Derek and I have been passing on the messages and emails and of course various posts on the impressions of Elemental: Fallen Enchantress beta 1. Thank you for the kind comments and encouragement. We really appreciate it. You can imagine how anxious we were about this beta release.
We will be lurking the forums (and third party forums as well -- Si vous savez ce que je veux dire) to gather as much information as possible on everything from bugs, user interface tweaks, game play suggestions, to feature requests and sitting down to determine what to put in there.
We are still some months away from release. There is work to be done but it appears we’re on the right track. There’s still a lot of work ahead for us to do. Lot of cool stuff to get in there and of course lots of bug fixing.
The current plan is to open the beta up a bit more next week. Eventually, everyone who bought Elemental: War of Magic in 2010 or earlier will be in the beta.
With any luck, by the time we release, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress will be the PC fantasy strategy game that players were looking for. Stay tuned!
This game is turning into a spiritual successor to Masters of Magic and that in itself is high praise
I played for an hour and even as Beta, FE is many times better than WoM. More lively world, better loot and quests, better spells and tactical combat, actually different factions... Everything is more polished and better thought out compared to WoM. Looking forward to the release. Congratulations Stardock!
Damn I had all but forgotten about getting the Elemental Fallen Enchantress for free with my pre-order of Elemental. Downloading as I'm typing and I'm really looking forward to checking this out. Also, nice to see some of the old crew from the Elemental forums are still alive and well.
Another poopy thought, though - I'm glad you've been hearing a lot of encouraging news. Might be best to still think you are giving everyone cancer. You honestly have something good here, but it still needs some work of course. What I'm hoping for is a stable enough beta that i can really get into the game, play MANY games, and then provide meaningful feedback. Us being able to provide feedback on bugs and have that stuff fixed is great (games that crash frequently shouldn't be released obviously), but I really think the most appropriate approach (although uncommon) is for your customers to get to play enough to be able to say why we'd keep playing this game for months (and buy dlc, etc) or why we could play it for like a few weeks and be done for good.
Anyway, that's my personal hope - to be able to play through the game GENERALLY crash free during the beta and be able to provide useful feedback while there is still time for tweaking.
That said, you already know that this is tons of time better than the actual launch of elemental. You made a costly, but wise decision (imo anyway) to hire great staff, give the game for free to dedicated fans that picked up elemental early, and work so diligently on making a good game. You aren't suffering from blinders this time - the game is fun from what I've played anyway. I hope you fellas get great metacritic review and I am sooooo looking forward to reading an article from an interview after the launch that looks back on the failures of elemental and how and what you folks did that made fallen enchantress so amazing. This could end up being a gigantic success story. From what I've seen, you all have something to be proud of.
Yep, it's nice to see that RavenX is still there
About FE : after a few hours of play, I have the same "one more turn" thing.
I have several questions about the future : I didn't see any special effect for flanking opponents. Flanking needs orientation, and there's no way to choose it, so I think there's nothing like "backstab" implemented. And I didn't see (but maybe I missed that effect) a "Zone of Control" that would stop the enemy, or give a free attack on them when he enters it (like in wargames or in D&D). Also I didn't see any difference between having higher ground in tactical battles. Is there one (like a bonus in defence) ?
Anyway, that's good to be back !
*jumps up and down impatient to be added to the beta* The suspense is killing me!
No, Brad... Stardock... thank YOU. Fallen Enchantress rocks. And it rocks hard.
THIS is the game I wanted to play. This is the game I hoped Elemental: WoM would be, and why I put so much effort into winning the contest you had to get a free limited edition copy. I didn't want to be a negative nancy when the game came out and it was less than stellar, so I quietly slinked away and tried to enjoy it. And E:WoM did turn out to be ok in the end, but it didn't suck me in.
Fallen Enchantress does. It's spectacular so far... I just can't believe it's the same world. It looks... it feels... so different.
A few suggestions/compliments:
I'm sure I have more, but I want to play now. Great job guys. It's... it's fantastic.
For these not in the beta like me, you can enjoy the first video made by a beta tester :
Yes a fantastic start to the Beta, already a better, more polished and much more fun game than the origional Elemental war of magic is today.
It really is a great game already so I have very high hopes indeed for the finished product this time, keep up the good work and well done.
This feels like the game Elemental War of Magic always wanted to be, but never quiet managed to be.
see below
Umm, this is not in English. I would love to know what it says.
Hi !
Just to add my comments :
- I had fun with the Beta so far !!! So thank you for having been so persistent ! It has been mentioned, but it's worth repeating: not every company (persons) would have make such effort ! Respect !
More about the game:
- I have no problems with any feature in the game, so it's great. One of the big positives is the early stage of the game with exploration. And another thing that works now really fine with the improved combat tactics is the customization of units. (it was already great in elemental, but now it has more meaning). It allows for tactics : I make units with shields so they block creatures in a line using their defense feat while I use pikers units to strike. Great that the game lets us do with that !
- I have made several plays, my only concern is that the game would become tedious by the end of the game (I played on normal sized maps). But I am now trying a small map to evaluate end game.
- Also, Maybe it's on purpose for the beta, but I lack the people animations that were to be seen in the cities before.
- Beyond that, I think all I would say are request for new features (like the dynasty feature which basically lets you craft heroes). Craft weapons would be neat as well. I think customization of your leader, faction, units is the strong point of FE and I just want more
Great work in any case ! (going back playing more)
Hum. One thing from MoM that I miss : the ability to choose how to spend the power points : mana/skill/level
At the moment you start with 2 mana per turn and there's no fast way to improve that a bit. And even the simplest spells use a lot of mana (10 mana for a fire dart. Ouch)
Wouldn't it be a good idea to be able to spend mana on improve mana generation ? (so for instance if I generate 4 mana per turn, I could use 1 mana to improve mana generation and the 3 other mana are used to get real "mana". And when I 've spent 50 mana on improve generation I generate 5 mana per turn.)
Appreciate that brother .Yep, still alive and kicking, for now anyway. The docs haven't killed me....yet...lol.
Fallen Enchantress is a far better game than WoM for the fundamental reason that it has a purpose.
WoM felt akin to trying to play a game that was composed of the basic elements of a game creator program, there was no focus no purpose and generally the game was closer to being a digital board game. While there was a rich conceptual story it wasn't actually showing at all in the game.
FE has a guided concept behind it, the story is told with the game instead of beside it. The artistic changes are also incredibly well thought out and clearly guided by that core purpose.
You've defeated my expectations with this beta so far, I'm excited to see what will come as the game improves even more.
I am experiencing a 3:1 ratio of game time to reading people's posts. Nice to see the forum so alive.
Ha, that's about where I am too.
I keep looking to compare my thoughts with other's feedback and to see what interesting bugs people have found.
Tried it out for a few hours and the improvement from WOM is incredible. The UI is a lot more cleaner, the RPG mechanics and character progression choices are great, and I haven't experienced any crashes as of yet. However, magic still feels vastly underpowered and too expensive, whereas in Master of Magic and Age of Wonders I was able to fling enchantments and spells around without having to worry about becoming mana-bankrupt after a couple of turns. If I am understanding correctly, its because this is a lore issue with a post-apocalyptic landscape and magic being rare, which is fine from a story perspective. However, from a gameplay perspective, it just isn't as fun having to carefully decide whether or not I want to enchant a particular unit or if I want to save that mana for an emergency teleport.
Balance for units is still messy, but it's a beta after all.
vieuxchat, compared to you, RavenX is a newbie. A prolific poster, but still a newbie as far as the Elemental boards go.
I almost made a post like Darkodinplus' when I saw you chiming in.
Now I just need to get enough time with the beta to say more than, thanks tons for the work on tooltips in general and for including keyboard equivalents in the tips for buttons.
LoL...Well thanks .... newbie he says....sheesh.
About story... will Brad write a new book related to "fallen enchantress" ??? Something like http://www.amazon.com/Elemental-Destinys-Embers-Bradley-Wardell/dp/0345517865/
I gotta stop reading this thread. Waiting for my beta too unlock is getting longer and longer..............
Dude, it's a matter of perspective. Some of us around Stardockia were hot for NotMoM back when there was some hope that whoever bought the name rights from Microprose would cut a clean deal for a sequel. My memory isn't that good for dates, but I think that phase was maybe a year or more before the game even had a street name. Then there was the long phase after the game got the street name and the boards launched but the public beta was still a matter of pure speculation...
You & vieuxchat have me wondering if folks like landisaurus, Jonny5446, LDiCesare, Ron Lugge, pigeonpigeon, Tamren or Wintersong will show up again. I typed with them back in late 2008 and things are certainly different now.
I was thinking to wait until a later beta before i tried it. But all this positive feedback made me curious.. I'm downloading the beta right now. I will search for bugs! And i will report whatever I can find!
Ps. Stardock is my favourite game developers, due to the fact that they listen to their customers more then any other gaming company out there!
I am loving FE and think so far its awesome. A great step up in everything. Very few crashes, and i love the tool tips everywhere. I would like a slow feature for Tactical combat, because the enemies and my chars go thru their animations so fast, I cant catch everything. Yes, I know that sounds silly, but for me I like to see combat a bit slower, in that regard. I like how initative works, and how over all, Tactical combat is fun. I also love the shrink effects and the maul effects...wow very nice. Spells also look better than in before. Great job.
My only question is about the music. I love what I hear, but on the main theme I hear for FE, I dont know its name, its sounds quite a bit like "Time in a bottle" by Jim Croce. NOt sure if anyone else has noticed that, and I was just wondering if you decided to use it as it would kinda fit the game in a way. Also, are you making all the music for FE yourselves, or are you hiring anybody to make it for you. I know in Dominions 3 a group made quite a bit for it and they did a great job.
The only bug I have seen, is that creature AI is not attacking NPC cities or troops. One AI city had a huge dragon right next to it and it did nothing at all..even when the borders expanded. My city, once the borders overtook it, well...they got pissed and decided to come pay me a visit and hit me up for some bed space!
Thanks again and keep up the good work.
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