For everyone who has Elemental whether you love the game, hate it or somewhere in-between we now have a poll up to see how the community at large feels.
https://www.elementalgame.com/journals
I think this poll is pretty telling. As I voted, 42% of people dedicated enough to visit and read the official fan forums are disappointed with the game.
How about people who can't figure out how to play?
I saw this on Amazon and definitely feel it warrants being echoed on these boards:
"I'm really tired of people making excuses for these companies releasing broken games at $50 a pop. "Long term support" is not a given, and small companies--like Stardock--are known for shutting down at a moment's notice. The product should be in working condition as soon as you pay for it; no waiting for the developer to get "some rest before activating and supporting that feature." Raise your expections and stop being satisfied with shotty work."
Obviously I voted, I am disappointed with it.
only started one game to have it crash at turn 8 even upon reload but haven't tried cloth map or a new game/10
I played a good part of the campaign and I think it is definitely too expensive for what the game is now. I'm disapointed too. I should have waited a couple of months before buying it...
Oh come now, you've also claimed you believe people who say they experience game-breaking bugs are lying.
I've been playing the game enough to get the odd disappointing look from my wife. I'm (obviously) enjoying Elemental. But that doesn't stop me from experiencing bugs, including CTDs and the "fixed" alt-tab CTD. IT doesn't stop me from cringing over the balance issues or the really bland, even boring, magic system. In short, enjoying the game doesn't stop me from being disappointed in it. And judging by the vote numbers, a lot of people are feeling the same way.
So please, stop slandering customers who do not share your views.
Here's a post that best exemplifies my disappointment with the game and with Stardock: Elemental: From Beta 4 to Gold to Day 0. It's a bemusing summary of why—in my opinion—the game was not ready for release. Obviously Stardock in its official capacity (having actually released the game) and an assortment of developers, fans, and other players disagree.
Try Viagra, it helps.
I am very dissapointed with the game. I do not mind waiting a long time for a good game. (I'm a big MoM fan.)
First mistake: The Campaign. Why did you waste time creating a campaign? When people click on campaign, they expect to play for hours on end. I would have been significantly less dissapointed if that feature did not exist. MoM didn't have a campaign button, you just start a randomly generated game and have fun with it. I am guessing an expansion was planning to visit the second part of that campaign, but who would buy another 1 hour tops campaign?
Second mistake: Population means almost nothing. In MoM, you balance your population between them farming or producing. This game can easily do that, as you acquire farms on the map (like we do now), less of your farmers are needed and can be reassigned as producers.
Third mistake: In MoM, heroes had special abilities that helped the main character AND they led armies AND they grew very strong but were balanced by sapping early resources and being very weak at the beginning. Armies and heroes got better as time went on, not *just* by fighting. A stack of peasants should not be able to kill a dragon, I don't care how many you got! See MoM's creature/balance.
Maybe I'm dissapointed because I just want MoM with a better AI/balance. I also like lush worlds where I set out to discover awesomer and awesomer stuff as my power grows. I want crazy global enchantments etc..
This game is just totally different than what I was hoping and expecting, but I think with enough support it can be it's own unique style as opposed to what people wanted it to be.
Another vote for disappointed, although friend can't be bothered to register and provide his feeback. I just got this on chat ...
"Man...I can't even get reved up enough to bitch about it on forums....Its just kind of meh. Trying not to be too over dramatic, but good greef. I loved the idea of a full fledge fantasy strategy game. But WOW...could they have taken any more of the fantasy out? What a giant yawn fest."
I ended up voting dissapointed. I haven't had too many crash problems or had to deal with many of the issues that people have been describing, I simply have found the game boring. None of the AI seem to be doing much of intrest, I've exhausted all the of the quests in my area. City management isn't as interesting as something like Civ4, etc. After the first hour or two I don't feel like I'm doing much.
I look forward to Brad's AI improvements, and grabbing some mods with more quests, heroes, and units.
Disappointed for now, looking forward to patches - in a few months I can see this being a great game. As is every game I play through ends in an Out of Memory error..
A lot of people who have expressed dissatisfaction with the current state of the game have taken the time to list very specific reasons for why they feel that way and there are some pretty common themes among those. Dismissing their opinions because you might not agree with them by just ASSUMING they never played the game seems pretty unfair to me?
I love and support Stardock too, but people are offering constructive criticism and deserve not to have their feelings ignored because of an assumption.
I am also in the purchased and played and extremely disappointed side. After playing beta 4 I really didn't know what to expect, on the boards the company assured us that the game would be almost completely different. While they did make huge strides since then this game is just not what I was hoping for.
To me they lost the fantasy aspect of it completely, sure it's buggy and unbalanced etc etc, but I can handle that stuff. The way the game plays right now just is not fun for me. The only thing I actually find myself enjoying a tad is the city building but even that is pretty bland and uneventful. What I see is a design problem and maybe what I wanted isn't what Stardock wanted which is quite unfortunate cause what I was looking for would have been epic, to me at least
Will it change in the next 6 months that much? Hopefully but i'm not entirely optimistic about that anymore. it's going to take a very long time i'm afraid and to be perfectly honest i'll probably have moved on by then and that sucks because it could have bee n soooo much more then what it is right now.
I voted disappointed too. The game is just not finished. The wandering monsters are a joke, you can leave your cities ungarrisoned all you like, they just walk around a bit and sometimes maybe step on a mine by accident to destroy it. The AI is a joke, you just roll over them without any challenge whatsoever. Heroes with 100 moves and 50 attack/defense are gamebreaking. Add on frequent crashes and it's just... meh. Not what I expected.
Voted for "like it, and recommend it", here. My game hasn't crashed once while playing (it has crashed once in the map editor when I was zoomed out spamming with a giant brush like a madman).
The last game I played (on challenging difficulty, with all the AI's set to challenigng) was just that. I had an AI blocked so he went to war with me. About 8 or so turns later, a huge stack forced a double teleport to grab a ton of units to defend was the only way to save my main city. Afterwards, when I showed up with my own stack, I again had to contend with a stack larger than my own. I eventually won this war, but the battles were pretty intense, and I lost about 2/3 of my units taking his 3 cities. This was an early game war. With both had size-4 units with maces at most.
Later on, when I got to the point where magic wasn't really cutting it, I finally got into a war with my other neighbor (I had roughly 15 or so units with attack in the 100's seperated into 2 stacks to fight this time, led by a soveriegn and a hero I gave some essence to). According to the graph, his power was about double mine. My non-soverign stack met his sovereign (and accompanying stack with similarly powerful units), and 3 of my units survived the fight by retreating. My sovereign's stack killed the rest of his guys the following turn, and took his city. I then killed his sovereign again and ended it.
I eventually quit playing this particular game (The lategame of 4x games has never been enjoyable to me. I finished 2 or 3 games of civ4 over the course of 5 years? Same with GalCiv2), but found the empire building really enjoyable. I found out alittle late that the adventuring tech tree can spawn more resource points, which I'll try to take advantage of next game. Battles could use some simultaneous attacking, and late-game-magic (and champions) could use a boost, but I enjoyed the game, and I'm going to sit down tonight and try it again with a bump in difficulty level.
I play this game on a 3 year old computer that wasn't even designed for gaming by the standards of the day back then, in 1600xwhatever resolution and most of the setting turned up to reasonable levels, on 32-bit windows vista, and the game is crash-free, and I haven't noticed an unreasonable # of bugs.
Just my opinion. I look forward to seeing where stardocks team and the modding community will take this game. Its fun already, and loaded with so much potential to be a classic for the ages. 3 good buddies of mine are off to get a copy today (from my recommendation) so that we can play some multi-player coop next week.
I voted the "I like it, I recommend it" option. With the 1.05 patch it is stable for me and I am enjoying it. Yes it still needs work (as I warn my friends that I recommended it to) but is quite fun.
Luxx
I voted "I LOVE it". I am addicted to it. I love the potential of it.
15 of my friends are gonna buy it (they are just awaiting my outlook on multiplayer)
The whole breaking street date, bugfixes, etc all~ Means nothing to me for the fun I am having with this game and the future promises or even more funnnnnnnnnnn.
I LOVE IT.
Thanks very much!!!!
I voted I'm disappointed with it. I'm enjoying it enough to not ask for refund and wait out the improvements but atm don't feel I got my moneys worth. Can't wait for it to be up to the same standard as GalCiv 2 + expansions.
The only issue I have with the game is performance. It ran ok during campaign, but on a large map with multiple cities....5fps. I voted I like it, but I honestly wouldnt recommend it yet. Once performance is ironed out and minor nuisances...gurantee this game will become a classic. This is coming from a stardock/4x newbie.
It runs pretty sluggishly on this laptop, which is only slightly disappointing since I thought it would run better than that.
But even so, I'm really enjoying it. I was busy on its release, so I had the benefit of starting out with 1.05.
As a sidenote I was also pretty impressed by Impulse. A short wait and three clicks and I was playing the game.
I voted "I'm disappointed with it". I don't think it is a good sign that I would much rather play MoM again now that Elemental has been released..
Maybe I was just expecting something entirely different.
I was waiting for this game as I have been a huge fan of GalCiv2 for years and I figured that since this was a Stardock game, I would be in for a big treat of high quality and great gameplay. I figured wrong.
I love the game as it's a mix of Civ4 and Heroes of Might and Magic; some of my other favorite games which still reign supreme on my hard drive. What I wasn't expecting was a crash-riddled mess that won't let you near the end of the skirmish with a large army. The minimap creates crashes *on demand* and I can crash the game at any time I wish - a really nice feature.
I am shocked and amazed at the poor performance on my i750 4 gig machine. I can play Crisis at full resolution, but this game lags and sputters all over the place with simple navigation. I am now running v1.05 and still suffer from endgame crashing (attacking a city with my party @ 98 vs 115 strength) and horrible performance.
I read the apology from the CEO regarding the bad press on this game and it stands that PC Gamer is indeed 100% accurate and Stardock released a buggy beta way before its release should have been. I am now removing the game from my system and waiting for Civ 5 instead.
I really enjoy the game but the bugs atm are quite crippling. I have no doubt they will all be fixed in time but it is frustrating nevertheless.
I voted "I like it, i recommend it" because i think the game has great potential. But in retrospect im not sure i should have. After all, its a product thats priced at 50 US dollars. The game could easily tilt to i love it, or dissapointed, depending on what kind of polish and extras the devs put in to make up for this rough release version. To me its all about the modding, i dont care about campains. If some polish is added and the expansions and dev time is focused on expanding modding, i will tilt toward "I love it". If not, and only a couple of minor fixes are patched in, i would have to say that im dissapointed.
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