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.
Well, I hope it is just a balance issue, and I hope they can get it right before release. I read Frogboy's comment in another thread and it sounds like they are aware of these problems.
I was thinking about Fall From Heaven and what made that fun, and I think it was that each faction played so different. Cool traits, different troops, different heroes. I wanted to start a new game and play as a different faction each time. With FE, it just feels like I make the same choices each time, which is basically to just make my heroes powerful and then trounce the world with them.I think it will get good reviews, because it does have that immediate cool factor, but replayability is low IMO. But, maybe I've played it too much and need a break.
I get this feeling all the time and have never played a game dependent on trained troops. I just don't think it's that big of a problem to fix.
The reason I don't play with trained soldiers is because heroes allow me to increase in power so much faster, because heroes allow me to explore in a way no trained unit does and because, and I think this is the key, because researching upgrades and training soldiers is SLOW. But Brad has acknowledged that the team is aware of both of those problems and that Beta 5b will be the first shot at addressing them.
The real question is do you think this imbalance (between the rpg side of the game and the empire side) is a design problem or a balance problem. I think it is a balance problem, but I'm not sure. I guess we'll find out as we continue to go through the beta.
My other suggestion, and I don't know if this would violate the feature complete state or not, is that scouts should be changed to allow them to at least pick up goodie huts. Only heroes can go on quests, but any old schlub should be able to pick up an axe and store it somewhere. That and proper balance would go a long way to bringing the sides in proper alignment and making real choices between play style viable.
I think some of you just need to take a break. How many months or years have you been playing it?
I played a little bit of the first public beta and then didn't try it again until beta 4 and it was like WOW. This is a great game!
I'm having a blast playing Beta 5. There are some pacing things that can be improved but if I had purchased Beta 5, I would have been more than satisfied.
the problems you encounter are all about balance
game is too easy, ai is not enough smart, some choices shadow all the other because they are too op etc etc
in fact since i started modding the game i enjoy much more playing, many times i end up losing too thats the challenge and replaybility i seek
also factions are very much different, the point is the same, when with a single sovereign you can conquer the world you dont care about unique traits, when instead you play a balanced game you start loving faction traits, unique units and weapons and stuff like that, because they matter
playing with magmar and slaves is quite cool for example but in vanilla magnar after 50 turns is lvl 10 and can deal 100+ dmg with 5 mana, or markin you never know what weapons he can build you never use armies because after 10 levels he can kill dragons solo
just let stardock time to work these things over
I think it's hard for some folks to appreciate incremental change.
As for whether heroes vs troops is a design or a balance problem, I think it's tough to design properly since the units are different, and it's really different for the AI to use those units. It can be done though. I think getting a high enough level champ should be a game winner, depending on the champ- if Ceresa gets lvl 4-5 death, she should become a monster.
I do think part of the issue is the AI needs to recognize when it's being out-tacticed and adjust. I know FE AI doesn't identify the player, but it should have something where if it notices a weaker side is winning battles, it assumes they are stronger.
We will just have to agree to disagree. While CIV 4 does have more options to it CIV V IMHO is more fun to play because of this
man civ expansion... IS ANOTHER GAME
you PAY the expansion
having ai working and balance is quite a joke because that should have been in the release
ofc you can always improve things, i know perfectly gaming industry work this way etc but there is a minimum and civ 5 didnt meet it
also you have to consider its predecessor, if you publish a SEQUEL the min standard is the old game, civ 5 was inferior in many aspect to civ 4 and im not talking about features like religion and stuff im talking of same features present in both games just weaker in civ 5
thats absolutely not acceptable
same you can say for civ 4, civ 4 BTS is a good game, civ4 vanilla was a mediocre game
That is the problem with game companies. Many times the people that made the game great leave. So you have the same name, but a weaker dev team. I still play GalCiv2:TA and wish for that UI to be imported to FE. It should be a simple concept, since they made such a wonderful unit and logistics UI less than a decade ago, but we still have to deal with so many annoy UI problems in this game. I think that is mostly because those wonderful UI designers were off doing other projects and WoM's UI was done by someone with less experience. So now they are back and have to upgrade an inferior concept, which takes forever as we have all observed.
But Civ V lost a ton more devs and got even more new ones. So I don't really consider them the same game, except in the basic concept and name. TBS square tiles and TBS hexagon tiles should be considered different genres IMO.
Civilization V is miles better than it's counterpart in replay value (the civilizations actually felt different to play from one another) and strategic combat, and the expansion fixed the AI incompetance, along with some other balance issues.
I think where people are giving praise to Civlization IV is in relation to all the available modular components. Heck the expansion Beyond the Sword came with several completely different game settings. If Civilization V had as big a modular community as Civilization IV did I suspect there would be nothing but ringing praise about the game. Sadly they haven't released the dll, modding is slow, and consequently it feels like a downgrade from it's predecessor.
While WOM had a different game team from our other games, FE is the same games team that made GalCiv:TA plus new additions.
I can't say I agree with the original poster, particularly with regards to our development process. We have a traditional QA/development process in addition to having public betas.
The public betas help us make a better game. And we appreciate the feedback we get. But something like 87% of the actual serious bugs are reported and handled by our internal QA process.
By contrast, the community is really good about identifying balance issues, UI issues, and subjective issues. That's why I think many people are comparing the beta of Fallen Enchantress to games that had multiple expansions. The goal is for FE to ship feeling like it's a v1.1 game.
I'm hoping that Beta 5-B (tomorrow's build) will feel like a "released game" and then everything after that is what you'd normally see in a v1.1.
We can talk about endless polish but I think people should go back and play the aforementioned GalCiv:TA. It's no where near as polished as FE is *now*.
I think what makes us all want to keep iterating on FE is because it's something really unique. I've been making games for twenty years and FE is really something different than anything I've worked on before. I feel like I'm in this living world and each iteration ties it all together just a bit better.
I got into some media trouble in my defense of Warlock. I love that game. But FE is a very very different game than Warlock. It's not trying to appeal to the same group necessarily (though I think most Warlock players will like FE just as I like Warlock).
you are talking like releasing modding tools and stuff was about to happen when a meteor storm destroyed their server
thats PART OF THE GAME, part of commercial choices of civ team, etc etc
btw thats not the only thing, i played 90% of my time civ4 vanilla
well im sorry for them but thats the price they have to pay
you want to make a movie and call it BATMAN?
its ok, that guarantees you millions more ppl than if you call it brickman but you have to pay a price, you have to keep the standard as high as other batmans or ppl will not be happy
same is for games, if you want to use a popular brand you have to keep the standard at that lvl, if ppl is not working for you anymore invest more money, hire better ppl, you have to find a way
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post. FE is turning out to be a fine game, in fact, I already have loads of fun playing the game. As to Warlock, I didn't much enjoy playing that game. BUT I do enjoy playing FE, and I have my daughter each time tell me what she wants for the sovereign traits and all. (That is what I refer to as playing on 4 year old difficulty (2 year old is much harder, as you never know what buttons they are going to press to crash the game)). I know that this game will not let me down (because I already feel I've got a good purchase on my hands). I look forward to the extra polished game that Frogboy is promising. Because right now this game feels like a 1.0 game from the olden days of game playing.
I love this comment! Thanks, Frogboy, for making my day, once again. (And, of course, thanks to all your FE design team, for all the work they have put into this game; which makes it possible for you, to make this kind of statement. )
Even if you don't perfectly hit the mark tomorrow, this continues to be a great effort ...
Hmmm...
I've played Twilight of the Arnor. Recently. And I can without a doubt say that it is far more polished than FE. FE is graphically superior (secret to videogame developers: space games and aliens are easy to render), but as a strategy game, GalCiv:TA is better balanced, provides more strategic options, has obvious counter strategies, etc. Twilight of the Arnor concepts worked. FE's concepts feel like they are unfinished. Really.
Compare TA's starbases to outposts. Starbases provided generic benefit to the surrounding area. They were an integrated and important piece of building your planets up. They each had upgrade paths that made sense with different focuses depending on your planet specialization. Outposts... They. Give more territory. And you can + attack or defense with them. Once. Where's my outpost that gives me GRAIN? Or gives me production? Or Research? Where's the upgrade chains for that? Frankly, I only use outposts for territory and then *completely* ignore the upgrades.
Compare TA's research tree to FE's. TA research was pretty differentiated per race. It had tech which allowed more colonization options. A diplomacy tree. Three distinct weapon lines and three distinct armor lines. FE? Oh, we'll just give you all that in one tech. Not that you'll care because go sovereign or go home. The civ tree and magic tree is pretty much where it's at. And by magic tree, I mean the very small part which gives you more champions.
Compare ship construction vs. unit design. Hands down TA wins this.
FE has spells, but there's A LOT of bad spells in there that will just never see use. Growth and shrink. Oooh. I'm sure glad I wasted a Life III getting that. At least every tech in TA saw use. Half the techs I get in FE just don't feel useful. You'd think I'd be all *woot* I just learned how to make my axes catch fire. But really why would I care right now?
FE has tactical battles. Yay that. But right now, they're just big stat comparison tools on a grid. There's pretty minimal strategy to them. Spells are this great opportunity to turn that tactical grid into an interesting minigame. Right now, it's like 2e D&D as a fighter. Walk up. Roll. Do damage.
Champion level up. Feels good at least. There's that.
City level ups. Feels like there should be more of it. But food max gimps it out at low levels for most of the game.
There's SO MANY features. So many opportunities for greatness. And none of it gets me going. It makes playing the game as a whole disheartening. For me at least.
I *want* FE to be so much better. I've been with the Beta for a while. I'm just not feeling it with Beta 5 yet.
I am gladdened by your warm thoughts of GalCiv.
But, in terms of *polish* (not raw content, AI, balance, etc.) I can't see how the two can be compared. The mechanics are largely hidden from the player. The game doesn't even have a real tool tip system. Why is my colony making X instead of Y? Trial and error.
I agree that TA has a ton more maturity behind it in terms of practiced game mechanics. But that's only because it's the second expansion pack to a sequel of an existing game. I can assure you, each faction getting its own unique tech tree is somethign I desperately want to put into an Elemental game at some point.
But in terms of polish - which game, upon loading, is going to feel like a "better" game to a new user? To me, it's obvious that FE is much better in that regard.
Just like in GalCiv, you'll see lots of post-release updates where we put in or tweak something that takes into account real player stuff. But at this stage, most of our feedback is coming from people who have put in 50+ hours into the game (if not more).
I can't even remember the last time this game crashed or had some real glitch. It's all tweaks, polish and balance and that's where I agree with many people here.
A single variable can wreck a game. And so great care has to be taken on balance.
I'm a little bit worried by that comment because not all of the bugs I've reported are in the .981 changelog. Maybe there will be surprises. Can someone please make me feel better?
You are correct that the UI is definitely more polished. The game system is also better from the ground up. In GalCiv you were still ascribing to the simulation vs. board game approach to gamedesign. Tsk tsk. Lessons learned in FE.
But I don't think it's a balance issue yet. You need to more fully implement existing features. To make them worth inclusion at all...
Well if by "released game" you mean the modern definition of playable but buggy and unbalanced, then sure. However if the next patch fixes the champion vs troops issue, and that's far from guaranteed, it will simply reveal many more serious imbalances. Late game in FE hasn't been tested all that much. I think there are 2-3 large patches needed anyway before mid to late game even resembles balanced.
I hate to be so negative without offering a suggestion, so here's my advice. Hark, and take heed! Or something. Also, lo.
Step 1:
List your features.
Step 2:
Make each feature AWESOME and integrated into the whole.
Step 3:
If you can't do that, or you don't have time to do it, cut the feature.
My attempt at the above:
----------------------------
Features:
1) Sov/Champion leveling. Awesome. Done.
2) City buildings. Pretty awesome. I'd mark as done. Some balance tweaks. Some buildings feel out of place.
3) Spells. Just needs some small balance work to be awesome. The hard work here is done.
4) Tactical Combat. I think this needs a *lot* of work. This should have been a whole beta phase, it's so core to the playing of the game. This is somewhat tied to spells. Use the gaps in spells to add tactical spells. Not damage dealers. Not percentile spells. AoEs stuns. Walls. etc.
5) Monsters. Also, making monster combat interesting. Giving monsters good abilities. Example: Mites. Might as well be fighting rats. Make them blink. Or split when you hit them into two. Every monster should be interesting in some way.
6) City leveling. On the right track, but feels like it could use more city levels, really. Or maybe I'm just not able to get them. It's so much work to actually get the grain to level up your cities. I'm not sure I've ever even gotten to a level 3 city in the last couple of builds. Compare the difference between a Civ 5 1 pop city and a pop 30 city. :-/ I don't expect thirty levels, but some range of strength would be nice. Even just a: "Hey would you like to add a grain, material, essence at this new level?"
7) Unit design. Awesome. Done.
8) Outposts. Not awesome, and no real plan to get there. Cut it. Outposts provide territory to get resources.
9) Resources. Oh, resources. I look back on resources and wonder if it was all just a bad idea to begin with sometimes. Maybe it would have been better to go the civ model. Probably too late to change that now.
10) Tech tree. Debate-able. Man, I hate the magic tree. I *hate* the magic tree. Civ tree is fun. I wish spell levels for sovereigns/champions were linked to the MAGIC TREE. How sensical would that be? And not to level ups. It'd give me a reason to research the dang thing.
11) Quests. ... Guys, I know you've put a lot of effort into it. But quests are not fun. I've wanted them to be fun. I know it's all extensible. And great. No, here's what it is. Go to A. Then, go to B. Fight something. I'm sure they could be made fun with a lot of effort. But currently not awesome. Cut it. Especially the noblewoman quest. Cut that twice.
12) Equipment/Loot. Sounds like you're tweaking this in the next release. Yay!
13) Diplomacy. Seems pretty good from what I've seen. Honestly, it takes a loooong time before I even wind up dealing with other civs. Maybe too long.
14) AI. Haven't played enough to determine this.
Interesting post. Don't agree with all of it but I agree with some of it and surely that is all one can expect on the intawebz?
But...
... I would not want to see the quest system cut. It just needs to be improved. I got a real buzz out of the quest which allowed me to build that theatre for the performers. Now OK this was mainly the reward, the quest itself was pretty mundane, but it helps demonstrate the potential for quests. I also rather enjoyed the arena 'quest' even though it was only a series of combats, it had me increasingly worried as the combats got harder and ground my forces down, when I finished the third one with 1 champion dead and the other 3 hanging on by the skin of their teeth, and then found out there was a fourth possible fight... well, I took the sword and bailed on the fourth fight but it was fun! OK the arena won't be nearly so scary the next time I do it but if you can get a great reaction the first time from the quest then that is more than sufficient to justify it IMO.
So rather than cut them I think double down and go big (as Derek says!) and make them cooler. Make them a great deal cooler, make them a major selling point.
Conversely I should say the master quest seemed pretty boring to me. I think quests need to deliver clear risk or interesting rewards (or tradeoffs?) to really be cool. Interesting writing is nice too but on its own it isn't enough.
Many times throughout WoM's and FE's development I've had this image forming in my mind. You have The Wheel (MoM) and you feel like you should re-invent it. So you go ahead and make it square. Then you figure that in order to make it "roll" you have to arrange carefully spaced, triangular holes in all the roads of the world.
Even if you make it work, it will be clunky.
Luckily much of this is behind us, by now. FE's wheels are now "octagonal" and manage to roll without needing a "converted" road. Problem is, some of the roads have been converted already and they're going to stay that way... at least until modding kicks in
@mastroego - If you just put fancy graphics on top of MoM, I think you would find the new game not as fantastic as you remember it. The times have changed, we want a lot more from games today.
Unique tech tree and unique units - for example Resoln is now the only "different" faction. There are many more improvments to be made - to outposts, to summoned units, more different city choices, maybe some flying transport units like the air galley in Age of Wonders and many more concepts that are waiting to be implemented
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