Our story so far…
On August 24th, Stardock released the long-anticipated PC strategy game Elemental on schedule…
Except, of course, that’s not quite what happened. Stardock released the game a couple days early to beta testers and pre-order customers – the same version reviewers were given (v1.0) and the results were painful in two basic ways:
1. The new engine that Stardock developed turned out to have a lot of compatibility problems resulting in crashing and out of memory errors for a significant percentage (I’d go as far as to say as many as 30% of users – which is a gigantic number – anything over 5% is considered unacceptable). It’s not commonly known but the engine in our previous games (GalCiv II, The Political Machine, etc.) was developed originally in 1997 and enhanced over the years. Nowadays, most companies just license their engine from Gamebryo (Civilization V, Oblivion, Fallout 3) or the Unreal engine. You are now seeing why they do.
2. The above ensured ruinous reviews but even without them, the game UI and some of the game mechanics just didn’t live up to people’s expectations, and AI issues.
The purpose of this blog is to help answer questions so that we can move forward.
So here are some of the questions / comments I’ve gotten in emails and private messages and on various forums that I’ll try to answer:
Q: What is Stardock’s plan for Elemental going forward?
A: For the immediate future we’re going to go down two paths. First, the v1.0x versions will continue to focus largely on compatibility (crashing or weird video issues) as well as bugs and turning on multiplayer.
Then, we will work on v1.1 which will serve as our answer to player feedback. Enhanced AI, improved UI, a tutorial, updated quest system, new magic system, numerous other tweaks. This version will serve as the basis to make a demo version of the game.
Beyond that, we will be looking at player feedback. That will work towards v1.2 (October) and v1.3 (November). Once we are satisfied that the game has met reasonable expectations, we can then focus on the first expansion pack: Elemental: War of Magic – Book 2, Cerena.
Unlike Book 1, which is fairly short because it’s only meant as a kind of introduction (the game is mean to be played in sandbox mode. GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire didn’t even include campaigns, we are generally not very pro-campaign-y people as you can gather, campaigns have limited replayability).
Book 2, Cerena is the excuse to introduce more far reaching game mechanic changes and begin to add in the multiplayer modes we have long been thinking of (from custom servers that yes, will work on your LAN that has no Internet connection) to tactical-only modes.
That first expansion pack will be free to everyone who owns the game at the point of v1.3.
Q: Stardock should just put out an expansion and re-release the game as a Director’s Cut.
A: NO. While we do intend to release future new versions of Elemental beyond the War of Magic series, we will not be re-submitting Elemental “patched and fixed” for re-review.
A lot of people seem to think that Stardock knowingly released the game “full of bugs”. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. As people who have played through the various versions can attest, weird stuff is very machine specific. For instance, the illustrative outline on graphics causes no difference (not even 1 frame) on our test matrix machines and yet results in 20+ frames for others who have, on the surface, similar hardware configurations for us. The PC Gamer UK reviewer ran into a white tactical battle screen that we had never encountered before (nor had it shown up during the public beta).
The low metacritic score for Elemental (about 3 out of 5 average) needs to serve as a long-term reminder to us and anyone else who might think that you can simply put out a major retail game in 2010 with its own custom engine without a massive massive long-term beta program and a long-term QA process. If you can’t do that, then either license your engine or don’t expect people to shell out $50.
Put another way, the blistering feedback on Elemental: War of Magic should serve as a scarlet letter to make us “never forget”. So no, no re-launch of Elemental: War of Magic. It is, what it is.
For fans who are disheartened, look at on the bright side. We will be able to see how much effect word of mouth is. If we do a good job making the game live up to its potential and expectations, then we can see what effect that has on sales. And we plan to share those details with you.
As it stands today, Elemental has sold approximately 82,000 copies.
Q: I heard Stardock is laying off people, I thought your non-games revenue funded the games team.
A: It does. It funds ONE games team. But Stardock has been hiring up across the board to build a second studio. Only Elemental can fund that. “Stardock” is made up of 3 groups: Enterprise software (our #1 revenue source), Consumer software (Object Desktop, Fences, etc.) and Consumer Entertainment (the games). That’s not counting Impulse which is a separate, profitable entity that doesn’t get affected one way or the other by the success of the games or the enterprise software.
Q: Brad Wardell: You should just kill yourself! [I actually did get this]
A: I’m sorry our recent entertainment product didn’t meet your expectations but I don’t think it would be helpful if I manually modified my date of expiration.
Q: Brad Wardell – you have a martyr complex! You always take personal blame for everyone! Get off your cross! [yes, got this too]
A: That is my job. If you’re going to spend years railing about CEOs not taking responsibility when something goes wrong, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me not to take responsibility when things go badly on a launch.
In addition, some of the issues are directly related to my specific decisions.
Q: Your act is getting old. Fool me once on Demigod, fool me twice, shame on me! [got this too in various forms]
A: The Demigod debacle ultimately resulted from a fundamental communication failure between the publisher (Stardock) and the developer (Gas Powered Games). It took us a long time to figure out exactly how the connectivity issue occurred (i.e. many months). Ultimately, and sadly, it boiled down to a miscommunication. When you host a game in Demigod (even now), you are given a dialog for your port #. It was believed by the Stardock team that Demigod handled direct IP connections and thus its raknet based port system would only be used when that failed. GPG, by contrast, thought Stardock was handling direct connections too. It turned out that that port # part (even now) doesn’t have a function and so 100% of connections attempts when to the Raknet system which overwhelmed it.
The reason why Stardock rightly took the blame is because, as the publisher, we should have looked at the beta tester connectivity logs and seen that 100% of connections were being passed to Raknet for the socket rather than the 10% anticipated. Add tens of thousands of users quickly and bam. A different system had to be developed.
But Demigod didn’t suffer from compatibility issues. It was very solid right out of the gate (for pretty much everyone) and was an excellent game on day 1. GPG did a great job making a great game. And Stardock did do a good job making a good backend. But one miscommunication between developers resulted in disaster. Only a much larger beta test would have discovered the problem. The system wasn’t “buggy”. Not that it does anyone any good now, but at least people can see and learn from what happened.
Point being, the situations are not similar.
With Elemental, the issue is the game itself. With Elemental’s MP, the system works because from day 1, Elemental’s servers are just hosted by Stardock. No P2P.
Q: What do YOU think of Elemental?
A: Elemental is the finest game we’ve ever released. Ever. At least, that's what I thought on the day we released it. However, I have come to the painful conclusion that we will have to dedicate more effort to making the game live up to the expectations of our customers as a whole. You'd be surprised how easy it is to confuse the enjoyment of making a game to the enjoyment of playing it.
Q: My post was hidden on the forums! I have a right to post my anger!
A: No. No you don’t. Believe me when I say I speak from first hand experience, there are entire forums dedicated to letting people post about their anger about something. The Stardock forums have never ever been some forum of free speech. And they never will be. If you’re looking for that, you should go elsewhere. I’ve been moderating “forums” since my Commodore 64 days as a “Sysop” and “Subop”. A few toxic users can wreck a community.
If someone needs/wants technical support, has a question, has a suggestion, wants to interact with the community, that’s great. Go for it. But if your purpose is to vent your rage on other users, us, the game, small animals, what have you, the moderates are instructed to take a very dim view of that.
After the release of v1.08 (this week) I intend to instruct moderators to be even more stringent on that sort of thing because we (as a community) need the Stardock developers themselves to participate on the forums.
While I have two decades of people telling me that I should kill myself or that <product X> is a “piece of shit” as well as various wishes that I get cancer and die “bleeding from every orifice) (yes, there are people out there that post these things) my development team are just normal people who are excited to talk to gamers who have cool ideas and we’re not going to subject them to haters (and most haters don’t have any idea they’re being hateful). Rule of thumb: Just treat people as if they’re right in front of you.
Q: You’re getting screwed in the reviews! I can’t believe <website X> wrote <Y>
A: NO. We’re not getting screwed. While some of the review scores do have a bit of “dogpiling” to them (relative to review scores given to other games) I have yet to read a single review that I felt was unfair in terms of the text.
If anything, I feel bad about putting some of my friends through this. It’s no secret that Tom Chick and Troy Goodfellow are friends of mine. The question isn’t how I feel about them criticizing or giving negative reviews of the release version of Elemental. The question is how they felt having to give a negative review of a game of someone who’s their friend? It’s called integrity. I’ll take a 1 friend who will tell it like it is over a 100 yes men.
So when I read the reviews, my first reaction isn’t anger but sorrow at having put people I respect through having to give something I know they were inclined to like and wanted to like through that. It’s also the reason I will not be re-submitting some “patched” version for review.
It also redoubles our collective efforts to live up to the standards we have set. We will be working on Elemental for a long time. We love it. We live it. And together, we will make it awesome.
Now, let’s move past the drama. Let’s do the things that need to be done going forward to have fun and create something that will stand the test of time.
You would be wrong. I Like several different types of games (from FPS to MMO's, RPG's to TBS games) TBS and RPG's being my favorite. I am a TBS fan and Elemental is not an awesome game at this time but it has the potential to be. In it's current form it is a very boring and unbalanced TBS however with Brad and the SD team working to correct this I forsee this game to one day be as Awesome as you think it is right now.
You are right there are basically two categories 1) Those known as fanboys who don't seem to play the same game the rest of us are playing. They never have any complaints of the game they are playing and some (the Fanboy Extremist) attack any sort of critism of the game no matter how accurate it is.
2) Then there is the more realistic players that see the game for what it is and will most of the time let the devs know what issues the game has. Now there is an extremist group here as well called the Haters which go over board and hate everything about the game no matter what.
Personally the Fanboy Extremeist and the Haters should just go into a small room and fight it out for these two extreme sides have unrealistic views of the game.
Also sea units as well. I am currently playing the Demo for Dominions and like many aspects of the game however not a fan of the no hands on Tactical combat.
No it's not. It is a bit more productive than fanboys praiseing the devs and ignoring problems with the game.
I vote kicking off all the fanboys on the forums (because thier input is wothless) and allow those of us who want to see the game improve and Stardock succeed to discuss the issue the game has and was to improve this.
Oh what a great idea, I mean, it's not like you could be mistaken in labeling someone, since it is totally objective.
Don't worry Rune, I'm positive you'd never get mislabeled. You are the one person there would be a near unanimous agreement on.
You just ignored all warnings. Multiple people said the game is not ready so late in the beta, you kept saying you can add content in half a month. That may be true, but you forgot that strategy game is not just content. That content you piled up in the last seconds didn't become a whole game because it never had time to be polished. In-game help is 20-years too old - Civ ONE civilopedia is better than Elemental one (say, it has a useful thing like "Concepts"), and Civ game mechanics is much clearer than Elemental one with a simple rules and simple icons. UI isn't polished because there was no feature freeze at least a month before the end. Because of the lack of the adequate manual/in-game help, it was impossible to effectively playtest balance/strategic gameplay. Not enough time to make multiplayer at all.
P.S. And there is too much spam on these forums. With so much spam, of course you don't notice important things.
Funny thing is that Qt3 has a number of people from the industry, who actually DO know what they're talking about from first hand experience. Even around here there are people with applicable experience, and others who have simply done the whole thing a few times before and know what they're talking about. (But yes, some of the stuff in that Qt3 thread is nonsense. My only post on that forum is in there bashing the guy who was coming up with the ridiculous conspiracy theories.)
As for the fanboy label, that gets whipped out for the same reason people whip out the "troll" label against the critical folks, only it's for blindly defending everything against all criticism, even when it's perfecty legit criticism.
I'll tell ya what, I'm looking forward to when this all dies down and things go back to just talking about the game. That was a lot more fun.
I tottally agree, thats what I want. I think unfortunately you have people on here from QT3 posting things to cause problems. I know it sounds crazy, but christ that was some sick crap over there. I'm at a loss why anyone would want to visit their forums. I listed off some problems I had with the game tonight in a thread if you are interested. I agree a lot is legit criticism but I think we are getting now where saying you should have done this or that...that is dwelling on mistakes you can no longer fix.
See this is why I love Stardock, able to admit mistakes, able to learn from them, never willing to just abandon their customers like so many other companies.
^^ Rune_74 the Ad Homs are annoying aren't they?
Exactly.
Eh? I am not registered on Qt3, but as I heard the Qt3 community is "mature enough", so this sounds weird...
Frogboy, I wanted to thank you for this post (drama cleansing). I had been on the fence about buying this game up until I read your post. I wasn't sure that I wanted to deal with bugs/glitches etc. However you clarified things for me in addition to a couple of reviews that came out post 1.07 patches. I felt that I had a pretty good chance of running the game without major problems. (win 7, nvidia 8800GT, 4 gig ram). I not only appreciated your frankness about what was/is happening but the mission clarity about what and where you are taking this game and the commitment being made to it.
I'm a long time gamer who has felt for some time now that PC gaming had gone the way of the movie industry. More explosions and special effects vs. story and gameplay. Not to say there haven't been many good games in recent years because of course there have been. But there have been a plethora of RTS and 1st person genre games and I got tired of all the reworked formulas. Been there, done that ad nauseum.
So, in part because I felt the game was ready to buy, install, and run and more importantly because here is a game that I felt was going to give me that "olden days of glory pc gaming feeling", I clicked "download now".
After playing the game <campaign> for several days I have to report that I have a serious stiff neck from being glued to the monitor. I have been seriously charmed and bewitched by this game. And glitch free at that! I feel like I have been transported back into the heyday of PC gaming but so much better. I love the understated graphics which have the charm of delicate and subtle watercolor paintings. I love the mouse controls and the zoom and pan aspects. I am enthralled with the sweetness and delicate nature of the game. I know a lot of people like me. We have long commiserated in recent years about the void in PC gaming. You have brought it back and as I share this game with others and they in turn buy the game and call me to tell me how much they love it too...I know something good has happened. Something rare!
So if you are on the fence still, just hop off and do it.
Thanks to the others who have posted their feedback about the game too. It helped me make up my mind as well.
I have a classic on my hard drive and I know that this is the beginning of an era.
I've been a registered member at Qt3 for many years and there are lots of bright, knowledgeable and mature gaming people from inside and outside the games industry who post there. But the Elemental thread IMO is a lot less "mature" overall and more disrespectful to each other than what I'm used to reading over there, seems a little more like some of the dedicated games forums I check out from time to time(blizzards for instance) and quickly leave.
Qt3 is what happens when you have open registration and no moderation. I used to lurk for hours on that site because there was so many industry insiders. It was like being able to get the straight dope unfiltered. Then they loosened up the requirements to have an account there and got rid of them entirely.
Now that place is just a cesspool. There are still insightful posts but the tone of the place is filled with hatred. The Elemental thread over there is a disgrace but isn't that much worse than most of the newer topics I read. I'm not a member, just a reader. I don't go there very often anymore.
Drama still *dodges plate* here...?
I guess so..
*throws plate* hey wait...how did you DO that?
Crap. time warps. I should be avoiding those.
I'd like to say the same, but I can't. The art direction is charming and the game finally appears to be stable. But presumably those aren't the only considerations for potential buyers.
MoM and other great oldies weren't great because they had solid AI & balance. None of them had either (nor does Elemental).
What they did have, though, were instantly familiar clichés and coherent, comprehensible, tabletop-inspired game mechanics. Elemental not only has neither. What Elemental has instead, are game mechanics that undermine it as a strategy game (even if you grok them - if you don't, I suppose it makes little difference), and a presentation that does nothing at all to establish a connection between you and the fluff.
So while Elemental looks pretty nice and - to the best of my knowledge - no longer implodes every five minutes, it has no long-term appeal to neither fantasy nor strategy buffs.
Between future the promised future new campaigns & fundamental gameplay changes, Elemental might eventually appeal to both fantasy & strategy buffs. But the key words here are might, potentially & future. For now, the only people I'd recommend it to, are people for whom the only fun part is figuring out how the game works. The good news for them, though, is that Elemental is fairly impenetrable, so there's at least a handful of hours of that sort of fun to be had.
As for the Qt3 thing: the more you guys ignore it, the faster it will go away. Arguably it would have already if not for the influx of users from these forums.
Eh......
Like many I was disappointed with the original release, but I didn't for a second worry that I had thrown my money away. On the contrary as a long time Stardock fan, I've actually enjoyed following the forum discussion about how this game is going to reach its full potential. I have full confidence that one day not so far off I'll be cursing you guys, not for ripping me off, but for making me head off to work on only two hours of sleep again (thanks a lot GalCiv 2!).
One favor though, I too am interested in the power of word of mouth in this. Any chance you could keep us updated on sales, at least in a general sense. I truly do hope that finishing what you started pays off for you guys. Looking forward to 1.08.
Thank you Brad. This does give me hope that the game will survive and become as good or even better than GalCiv2.
You came out attacking and sounding like some damned Fanboy who has thier head up thier ....well you know. You make yourself sound like a 15 years old kid. Perhaps you should go back and yead your post to see what we are taking about.
But arn't you doing the same thing by labling anyone who as an issue with a game as a hater or troll or what ever.
Hey Frogboy, thanks for trying. There are just not that many people who even attempt to create a strategy games these days - mostly because it is way easier to find 100 good artists for a shooter than a single analyst that can construct viable gamplay rules for a strategy game.
Too bad that it like that, its just that Big Pharma and Big Med pay so darn well for good software analysts/architects that nobody with a right mind would want to work for a company where a 7 figures 401k is not guaranteed...
In any case - it is still nice that somebody is willing to provide good entertainment for us geeks...
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