Hello,
apparently the stand alone Fall from Heaven game has been cancelled.
But on the plus side, maybe this would be a perfect opportunity for Stardock to entice Kael over to modding for Elemental... his work his admired by a lot of people, and I'm sure he'd have a lot of invaluable insight into expanding and improving elemental. Stardock just need to give him a reason to switch from modding the hugely popular CiV (he's already produced a couple of small Civ5 mods!) to working on the far less popular Elemental.
Thoughts?
And no, I'm in no way connected to him. I just really like his work in with Civ4-FfH2, and think that he'd likely help transform Elemental into the game a lot of us originally wanted.
I think the game-play "differences" between races/factions should be the greatest in-between factions.
I mean sure, races can have access to X,Y,Z ... or are a bit stronger or magic resistant ... but the big picture of how they play out might need to be faction <-> faction based.
Imho races should only be divided if there is enough phonotypic difference to warrant such a divide. All of the human races imho seem to have only cultural divisions ... hence I don't see a need for a "racial" divide.
With less races, races can still be quite different, yet the main gameplay-divide is by faction.
Just an idea, while playing within the lore ...
Personally, I don't buy the "different race" line.
Factions, sure. But with all the inter-racial marriages in game, apparently every combination can produce offspring which are in turn perfectly fertile and compatible.
Different races? I think not.
I think the argument is old and tired
It depends on what "race" is. (channelling some bad Bill Clinton there!)
The human race? That is a new construct. Heck, race itself is a poor attempt as well. We call different types of dogs by "breeds" and we call people of different colors by "race" either way you slice it, it is the same thing IMO.
If you can reproduce with another animal and that animal retains the reproduction rights of both parents, I believe that is termed a species. Race/Breed is just a way of detailing variance of the species. Now, I am just some guy on the web and there are many here who are much more intelligent than me. I feel in some ways the arguments are a matter of nuance. Feel free to correct me, as I am sure those that post will
The problem is the Fallen vs. the Kingdoms is ideology. There seems to be a subtext of the fallen are "other" creations. They are not "human" so the Kingdom family cannot mate with them. Fair enough if that is the case. Except you have a fallen empire that is actually human. That messes up that neat argument.
So how does this get "fixed", hell if I know!
You don't need obvious superficial differences to make sides of conflict feel very different. Look at Dominions 3. It has huge variety of themes and units, yet vast majority of it is just humans. But this military uses only archaic weapons, obsidian swords, copper, feathers, hide shields, slingers. Those are black knights, effectively tin cans, slow and outlawing any use of magic. Many nations don't have any form of archery, or have only crossbows. Or no cavalry. Even within a single nation there's a big variety. If you recruit a mage (commander type), you don't know what his exact abilities will be. They have a common base, but many of them have special interest. So he may have 2 levels in Fire and 1 in Nature, but apart from that one of (Fire, Death, Nature) and one in 10 will have one of(Astral, Earth, Blood).
Too often fantasy games attempt to diversify races by the shape of ears (Start Trekism) or faces. Often no effort is put into culture, tradition, philosophy. Here in Poland, it is considered polite to eat everything on your dish. To show that you liked all of it. Over there in Asia, it is polite to leave a token piece on the dish. This is to show the host has given enough to satisfy everyone. Cultures can be very different and have bigger impact than technology. The Chinese had 800 years of leadership in ship technology and navigation, and they threw that away. They were not a colonial power because the faction of beaurocrats and court, lazy and risk-avoiding had nothing from long travels and trade. They were jealous, and when they won they outlawed production of big ships.
Err, why does it matter if the factions in WOM are technically different races?
In the 4x genre, races are typically ones like Klackons, Draconians, and humans. They look and "work" vastly differently.In WOM, all the factions look like Human Mk.1 and the gameplay differences between them are very very small.They don't even have different ear shapes like in Star Trek. =P
Calling them different races seems presumptious because it implies a far greater degree of variety. To me they are factions of the generic human race. Different ideologies and religion, slightly different tone of skin.Sure, there are out-of-game stories about the fallen/mutant/freak members of the empire but since they are absent from the game (as in integrated into the empire population in a meaningful way), they are as substantial as the background story of Duke Nukem. Artificially tacked-on lore and background story that don't manifest in the game can safely be ignored.
And yes, they don't need to be different races to be sufficiently different.They need different gameplay, not different models.Economy, warfare, research, even magic could work differenly.(Like these temples, for instance. They don't even require "new code", only add another twist to the bland magic system.)
Well, Humans and Fallen are all approximately the same species ... just various races or breeds.
If I were to ever make a mod ... I'd have multiple species, and each specie would be divided into several "races" or "clans"
Great to hear that Kael is aboard! I am a huge fan of the Fall from Heaven mod; played it quite a lot. Look forward to the future of Elemental.
That's your preference.
My own is that I do not care about the whole Elemental lore -- not one bit.
I am only interested in playing single-player "skirmishes" against comps.
They can be Elves or Dwarves for all I care.
The current factions and their lore leave me cold.
(Going back to my game of Heroes of might & Magic 5.)
@ Cryptomancer > Who cares about your personal preferences ?! Why don't you go troll on some other forum ?
Maybe I am missing something here but is the above poster having an argument with himself???
I like lots of lore myself. I loved the story behind Fall from Heaven and all the work Kael put into it.
I also like the story behind Elemental. It definitely could use some more fleshing out though.
I would definitely like to see a well done mod with Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, Orcs etc as well.
I'm confused too.
That is the mark of a typical multi account trolling. Someone forgot to change accounts inbetween posts no?
I don't think Crypto is a troll, I think he was joking.
He was only saving time by giving the inevitable reply.
But basically I agree with his first post. I play the game, not the book.
I want to play the book! I want total immersion. I want the Chronicles of WhiteElk to be written as I play.
I just want to play a 4x strategy game against a challenging & competant AI.
The story line isn't even on the list of relevent factors.
"Story" is not a bad thing but in the current WOM, it just doesn't exist.
The entire story of WOM: Here you have this sovereign and an empty map. Go conquer the world. .....and they lived happily forever after.
If SD wants to integrate the lore into the game it must not be one button to "Click Galactic Libramon to receive lore".
For instance, a researched tech breakthrough doesn't have to be an anonymous screen with "you learned Archers Mk1".It could be the same screen but the research of "Archers Mk1" also displays a teaser story about how the archers of count Blah won the battle of Bleh without losing a man.[Click here to get the full story].... that takes you to the Libramon to hear the full story.
The founding of a new city could display something similiar while providing useful data on the new city.Nearby resources and at which city / ZOC level they will be "in range", present beach tiles... something.If the screen doesn't display anything useful it will be disabled as fast as you can say "click".
That is how you get ambivalent players (like me = ) interested in the story at all. It can be done unobtrusively, actually enriching the game.
Forcing "lore" down the player's throats is not a good idea but offering it in a way that is related to gameplay events and possibly even hinting at possible good tactics over the course of those stories... sure, why not?
This is a very good point, in the game-as-is I see a very bountiful thriving world with food basically falling from the skies. I see nothing even remotely close to a "post cataclysmic" world. Someone definitely dropped the ball there as far a matching gameplay to story line.
I just want everything that everybody else wants plus my own list of things that I want, and my cat and neighbours friends' dog from three blocks away.
Lore is good for the campaign. This game was designed from the beginning with the intention of being heavily moddable, to give it that 'play your own way' feature. What happened however was that the lore intruded heavily into the flexibility and diversity of the 'other game', and the campaign got less of the lore than what it should have. This has been mentioned before. I think however that, happily, this is all being addressed.
Maybe the campaign can play more like Warbands?
anyways, all I want for 1.1 is a nice strong game that stands on its own.
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