very impressed with the game as it stands.
Get past your anger at how bluntly PCGamer has analyzed the game and coolly look at its flaws. I think over time most of you will agree with me.
Empire Total War was imho way buggier on release and still managed to get high scores from nearly all the major reviewers. I thought it was the worst by far of all the total war games released. Yet somehow this game is worse for having all the bugs that Total war had? Yeah I would say this reviewer has some sort of axe to grind with either stardock or the CEO. This game has a few glitches but it is still playable whereas Total War was not at release.
there would never have been a 0 day patch if they game didnt break release date.its not easy setting a game up to run on an infinite amount of set ups.people should remember that,..i dont know any games that didnt require patches at all.
I am a rabid Stardock fanboy and evangelist, ask any of my friends or just review my long disused blog over at JU... That said:
I agree with the PC Gamer article with the exception of "the quote".
I *want* to love Elemental but I don't. I really don't care about the bugs or crashes (although I have lots) since the autosave feature prevents me from losing more than a turn of play but I was seriously underwhelmed by the game design and balance issues the game has.
The game feels unfinished and unpolished in the extreme. Some design decisions seem at odds with the overall game philosophy.
Overall the gameplay feels very generic and the magic system is frankly laughable. On the hardest setting the AI is still terrible and routinely flings underpowered units at well defended cities to no apparent end. I could go on and on (I actually laid awake launch night mentally running through all the things I felt were inexplicable) but I don't want to pile on too much.
The game needs work, not just to stomp on bugs but to finish the game system.
I am sorry Brad, but this one wasn't ready for primetime. I look forward to seeing it develop into the game it should have been.
Pc gamer gave Spore a 91% score. I rest my case.
You're a troll and very wrong. You are just jumping on the complain about any little thing bandwagon and it's very apparent. I bet you don't even have the game. I would bet many that are complaining don't even have the game. I would wager it's all those nasty elitist multiplayers who are mad that this game doesn't have MP or is going to have minimal multiplayer that are doing all the complaining.
The game is great. I've played it for 2-1/2 days now and it has no more bugs than any of the rest of the games out there like HOI III and Rome Total War just to name a couple of games that were released and got 90% reviews.
This is one of the best games I've played in a long time. Right up there with the enjoyment of Master of Magic (after it's 1.31 patch of course) and Heroes of Might and Magic II & III after their PATCHES.
Most of you moe's act like this should be a perfect game out of the box. I've yet to run across a game breaking issue since 1.0 and certainly not since 1.05.016
So stop your exxagerating and copycatting threads and start actually playing the game all the way through. You'll find it's a great adventure. )
Eh, I could play through the entire single player of ETW on release with little difficulty. Obviously, that is just my experience. Also, ETW is a lot prettier than this game, and had a much more cohesive and useful veterancy system (see my post above regarding sovereign veterancy).
Additionally upon release ETW's multiplayer was functional, so IMHO it wasn't "way buggier" than this game.
Exactly I had forgotten about that POS game for kids.
The reasons listed in this article and by some forum users here are the reasons I do not pre-order games. I don't care if the quote was taken out of context, exactly when is it okay to tell paying customers who are your fans to take a hike because they care enough to bring up missing advertised features, game breaking problems and bugs. This will probably be a nicer review than Elemental will get elsewhere because at least they mention they expect the game to be fixed, that features talked about will be added and at some point Elemental will live up to the promise. Hell this article says in no uncertain terms says the "Developer and publisher Stardock are generally a great company" yet people here are still so blind by loyalty that they are sounding the charge against PC Gamer and trying to attack this reviewer who could have, and probably should have, just finished the review and given it a terrilbe score. They're holding off a review, not that common to do actually. The responses here... some you guys didn't and haven't been doing Stardock any favors.
lol I remember the forums when ETW came out I can still hear the complainers ringing in my ears about every little thing. ETW was a MESS when it was first released. It might have even been worse than M2TW actually. lol
I say everyone who buys PCgamer UK and is a fan of Stardock should immediately cancel their subscription. We'll show em.
I’m certain Stardock will fix Elemental. They may even keep working on it until it’s as good as their last game, Galactic Civilizations 2. But putting junk like this in a box and charging money for it is not okay, however rapidly you try and patch it afterwards. It punishes you for being a fan, it punishes you for buying on day one, it punishes you for pre-ordering, and it punishes you for having faith that a great company like Stardock wouldn’t ask you to pay for a game until it’s fit to be played.
Couldn't have said it better myself. I wish I'd saved my money for when the finished game comes out, rather than paying Stardock for the privilege of being a beta tester. They're actually being generous in not writing their review yet, considering how broken the game remains, even after 1.05. I'm referring to gameplay stuff more than crashes...it's difficult to get a handle on how widespread the latter is because hardware/software combinations vary so much. The former, though, less so.
It's inexcusable to ship something that was not completed. End of story.
lol don't know what to say, must be and age thing.
this is dumb,they may have been harsh but they really were just trying to look out for fans.
Oh yes the phallic aliens, the DRM , the bugs and the complete lack of gameplay. .. complete facepalms all around.
RAT
age thing?really?implying im a child im assuming.
that says it all, as a fan of empire of war series and owning them all ,I remember some HUGE HUGE HUGE buggy releases that wouldn't even launch yet the reviewers praised the game as the next coming. Sorry I am all about having a descent release, but this game even on day 0 was better then 2 and 3 of eow. Funny thing is try to get patches for the EOW franchise, people scream, curse, get banned on the forums etc for pointing out those flaws. Eh, whatever, I care not at this point, many of us knew the status of the game and that's no excuse, but they always ALWAYS fix it and quickly, I have to see another company do that. So na, I don't blame stardock for a pre-release fail, I blame the retailers getting them off guard.
I see what happened here, the gold was shipped with issues on it and they knew it was there, quick fix and a patch on launch and no one is the wiser. Issue was the launch was jumped on a day early and people played a broken game. I get it, but then again I also get more developers releasing broken games so people rejister and show they actually own it to patch it up offically, call it the side step of a drm, (thats my theory anyways) but alas, I have seen worse and what was posted about them here was just over the hill and streight out rude.
If they are looking out for fans, and not just corporate whoring, why did they give Spore a 91% score? It lets you edit units like EWOM does but theres no game attached to the editor, unlike with EWOM.
Don't forget though that a lot of those people had sub-par systems and were still trying to run the game. I had an excellent system (cost over 2000$) at the time and was able to run it at release with practically no issues. I'm trying to remember if I had any problems at all... I think I had some kind of crash once but that was it.
....
Implying that everyone with a complaint about the game is a liar who doesn't have the game is a terrible way to make your case.
I have the game and managed to play it it through many times on single player by leaning heavily on the autosave to recover from the many many crashes. Call me a liar. Just say that everything I posted above is a lie and has no bearing on the truth. Quote some other game with bugs that got a good review. I don't care. This game was not up to Stardock's standards. Period.
Well it's important to note that WoW's release, while it did have serious problems, was actually really good when compared to other MMORPGs. And the game was actaully far more complete and polished then any other MMORPG released, which of course is not saying that much given that most other games tend to be released extremely incomplete. So the standards were quite a bit different there.....getting a C doesn't look so bad when everyone else gets an F. So I'm not sure if I would hold them up as an example of a horrible release.
This is total bull. Elemental is more bug-free and playable than most major house releases on day-0. Another crappy commercial gaming rag slamming the games that aren't made by major advertisers.
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