To Mr. Wardell and the development team at Stardock:
I have been following the development of Elemental: War of Magic since I first read about it on Joystiq, just about two years ago. As a kid I played Master of Magic on a hand-me-down 486 using a boot disk that my dad made for me (had to disable a bunch of stuff because, if I’m correctly remembering, MoM required some insane amount of EMS memory that wasn’t otherwise available on my crappy machine). Never got the sound working, either. But boy oh boy, I played MoM to death and back again. Figured out a half-dozen ways to break it wide open, but steamrolling the map with Torin the Chosen (loaded with so many glowing buff spells that he probably contracted testicular cancer as a result) was always my favorite way of going about things. Maybe three, four years ago, I rediscovered the game on an abandonware site and probably dumped another hundred hours into it – just for nostalgia’s sake. Master of Magic was a deeply, deeply, flawed game but for a certain type of gamer it scratched a very particular itch. So yes, I’ve been following development closely.
Not too closely, though – I chose not to take part in the beta out of a kind of gaming celibacy. I wanted to go into the launch fresh and see everything new rather than taking part in the development cycle.
I hope you’ll forgive me when I tell you that my first experiences with your products were for free. Probably the first game of yours that I played was Galactic Civilization, borrowed from a friend. Likewise for the first Political Machine. I’ve since become a paying customer and a satisfied one.
When I finally went ahead and pre-ordered Elemental, maybe a month ago, I started actively seeking out content about the game rather than passively letting it filter into my RSS feeder. I’ve never participated in the Stardock forums before, so I was not expecting to see Stardock’s CEO (of all people) actively taking part in discussions about his own game. The conversation posted here blew my mind on a certain level. And what I learned is that you, Mr. Wardell, ‘get it.’ You’re a gamer. You’re one of us. You make games that you want to play. I want to thank you for that.
There’s no denying that Elemental has some pretty serious issues right now (I am eagerly awaiting a fix to the multi-core processor slowdown issue that’s being discussed in the support forum even as I type this), but I don’t mind the wait. When I read that now infamous quote of yours (shall we call it QuarterGate?) I actually laughed out loud. I liked it. I certainly don’t feel like I needed an apology but I respect you for offering one.
I can’t wait to see where Elemental is a week, a month, a year, five years from now. I can’t wait to see where Stardock’s talented development team takes it and I can’t wait to see where the talented fan-base takes it. And Mr. Wardell, when you tell me that Stardock will continue to support this game I believe you. Because you get it. So – thank you for what Elemental is and thank you for what it will be. And thank you for this rad little pewter dragon that I am keeping on my desk at work.
Respectfully,
Cale_Knight
As someone who loved Master of Magic but found it too unforgiving, I have to say that Elemental is more fun, at least for where I'm at now as a gamer who is close to 50 years old. Like you I agree it has serious issues but the game is enjoyable, deep, and should provide plenty to do for years to come.
I've just completed my first game as Tarth with the master quest victory, and I'm about to hop in and try a Fallen game now. Can't get enough of it
I, personally, am happy to see somebody so pleased they were willing to type up such an extensive letter. Its inspiring to see people so motivated.
They say that one is 10 times more likely to say something bad to another person than something good. And when one has so much good to say, it means something. I expect the devs will be pleased to read this.
Great post bud!
Brad and the team have really made a special game here. Rough around the edges yes, but it has sooooooo much going right for it.
The people who work for Stardock do seem like gamers to me also, like you said. They GET IT. Get what you ask? Well they understand DRM, updating a game and keepign it fresh, mod tools and fun games.
Its amazing to me that a company the size of Stardock can come up with such ambitious and great games. Other companys spent millions and millions and come up with generic crap. Stardock might not put out the most poilshed games, but they take chances, are ambitous and keep patching and updating for ages down the road.
Its rare in this day and age that there is a company that GETS gamers like Stardock does.
I really hope people give this game a chance, its a breath of fresh air in this stale videogame market.
Yes the game has issues but man is it sooo addicting already!
MOM is one of my all time favorite games, right up there with Master of Orion 1 and 2, Panzer General, Fantasy General and Koei's Ghenghis Khan/Romance of the 3 Kingdoms games. As you can tell I am a huge fan of strategic turn based play and this game is a blast to play. I just hope they can iron out the bugs before this game gets an undeserved reputation. Thank you guys at Stardock so much for giving us back a new spin on a wonderful formula.
Very well said.
That's one of the thing I appreceate from Stardock, it's the proximity the developpers and espicially Brad has with the community.
Great write up, my thoughts exactly. I admire the patience a developer has today dealing with all the quick to judge customers and the fact that most of them have the same expectations on a super deep strategy game as a shallow game like modern warfare.
With great scope and potential comes a lot of risk. One of the things I hate about other big game companies is the fact that they dont take any risks and limit scope to the bare minimum, and even with that approach they never get their game to full potential as they just stop supporting the game and move on to other things.
With Stardock I can expect that we get both a very deep game and excellent support and thats worth my money and support.
Great post, I completely agree.
thanks for the well thought-out message Cale!
p.s. i have desk envy...
Thanks guys...it's been a rough couple of weeks getting things wrapped up (today expecially has been draining...for obvious reasons), but we're THRILLED that people are playing and enjoying the game.
You ask the team and they'll all agree that post-release is where the real fun is, so I can't wait to see where the road leads us next!!!
The games needs some more UI love, but I like the way this is going
Pretty much this. Some buttons and other things are too small and dialogs are somewhat obfusicated, there's also some slight tearing and slowdown while scrolling. But overall, I appear to be having enough fun with the game to put in an 8 hour marathon last night. Thanks guys, and enjoy actually having a weekend this week.
-J-
great letter!I agree with you.
Agreed!
Ditto!
Thanks for great letter. And, as you write, Master of Magic was flawed even in it's final version. The first version of MoM was essentially broken, but for some reason still fun! Strange.
Excellent post.
Looking forward to the months ahead.
I agree. very nice post.
I'm sure they are all working hard and like everything else they do this game will shine.
Thank you cale_knight for a well thought out post
Great Post!!!
You hit it on the head, that is exactly how I feel. The game is rough around the edges right now but every patch so far has been a major improvement.
Sammual
Yes some UI love would be nice. Some balancing still needs to take place i think and some tuning of the combat system. Spells do odd dmg and stuff like that its to unpredictable.
And then im on a x64 system with ATI card = memory leaks all over the place. But thats also the only problem ive had with the game since the 1.05 patch.
Good game. A little rough but i know that with Stardocks support it will be great down the road.
Nice letter there C-knight.
Totally agree. I have played through one set of original floppy disks on MoM and then the CD. Tried it a few times to ease the blood dripping from my eyes during Beta 1 & 2 of EWoM,
That kept me partly sane. One of the most enlightening aspects for this while it was under development was the deluge knowledge. I have never in my long career(?) of gaming, seen the high level of information and feedback from Developers on any game compared to this one. There are 338 Developer posts. That is a LOT of time and some of the others have taken to post and give us a glimps over the past years into this excellent game.
Granted there are issues.
*shrugs* They are fixing them. FAST.
With all the development going on and coming down the pipe it is a good time to be on the Elemental wagon.
Cheers. Now, time for the Devs to .
I agree, lots of hate out there...but you know it is the internets, its what they do.
Devil's advocate here...
The problem people have isn't that Stardock and Mr. Wardell don't "get it". Everyone who follows PC gaming knows that Stardock gets it. The problem is that Elemental is not in what most people would consider a release state. Not for a game that costs $50, and certainly not from a developer which has publicly stated that gamers have a right to demand games be released in a finished state. If this is what the guys at Stardock consider a finished state, they should have a talk with the guys at Blizzard.
Having software development experience myself, I can understand there being a few technical issues when you release a game that has to run on an untold number of hardware configurations. What I am not willing to accept in a finished game is a total lack of polish in all aspects of the UI. Elemental has missing description text; text that doesn't fit in its box and can't be scrolled; the gameplay tip that shows up when you start a game is unreadable because it disappears too fast (no ready button); there are blank icons on some event notifications; the context frame sometimes fails to update when you make a new selection; you have to manually unequip items before trading; many of the spells are lacking effect art; some of the unit move animations are really bad; the city level-up notification locks the UI so you can't look at your cities before picking a bonus...and the list goes on and on. UI failures like that ruin the playing experience. These are the kinds of things that are supposed to be polished out before you ask people to pay for your game.
That said, I'm sure all the devs are hard at work fixing these problems. I have no doubt that Stardock will resovle these issues eventually. I just wish I could have enjoyed the game on launch day, instead of having to wait a month for it to actually be ready for release.
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