I respect the hell out of the guys over at Space Sector and I just wanted to make sure you all saw this article. Very well written and really sums up some of the remaining issues, while remaining very positive:
http://www.spacesector.com/blog/2012/08/elemental-fallen-enchantress-hands-on-beta-preview/
I searched for it here in the forums, but couldn't find it. Sorry if this is a repost.
Make sure you read the comments, too.
Yea, it's a great review. He really went deep on that one.
Ouch. Interesting to read peoples comments at the end too.
Any of the devs read it yet?
Really is a very well written article. I hope that Froggy and the like read it.
I am sure they read it. Probably as annoyed as I am that the modding was not mentioned. Modding is 90% of the draw for this game. But the article was still great if you ignore my bias.
Modding is only important when the reviewer is a modder. If the reviewer doesn't know the first thing about modding, their review would be useless.
I never even considered modding for this game at first.
For me it was MoM v2.0.
The fact that FE can be so easily modded means I'll be that much closer to my MoM.
I'm sorry, brother Sean, but I really don't think that 90% of the draw for this game is modding. I have never used a mod and may never use one. I have always been a vanilla player of EVERY SINGLE GAME I'VE EVER PLAYED, save for FFH. And this game is no different.
I'd be willing to bet that these guys are more interested in their vanilla game being judged than its modability. Just sayin. I hear your mods are fantastic, though, so I might check them out one day...
And I would still say you are missing 90% of the game. That said, the 10% you do see is quite nice.
Yes and No. Using a mod and making a mod are two different things. I would use a mod, but I do not have the time, patience or skill set to make one. I can come up with ideas and maybe suggest implementation, but that's about it.
So, E:FE is even more fantastic because it lets people mod the game, even noobs if they care to learn how, but it's original fantastic-ness comes from the game itself. At least, that's how I would interpret that article if he had added the byline mentioning the modability aspect of the game. By the way, I remember seeing some crazy additions to E:WoM a while back.
It all depends on perspective. I see the engine as the best thing about the game. In fact, most of development time is spent on engines. Much less is spent on the actual game mechanics. So when I say 90%, I am talking about the engine's design, the fact that pretty much nothing is unmoddable and the limitless content that can be added by the user. You just don't get this in most games.
I suppose it's the same as people who think babies are cute, while I see them as really crappy adults.
Sure, I can see where you are coming from. I understand exactly what you mean about the engine, and you are right, that's monumental, but unfortunately, I think most people don't delve that deep and all they care about is the surface experience.
How is E:FE better than E:WoM, engine wise?
I disagree with your analogy by the way, a baby is just a baby, cute or not.
WoM engine had terrible compatibility problems. I think it is called Kumquat. They did most of the compatibility stuff while developing for FE. They did alot of reworking and got rid of things like pixel shader 2. I know there are some posts by Brad about it somewhere. Basically, the engine development was the major impeding factor of WoM, but is now the major contributing factor of FE. Funny how that works.
Hey all. I'm the author of that article. I'm glad to see that some of you have enjoyed the article and felt it was worthwhile. While it is impossible to cover every single aspect of such a huge game, as Fallen Enchantress really is, I tried my best to include nearly everything someone would need to know about the game at this stage.
I realize that modding is a large part of what Fallen Enchantress is for some people. As someone who was the primary designer and coder on a rather large conversion mod myself, in Mount & Blade using Python, I am well aware of the capabilities modding offers to a game. I barely played the unmodded Mount & Blade once I started getting heavily into modding, so I do know where you are coming from. The fact that Fallen Enchantress can be modded relatively easily is a great feature, no doubt about it.
At the same time, the beta stage and a preview in general is more about where the game itself is now and where it needs to go. I don't feel like players should need to apply mods to have a quality experience. For that reason, I do not install mods or even look at them before a game is released. I expect the game developers to provide a worthwhile experience out of the box. I am also not aware of any mods that fix some of the bugs and other engine issues I mentioned experiencing, so time will tell.
When Fallen Enchantress is released, I will be reviewing the game and modding is certainly going to be mentioned. Depending on the issues that may or may not remain, I may mention the game's modding flexibility as a workaround or solution to balance or tweak the game to their own liking. Modding alone can not overcome some of the issues being experienced right now in this beta 4a stage.
Very well written, Kardio. Good to see you on here. And an excellent point about modding. I look forward to reading your words on the final game, when it does come out. Big fan, by the way...
Nice to hear from you. I really did like the article and the awareness it spawned of the work so far. To be fair, modding is not officially even opened at this point in the beta. I can see why you would want to focus on progress. I might ask that when you do a release article for the game and then maybe a post-release report, you might mention some of the day one mods that are scheduled to be out by then. It would seem a big selling point to people that are looking for long term content. There is already alot of great stuff coming from us modders.
Nice Find, DevildogFF ... and thanks for sharing!
I really do think this is one of the best PC strategy game reviews that I have read. IMO, it is remarkaby detailed, and genuinely fair. As a result, it is also genuinely helpful/useful. As seanw3 suggested, it will help to build early awareness (more sales !), and that in turn should further incentivize Stardock to keep plugging away at it ... and refining it. Pretty much of a win-win.
Finally, from my perspective, having been so immersed in the E:FE Beta for the last few months (and reading these forums), it is pretty interesting to get an "outside view" for a change. Nice "pick-me-up" on a slow Tuesday ...
I found the article highly useful. Today I spent more time on the perf. Our biggest performance hit remains the outlines on the map (part of the art style). It can be turned off in the display options but we are still trying to find ways to improve the visual performance.
Ironically, the outlines are designed to make the game visually look "simpler" -- which it does. But it is the single biggest performance hit in the game.
If the visual outlines are done as a standard post process, then it's expected that the GPU perfomance hit should be relatively consistent (ie, independent of scene complexity). And I suppose also that the GPU in this game isn't being taxed very heavily overall.
However it sounds like most people and the reviewer of the article are getting noticeable slowdowns late game, presumably when things start to get a bit cluttered, which actually sounds more like a CPU thing. Unbatched draw calls being the most obvious one (because of swappable meshes for the characters?), but it could be anything else like AI etc. Just hazarding a guess.
I solved my slow downs late game by adding lots of monsters early game. Then the speed is equal as monsters are replaced by armies.
haha
Sincerely~ Kongdej
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