There was an article posted earlier today on PC Gamer UK outlining some of the frustrations that the reviewer had with the pre-day 0 version of the game as well as a problem he was having with tactical battles.
In the article, he quoted an inflammatory forum posting I made on a site I participate in called Quarter to Three. This is a site I’ve been a participant in for many years and many of the people I discuss things on there are personal friends of mine.
During one such exchange with my friend Ben Sones, I angrily responded with a statement “Ben, please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”
This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel. Ben’s a friend of mine and his comment that the game felt like a “beta” to him upset me and I responded inappropriately. I post a lot on many forums and unfortunately, sometimes the things I say are inappropriate or inflammatory.
As the CEO of Stardock, I want to be clear that my comments on the Quarter to Three forums do not reflect my team at large. They were words spoken out of frustration and sleep deprivation and I am truly sorry. We stand behind what we feel is a great product, one that we will continue to support for a number of years.
With regards to a post on Rock Paper Shot Gun, which picked up the PC Gamer UK story, they erroneously point to a 2+ year old URL to a Stardock news item that is no longer active (we switched news systems a year or so ago). Their article falsely implies that we have stepped away from our commitment to the Gamer’s Bill of Rights.
The site, www.gamersbillofrights.org was set up and is run by Stardock. We stand by it. It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is.
However, it also became clear that the pre-day 0 version of the game was problematic as outlined in the PC Gamer UK article. The official day 0 version of the game, what is available right now, should address most, if not all the issues that have been described. That said, as is our long-standing policy, we will continue to release updates and improvements Elemental just as we do for the other titles we develop.
I anticipate us putting out regular updates for Elemental for months or years to come based on player feedback, suggestions, and yes, bug reports.
I hope this offers some explanation as to the events that have come up. I sincerely apologize and feel terrible for the effect my forum posting on Qt3 may have had not just on our fans but also my team that has worked incredibly hard over the past 3 years to produce what we hope, is a game that you will enjoy for years to come.
great comment dude... seriusly, did you have to think hard to come up with that? are you saying that it's my fault for having an ATI cars, or ATI's fault? I've never got any problems with other games... and if the problems is just with ATI, shouln't Stardock fix that? or at least say " if you have ATI don't buy this game", so, yeah.
and that is one MAYOR Bug, between many, the fact is that the game wasn't and ISN'T ready for the release, and they have really poor testing department.
Majority of GPUs sold nowadays are ATI (source: http://bit.ly/9EZy58).That, and people with NVIDIA suffer from the same issues with performance./feeding the troll
I'll take an emotional dev over an emotionless dev any day of the week Brad.
I really don't think he should of apologized. I don't see anything wrong with what he said. Yeah the game was released early in terms of overall polish. But, it is playable and I'm happy I have it now and I was in the beta. Heck I was in the very first beta ages ago. I bought this game because I know in the end, they will make it right.
Good job Brad and seriously I would of just told people to blow me. I think what you said was pretty diplomatic. But, I did grow up in Philly so we are a bit "different".
I'll be honest, if it wasn't Brad and Stardock behind Elemental, I would have been trashing the game and asking for a refund. That being said, Karma is finite and it's bank needs filling from time to time.
I've got much better, but not perfe...ct, stability from 1.05Personally, I'll grant a LOT more leeway to a company of engineers driven by engineers. A LOT, but not infinite
Wow looks like most people have forgotten the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 launch which had tonnes more breaking bugs, issues and problems didn't see PCGame Uk having a cry about it. Elemental from what I have played is a good game, but should have been kept in development for a couple more months to solve some of the problems and a comprehensive UI tutorial .
As a web/software developer I fully understand the frustration Brad must have felt.
Now that Elemental is out, I hope it continues to be improved. It has the makings of a classic.
Holy crap, a dev, CEO no less, admitting a boo boo and that the game has "issues."
Like I have previously said, I see the potential. Maybe I did not waste my money after all.
The fact that the game is unstable for now is kind of a win win for me because I'm going to need to get a WAY better machine before I'll be able to play this. My 6 year old T5048 E machine is pretty much garbage now. I can wait till things get sorted out. Keep making this game awesome Brad! I know how hard developing is and how critical people can be, but it is helpful to use some psychology to understand those who are more critical than others. Things can spiral into a stockpile of bugs relatively quickly and the only way to get past it is to just keep working at it(which you obviously know). You'll get it eventually . It seems that this game could have used another week of bug fixing from what pretty much everyone(even the fanboys) are saying but I don't really care, I won't be able to play it for awhile anyway. I trust you guys at stardock.
This. Brad, nice followup.
Get some rest and come back clear headed and fresh. Everyone has meltdowns. You just happen to be in the spotlight with the biggest magnifying glass in the world shining on you (the web).
While I can understand the frustration, the venom spewed over Elemental is, in my opinion, a little dramatic.
In the end, IT'S JUST A GAME.
Well, as a guy who has been waiting for this since the late 80's (Masters of Magic by Micropprose) for the updated version, I can wait a bit longer for them to enhance and spruce it up a bit. I was looking forward to it, and I like what I see so far. Being able to customize many many things is very desirable. The only negative drawback is the slowing down of the game as I progress to the point where I have to save it and quit the game. Then do something else, like I'm doing now, to see if they have any updated patches.
I give Stardock kudos for putting out PC games when they are becoming more and more rare with the mindless console game players who need the instant gratification rather than the building of an empire. I don't want to hear them shelving this game due to the bad launch according to all the reports I've read.
Give em some time, play Civ 5 in a couple of weeks and revisit this bad boy when they have had a chance to work out the bugs.
im not sure what the big deal is. You said you told that to a personal friend, even friends snap at each other now and then. Heck, I have never met a married person that never had an argument with their spouse. Even lovers argue, and if you truly berated or hurt your friends feelings you should apologize to him, not the public.
That said, I am pretty annoyed that a prominent press of a GAMING site would take things so out of context, and try to spin it into some grandose story like often seen on tabloids. I thought mud flinging was only reserved for political and religious debate,, but i guess im wrong. I never had much respect for the press to begin with, and this furthers my doubts on their ability to deliver a unbiased and well-researched prose.
After playing the latest version of elemental for several hours, I personally think elemental is a good game but a little rough on the edges, nothing gamebreaking or terrible, it just needs more polish and shine, Particularly in the animations and sound department.
Overall, I think gamers have the mindset of what most companies do, which is release a product, patch it once or twice, and move onto to the next project. So for people who are not regular stardock fans, they make assumptions based on prior experiences with other game companies.
At any rate, good job on elemental and crossing the finish line, looking forward to what seems to be a franchise in the making.
Anyone remember the CIV IV issues on launch? Huge problems with certain graphics cards. Turned out to be the best game ever made in my opinion. Noone (except me) seems to remember that now
I feel the reviewer was a bit out of line there.
Sure the game was bugged all to hell when you released it, and maybe you shouldn't be posting such comments on a forum when you're the CEO of a company and you should be fixing the damn game. However you've done a great job getting the game to a state in which it can at least be played for an hour or two before crashing, and I hope and believe you'll get it right eventually.Hey, you're only human (or frog, whatever).
Anyways, decent of you to apologize even when you shouldn't have needed to and good luck with making Elemental into a great game that works all the time.
You decided that incomplete and buggy code was good enough, and used it to make an incomplete and buggy master. This incomplete and buggy master was used to create a bunch of incomplete and buggy copies that were sent to stores. A few stores sold a few of these incomplete and buggy copies to customers a bit early. It's clearly these stores' fault that the customers now have incomplete and buggy games
Of course, if you had DRM, this wouldn't have happened. Obviously forcing people to verify their purchase (and update through Impulse) so that they can have a playable game is the absolute antithesis of DRM, which requires people to verify their purchase so that they can have a playable game.
Also, for reference, beta means feature complete and gold means ready for release. How long until this game actually reaches beta?
This I will have to agree with.
Being a rather old gamer (played games for the last 26 years), I have seen a lot of unfinished games being released and never fixed. I have total confidence in Stardock solving all unfortunate bugs (and with all the OS's and Video Cards around today, there can be a lot!!) and making this game one of the games that will stay on my PC for years to come.
I preface what I am about to say with the fact that I am a loyal long time Stardock fan who's been willing to buy just about any game since galciv2 just because it has the Stardock name on it. But in response to the above, this is just unacceptable. The product they released plays like an Eastern European budget title. (No offense to Eastern Europe, it's just that is where most of the unfinished budget strategy titles come from nowadays.) Every game should be playable out of the box. The paid beta was a promise of things to come so despite the fact that I still had issues trying to get through a game of beta 4 without a game wrecking glitch, I had hope for the gold version. These hopes were dashed, when I got my hands on the version that was sold in stores; sold, I might add, without caveat as a game worthy of the Stardock name.
Bashing the game for it's graphics or sound design is not really fair. True Mr Wardell might have raised some expectations as he touted the new engine and it's amazing scalability but hyper realism is simply not doable in a massive strategy and the graphics we got were nicely stylized and perfectly serviceable. (If they put you off though, I suggest playing cloth map only as it's nice and (for lack of a better word) roleplay-ey.) No, the games true faults, or at least it's two biggest, are the campaign and the tactical battles, both of which if the developers were determined to make this street date should have been dropped entirely from the game and perhaps patched in at a later date.
The campaign is for many people and has been suggested by Mr. Wardell to be an introduction to the game as a whole. To that end, it is kind of like a man who sneezed in his hand before going to shack yours. Not to distinguish itself from the rest of the game it is of course full of bugs, but putting that and its short 5 hour length aside, it has bigger problems. For one it just drops you in without instruction so you must fiddle around until stuff starts happening. This sense of confusion was continued through the whole experience as I often found myself randomly moving my army about trying to find a spot to trigger the progression. On one occasion this actually caused me to skip a chapter and I found myself backtracking to complete a quest that was now apparently moot. Next, as far as narrative goes, it completely lacks character, literally. You get yourself and two other characters right at the beginning, and then absolutely nothing all they way to the end. Now that could be acceptable if they were well developed, but one is never mentioned again and can die at any point with consequence, while the other gets only a single event as quickly forgotten as it is brought up. Even the main character's motivation and back story remain foggy. If the game wants to hybridize with rpgs, it should know they left these problems behind back in the days of Diablo 1. Finally, there is no sense of urgency. The best strategy is to just make the biggest killer stack possible (absurdly big as it turns out) then steamroll the map, and if you lose, just retreat your sovereign rinse and repeat. All the bad guys kindly just wait to die and there is no punishment for taking as many turns as you like. There is no reason to boast that this was created entirely with the games included modding tools: it shows. I was a big supporter of including a campaign ( I think one of the biggest holes in the soase package was a lack of one) but this is a terrible first impression to make. I can only hope the uninitiated don't take it as indicative of the whole game and drop it without experiencing the main attraction.
Don't get me wrong, the game is indeed worth experiencing and I don't feel ripped off in the slightest, but this game's flaws are unavoidable. For example, the tactical battles: at best they have an unintuitive UI, at worst they are just anti fun. Once time I attacked an army with half my combat rating. In the tactical battle his channeler dropped some spell that kill 2/3rds of my army but when I reloaded and auto-resolved I won with no losses. Is this a bug? Do I just need to suck less? maybe on both counts. Either way the game gave me no indication of what I did wrong or what I should do next time. Like a lot of ideas that were eventually dropped this one is great in theory but not so much in practice. I am forced to wonder if perhaps the reason it wasn't dropped like the others was due to the team's heavy investment in art assets for it.
In any case, my point is this: Every game must be judged on its version 1.0 as this is the version that is being sold to you. Patches are for adding additional content and balance tweaks not addressing basic stability issues. Just because Stardock is an awesome company and we know they will be supporting this game for years to come does not give them a pass to sell us something that must be updated to run without issue. What if I bought a boxed copy of Elemental for my laptop moments before hopping a steamer ship for a round the world voyage without internet access? Would I have to wait till I got back to have the experience I was meant to have? It shames me to have to write such a negative post about such a great developer but I'm afraid I must agree with PCG-UK. This game should have been pushed to its backup date next year. I must assume it wasn't because the makers couldn't wait to get it into the hands of the general public and not because the marketers were afraid it might be an Alpha Protocol to Civ5's Mass Effect 2 (That's not a dig, I'm a huge fan of AP it's just buggy no comparison with ME2).
Thank you for your time. Hopefully I haven't been to inflammatory or hurtful as that was far from my intent.
Edit: just read the busy Wednesday post and I feel bad so I should say that while I stand by what I said, I recognize that my expectation are a bit more for an ideal world and you have nothing but the best of intentions full of love and pride for your game. With the amazing quality of your back library I sometimes forget that you are still a small team and I should not expect you to be able to throw the number of bodies at an issue that a company like Blizzard could. Dealing with each of these problems must come at great personal cost to each of the developers in terms of overtime spent away form their families where many companies wouldn't bother and for that I thank you all. You spoil us so don't be surprised if every once in a while we act a little spoiled.
I preordered Elemental. I am having a reasonably enjoyable time with the game. Right now, it does not quite grab me the way Master of Magic did - the game seems to be a bit over complicated with a less-than-intuitive interface coupled to just-above-zero hand holding to figure out how the game actually works. Poking around (a lot) has allowed me to figure out how to play * in general * - but there is a lot of superfluous micromanagement here (Why, for example, do I have to build huts? Shouldn't the city kind of grow them automatically as the population increases?) and it can be difficult to find what you need int the interface menus. I have complete faith that the experience of it will improve dramatically over time. Stardock has earned this faith with high quality games - I have Corporate Machine (oldie but goody), GalCiv, GalCiv 2 Ultimate, Sins (Complete) and Demigod. Demigod in particular had a rough launch, but it grew into a favorite LAN party game with my gaming group. There is one thing that really bothers me, though. . .
The game was apparently Released To Manufacturing with the 1.05 patch already planned to be released on launch day. It has been stated that the 1.05 patch is how the game was intended to be played by first-time players. If the game needed such a major revision released on Launch day to be considered playable and reasonably representative of the game play the developer intended, then it was simply not ready for Release To Manufacturing. The 1.05 patch (the first one) is what should have BEEN IN THE BOX TO START WITH. The early street release date thing should not have been a big deal, because whoever bought the RTM DVD of the game should have been playing the completed game - not Beta 4. This is not the same situation as Demigod where the multiplayer servers for this multiplayer-centric game got hammered before the game was supposed to be on shelves.
Sad but true. There will ALWAYS be retailers that break the negotiated street release date for games. This is just the reality of having untrained employees stocking shelves - you see product, you shelve product, people buy product. Nothing you can do about that - just count on it happening. I myself bought Demigod several days early from GameStop. I went in, saw the game on the shelf and said "Oooh, the new Stardock game I have heard about is out! It looks good, I will buy it!" I had no idea at the time that the release date had been broken. I had read a little about the game online. Just enough to know it was interesting. When I saw it, the price was right, I bought it.
There is a better way to handle these situations. If Stardock wants to keep it's stance on DRM, and also have control over the release date, then what needs to happen is they need to release the .EXE on Impulse when the game is ready for launch - not patch the game on launch day to the version you actually want us to be playing. This will work because the game is unplayable without the .EXE, it gives Stardock time to do more polishing on the game (i.e. bugs), the "patch" will be minimal in size as it will just be the .EXE, and it means people will not be playing a version of your game you never even intended for them to see. When the game starts releases everyone will be playing (and reviewing) the same code.
Wow - this got quite a bit longer than I had intended . I really don't feel like I have fully articulated the concept I am trying to convey here.
In Short:
1) Elemental is fun. I have complete faith it will get to be even more fun later.
2) I think that the way the launch was handled could definitely have been better for everybody.
3) The concept of the game being released to RTM with the expectation that the actual final version of the game would just be patched in on release day really disturbs me. This left people who bought the game (when it was released early) playing a version they were never supposed to even see.
I think that this is the first time that you at Stardock face a situation like this. None of your previous games raised as much expectations as Elemental, and none of your previous games had so many people waiting impatiently for the release.
For this reason I think it's logical that you make some first time mistakes. But for me the important thing are not those mistakes, but the fact that you will sure learn from them and the very good game that you have delivered. Elemental is much better than HOMM5 was at release. And Ubi is much bigger than Stardock!
Agreed...I guess everyone remembers their Empire:TW review....
Hi Brad,
I am a long time customer of Stardock and this is because I like some of your products and your attitude to DRM and how well you treated your customers and your open communications with them. Therefore your recent reactions to criticism surprised me and made me a little bit uncertain about my evaluation of Stardock. Especially because I think that some of the criticism is legitimate. However, I appreciate reading your apology, it definitely restored some* of my confidence in Stardock.
By the way, another thing I nowadays see more often is that more and more fanboys are taking over the Stardock forums making it more and more difficult to voice an opinion that doesn't fit their nature. I think that this is an issue that should be addressed.
Kind Regards
Marc
Edit:
* Because of the extremely high standards even if it hadn't restored some of my confidence Stardock would still be by far the best gaming company I know. There is no other company out there that comes even close to the level of customer support that Stardock grants their customers.
I think there's been some valid criticism leveled at the release, but I have to say that I'm enjoying the game so far. No show stoppers, CTDs, or problems with the actual running of the game. I've got every faith that you and the team will polish the rough edges and that Elemental will become a game that I play for years.
I picked up Civ IV on launch. Only issues i remember were OOS that occasionally popped up on multiplayer, and a performance issue they eventually fixed. Then again, no one in their camp claimed these issues weren't issues, and all features listed on the box, including multiplayer, were up and working on day one.
This is not the first time I've seen Brad tell customers with legit gripes to take a hike. It's an unfortunate comment to make. I am pretty sure when the Gamer Bill of Rights were formed to include things like customer rights and refunds, it wasn't intended to throw in in the customer's face and to be used as a way to boot them out the door. Even in context, the remark was pretty bad, and it has nothing to do with DRM and broken release dates, neither of which were responsible for what is sitting in the box on a shelf for customers to purchase.
However, everyone is entitled to make mistakes and apologize for them.
This
+10 points and a parrot sticker
Its almost like everyone had this pent up RAAAGGE about the 'unfinished game' stuff but they wouldn't dare say anything against someone 'important' (like EA or something who have far more fanbois than Stardock) so when Stardock screws thier sister (that dosn't really sound like a bad thing...) they become the perfect target even though its not as if they are the only ones.
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