You want the good news or the bad news?
Oh, you want the good news right? Of course. You want that? You want that first anyway? I’m not brave enough to do it the other way.
Well, the good news is that next week, I’ll be traveling to California to visit with the gaming media to talk about Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion. So hopefully we’ll be able to get some coverage and I won’t lie to you, WE WILL NEED YOUR HELP.
I say that because if you’re reading this, you are familiar with the whole Internet thing. Here’s how it goes:
Website X will write a preview of Fallen Enchantress.
First comment will be “Elemental sucked, they should give up on it! I doubt this is going to make any difference”
Hopefully, you, reading this, have played the beta and hopefully you agree that, Fallen Enchantress is turning out to be very very good, especially when you consider our current estimated target release date is this Fall (think of where War of Magic was at this stage). So we’re going to need all the help we can get to get the word out that Fallen Enchantress is turning out really well.
Because without positive confirmation from actual people playing the beta, it is, as GamersWithJobs’s podcast recently put it, “doomed”.
Now, the bad news…
There won’t be a beta update this week. The team is trying to get the build ready for Beta 3 which is what I’ll be showing next week. When I get back, we’ll be putting it together for you guys. It’ll have the dramatically changed Quendar and Gilden factions. We think you’re really going to like what we’re doing with faction differentiation and can’t wait to get your feedback.
He will be showing Beta 3 to the press next week. The team is currently trying to get a build ready.
Give us access ASAP to the first beta 3 build that seems to be bug free. Everyone on the forum can do some quick testing and report any significant problems. Problem solved.
So, no better than WOM you're saying?
Or are you using some special review scale known only to you that we're supposed to telepathically relate to?
Why give a "score" with nothing to reference to?
I give FE two purple rainbows, a blue diamond and a purple horse shoe.
Well, understand that MoO 3 has a metacritic score of 64. WoM has a 53. I think the idea is, not so much what your personal scores are, but what do you think FE metacritic score would be if it was reviewed by a bunch of game reviewers today. So those games being what they are, I stick by my 75. Which is a pretty god damn good score for a game that is several months from actually being released.
Metacritic reviews are for finished games so I don't really understand why everyone is sticking scores on FE at the moment - seems pointless to me. I think a better approach is just to ignore the scores for now and assess the betas on their merits and compare them to previous betas and WoM. On these grounds I think the game is making steady progress and the early indications for the next beta are showing further significant progress.
I am also greatly encouraged that Brad, Derek, and the team are having a hard look at the city management/economic side of things for beta 3 - for me personally, this side of the game is a bit like the turd in the punchbowl and if they properly tackle this then the game will become much better.
Some of you are saying the UI is weak, which I feel is an exaggeration - it's servicable and unintrusive - my only gripes with the UI is a lack of hotkeys and some things (like disenchanting spells) are unintuitive
If FE was given 1 month that was devoted entirely to polishing the presentation/UI and the AI, I'd probably give FE a 75 after that month.
I think that enoeraew37 hit the nail on the head for me as well (though I would not rate the game *quite* so low as a 5; maybe a 6 / 10): in the current state, the game has a dire need of unique content. There IS some character (ie. wildlands) in the game and I would absolutely LOVE to see it expanded. Perhaps a pool of areas similar to the wildlands that "could" spawn in your world at random, almost like a resource.
Still, being in beta-form with 6 - 9 months to go until release, the progress has been promising. Now that the engine is up to snuff, if the FE team just goes to town on making content, polishing sounds and increasing replay value, I would say that a high score would easily be possible. I enjoyed playing several games of FE, which is more than I can say about WOM at release!
@Frogboy
I understand completely how important marketing is to games and one recent example should hopefully stand out to most people: Skyrim. Now, many people here may claim that Skyrim really was an amazing game (it had its good points), but as far as an evolution to the Elder Scrolls IP, it was actually a slight step back! They chopped alot of mechanics and added in some half-baked crafting. Here is what made the difference: marketing and playing to the market. Todd Howard hyped Skyrim to all hell. It is very hard to deny it. They released the trailer for Skyrim on December of 2010 and Todd Howard marketed that game to every gaming venue that he could! Close to release, I could actually talk to my non-gamer friends about it. Skyrim was a huge financial success, despite not being amass-market-fps or a casual-MMO.
So I'm completely ok with you guys giving preview builds to gaming news sites. Other people should, IMO, be ok with this as well. You've gotta sell games to make a living! I share some of their concerns that there may be a bit of overconfidence about the product, but, again, I share in your enthusiasm for the eventual release. Just please, don't release it until it is ready.
My rating for the FE current beta release, using Civ4 BtS as the standard '10.0', is 2.0.
To those that will say Civ4 BtS is an unfair comparison -- that's ok, opinions are just that, and feel free to substitute your own standard. Civ4 BtS is the product of ~20 years of work and several expansions. FE had Elemental so it's not a new product, plus the 'wheel' doesn't have to be entirely re-invented -- features from Civ and other predecessors such as MoM have paved the way for FE -- so FE should have that advantage. Plus games such as Civ4 are the landscape FE has to inhabit. Games that excel should not merely match those that have gone before, but should stand on their shoulders.
To understand why only a 2.0 score, peruse the CivFanatics Civ4 - Succession GOTM forum to see how intricate and varied Civ4 games can be, then compare that to the current FE build.
What the score for the next beta release will be, we will see. I won't assume, I'll have to see it, and so any speculative/hype isn't reflected in the current 2.0 score.
An 8.5 FE score at release would be acceptable, given there'd be expansions as with Civ4 to bring up the score to 10.0.
@Nick-Danger
I don't see FE as a Civ clone (at least not at the moment) - definitely feels more like HoMM to me
The problem with this line of reasoning is that your ratings scale is entirely arbitrary. How is the dev team supposed to know what qualifies as a 3.0 or a 5.4 on your scale? What makes a game get to 7.21 on your scale? What's the quality level of 8.0?
That's the value of comparing things to metacritic scores. Moo3 is a 6.4. It's an average of all the reviews it received from professional reviewers. If FE needs an 8.5 minimum, according to Frogboy, to have a chance of overcoming WOM's bad reputation, then the only scale that anyone should bother referencing to give opinions is the Metacritic scale that gives WOM a 5.3 and Moo3 a 6.4. It's the only way Brad and the team can have some perspective on the rating people are giving. If someone says FE is a 6.0 rating on the Metacritic scale, they know implicitly that person thinks FE is better than X-list-of-games and worse than Y-list-of-games.
Otherwise we should all just create arbitrary scales and see who can be the most ridiculous. Because they'll be useless to the devs either way.
Reviewers must have been suffering from a serious case of nostalgia, or perhaps the Emperor's Clothes in that they didn't want to be the only one bagging it. At release MoO3 was appalling.
For me bug fixed FE released right now would be worth about 6.5 (but Metacritic might give it more like a 7 I think).
I'm pretty confidant that the various improvements underway (including hopefully a rebalancing of early game city vs loot gildar economies, making more of a trade-off between focussing on military and economy so that it is actually worth considering an early growth/economic strategy, adding more city building options, etc) will bring it to an 8.
Reaching 8.5, 9 or 9.5 is much harder to predict because it depends on getting the game balance just right (I mean so that there are lots of meaningful choices, I'm not talking multiplayer style balance) and succeeding in making the content exciting and varied. I think Stardock can do it but it requires getting everything to 'gel' and that requires being either very good, or a bit lucky (or both).
I'm certainly in for counteracting any unnecessary pessimism though, Stardock are moving in the right direction (as shown in the betas) and saying all the right things which was far from true with WoM at this stage.
<snip>
I agree entirely. However your scale is effectively a blow up of just the top portion of the metacritic scale - you're focussing on the game from the point of view of a strategic game aficionado and applying higher standards than are applied in typical industry game reviews.
I agree because I feel the same way, Civ 4 BtS is the most beautifully balanced strategy game I have ever played which is why I've probably brought it up a dozen times in earlier posts. I would be esctatic if FE got even close to the same level and I certainly hope they are going to try.
Of course people are also asking for MoM levels of variety and crunch... I don't think MoM variety and Civ4 strategic balance are necessarily mutually exclusive but delivering both is certainly much harder than just one. We'll see how it goes.
Soo... you're officially telling us the game won't give us cancer now? Should I inform the surgeon general to discontinue my treatments?
I guess I'm in the minority when I agree with metacritic that MoO3 felt around a 7/10 for me. I still had fun with the colonizing, zoning, ship building, combat, techs, custom races, all that good stuff... the game was pretty serviceable after the community AI patch. Sure there were a lot of flaws and things that bugged me (they never did get around to explaining the difference between the 10 gadzillion stances for ground combat or diplomacy) but the game itself was somewhat fun. Not fun enough to keep me playing for too long, but it definately had its moments.
Yes, yes, yes. I like that!
Just remind everyone Kael is in charge, include the Halloween pic of Kael in the penguin costume in all marketing docs, and the game will sell millions!
What are you suggesting? That we look at what the metacritic score is for WoM, think of how much better FE is in comparison percentage-wise and add to it? Are the reviewers going to take the ratings they gave to WoM as a base to rate FE?
I understand where you're coming from with having some established reference system to give our scores some perspective. But the problem is: The ratings that were given to WoM don't represent what I think of that game; the score is an average; and the reviews are just opinions, made by professionals, but opinions that I sometimes agree with, and sometimes I don't. I can't take that as a "fixed" reference system. If Brad wants to know what they think of the game, he should ask them.
On that note, I just hope all this doesn't mean they're aiming at making a game to please the press. I understand it's a bussiness and they need to be comercially successful. But my interests and the press's don't necessarily go hand in hand. Just look at what the metacritic score is for ME3 compared to the user score: http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/mass-effect-3. What would have more weight comercially speaking, then? The press reviews or the word of mouth?
Anyway, the best I can do and FWIW, is give a self-explanatory x/10 score, according to my opinion and experience with games of this kind, with 6/10 being fair, and 10/10 being excellent. Oh, and I did give an external reference to my score: AoW:SM. That one being excellent.
Why not?
I was just giving my opinion on the matter, not stating absolute truth based on other perceived truths.
Why bother creating an entire response to my post only to point out some abstract flaw in my theoretical reasoning? You don't even bother responding to my critique of the game, just the fact that I used some random numbers to give an overall impression that I may have.
Do numbers bother you?
Brad - just to throw this out there. I completely agree that FE is substantially better than Elemental. That said, is it a game that I expect I'll plan a ton at this point? No. I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like something is missing. I'm hoping that is resolved when I play the next build released to us, but frankly, I'd probably put less time into FE than I did in Civ5 (about 1-2 months of gaming nerd time). I can say that I'd certainly pay for FE based on what you've shown in the beta. And I believe the game will be good. But I don't think its something that will keep my attention past a month. I really do hope I'm in the minority. That said, I love SD and will do whatever I can to promote FE to help combat any rot. I've just got my fingers crossed that something "magical" will happen and I'll really get drawn into the game and the universe. You certainly seem to have the right people working on everything... just not sure what I think is missing... maybe its just me thinking in a negative context based on the original game.
I'm not in love with FE the way I was with GC2. It's a lot better than EWoM, and I trust it will get even better. But still, at the current beta level, it has that essential quality in a TBS game - I'm going to play just one more turn. One more turn. One more turn. One more turn. OMG it's 1AM.
Yeah, I'm wondering too why you are in such a hurry to show it to the critics... uhh, I mean press. What happens if you show an incomplete version (which it is) and then no-one even looks at FE as a complete game, even if has promise now? Don't you want to blow people away with how fantastic the "complete" game is? You might lose that chance if people start saying negative things about the incomplete version.
And what if a particularly narky member of the press is one of the ones to get the show-shopping bugs? I guess you could use vetted computers, but it is obvious there are some show-stoppers that still exist in a reasonable minority of gamer's computers.
Just be careful that you don't blow FE's potential out of the water by praising it too much before it is a complete and really fun game...
That said, is it a game that I expect I'll plan a ton at this point? No. I can't put my finger on it, but I feel like something is missing.
I agree. I think that part of it is that the things that were roughest about WOM are still rough. In some cases, they are rough in spite of obvious and vast improvement. Example: all the AIs field armies with similar troop types. This is waayy better than WOM where they all fielded max-armor troops with war staffs or mauls, but there is a noticeable lack of variety.
In other, more troubling cases, there is *no* improvement whatsoever between WOM and FE. For example, the AI does not cast offensive strategic spells-- only city buffs. Neither did it in WOM. Pathfinding around cities is just as terrible as it was in WOM, and what's worse is that I haven't heard a peep from any of the devs about this (my forum reading is not the most exhaustive, I admit).
It's things like these that make watching FE development a little ominous.
You'll see a game that can be played in many different ways, a game where the map and leaders have a significant impact, etc. -- all things missing currently in FE.
I remember how Elemental was rushed to make the marketing 'shelving' deadline, and hope history isn't repeating itself.
I wish I knew more about marketing ... I really do.
The way I currently see it, paying for advertisements on Critic review sites is the best bet ... while (due to digital distribution) the release schedule shouldn't be affected.
At least, I hope the release schedule isn't affected by any arcane marketing practices.
Advertisement and $$ to Critic sites = good ... rushing or delaying a launch based on some 'golden moment' = bad, at least from what I understand.
Do people really think that paying for advertising helps ratings? Someone should have told Duke nuke em Forever. That was advertised everywhere and still got panned. Or Crusader Kings 2 which wasn't and got a really high score despite being about as niche as you can get. Even a lot of the sims 'add-ons' are getting low scores despite huge advertising.
Maybe there was a time when adverts helped a game score more, but the loss of face when you are caught out mean that this is no longer the case. Couldn't it be that reviewers are actually less biased in their reviews and review a game as a stand-alone pice rather than comparing to a rose tinted vision of how that game should be? And it is this which leads to games scoring higher than a fan of a particular series would score the game?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
