Okay, so this is just my opinion, but I value my opinion.
I don't think the initial release of EWOM was ever meant to be an end game. This game was always meant to be a platform for us to play with and expand upon. This was meant as something that each person could make their own. If you want a fully polished and complete game that you play for a month and then move on, then buy SC2 or something other carbon copy piece of crap something else.
However...
...If you want a game that you will be playing for the next decade because every time you look there is a new fantastic mod that makes it seem like you are playing a brand new game, then buy EWOM because that is exactly what this is.
I'm tired of people complaining that this game was released 'unfinished' because this game will never be finished until we, the gaming community, get tired of it and move on. For me, I would still be playing MoM if I could find a copy, but I have this now and I'm not letting go. This is love people, love of gaming at its finest. I'm all for Freedom of Speech, but wake up to the possibilities, if you see something in this game you don't like, then get off your a** and mod it the way you want it!
...well I guess you still need to be sitting down, but you catch my drift.
Oh, and as a disclaimer I meant no offense to Blizzard. You guys are cool too and I'm still waiting for Diablo 3. Anytime guys.
Okay, I'm getting off my soapbox. Gonna go mod something.
*edit* True, SC2 is not a carbon copy piece of crap. Too many people are focusing on that sentence so I am lining it out.
The only thing I'm sensitive to is the obscene number of morons overrunning the forums. I was referencing your statement - not his: you're sitting here telling us to stop bitching about something we paid for. I agree that useful posts are more, well... useful, but people have the right to express their frustration on purchasing something that may not work for them.
Try clicking on the "view edits" button beneath his post - you'll see he edited his post after I quoted. The only thing sickening here is your severe ignorance.
Because it's a carbon copy of a decade old game.
What's with these people who become such ardent supporters of companies which produce inferior goods? It's a company who took your hard earned money! If MacDonalds' burgers started poisoning people you'd rightly expect outrage and not sympathy for poor ol' Macdonald who was just trying to make us happy by making his ol' burgers.
This is gross sentimentalism at work. It's one thing to genuinely like Elemental-- I don't doubt that there are many people who are having lots of fun with the game as it is now, and that's perfectly fine. What is utterly bizarre are these people who clearly admit that the game is lousy (or euphemistically "a work in progress" or "highly moddable" or "has great potential") but still insist that we the consumers weren't short-changed. The fact that Stardock may try to rectify its mistakes is a point in their favour (although my own view is that the fundamental game is so flawed as to be irredeemable unless they re-do it from scratch), but it doesn't change the fact that the game is right now not something I'd recommend to my worst enemy.
I don't feel obliged to "give Stardock a chance". They're not my best childhood friend. They aren't the poor kid from a broken home down the street. They're quite simply a company which gave me a lousy product for US$50! They deserve every bit of criticism they get, and then some!
I know that it sucks to feel like you wasted money. I know I don't feel great about it right now. It sucks even worse to admit you made a wrong (though completely understandable) decision to feel so invested and interested in a game that didn't meet expectations at all. Nobody likes to admit they were taken for a ride. But it's time to face reality and call a spade a spade.
Can I have my $50 back, and get a carbon copy of MoM with better graphics then?
With macdonalds, you have huge variety of competitors to choose from.
With Elemental, there is none (I already have each title worth having). So its either SD fixing it to finished and enjoyable state (and that requires some support from players) or we left with nothing. Civ5? I'm getting that one too, I'm not restrained in my budget. But I've played civilization series too much, and need something different. I've looked at release schedule for 2010/11, and it makes me sad - we will get SotS2 and Star Legacy in 2011, but they are both space 4X, not fantasy. So its safe to assume Elemental is the ONLY fantasy 4X for these two years. And most of us prefer 'something' over 'nothing'.
My post was meant to show how funny it is so many people say they would have done this or that...when in reality it probably wouldn't go that way. I never said stop bitching....you took it that way...hahaha man, just for agreeing with a post, grow up.
Fanboy is a label which describes a particular stereotypical person. If they fit the stereotype then it is perfectly normal to call them by that label! And the person in question certainly fits the label, we are meant to ignore the fact that the game mechanics are broken and unbalanced and instead be thankful that they made a PC game so they could take "our" money for it instead of ripping of console players?
Get over it and accept that there are fanboys on this website.
P.S. I'm pretty sure Elemental will end up being much better, I'm just not sure it will ever get where I hoped it would be after this start. But to pretend all is fine with the game right now is wrong.
Yes i thiink this will be what NVW failed to become... at least for me.
If you're tired of people speaking the truth, nothing forces you to read those topics. Or to come to the forums.
This game is supposed to ship with coherent mechanics, decent optimization, a reasonable set of bugs at most, and enough content for a $50 game. This is what "finished" means: self-sufficient out of the box. It means release-worth, not in the beta state it is now and will be for at least another 3 months. Mods and patches are extra, and are here to expand a finished game, not to slowly transform the game into a late Release Candidate.
I have no idea what point you're even trying to make any more - see a doctor about your short term memory loss:
Only thing I want to say in this thread, is that if the idea is to get people to play this game for 10 years, then you need to start with a great game. Unfortunately, IMO EWOM misses that mark.
here's the common response i see to this thread
"dur, i didn't spend my hard earned dollars to edit a friggin map, I spent it to play a game, dur dur dur."
not sure if you guys realize this, but just because the game comes with a great modding system, doesn't mean that you're only able to play the mods that you personally create. There's a community out here guys, other gamers with more open minds than yourselves. If you were so motivated, do you guys think you could create a fun to play mod? Of course you can. Now imagine the mods that will be made by people who are motivated and who are smarter than you... There's endless gameplay in store for us with this game. You guys are basically complaining that the chameleon you bought from the pet store was an ugly color when you finally brought it home; it makes you sound naive/ignorant/incompetent.
Ok here is one from me, somebody standing on the side lines and watching the game unfold. I just played EWOM at my buds house the past couple days, I was surprised. I mean the game seems so freaking addicting! There is no doubt, no doubt that there is a ton of expansion room in this title. Simple things, such as adding more creatures, more quests, just more of everything. The actual engine is right on and you can bet SD is all over this game from what I been seeing. I read people talking about lack of instructions or whatever, I for one jumped right in and was playing my butt off. I guess MH2, SSE and a few other games that have recently been released and on my "to buy" list have to wait for now, I am getting Elemental.
Once they fix the engine, and lets face it, there are some really huge memory leaks and some massive performance issues. I believe this game will be on par with just about every other game that's come out this year and cost the same ammount.
Everybody keeps going on like this is the only game to ever be released with critical errors still in place, and lets not forget that stardock are a small indie company, they haven't got the resources to sit on a game for 12 years and polish the hell out of it.
More importantly THEY ARE TRYING TO FIX IT. This is a small company that's giving better support than i've seen from some of the software giants, EA and Atari to name two... cut them some slack and be patient, you got the game early you're playing it.
If you didn't think it could be fixed you wouldn't be on the forum posting about it.
Dunno, there's this little thing invented recently called 'Internet Forums'. You can go onto one of these 'Forums' and discuss certain topics and ideas with people who are also interested them. I'm probably way off base, but there could be one of these 'Internet Forums' set up for Elemental's Mods. If our dimensions was suddenly changed, and we found ourselves in a world where we were able to converse from person to person, in this world you would find yourself lucky enough to ask other Elemental players about their experiences with mods, even which ones they thought were most complete/addictive/popular/etc...
Unfortunately, the scenario I described in the previous paragraph is all just a pipe-dream...
Unfortunately it seems about par-for-course lately. Every company has begun to realize that they can rush unpolished products into the market place; we have proven time and time again that we won't learn from our previous poor purchases.
For this reason, this is for me why Elemental's release seems good enough for a release... I'm too used to getting shit on lately.
That is a subjective opinion. While i do agree that there are many unfinished features and untapped potential in Elemental, that didn't stop me from wasting every evening since release just playing the game and having fun doing so.
The funny thing is the more i play it the better it becomes. I notice what is wrong less and less, and what is right more and more. Some of the shortcomings even became a non-issue(mainly lack of documentation - i've figured it out in meantime).
The Elemental ICQ chat channel's awesome for getting questions answered quickly too.
Can someone tell me if the faction editor currently works ? I think there was an issue with technologies not being in game.
It's also a company who will happily give me it back if I ask. Lets see you try that with McDonalds.
Well durrp, you're on the official company hosted website for the game. Who exactly do you think would come here, the local knitting circle?
Of course there are, but calling them that just makes everyone involved even less likely to listen to reason.
Okay, that does it. I'm shamelessly reprinting a post from another forum, because I totally agree with it. He also put it better than I could.
In support of 13lackgu4rd's comment: I think that many, if not most, Dom3 players can accept that game balancing is one of the responsibilities of a game's community. It's also more of a subjective "grey area" than broken features/promises. If Elemental had come out with only balancing issues, I doubt this thread would have gone in the direction it has. Beta's for ironing out atleast most of the major bugs, and for making sure the game is working well enough to be called Gold. "Crashes every 2 hours or so" should never, ever, be an issue in a Gold version. And this is the second Stardock game that's had this issue. I personally experienced the exact same problem with GalCiv2. They should have just waited for a holiday release. Yeah, it's difficult to have to hold out for a payday, but look at Blizzard and their successes. They wait until a game is actually Gold, before releasing it. I'm not saying that their 1.0 versions are perfect, they've released plenty of patches (itself a good thing, rather than any mark of inferior coding), but they give quality product from day one, without any insulting "take it or leave it" garbage. This whole idea of the community being a second or third Beta team is getting out of hand, and really starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. People volunteer for Beta all the time, so let whoever wants to, sign up and help out, until the game works. Games are for entertainment, enjoyment, a clean break from work. If I have to work hard just to help a game become playable, on top of my 40+ hour work week, why aren't companies like Stardock paying me, instead of the other way around ?
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?p=755620
I agree the game will be developed long after it's in a solid state, Stardock always adds both free extra value (mini expansions, extra content, AI tweaks, new features) along with expansions the charge $ to buy.
But, this hardly excuses the present state of the game. It was released too early. It should've been further beta tested, cleaned up, and polished. (beta testers never really got to work with a version of the game that was anything like what was released - that is, none of the beta builds really presented the whole)I happen to be a huge Stardock fan. I like their take on the gaming industry and like a lot of how they do things.
If any other company released a game in this state - they would get thrashed even more mercilessly by reviews and paying customers and wouldn't have die hard fans sticking it out. They'd be bankrupt.
Is the game fun despite everything about it that could and should be better? Sure. Will it be even more fun 3 months from now. Definitely. Could it have been released 3 months later in a far better state, got much better reviews, and been way better rec'd, and been even more fun. Definitely.
Basically you could pre-order Elemental months ago and get access to the very rough early beta. Now you can pay retail and still essentially be in beta. Same deal. Nothing has really changed for those of us who pre-ordered, except that now we're seeing the real game and can provide some actual beta feedback!
They couldn't. It was August or February, no other choice.
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