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.
(...)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.
(...)
I love the open betas. Good way of instant customer feedback and really a big thumbs up. Maybe my original post seems more negative than I actually am about the game and Stardock - I was kind of frustrated since I was really when I saw the projected release date in fall. Believe me, I'd love nothing more than to be proven totally wrong about what I wrote. (In the context of Fallen Enchantress that is, not life as a whole of course). And I probably gotta iterate that I'm still very positively surprised by how Stardock managed WOM - I've never seen anyone giving out free games and huge discounts in response to a bad game. So again.
That said, I believe that traditional QA/development processes are dead wrong and inefficient. It's like with my obsession of clean code, many people don't get it until they work with it and learn to appreciate it. The first paper about "Waterfall" (which you gladly aren't doing), the one that allegedly invented it, actually detailed how bad it was and how it could be fixed. Like more than 40 years ago. But yeah this a discussion for another time and another place. To each his own.
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'm really looking forward to the release of this build and hope that it'll be awesome and prove me wrong.
Maybe I worded my post badly, my concerns aren't mainly with polish. It's with the severe bugs I encountered and the memory leaks. I was just frightened by all the bugs I found and the real unpolishedness I found in such a short time period. There ought to be more. There ambitions (90+ metacritic score) and release date (fall 2012) are just not combinable with each other for me.
Cheers + another for people from the dev team actually replying to posts like this, which I really like about Stardock as well. Being close to the community. Please keep it that way.
Of course it needs to be improved. Save the girls and marry her - activate the dinasty system. Get the dragon to serve you. Get the blueprints for a new weapon/magic item for your troops. Get a flying transport unit. Quests should be tied to rewards that are precious compared to the normal tech tree or xp grind.
One must take great care in weighing the value of forum feedback.
If you go to the Sins of a Solar Empire forum, you'd think that Sins Rebellion was a total disaster, a mess, unplayable, etc. I actually had to step away from reading that forum because I was getting so annoyed with it.
Whether we released FE tomorrow or a year from now, you will always have people who think it's not done. Every time there's an article on a game site about Galactic Civilizations II there's someone promising they'll never buy another game from us because we "never finished" Twilight of the Arnor.
Games are never truly finished. They just eventually ship. The challenge is to make sure that the game reaches that magical critical mass of excellence. Once you do that, you can calmly evaluate the different requests coming in and start implementing them.
On the internet, the most negative people are also usually the loudest. I got pretty discouraged from my last major foray into modding partly on the basis of forum threads that consisted of one or two people offering extreme negativity in what was, in retrospect, probably mostly attention-seeking.
Most of the people posting here seem to like the game enough to care about it, and seem more like they want reassurance that it is being tended to lovingly, rather than just trying to get attention by being pessimistic.
@Frogboy. I think this game is moving in the right direction and with good speed. Since first impressions are vital, it is important to get the buglist down to a minimum before release. People have a tendency to take the first vocal comments as truths and never adjust that opinion. Therefore I hope for a few more bug/balancing patches before release. Dont rush it in the final stretch of the development.
A good example is the disappearing cities/resources/AI empires. This bug is easy to spot and will make people claim that the whole game is buggy. These kind of errors must not be there when you release the full version.
For me FE is already game of the year based on the time I have spent on it, but I also see a lot of potential for more fun and improvements.
It's all about replay value and the test of time. For example, I am now playing Age of Wonders:Shadow Magic, but I'm not playing Elemental:War of Magic ( and I purchased the limited edition of E:WoM, and I like the unique dinasty system very much ). I know it's far more dificult to have a fully 3D game, and I welcome the baby steps in the right direction ( the air elemental is now actually flying - yay ). I am here to support another try after FE , with more replay value, so if another purchase is needed to import the many variables of MoM and AoW:SM into the engine I will gladly send more cash to Stardock, just please be honest and tell us what to expect from FE ( content lockdown I guess ) and from the game after FE.
Well the CIV4 Vanilla is not a very fun at least not any where near as fun as CIV V. What made Civ 4 replayable was Dereks mod (the Fantasy one I forget the name now) But even then I never enjoyed the combat aspect of the game. But I love how CIV 5 handles combat. And with Gods and Kings the AI got much better.
You know Brad I have read many comments over the last two years (has it already been that long) that you have written referring to GalCIV and many of those lead me to believe that you do not realise just how awsome GALCiv:TA actully was. That game was a masterpiece with only two problems 1. No Tactical combat. 2. No MP but other than that you made the true aire to Masters of Orion 2 (MOO3 was a POS)
Now As far as FE goes I have to agree with the previous poster it does not feel anywhere near 'finishes/ polished' for many of the same reasons he mentions. I still don't get that feeling of "Oh I will just play one more turn....ok maybe another turn' and so on like I do with Galciv:TA, Warlock, Civ 5, AOW:SM etc. At least not yet. But if the current game is the one you feel is the release version then I can only hope that some day we will get to the FE equivalent to GAlciv:TA.
Yea, the bug you mention is supposed to be fixed for today. But that would be an example of a bug that we wouldn't allow the game to ship with.
On the other hand, a "Bug" that is that Karavox in tactical battle didn't cast Haste on his captured Juggernaut unit but instead cast berserk on it, would not be something we'd consider a "Bug" by our standard but is increasingly representative of the reports we're getting.
Would you like me to sing you a lullbuy?
I really appreciate the kind words on Twilight of the Arnor.
I guess what I mean by polish and what you mean by polish are different things. When I say polish, I mean, user experience.
For example, many people think Diablo 1 was a better game than Diablo 3. But Diablo 3, imo, is much more polished.
With FE, we go out the door with something truly solid. Something more solid than anything we've made before. It's a fantastic basis for expanding upon in the future with LH and EOS and beyond.
There was a discussion the other day on another forum about the "Best space strategy games ever" and GalCiv never came up because they had never played Twilight of the Arnor. So their memory of GalCiv was Laser I, Laser II, Laser III, etc. No influence wars. No rally points. No terror stars. No unique tech trees. Ugly graphics. etc. BEcause that was what GalCiv II had.
By Twilight of the Arnor, we had done so much to make it a better game.
What I think makes Fallen Enchantress so special, and this is just me speaking here, is that unlike GalCiv, FE opens its universe up to everyone. Sure, in GalCiv you could design your own ships. But in FE, people will be able to do amazing things that right now can scarecely be imagined. I don't mean just mods, in the traditional sense. I mean that we all will be able to expand on the experience from the get-go.
That's unlike with GalCiv where users had to wait years for us to do it with expansion.
That's why FE having such a solid, polished base is so important ad why we've made that such a focus. Now, with beta 5, the balance, bugs, UI improvements, etc. get addressed.
So to ramble. The point being, I hope people understand two things: 1) FE is a very solid, polished, good game and 2) Unlike our other games, FE is far more open to user generated content which means that people won't have to even wait for expansions to increase their replayability beyond what we have in day 0. I think in the long run, these two things are going to be what people remember.
GC2's AI is something I just havent seen since. Neutrals played like Neutrals. Evils played like evils and good's played like, well you get the picture. The badge/achievement system gave a reason to play online single player games (with no reloads) and beating the game on anything above challenging was extremely rewarding. Overall I have such fond memories of playing GC2 Dread Lords and then TA that I purchased FE on that basis alone.
I agree with an earlier poster in that FE factions dont feel as differentiated but I also take the point that this is a game without expansions.
Goodluck and looking forward to seeing this game develop into the gem we all want it to be...
@Frogboy. Just dont forget to give us Umber back one day!
i repeat
mods arent the game but also are made possible by the game
while i didnt use much the modding abilities of civ4 that was PART of the game
so whoever enjoyed civ4 mods can thank civ4, the core game that allowed ppl to mod so well
so saying "derek mod was so good" is equivalent to saying "civ4 was good because it allowed to mod"(and also derek was good to make such a mod)
for the combat i totally agree, that was the best improvement in civ 5, a great idea and a great realization
but still, multi was unplayable, and ai wasnt able to combat... so was a feature for no one basically
yes but having 90% of ppl saying it or having 2% of ppl saying it is a bit different dont you think?
basically its like a government said "ehy we could provide 1 M jobs but we have 1M and 100 ppl unemployed so we rather not do it because there will be anyway someone complaining"
cmon...
well we all know games are like this, but thats not right
this is an abusing way of handling things by all game companies
the problem is in the actual world there is too much money in game industry so its hard to make someone really pay for their mistakes
also even here there are many degrees of "unfinished"
civ5 was way below the standards, dragon age 2 was totally uninspired and poor, diablo 3 was a beta released
its not all the same
I don't want to see it cut, I want to see it awesome. But they've been there a while and I'm not seeing a whole lot of more interesting stuff there. Instead it's still pretty repetitive blah. With a choice at the end. Maybe it'd be nicer if there were (always better) options at the end of these things like:
"[Life] Use your healing spell to heal the dude."
"[Plate mail] Block the attack with your heavy armor"
Etc. You'd need lots of them though to make sure there was always something appropriate and always something new to discover with different heroes. Kind of like the Bioware or FTL (to use a more recent approach) model.
In response to Brad's comments , more philosophical than FE related.
Warlock- it was a good game for what it did, I just didn't think it did enough for me. It was worth what I paid for it, so I can't complain too much. I do think FE would have benefitted from hexes.
As for TA vs FE, I still think, as of the current build, Twilight wins but barely. Twilight was an A- game in my eyes, FE, as of the current build is a B+. If the balance fixes hold true, I can see it surpassing Twilight , and the only TBS that are A's in my eyes are Civ4 and Alpha Centauri. Stardock's games have just come up slightly short, I often call Twilight a "near-classic". FE has potential to be classic, but I think it will need an expansion to do so. Civ 4 took modding to be a classic (Wolfshanze mod) Giving each faction their own tech tree- that's what brought Twilight up from good to near-classic, I think it's one of the first things that should happen in an expansion. I'd also like to see quests give tech tree branches, maybe discover gunpowder, new forms of entertainment or moneymaking, or discover a new line of magic.
That said, a B+ is like an 8.8-9.0 review score, and I don't think any company would be unhappy at a score like that, so the game is probably closer along than I think.
I think late game balance problems are inevitable, ultimately the game has to be imbalanced for there to be a winner. Also, I think you have to take the fact that most player-lost games don't make it to the late stage, that's one reason why late-game can feel unbalanced.
I can't understand why this has not been addressed or even commented on by the Devs.
See, I think the argument you're making leads to the exact opposite conclusion. First impressions *count* now more than ever. GalCiv:TA *is* a great game. It was not as good of a game when it released, but it was still pretty fun in the intial release stage. Was it a great game at release? No. Probably not. And that's why it's not in that list. But then it was released in a different environment.
The internet's judgement (of reviewers and users) is swift and merciless these days. Civ 5 is *currently* a very good game, but it will *never* live down the terrible state in which it released. (I'm sure Firaxis is crying into their piles of money, but they should be concerned about fracturing their player base like that).
You can't release FE unready and expect it to succeed over time. If it's unready, the reviewers will compare it to WoM, and it'll be done. A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.
FE isn't a bad game. But it's definitely not a good game *yet*. We can smell something good in the oven, and we're hungry. It just needs more time to bake.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/432123
"When monsters conquer a city, they destroy it but they no longer raze it"
I think this clearly lays out the current problem with programs being released before they should be. If the vanilla isn't stimulating enough, no expansion or update can redeem that. While some of the more driven players explore these later options, most of the gamer base does not and relies completely on the initial comments from reviewers.
AND Master of Orion 2 !
Okay, sorry, now I am being self-indulgent ... but, hey, one has to give into these impulses, occasionally ...
BTW, 2 out of 3 ain't bad ...
I understand hearing people complaining still about the state of the game can be annoying. We don't do it out of spite. I personally am just giving my honest, unfiltered opinion.
I like a lot of the game concepts, I really, really like the graphics (fresh and unique), I praise moddability, I love the cloth map and many other things. It's not even about FE being "completed" or not. It's just that I don't agree about how some of the features have been conceived and/or implemented and I find the "final mix", for some reason, somewhat unappealing after the first playthrough.
It might be just me, or just a few. And it might be just a balance issue. Can't say for sure. Sure enough, testers were onto something when it was about WoM. But I'll be happy if the game succeeds at launch (Stardock would deserve it anyway) and manage to attract a large modding community.
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