Subway Wednesday
At Stardock, Wednesday is usually “Subway Wednesday”. We go to the local subway together and talk gaming. I substitute the potato chips with cookies. We usually talk about all manner of things (nerd talk).
Today was a tough day. It has definitely changed the way I look at certain gaming “journalists”. I do want to say we really appreciate the support from the community and have really appreciated the way some in the media have stuck up for us too.
Street Dates
Elemental marks 2 of 2 in terms of broken street dates and it really biting us in the rear end. There’s a reason why most games today require you to install and get the instant update and are locked out until release day. It’s something we’re going to have to really think about in the future. With Demigod, one could have said it was a fluke. But with Elemental, it’s a pattern.
What’s next?
For me, it’s AI AI AI. Elemental is a lot more complex of a game than Galactic Civilizations was. I do want to emphasize that the difficulty level at the world setup is not related to AI difficulty. It has to do with how tough the monsters and such will be (crazy shrills late game type stuff). The player intelligence is set up on the opponent set up screen.
If you’re able to beat the AI at harder settings, please feel free to post your strategies and such. I am not only happy to incorporate your strategies into the AI but relish doing so.
Compatibility. This isn’t my area of expertise but I’m getting a new found respect for the engine coders. Talk about frustration and scary. You get one video card that leaks memory (think megs per turn) if you use feature X, but if you turn it off, then it causes alt-tab to break. You got Windows XP Sp5 with older video cards having one weird issue while first generation quad core having a different issue.
Makes me long for the days of DOS.
Today, you’ve got Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64, Windows 7 and Windows 7 64. Then you’ve got a plethora of video cards and CPUs to go along with it along with different versions of the drivers in all these various cases.
There’s a case of white screens happening along with terrible performance afterwards on some setups. That’s been apparently fixed internally based on the checkin logs.
There’s a case where some machines aren’t even using the GPU. I’m a total lay person on that but isn’t that what DirectX is supposed to take care of? Oye. But they tell me they’ll be able to figure it out.
My understanding though is that the day 0 version of the game has largely resolved stability issues that some people ran into. That is, the version of the game available on release day should work fine. But if you have problems, feel free to speak loudly and specifically in the support area.
Expanding the world
One of the areas we’re really interested in going into is in the realm of expanding the world. More spells. More special abilities. More characters. More quests and so forth.
The Modding World
There are already some amazing mods being made. Keep an eye here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/forum/756
You can share maps you create via Impulse::Reactor which is built into the game. We will be enabling the sharing of other types of mods once the moderation guidelines are firmed down which should be after we have a chance to catch our breath a little.
You guys are awesome
We’re a small dev team as you can imagine so your kindness and support really puts wind in our sails. We love you guys. I think many of you love Elemental for the same reasons we do. Personally speaking, I feel like too many games come out these days to be “consumed” and then moved onto. As an “old time” gamer, I want to have a game that I’m playing for years and years to come. That’s why updating the AI matters so much to me because the AI needs to get better over time to keep up with players.
I can tell you this: Regardless of whether Elemental gets good or bad reviews or sells well or sells poorly, this game is the ONLY game Stardock’s development studio will be working on for 2010 and much of 2011.
One of the benefits of being a small, privately owned company is that we can focus on things for reasons besides quarterly earnings. This is a game we love and will be expanding for years to come. And I don’t mean just the single player game either but the multiplayer as well.
A bit of a vacation
Anwyay, this may be my last post for a bit. I’m going to take some days off. The last few days have been pretty challenging. But I will leave you in the capable hands of the game’s producer, Boogiebac (Scott Tykoski) who will keep you up to date.
You guys are the most dedicated dev team I've ever seen. Keep up the fantastic work!
Good game, amazing concept, and an outstandingly awesome dev team... it a few months it'll go from good game to a classic.
I'll echo the praise and thanks going around, you guys have been fantastic and I appreciate all your hard work and support. I look forward to enjoying the game you've created with you for many moons to come.
Go and enjoy a well earned break!
I have to say 1.05 is much better than 1.0 and I haven't had a crash since.
This game is quite amazing. In the version I'm playing, I'm running on the map I built in beta, updated to the new resources. I've titled it The Giant Faege. I've also got 25 custom minor factions, and they've each got custom leaders. In general, I'm excited about the game, and can't wait to see what else comes down the pipe. (Well that and figure out how I'm to upload my minor factions and custom leaders to the mods section.)
I'll admit to having been quite pissed off about getting a half working game at the first go, but it's gotten quite a lot better over the last few days. A word of advice: stop putting new stuff in untill you've ironed out most of the bugs.
I'm going to go ahead and be a shameless fanboy here; I love this game! Are there bugs,yes but I've played several games that were far buggier and weren't even interesting enough to stick with, Elemental is. After the last patch my win 7 64x with ati hd4890 system, I played this game for 8 hours straight with no crashes or slowdowns. This game is sophisticated whether critics accept it or not, but it wasn't intended to be Dominions 3 with more graphics, its about strategy AND immersion and I think it works. Elemental has excellent potential,(which will be realized), and is already an engaging ,fun experience. My take on improvement; squash bugs first, then make ai more aggressive,(but not mindlessly so), then add more spells weapons, armor and magic gear, then expand quests making them more immersive, like dungeon crawling quests. I'd love more options for ships and sea monster type stuff too.
This is the best complement I can give you and your team; I'm having a blast playing.
I purchased this game before beta 1. A friend of mine bought me Starcraft II as a gift. I received both the same day. I played two missions of Starcraft. I've played a dozen hours of Elemental.
Thank you for daring to be different!
Thanks for such an awesome game!I feel like I haev finally found a game that I can enjoy this much!Its very deep, challenging, lots of mod options and its just fun as heck to play.
It really has got me addicted to the gameplay, ONE MORE TURN! I SWEAR! hehe
Good luck to you and your team! Keep up the great work! I love this game!
Its like a breath of fresh air to be honest, with so many games playing it safe and doing ideas over and over. Stardock has a great game here that I hope will be a series. Cant wait to see what the community comes up with for mods (:Enjoy the vacation!
This could also mean that you must take this problem in account with the 0 day patching: you need a day -7 patch ( for the case of broken street day) and a day 0 patch for the release date.
The problem about PC configuration reminds me of a post-mortem made on GC2, when it was stated that new users always detect new problem with the UI and new problem with hardware configuration. Given all the bugs/problem/crash solved between the gold version and the day 0 patches that have been spotted through forum feeback, it seems that a period of beta testing the gold version with the help of beta testers from the forums could be useful to improve experience for retail users with a more robust gold version.
Brad, admit it - you made great game but the launch is a total failure.
The game is totaly unstable, buggy and rushed 1.05 version , while fixing some stability issues (only some) made game unplayable due to inconsistent behavior of almost all components.
So please, please , please take a time and do a "good release" , does not matter how it called 1.1 or 1.5 or 10.0, as long as it stable and reliable.And in the future please consider investing more time in real beta testing. I know you were trying to surprise the us, well ... the surprise this time was unpleasant one. Couple of weeks of public testing of "gold" version could prevent this.
You made great game, it does not just mimic MoM, it better, but in current state it's unplayable.
No,
You guys are Awesome, and i really mean it Froggie
Like the Impulse chat on release day was Amazing, like i had the opportunity to talk with the actual developers, made my day and even more they told me what they are planning (or some small parts of it)
Anyway your game is really nice, i have waited this kind of game a long time (since Master of Magic).
I will personally make one Mod that i have been planning for years, its done on paper and only needs implementation. (more later)
/Bloodlance
ps. o... and somehow my 1.05 works fine, no bugs no CTDs or anything.
I can't help but love you guys. After reading this any dent in your shield from the scandal yesterday is completely mended in my head. Have a nice vacation, and all my support to the whole Stardock development team.
I wish we could just fast forward and see the Elemental of the future already.
Try and do the right thing by people and they hold it against you. I thought you did the right thing be releasing the pre 0 version when the street date was broken, being that it was brought up to speed in no time, but alas people want the world and they want it now.
Enjoy the break, your work has been stellar (pun intended) to this point and a holiday is deserved.
Thank you very much again for your amazing communication. Its the first time i find Dev Journals really interesting, because they feel real and not full of PR.
I'm building a "final release" patch tomorrow... I understand your pain. I've managed to squeeze in three whole hours of Elemental during train travels when I was so brain-dead I could not code anyway. So far, the game feels a bit sluggish on my laptop (and gaming rig), and yes, lots of expanding to do, but I am very interested, and a small but dedicated team can do so much more sometimes than a big team, provided you have the talent... which Stardock clearly has!
Have a good time Frogboy, take a nice nap, and keep on coding!
Thank you Frogboy and the rest of the Stardock team for being different. You didn't water your game down and you didn't waver when confronted with bad previews.
As it stands now, Elemental is playable even if, to be totaly honest, it would have needed a month or so of developement time still. But when it's a choice between bringing the game out now or next year, you've made the right one.
I trusted Stardock enough to pre-order the limited edition copy and I'm not sorry.
Keep up the good work and keep polishing your newest jewel, it can only get more briliant.
I want to start by saying that I love the concept and idea of this game, I have being following every single journal since the start. My expectations with this game were high, I had in mind GC2 and the great strat game it was and had that as a reference of what this company could make. I pre-ordered the game and played since min one of preday, with terrible gaming results(I still love it thought, completly adicted to the idea of this game... makes me even more sad of all this problems). I am quite a hardcore gamer. So I have put around 30 or so hours of gameplay the last 3 days, and gosh I have things to say, but Ill make a post with all my ideas on suport section I guess this will fit there more since I WANT THIS GAME to be succesfull. I have a question that really needs to be answered, hope Frogboy with his insane dedication can tell me why, even if it has to be on a private mail:
How is it posible that you guys thought the game was ready? I mean I have read so so so many times in the journals how you guys said that the greatness of being a private little developer is that there was no rush at all at releasing the game, Frog said so many times the game will be release when is ready.
I am sorry becouse I wasent in the beta team, but seriusly this game suffers from all posible things a game can suffer, taking the performance/graphic bugs apart, there are many things that once you play the game for a few hours you notice right there. That should be a red light, never ever release a game with red lights. Now after the last 2 pacthes crashes has being reduce, still performance is lacking, balance terrible and there are so so many fetures that feel empty, rushed. Technologies trees feel empty and it just feel that there was more work need it in all aspects, tactical battles need balance, ranged vs close combat, items of sovereigns, Magic tech tree gives insane good armor that is so much better than the War tech tree, I mean things you notice once you play a few hours, how the hell did the internal beta didnt see it?? or did they see it but the game need it to go out.
If frog could tell me why did you guys thought the game was ready? I mean you can tell the team of stardock has being working 24 hours a day the last week(probably a lot more) now the game is out and you can feel the exahustion of the team, people taking vacations after the game is release with toons of issues. I mean a well planed release should expect this to happen and the team should be ready to take the stress, or better the game should be clean and ready and no need for all this pacthes and fixes. It feels that for some unknown reason the game need to go out now, maybe civ V coming out has stress things or maybe wanted to use the summer sales. I mean 4 or 5 more months to polish the game and it would have being such a great game. I hope it becomes that with time, right now is way off where it should be. I just dont get WHO thought this game was ready.
On a personal note Frogboy, the way you have keep us inform and how you have treated the people in the forum is by FAR the best I have seing in any game. You do deserve a break a pitty right now the game needs you so so badly. Good luck and hope the best for you guys.
I feel the same way Froggie! Have a good vacation!
Brad
A big big Ty from Italy.I love this "shit",mate:D
really love.Awesome game,full of interesting and intriguing situations.
But r so many Bugs atm,mate.And? need to return work,not vacation mate:)
A little "trouble area": 3 times am off-game for "Out Of memory"
Am hope are a little un-compatibility with W7 64-bit. Hope solve soon.
See ya and happy holydays.
Astorre-Aka Giorgio
North East Italy.
I simply adore this game. It's the only game that caused me to stop playing World of Warcraft and I really enjoy every minute of it.
Yes, it's got stability bugs to a point that I have to save the game, quit and reload. Some of the bugs that needs a reload is Razing an Empire town and getting a new Kingdom Pioneer over the ruins to build a new Kingdom town. In order to build, you need to reload the game or you won't be able to build anything.
Another reload bug is spells during Tactical. At certain times, I'll lose the sound effects and on the next round, Spell animation is lost for the entire tactical. So I save and reload again.
At certain points, the reload causes the game to crash to desktop and requires a whole restart.
Yes, I wish the game was more stable but the game itself is highly addictive and the fun it generates places all other notions aside.
I believe in Stardock as a company and as a game publisher. I think that building this game with the community, the way it was done is simply amazing and I wish more game companies would produce games that way.
But the cataclysm! It brings goodness!
And on a related note, are Stardock going to move to an activation/DRM model now to help enforce release dates and make sure everyone has dat patshh (for future games)?
Yeah it does seem like this was a hectic week even from the fan perspective of things (like waiting for things to get uploaded and what not).
I got the game and it's fun to play. You guys do what you did with Galciv2 and keep improving it and there will be no giant rant threads by me (maybe some nitpicking but no ranting).
Brilliant stuff Brad, and everyone at Stardock!
I only wish you the best success with Elemental, and you certainly deserve the break too. Have a good rest and we'll all be right here. Cheers!
it really is a great game. Like i've seen others here saying, I'm not sure i'm playing the same game as the more vocal nay-sayers. since updating to 1.05, I've not had a single crash and the only bug I've encountered is the auto-turn fast foward thing.annoying, but easy to fix once you know its there. (just turn off autoturn)
having a blast playing too. I'll confess I've not finished a single game yet lol. I keep starting over so i can see how this race plays or how that trait works .
No need for apologize. Ok nice that you do it anyway. I totally understand you as a person that is a softwaredevloper and needed to work in customer service for a while.
So finally get some days rest and distract yourself. By the way the book of you worked out quite nice and the gift offering looks promiseing.
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