Hi there,
yesterday I got up again and played 6 hours of Fallen Enchantress... and I must say I'm a bit shocked about the state of the game. Yes I know this is still Beta, but the final Beta. I'll try to keep this short... but I really hope that the launch gets postponed. I've been here ever since I've heard of the original Element as it's kind of my dream game... so I really want this game to succeed.
Glitches everywhere
It's been the same story for me since the first Fallen Enchantress beta, glitches are everywhere. It got better, but still. At least I gotta comment on the stability, not a single crash for me on 8 hours of running Fallen Enchantress. But there is just too much of the little things: I can't read whole descriptions on traits when creating a new faction, I can't select multiple weaknesses, other factions just greet me turns after meeting them, some weird movement, still can't change the map color in the faction creation screen....
That's the little stuff, some of it can probably be fixed within less than an hour by an engineer. But there's also the more hardcore stuff. Often some improvements or buildings just aren't shown on the 3D map just to magically reappear a few turns later and in my last game I couldn't go on any quest more difficult than weak despite having researched all thos technologies. Oh and balancing. Don't get me started on balancing.
I filed issues for most of those problems just as I did in the past but somehow it doesn't seem to get much better which leads me to...
Questioning the engineering culture at Stardock
I'm seriously at the point where I start to question the engineering culture at Stardock. I mean what I've seen from patch notes and the game as a whole is that so many glitches made it in the game that should have never been there in the first place... like AI not being able to see goodie huts. What the hell? Seriously. I really don't think Test Driven Development (TDD) is practiced at Stardock, which right now is regarded as being unprofessional by many people. I know that it's hard with all the multi-threading and the graphics/GUI. But at least the game logic should be properly tested and TDD'ed from my point of view. Then again, I'm not a C++ guy myself but I know that tools for this exist and work.
It doesn't stop there... I mean essence is cool, I love random events and all the other new stuff. But from Beta release to Beta release I feel like the team is just like "Oh we got all those great new features! Check it out! Nahhhh those bugs everywhere... we'll fix them later." As the software grows larger it only gets more difficult to fix bugs. Imo fixing bugs should be the first thing on the agenda, only if those are reasonably clear new features should be added. That significantly reduces the amount of rework and also customer happiness. I mean seriously people, I like the new concepts, but I could have done without them. I would rather have a bug-free and more polished game.
Speaking of polish, truly great games (like Blizzard games or Guild Wars 2), those that get the aimed for metacritic score of 90+, feel like a finished product in their final beta. Fallen Enchantress is far from that. Too many little and bigger glitches, that turn people off.
Dude you're so negative!
Maybe I am. I just want FE to succeed. The Elemental franchise and Stardock can't take another blow like WOM. Conceptually this is a great game and a game concept I always wanted to have and play with. It's like Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic had a baby. Although all these glitches I had a wonderful time playing FE until I was way too powerful again and the quests didn't work. I just hope that the team recognizes that this isn't ready for launch this fall and imo not this year. Yes I know how GalCiv 2 worked out but it can't be like this every time. Take extra care with FE. Please.
TL;DR
I love FE, but it is way too unfinished and unpolished to even consider a release this fall.
A REALLY cool game intro.
Those things you mention are 'content' - new quests/events/spells/traits are pretty easily addable to an existing game without fundamentally altering the gameplay. I think by 'features' they mean things like the new city specializations or essence - so there shouldn't be any more changes to the game at that level.
But terminology aside, I do agree: while new content may not be as difficult to implement and test as new features, it still needs some testing and plenty of balancing. Since they're still adding lots of new content for us to test, I think (hope) we have plenty of beta testing yet to go.
There are numerous issues with this game, and to be quite perfectly honest I struggled to complete each game (of which there were about 5) after beta 4, and could not make it through a single playthrough in beta five. The most glaring issue being the completely random nature of the game.
Balance issues aside, I cannot believe that this is even being lauded as a strategy game, when starting position can be so randomly horrible that it can remove an empire from competion, that player strength is almost entirely based on random loot drops, player skills are determined randomly and even combat includes several rediculous elements that can instagib (see maul) your units or cause your planning to be pointless (string of impossible misses, super low/high damage, etc).
Random elements are important to provide replay value, but a game that is based off of randomness is not a strategy game. You may as well call it "Dice 2.0"
well game need a lot of balance, we all agree on that
but things like dmg and stuff is so easy to do, basically anyone who modded the game has already fixed all that, you shouldnt worry too much about that stuff
while some other mechanic i dont know if it will be good at release, like tactical ai, bugs, etc etc
The more I think about this, 90 is a pretty big number to get to, but I still think it's achievable. For some perspective. War of Magic got something like 52ish. Warlock got 70ish and Civ 5 got 90. I use these three games as they are all turn based strategy, they are games I have played a lot of, and they also give a good range of scores from 50, where WoM was, to 90, where we want FE to be. How does FE compare to those three games? First off, I think it's heads and shoulders better than WoM, I don't think we need to worry about a score of 50 for FE. If you read the reviews, the glaring problems with WoM were bugs, crashes, and half-ass features, in my mind, not really an issue with FE. So Warlock a 70 and Civ V a 90 are our big comparisons.
Compared to both games, I find FE's presentation to be the impressive, the art is really outstanding.
I find the depth of the game far superior, but I find the pacing very slow and movement clunky. I think about the number of turns a game of elemental takes compared to the other two. I can go hundreds of turns in Elemental with little difference. A hundred turns in Warlock might be the entire game, and a large chunk in Civ V. This doesn't bother me, but I can see it being a problem for many other people.
The number of options in FE is excellent, the best of the three. It only fails in one major way which is the map. But nation creation puts it above even Civs many options.
I find the maps in FE to be the worst of the three games. Their overall shapes, they rarely are anything that resembles actual landmasses. I really can't stand the limited ability to create new cities. I think the outrage against city spam, and the devs listening to it have really hurt the game more than it helped.
Cities ability to defend themselves, FE is the worst of this. They do develop better militia, but that militia is incapable of actually defending against anything. At best they can support a defense. I wouldn't have a problem with this if it didn't take such a huge amount of time to train or build anything, but this might be easily addressed before the game is released. To me, this makes this part game just feel poorly designed. Cities that have been building for hundreds of turns, is destroyed by some wandering monster in a blink of an eye. And you might see this coming for several turns, as the ability to send troops who are not already on a road might take decades(literally) of game time to get there. Spending the first 200 turns of a new city to create an army to defend it is boring as shit.
Troops. Warlock has an abundance of different troops of all types and races, but what it doesn't let you do is design your own and that gives FE the win, with Civ 5 having pretty bland units in comparison to the other two. But, where FE fails is how meaningless troops often feel. There are many monsters who kill troops with a single hit, and many heroes can destroy them almost as quick, if not quicker making designing trrops feel somewhat hollow.
I'll think of more later, just my thoughts for the moment.
IF WoM is 60, FE would be either 75~85, but not quite 90.
And Xia, it is not because dev listened to city spam problem. It is their solutions which are utterly broken that made matter far worse.
Whatever the reason, it's not fun. And that's the bottom line. It's a less fun game mechanic as if I want even three cities, I am rarely capable of having them remotely close or in a way that would resemble an actual nation.
On a business level, I entirely see why it should be released sooner rather than later. It's been 2 years already for a game promised as a "gift" to a big chunk of the target audience. Seriously, it's a miracle already, in this regard. And the game does offer a "great first impression" this time around, I mean, unlike EWoM. It might even be enough to get good scores, after all reviewers will just play it once or twice. Commercially speaking, releasing it soon might just work.
I don't see it being praised as a modern classic, though. That would really surprise me. I tried each Beta iteration once and got bored after a while. Honestly didn't even try 0.98 as the changelog didn't show anything significant enough for a new game.
I don't particularly feel a duty about reporting bugs either because most are simply left untreated. Yes it's right to prioritize but it can get annoying for testers (I reported a bug with my multimonitor set-up months ago: nobody cared. I understand it might not be common, yet at the same time I don't see why FE must be the only program in existence that reads my secondary monitor, the projector, as the main one. Another one of those baffling things this game does).
So, I mostly wait and debate a little over the forum. I welcome even a "hasty" release as long as it's stable and modders can do their magic. It will be interesting to see how much "soul" modders can inject into the game.
I think Civ V bribed about 10 of those metascore points. That game was not great on release in terms of bugs and a few major game mechanics.
To add to the discussion, what about the AI? To me, FE blows the other two away, though I only think that about Warlock from other people's posts about it. I am getting some really great results from tactical AI these days. Strategic AI is doing pretty well, but needs a little more refinement. I think in terms of the metascore, which is only reviewing the shallowest parts of the game, one can expect at least an 85 by release. That is assuming we get all the bugs fixed and some reasonable pace improvements.
Warlock had no AI to speak of. Their cities were rubbish (hidden by the fact that almost the entire town was razed on capture) and their units just moved really poorly. They weren't horrible at grouping up. At anything above the normal difficulty they simply auto-summoned units (a big cheat). Mostly it happened where you couldn't see, but sometimes you'd have 10-15 archer units appear out of nowhere. Archer units, of course, are so much simpler to play because you don't need to worry about counter-attacks or where you are when you attack.
OP has stated clearly and fluently that the game is in dire need of polish. I agree. I can play the game for 4 hours and run in to 30 things that need tweaking/changing/bugs out. That said, if they polished up all the crap occurring, the game would be good. And with a little bit of balancing, it would be great. If not 90 then damn close.
So. Let's see what Stardock does with beta5. I'm sure they feel the pressure mounting, the players certainly do if the forums are anything to go by. We're nervous that they'll falter, miss out on so much important polish that is sorely needed. I feel we should be wishing them good luck instead of despairing though.
I've been playing Warlock since few days.
I've started it as a more shallow version of FE, dumber, prettier.
It's VERY similar to civ v, with hexes, upt, selfdefending cities. Their research part is mystic - I can't find a clue to it. The UI is just more clunky younger brother of civ it has a feeling of unfinishness to it ...
and yet it is fun ... I don't see this game become MOM, or even fantasy Civ V I'll play few more games and that's it, but they are genuinely fun games. The heroes are meaningful, but not overpowered, the artifacts are special and you can have only three of them and not all of them fit (in FE I have dozens of things that stack +1 or +2 or something meaningless else)
The units cannot be designed, but they are interesting - you really want to have those ghosts for their melee, missle immunity (why don't we have immunitites in FE), you really want those trolls for their regen or flying ships for the bombardment of cities ...
The city building is rewarding - stack those pigs with great granary and build cheese cav on that mana node and cast a spell on the city (why do we limit enchantments with essence if the mana cost would and should be sufficient for that)
The quests drive the game forward, attack this city, kill that beasts, and give substantial rewards...
I usually play only one game of FE after each beta release. Maybe I shouldn't be part of it, I get so dispirited when I read those dozens of bug reports everytime, most of them the same as after previous beta (yes, I know it is the point of beta). and I don't feel the urge to start another game, after finishing single playtest, that confirm my old issues (clunky UI, map difficult to read, exploitable AI in tacticals, poorly developed AI sovereigns, dramaticaly slow performance, freeze after locking the laptop).
had I measure the depth, effort range of options, the FE wins by a small margin, the wider choices being technology tree on top of spell choice (though, we don't research spells anymore which is pity) and tactical combats, but if I add the fun factor to the equation, I see Warlock a superior game, which means that in my opinion the score of the FE will be above WOM's 52 and less then Warlock's 70.
What we need to focus on during this final development period is on finding the fun without introducing features but with bugfixes, tweaks and content.
What is the most fun and least fun things in FE? how to enhance the prior, and reduce the latter? five three things?
For me it's:
top 3
1. Heroes - I enjoy them being Sauron like, dropping troops like flies, facing dragons and beasts alike, I'd love to see them even more spectacular in tactical combat (throwing three squads of nine mites several tiles away in all direction with a single blow)
2. special troops like juggernaught - I lvoe how they squash low level troops like bugs, with their maul and splash damage
3. loot - I love finding things, having my hero enhanced with each found item
all of those need to stay, they are satisfying, fun, plain awesome, but they need also to be put in persepctive, if they can crush the troops like bugs, I want those bugs to be cheap, affordable, and posign a challenge if presented in large enough number. The main problem is lack of counters, heroes should fall to plurals, just like juggernaught to archers
down 3
1. magic - I hate how unspectacular it is, how AI can't use it, how predictable it is .... I want more spells, more choice and I want research it or at least be given a choice to take
2. armies - I hate how micromanaged must they be, how difficult is to get them, upgrade them, how expensive and useless they are, and how AI waste his resources on them
3. UI - I hate it passionately, all those clunkiness, small x, missing information (which resource was destroyed), windows covering vital map view (city level up), armies management, queue management, inventory management....
meh warlock was just so flawed i could play only 2 games and then deleted it
also not much differentiation or replaybility, it wasnt good at all apart few mechanics
magic was really boring, only creatures were "decent"
also city spam was so annoying the worst of strategy games, ever
thnx god they thought about some way to lighten the city building otherwise it would have been a game deserving 3/10 or so
anyway nothing really worth mentioning
its fun for 1 hours or so until you see all those ridiculous settings that makes no sense and understand they just didnt test the game at all
Large systems do not always lend themselves well to automated unit testing; games are a particular example of this. Due to the number of variables involved, enormous setup to test certain components or scenarios, etc., some or many parts can only be effectively assessed through traditional testing.
and we are more than happy to help you with that endeavour!
To add, with games you can of course also do things like have the AI play the game alone at max speed as well. But that's closer to a traditional test--you're just eliminating the human.
So Stardock's true plan is finally revealed...
Resistance is futile.
I intended to write a post about the bugs in 0.98 at some point. It strikes me that 0.98 is buggier than the last couple of beta releases. I've had all sorts of glitches, my sovereign's army stack disappeared at one point (it was still there, the tooltip said it was, but I couldn't select or move it until I restarted the game), one time I suddenly stopped being able to move any units, I could see them, select them but not move them. Double clicking to case arcane monolith more often than not auto builds it wherever on the screen you were double clicking, etc.
Meanwhile there are all the old bugs and glitches, many of which have been there since the first beta or even WoM. Of course some have been fixed, possibly many, it is human nature to not notice and credit problems once they are solved, but even so it strikes me that a surprising number still persist.
I think Stardock can make a good case that Beta 5 is the last beta required in that the core game is pretty decent now (I would still argue it needs more love but hopefully balance and more content is part of beta 5 and will help it - failing that there is always SeanW's mod!).
However if Stardock thinks this means they are on the verge of releasing the game then I'm not convinced. If Beta 5 is the bug fixing, balancing and polishing beta then I think it needs to be several times longer than previous betas. FE just doesn't have the feel of a A level game yet and as a software developer myself I'm pretty sure that there is more than a month's worth of solid work to get it there. Polishing software to a good level is a phase that almost invariably takes longer than expected, largely because 'the devil is in the detail' as they say.
Of course Stardock are a software development house, they probably know this. However the WoM experience (and quotes just before WoM release saying don't worry, bugs are really easy to fix, sigh...) encourage me to make darn sure by sticking my oar in with posts like this. For the same reason I think the OP, while slightly over the top, had a very good point.
It's also worth saying that I'm not sure Stardock have ever developed a game to quite the level of polish that I believe FE deserves at release (which is meant as a comment about FE rather than a criticism of the previous games that Stardock have developed). FE has the potential to be huge but it needs to feel really professional and finished, which is a high bar to set.
alright my own 2 cents. Magic is in serious need of addressing. I could bold this. put a period after each word. make it bright pink and neon. I would like to see the following addressed since I went to lengths to mention magic
1) Magic balanced based on player choosing 1 or two magic flavors at the most. Some people can take more but you only get so many creation points. Magic takes 2 points, everything else cost 1. This means that all the elements should have almost similar damaging type spells, enchants, curses, a way to shield damage of that type, various ways to dispel enchants/curses on your units and cities. I am all for each having some unique spells, but I don't feel the elements are exactly even.
2) Summoning made viable. Whether there's a path of the summoner or not. There needs to be something sustainable for mid game and late game. The initial warg you get will get destroyed hard in the mid game. When I chose summoner before I thought of a playstyle that would involve using multiple summons. You are limited to 1 per type. Familiar is generic, but it costs hit points and uses mana. Now I don't choose it (summoner) because it sucks later.
3) What to do about shard scaling? A) Tweak their influence based on factor of magic density selected at world creation B ) Allow for each level of magic school to count as a shard. C) More ways to convert shards to certain types. D) Life and Death shards are wild cards, they count as a shard for any type spell. Only reason I say this is the random number generator is a merciless god. Being a <insert magic type> mage and the opposite shows up next to your town just makes me want to cry as a player.
4) Negative traits to damage from each particular magic type. Maybe 1 pt for 25% more damage and 2 pt for 50%.
5) Look at existing racial traits if more damage type spells not added to water specifically (Ie #1 above gets ignored). Is damage to cold a penalty for the Quendar if there is zero risk of taking cold damage. Blizzard is brutal but what else you got ?
6) need to have magic items that add damage of all types. not just fire / cold. Same for resistance items.
7) related to magic tree, ranged staves are woefully inadequate. they are good when you get them, for a while. But lacking later. Suggestion here is have another tier or two of them. Need to have to make 'mage' type units better for mid and late game.
8) mage units could gain an additional + to attack after gaining x levels, that would make it worthwhile to keep 'em alive. Well all units could really. All I really notice is some hp...
EDIT: WOM is exactly why I am a lot more vocal about this game than before. Yes it's better, and we want it to be the best it can. Until certain things get done like some of what I layed out in additon to the champs > everything issues. I see that as major, while smaller bugs can get squashed yes. Tweaks and polish in this beta sure. I am not the first person to point things out like this. I am pretty sure there are others who laid it out better in other posts. I would also venture to say I won't be the last. I am going to keep pointing this out till either they get to it. Say they'll get to it or outright say why such things are or aren't needed. Too important for them to stay silent. I just don't want to see WOM 2.0.
As a professional software developer, I can say that for a project the size of FE, for where they are in the cycle the number of bugs is within what I would expect. Yes, there are lots of bugs but there always is. Your programmers can only fix bug so fast so the analysts prioritize them and fix them as they have time. Bugs that affect functionality and stability will always come first. Bugs that are display, prettiness or have reasonable work arounds come last in priority. Plus, up to this point there has been lots of content being added which means you're introducing new bugs and even (due to human error in library control) reintroducing bugs that have been previously fixed.
The fact that everything in the game basically works without crashing is what you want to see at this point in the cycle and I think everyone can agree that this is currently the case. Right now is the time for A: balancing and B: fixing lower priority bugs.
Bravo Stardock!!!
As an amateur software developer, I can pretty much agree with what Aerion said. For a project with the scope of a full-scale PC game there's going to be some triaging of bugs at first. My experience with FE is that the game is pretty stable in terms of crashes, even moreso than some recent games from other developers were after release. FE also has the most compelling and detailed hero gameplay in any strategy game I've ever played.
That said, I think polishing has the potential to make a big difference in metacritic score, since reviewers tend to notice the superficial stuff a lot.
I havent gotten all the way though this thread
Rather than be negative - let me simply say it needs a lot of fixin - that the role of a late beta
In terms of content - this is the richest game I've encountered especially in setting to suit yourself.
How much more do you want for about $40.
I just want it to work well
I'm a IT professional as well (I'm still at programmer at heart, I just get paid more) and I usually get called to help with troubled projects. Fallen Enchantress does NOT feel like a troubled project, but it looks very far from completion. It needs balancing and polishing, but I cannot see that happening for a November release. No way, no how.
It also needs content. The campaign can make or break the game. If I were called on a project like this, and were told that the project goes in production in November, come Hell or high water, I would say - put EVERYTHING into the campaign. By having a series of small maps, by being able to limit levels, traits and units, one could produce a satisfying campaign that will wow reviewers and give a pleasant experience.
As for the sandbox, it can be enjoyed, and it is charming for a certain kind of player. But I do not expect that it can be polished in time for a November release... It will have enough minor annoyances that it will frustrate a large number of people, and get terrible reviews...
But then, what do I know. I have not worked on a game since the '90s, and most importantly, I do not know enough about Stardock. All I know is, I have really enjoyed some of their games, and none has held me for as long as Fallen Enchantress.
I shutter to think about reviewers. They will probably play the campaign for six hours and check out sandbox for all of 6 seconds. As long as it loads properly, they score it at full points. Then those points get taken away for no MP on release. So most of what FE is doing now depends on the part of the game none of us has even played...
Mostly, I just want the game to be fun, which as it stands, as much as I want it to be, im not finding it so.
Each beta release that comes out I jump in excited and ready to go... I check these forums for updates all the time however as of yet the game just hasn't gripped me like many other 4x TBS games have and do.
In my latest game, the random map I played was EXACTLY square (could have just been unlucky)...
I waded through the corpses of about a million mites which frankly gets really tedious quickly noting they pose no challenge whatsoever for even a minor hero. Tactical combat seemed shallow and pointless after the first couple of battles however using auto resolve is like suicide for units. It just doesnt feel either difficult enough, or that the players actions will have any impact on the result - your either going to win or lose BEFORE the tactical battle even starts (due to hero, army size, ect).
I established a couple of cities that seemed to go ok, but not obvious as to what improvements were doing what, no real feedback as to how the city was doing, or more importantly how to improve its production/research/mana ect other than "build this building get +10% to blah". The game lacks interesting feedback loops in my experience.
I had a moment recently whereby I settled near some wolves which I realized could be used for mounts... only to find that I would need to spend about 130 turns researching before I could do so... that just isnt fun. Research can and should be proactive AS WELL AS reactive. Take the civ series (Ive played them all but mostly 4), you settle near a resource which may influence your decision to research the tech that allows you to utilise that resource... or you research something that will enable a very short term military advantage over your enemy, or in reaction to his advantage. This seems absent in FE due to the VERY long lead times on research in relation to the rest of the game. This would be fine if the rest of the game was similarly paced but it isnt so, units move fast, heroes become very powerful very quickly ect. Luckily these points can be fixed and may not be spot on for release, balance is an ongoing issue however this game is WAY off at the moment especially when you compare to betas such as Endless Space.
I admit some of the above points are due to my ignorance of the game however I don't and didn't have much trouble with other deep strategy games such as distant worlds, civ 4 , europa universalis and one of my favorite games of all time bar none, galciv2.
Unfortunately nothing in this game SO FAR drives me to invest more time to get into its deeper mechanics..
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