I want Stardock to do well and I want Elemental to be a great game but where things currently are I am really concerned about the various decisions and releases over the last 12 months.
If past history is a good indicator of what to expect in the future, what are the most likely outcomes:
1. FE will be a little different than WoM but still suffer from the same game-breaking choices regarding the underlying game mechanics.
2. Decisions will be made affecting FE without really having a grasp of the big picture and the impact it has on long-term replayability,
3. We'll be playing catch-up for yet another 12 months going through the same flawed rinse cycle.
A year ago, before WoM was released, many people on the forums expressed concern about the game and they were unceremoniously shot down in flames. It's true that I have no real idea of where FE is in its development but the big difference between now and 12 months ago is that we have a very flawed game that is the older sister of a new game that both share much of the same development decisions and advances (at least - that is what we were told when given the promise of what to expect regarding the pending release of WoM1.3).
If FE shares any of the development process we've seen with WoM1.2 and WoM1.3 then I'm sorry to say I'm not really going to be expecting a lot from Fallen Enchantress. Basically it makes no sense what-so-ever to release something like WoM1.3 if all the issues have been ironed out in FE. Surely if the products are being developed concurrently then any lessons learned would be applied where possible to the other - and I'm talking about the underlying game mechanics - not the surface veneer.
I was really disappointed when FE was announced given the state of WoM and thought it was a strange decision to split the development tree at that point before the main issues had been sorted. If it was part of a bigger decision to abandon War of Magic and allow Fallen Enchantress the opportunity to distance itself and hopefully enjoy a more favourable launch then that would make sense. But instead we are told that FE is awesome and that WoM will borrow many of the advances so players have a choice between the two. Before WoM was launched we were similarly told it was awesome and we just had to trust that it was all going to come together - and that the development team were playing a very different game than the beta testers were. And so on and so on. Based on past dealings with Stardock I believed the spin at the time but I don't believe it this time around. I trusted that the right decisions would be made to make the game great last time but that trust has eroded away with the last 12 months.
I've rabbited on longer than I wanted to but please, if anyone from Stardock is reading this, please don't even release the beta of FE until it works. WoM has done a lot of damage to your reputation over the last year and this one really needs to be as close as possible to hitting the nail on the head. For all I know I may be completely off the mark and WoM and FE may have completely different teams that work in isolation of each other - but I wouldn't be prepared to money on that horse.
Sorry for this being a negative post but I really think there is an awful lot riding on FE now as far as Stardock and community trust is concerned. Just really trying to say - don't rush the beta out the door!
An excellent post which highlights the sort of in game choices that a truely amazing game could have.
My comments were more about the underlying core mechanics (ie what is the trade off between researching tech and building a treasure of gold, how does building and maintaining a large military slow down my other development, etc) but I agree entirely about the need to carry the design down to indepth analysis of the sort of 'fluff' that really makes the game exciting to play.
I have been playing fall from heaven 2 for the past couple of days. For whatever reasons I had never played it even though I have owned civ 4 since it came out, wasn't much into the civ mod scene. So I played it and wow, its amazing. It has so many cool things going on and such variety in factions and religions and units and everything. I wish Derek would bring these kinds of things to FE.
What I was saying is that for the new team it is a matter of them designing a good game. You don't even need a computer to design a good game, you just need creative people. These are fundamentally two different problems. One is an artistic/creative problem and one is an software engineering problem. You can't really compare these types of problems on the same scale, art and creativity by its very nature is the intention of the design and not neccesarily a complex problem to be solved. Either a good game will be produced or it won't and whether or not its good or not doesn't speak as much to the "difficulty" as it does to a "failure of imagination/lack of creativity".
If you pose the question "can this new team design a good game" then the answer is yes, depending on their creativity. If however you ask the question "can they design a good game within the limitations of the engine" then you need answers about what has been fixed in the original engine before you can answer that question. And that is truly a complex math/programming/software engineering question with a binary answer.
Can the game produce truly random maps?
Will the maps have rivers?
Wiil the rivers link to the oceans and mountains and generally make sense for the topology?
What terrain types will be deformable for spells? (flood, volcano, earthquake, etc)
Does the game save state for each turn so you can do an end game replay?
Will the game have terrain that follows a logical pattern and resemble a terran topology?
Will the random map generator name, landmasses, geographic areas, etc ("Black Forest")?
Will the scale of cities, national borders, etc be taken into account in the map generator and initial player placement to give the player that fantasy kingdom feel, i,e some civilized land, some uncivilized? (mainly because wom turned into a Civ like map full of cities and stopped looking like fantasy and more like industrial revolution)
WoM could do very little of the above and while you may think that compared to the creativity neccesary to invent a great game this kind of stuff is trivial as a programmer I can tell you its incredibly difficult.
Yes. Reassuring. Thank you!!
Right, I get you and I had missed your point slightly. However I still think you are playing down or underestimating the technical nature of good game design. Done properly there is a significant amount of structured analysis and design, in fact the core elements are pretty much entirely about it. Only once you have a strong core design and are adding 'fluff' does artistry and creativity start to trump mathematical and structureal analysis IMO.
Your list is actually quite good at illustrating the difference between my concerns and yours. I can see where you are coming from that all of the above features could add something to the game and they all require certain specialist engine functionality.
My response is that I think a very good fantasy TBS game (eg A- grade?) can be written without any of the items on your list. None of them are particularly important to making a great game. They would be great things to add to your core game to flesh it out and might help you to turn your A- game into an A+ game but their absence doesn't mean an automatic fail.
Conversely if they get the core game mechanics wrong then having every single item on your list won't matter. Your list might manage to raise the game from a C- to a C+ but it is still a C grade game.
Agreed - these features are far from trivial in terms of time (and I am also a programmer). I guess my point is that I think there are of only middling importance in terms of making this game a big hit.
I agree completly with that sentiment. All you have to do is look at Sins of a Solar Empire which is an absolutly horrible representation of space and a brilliant game nonetheless. Planets don't orbit, planets have huge asteroids that sit in near space, stars make no sense and kinda function more like galaxies, the starfields were horrific bright colors, and on and on, but still a great game. I think its a little more important when your talking a land based game but still people can look past alot if the game itself is good.
That being said even SOASE had a random map generator. Thats almost a seperate issue entirely. If they just have x number of canned maps and you just get one of those randomly like in WoM that is a big big deal to alot of people, thats like a whole letter grade.
I would also point out that the games that qualify as AAA try to go for unbelievable detail. Mostly these are FPS games and say take a city block you get everything down to a can rolling into a gutter and a breeze blowing trash at your feet. I guess what I am driving at is that for some gamers immersion is a massively huge factor and when it can be delivered and make your suspension of disbelief that much easier it tends to make a much much better game. I honestly think as bad of a game that EWoM was it might have been forgiven a little more with a random map generator, terrain that made sense, and better textures.
Great scott! At core we agree then Jam3, with relatively minor peripheral areas which we seem happy to disagree on. Astounding... this might be a first for the interweb!
More troubling though, it doesn't really matter if we agree, what matters is what Derek and co think and agree on. We can only hope that they are paying attention and fully aware of these issues.
Cheers.
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