“Expansion Packs”
In the time before digital distribution, you had “expansion packs”. It is a concept that has survived well into the digital distribution age.
You’d release say Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar as an expansion for people who had the game and then Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition for new buyers. Similarly, we released Sins of a Solar Empire: Diplomacy and Sins of a solar Empire: Trinity for new buyers.
So why was that done? The answer is, in the old days, there was no sure fire way to tell if someone had the original game. So you had to offer a second SCU just for those people. On the business software side, all kinds of efforts have been made to try to get new editions down to a single SCU including installers that sniffed for the original version, send in a copy of your manual, you name it.
A New Team
Fallen Enchantress gives us the opportunity to have a very different fantasy strategy game than War of Magic. While the original intent was simply to eliminate an unnecessary SCU (we can simply have Fallen Enchantress with an upgrade price for people who have War of Magic), in this case, it lets us make an even bigger break from War of Magic because it has a new Lead Designer (Kael instead of myself) with Jon Shafer helping as well as we begin pre-production of Jon’s new game along with many other changes. It’s still Stardock but it’s a very different Stardock than what made War of Magic (or GalCiv II for that matter).
I’m still filling the role of studio lead developer and Executive Producer but we’re actively seeking out industry veterans to take over the role of lead developer of Stardock Entertainment.
A New Game
There is also another advantage to Fallen Enchantress being its own game rather than an “expansion pack”. And that is, it frees the team to make radical changes to the basics of the game while allowing War of Magic to still be updated on its own source tree. A user of Fallen Enchantress won’t have to have War of Magic to play it and can treat War of Magic as a separate game.
This will be the same case for the third entry in the Elemental world which won’t be out for a long time still (but will be free for people who got War of Magic before the end of October 2010). It’ll be its own game as well not requiring War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress but be available at a sharp discount to those who have the previous entries in the game world.
The Changing Market
A few years ago, this wouldn’t be possible. Retailers would have refused to carry just stand-alone expansion. There were exceptions and the Company of Heroes series did a lot of good for our industry by paving the way here. Supreme Commander’s “stand alone” expansion helps as well.
Of course, no one has brought more attention to the changing digital model of PC games more than Blizzard with its recent release of Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty which will have two additional stand-alone games in the Starcraft 2 universe.
Will this be a good thing for PC gamers? I think it depends on how it’s handled. Personally, I’d like to see people get discounts if they have other chapters in the series. That’s going to be our model for the foreseeable future but part of that is because we have our own digital distribution platform (Impulse).
FE in general. SMAC was mentioned in a previous interview when talking about lore, environment, story elements ect.
The game was still a sandbox but managed to impart the world lore feel to the player in remarkably clever ways without needing a campaign to tell the story. Of course SMAC was based on extrapolation and scifi.
Haven't they already hinted/mentioned that the next planned game was an RPG of some sort based on the Elemental world?
The lore, flavour, colour, whatever you like to call it, of SMAC was outstanding. The factions were so distinct that I RPed them differently. Trying to think of another TBS strategy game that had that level of faction immersion/differentation, and can't. Maybe my memory is going.
What is this game 2? Tell tell brad!
Speaking of Beta, what's the target schedule for the beta test ?
So there's a fair few possibilities.
It's galciv 3, without a doubt. Frogboy has been very open about that before.
For my own observations, despite the fact that ill get the new game free, I feel like this project has been a huge let down. I continue to find the AI and tactical intelligence in E:WoM to be ridiculously weak, although the production quality and stability have reached a satisfactory level. There are still so many buggy stupid issues in E:WoM, that embarking head long into a new game that departs heavily form the original, seems a fools bet to me..
Oh in the next E:WoM update could you stop the champion cloning? I mean once I have like 4 copies of a Champion I start getting evil and marching them to their death unarmed. I could see it if after they die, they might re spawn.. but come on..
Two free games sounds really nice.
Some may think I am off base here, but since you guys are taking the expansion to another level... what if we want to pay for it. Quite honestly, I prefer Stardocks mistakes far more than most other developers AAA successes.
Tell you what, I bought War of Magic on day one and as such that makes me eligible for the free stuffs, but if Enchantress blows me away... I'll pay you anyway. That's the best way to tell you what I think of your endeavours, and help keep you working on more.
Keep up the good work.
That's actually a good point regarding game balance. Currently, well equipped champions are op. Since money isn't a problem (and is very hard to balance in itself) why isn't the spawn rate of champions reduced or even stopped at all?
Having 50 champions in late game is neither fun, realistic, or balancable at all.
I'd rather have 5 interesting champions than 50 generic ones. We should have less, they should not die, they should be captured. They should be more unique and interesting.
It doesn't make sense that a ridiculous level AI sits on 100,000 gildar and refuses to hire and fully equip all available champions. If they did then the amount available to players should be lower. But agree champions should be more rare, thus more valuable. Right now they are a dime a dozen.
Funny because in my game if I run into maybe 4 champions I'm lucky...
Make sure that there is some sizable territory under the fog of war and without any influence on it. In the course of the game, dozens of champions will spawn in that area.
At least, that's my experience.
Well, I must admit that I'm a turtler type so... I don't "expand" that much under the 300~ turn. Maybe If I focus a little more on the explore thing
When it comes to stand-alone expansions I allways have the feeling that the seller is trying to sell me the same thing with pink ribbons added. That's not the case with E:FE because I was one of the prepurchasers but still. I never bought COH:ToV and I never played GCII:DL after buying GCII:ToA.
On the development side. I think that when you spend the amount of money on two separate dev "trees" it will cause the geme to develop slower then sticking to one title.
I preffer the kind of update like in Diablo2 or GuildWars, or even the COH and first expansion. You have one game that gets bigger, have more options but is based on the same principles.
And generally speaking about digital distribution. With the cool things like the instant download and not waiting for silly localization when you live in 'the wild' there came some bad things like crappy DLC's, Episode kind of publishing and increasingly lowering of devs attitude to make the things right with the first time. Now it's "Well it have bugs, download our first day 3GB patch. It still have bugs? We'll try to nail them. Meanwhile download our 2nd day DLC that adds half an hour of play and costs about half of the game price but it's amazing, I tell ya".
Lately I've been spending long hours with the games from 2000-2005, ecpecially all hkinds of city builders (including bunch of Ceasar based ones, and SimCity like) and in the moments I didn't extinguish fires or try to work the food/money/luxury shortage out I compare them to current titles. And it makes me sad.
Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic was a stand alone expansion, and that was years ago.
Is fallen enchantress going to be a campaign style game, or a sand box type of game experience?
Since Fallen Enchantress will be a better version of War of Magic, it will be like E:WoM
I just hope that this NEW game FE will be the spiritual successor to MoM that we were promised SOOOOO long ago and that lead me to purchase EWoM in the first place. I hope it does the Fantasy 4X game+tactical battles correctly the way EWoM did not.
I am really pleased to hear that Fallen Enchantress is going to be a stand alone game and not just a bolted on expansion. I think that move makes a lot of sense from many point of views: PR, programming, game design and lore etc, and really cant see any down sides to it. Getting it free, will certainly help redress any feelings of disappointment I had from War of magic. Hopefully if it is done well it will get some good press and word of mouth going and will be seen as completely seperate from War of Magic.
I get the impression that Fallen Enchantress will be the chance for Kael and Jon Schafer to really make their stamp on things, and it will be interesting to see what they can do. Incidentally, at this point I have pretty much given up on War of Magic. I dont want to come across as being too negative, but for me, I think there is too much wrong with the basic game design which stops me from enjoying it. After playing fall from heaven 2, and seeing what an amazing job Kael was able to do with making all the different factions play so differently, it will be intriguing to see how FE turns out. The lore of War of Magic just came across as a bit of a rip off of the D&D darksun setting, but with all the factions playing and looking pretty much identical it held no particular interest.
My main hope for FE will be the possibilty to open the door to non-human factions and make them radically different to play/fight against. Also a tactical map with greatly improved tactical options, and a complete re-design of game balance and weapon/armour mechanics all become possible in a totally fresh game.
Im really pleased to hear that a Galciv 3 is being planned, as I was a big fan of Galciv 1 + 2, and bought all their expansions. Galciv 2 was a huge improvement over 1 (which I loved as well), and from reading Brads comments, it seems he is aware of the small flaws in Galciv 2 which stopped it from being absolutely perfect. This gives me a lot of hope that Galciv 3 will be really awesome!
The news about the "old school rpg" sounds really promising as well. From the games mentioned in the same quote, the idea of a more modern version of the old style rpgs would be brilliant. Im a big fan of a squad of player characters for rpgs, and never liked the move to fps style single character rpgs that have been the fashion recently.
So all in all, some really great news updates recently. Gives me a lot to look forward to in the next year or two!
What's the current plan for this given the announcement of the FE expansion?
Wow,
a master of necromancy
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