Greetings!
For those of you not familiar with our Elemental game universe here it is in brief:
Elemental is a fantasy world made up of many different civilizations vying for control the world. There is a great deal of history and lore to tap into and we decided to begin making games in this world back with 2010s release of War of Magic. Unfortunately, when it came out, it was pretty buggy and got some negative reviews. We fixed the bugs but the game itself was still pretty meh.
So in 2012, we released the second game in the Elemental universe called Fallen Enchantress which was good and we're pretty proud of that game. We followed it up with an expansion pack called Legendary Heroes that further refined the Fallen Enchantress game mechanics.
We do intend to follow Fallen Enchantress with a third strategy game in the Elemental universe but it'll be very different from either War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress as it focuses largely on, well I can't really go into that yet.
When Fallen Enchantress was released, we discontinued War of Magic. I don't think it's available for sale anywhere anymore. My question is, would anyone be interested in us revisiting War of Magic in the future to release a kind of "War of Magic: Director's Cut" or something where we refined the WOM game design, updated the visuals.
WOM had some interesting game mechanics such as a pretty big emphasis on a dynasty system and a number of other distinctive mechanics that could be refined further.
Let us know what you think. Would we be opening up "old wounds" or would be restoring faith to those who believed in the original "not-MOM" concept?
I would love to see a new WOM, but....
I played WOM original (not so much the subsequent patches) far more than FE! I think for my own taste, the direction the game went in with WOM patches and FE, it was allot like 'whack a mole' .... knock a number of game aspects on the head - both good and bad, then an equal number of new moles pop up - both good and bad. Or in other words, one step forward, one step back! The net result is that the game is not really getting better.
To sum up: the impressiveness of the new good/changed aspects of the new game version, for me, did not make up for the lost/changed good aspects that i liked in the previous versions.
I think the reason for all of the above, is that there seems to be a particularly large lack of consensus in the game community on what to do with the game and how to make it good?? 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' never a more appropriate use for this saying have i ever seen!
Given the above, i have to assume a new WOM would only disappoint me as well.
LH is a typical 4X game, similar to Civ4, where Xpansion is punished/balanced/countered by economic penalties. WoM (as I understand it) took a very different tack -- rewarding staying small. A small empire/kingdom (in terms of # of cities and/or champs) could still be powerful, having a powerful sov cast powerful anywhere-on-the-map spells from her/his capital. There's no 'reward' for staying small in LH/Civ/etc., and in fact there's a huge penalty (I know, I've tried to stay small in LH and it's not feasible except on possibly easy difficulty levels).
Being able to be small yet powerful allows significant game play choices and replayability.
When I think of War of _Magic_ I don't think of a huge empire (city number-wise), I think of powerful spellcasters. LH is a great game, but it's more a 'Civ4 with spells', which is fine, but your original concept for WoM is also fine, is also uncommon in the genre, and is much missed by me.
I was dubious until this clarification. That does sound interesting.
The original WOM could be summed up like this:You had your sovereign. He was a channeler which meant he has magical essence.Essence could be spent on: (a) Reviving land to build cities on OR ( Turning people you found on the map into Champions (you would not have enough essence to do both well).There were NO questsYou could marry and have children which would, if you were willing to hold off on using up your essence, result in more powerful children.You could use children to create alliances by betrothing them and this was the primary mechanism for winning via alliances.The graphics were supposed to be cell shaded looking (I had just finished Zelda Windwaker and loved that style)There was no unit design. You could only change weapons weapons (piercing vs. cutting vs. blunt).Each race had hard-coded units tied to their own, unique tech tree (even to this day, each race can have its own tech tree, the code supports it). Because the units were pre-designed, they were supposed to be very different. The Quendar were evil elves, the Trogs were basically Orcs and so on.The battles were supposed to be simple, RTS maps with lots of units. This got changed because of the graphical performance problems.Cities were 1 tile.What happened is that Stardock didn't, in those days, have a concept of a dedicated "designer", producer, etc. We all would put in stuff and while I had the original concept (shown above) I was working on Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire for most of the time and so additional features were added to the game -- MANY of which were taken out....
This would have been a great game ... in 2009. Now we have Warlock, which seems to adhere to the same design that you discribe above (ok, not the RTS part). And was very well received. And is releasing part 2 in early 2014.
If you want to try your design above, you need to make sure it is different enough from Warlock and at least as good. Or it will tank again, because there is a f***ton of games coming that look like to be trying the same as above.
I am torn. For one i would like to see more games from Stardock, but on the other side i still think you could spend the resources better on the games already in development.
Hm. Why dont you save that money, license Nitrious (or whatever the name) and develope the above with that? The RTS part could be grant, if that engine provides, what it promises. Maybe (wet dream incoming) make it like Kohan in the E:WOM unsiverse?!
Some of the ideas in the original game were undoubtedly interesting, but at this stage I think resources would be better spent either bringing the best of them into Legendary Heroes via paid for expansions, e.g. the Dynasties expansion, or just designing a new game from scratch. In the short term (and especially bearing in mind how burned you got last time with a very ambitious new game) I think expansions to Legendary Heroes are the way to go. To take the obvious comparison, Civilization IV and Civilization V both introduced major new gameplay elements in their expansions. I think major expansions for Legendary Heroes would sell for multiples what normal DLC sells for if the new gameplay elements were significant enough.
Warlock isn't the main competition next year- it will likely be AOW3 instead.
This is another reason why I don't think this is a particularly good idea.
I'd rather see Stardock concentrate on GalCiv3, and plan a new fantasy IP for 2016 or so. (Fall From Heaven remake might have name value, or a full-fledged sequel. I wouldn't mind some silly faux-Japanese fantasy strat game either)
Nothing I would buy. Entirely up to you.
Is there any reason NOT to use Nitrious for every single strategygame you're gonna do..?
I find it completely uninteresting. I say focus effort and time on something new, or perhaps on making LH even better.
I would rather see LH expanded with Multiplayer / Cooperative multiplayer where players control the same Empire but different "Sovereigns" than any time being wasted on a by now dated product.
Why not release en Epic Director's re-cut that has the E:FE-LH core game with WoM gameplay added in as a bonus. Minor civs, dynamic looking cities, the dynasty system and whatever else was cut out when E:FE was made.
More 4x games. - full stop
I have to disagree. While the lack of integration and polished was a large part of what dragged WoM down, and while this suggestion addresses these points, other important shortcoming was a lack of focus.
Compare reserach in Civ and MoM to Elemental: Civ is about civilization building - tech research, better options from tech and a feedback cycle leading to even more research are a large part of the game. MoM abandons the tech progression in favor of spell research, which does not have that virtuous cycle and also has much less internal coherence. Elemental has experimented with having both without reaching a state where either is considered good. I consider this situation not a failing by Stardock, but a fundamental problem of trying to do two similar, but totally disconnected things at once - what I've called lack of focus above.
The dynasty system would add another system of long term effects, with the additional problem of those effects being subtle and hard to predict. Major effort will be needed to turn it into a viable and fun system on its own, to say nothing of integrating it with the existing systems: From which other systems would you suggest to take away the player's attention, and with a lot of systems vying for attention, how should the player have enough fir any of the to make real decisions instead of sying "whatever"?
I think this might be a corollary of Derek's "Go big or go home" - there's only so many big systems you can have before they turn out to be the seven little dwarves.
A Navies DLC pack could be a sensible addition to LH - adding the seas as terrain instead of its current role of pure barrier doesn't detract from the expansion mechanisms that are already an important part of the game.
On the other hand, Dynasties should IMO be a large part of a much more diplomacy-focused game, and Minor Empires would be a natural fit for that. I hope it would be making diplomacy as effective for the expansion of power as military conquest. The feeling of such a game world could be anything from middle-ages Germany (1) to A Game of Thrones (2), all of them with enough factions that the player is weaker than a majority coalition of the others.
Such a game will need an excellent diplomatic AI, and while Brad and his crew might be the best to write it, it may be even beyond them.
The original WoM concept seems to go in this direction. I don't think it goes as far as I have outlined here, but that may well be what makes it doable without heroic effort in the AI department.
(1) Cliche: relatively peaceful. An attacker suffers large diplomatic penalties up to having war declared on him by all others. Use diplomacy to get others to attack you, then you are right to conquer them.
(2) Cliche: War is (almost) open, only diplomatic meetings are (mostly) exempt. Use diplomacy to gang up on somebody else but you. Don't be afraid to do a real instead of a diplomatic backstab.
mmilleder,
Nothing ventured nothing gained. My thoughts on Brad and his team's efforts to this point is that they've had a LOT of things to perfect, so they weren't able to focus on any one thing exclusively.
However, now that E:LH is more or less ironed out (still a few bugs to kill, but quashing bugs goes with the territory), they can focus on individual aspects. The DLC concept actually encourages this. Brad can allocate the entire E:LH team to one 'aspect' at a time. Note the recent DLC for Undead.
If the entire team focuses on the Dynasty concept exclusively, I have full faith in their ability to design a compelling game dynamic when they are done. And the payoff isn't just for E:LH. Some of the groundwork here (vastly improving Diplomacy) has payoffs for the GalCiv franchise as well. That being said, this isn't something to just 'crank out' on the spur of the moment. It needs to be thoughtful, and the time taken to 'do it right'. E:LH players aren't going anywhere, and I think they would rather wait a few extra months for a killer DLC release, rather than jump immediately on an 'afterthought' DLC.
Of course, the time invested will affect the price of the DLC, but if Dynasties are done awesomely, it'll be worth the expense. As I said, this ALONE could take Elemental to the next level. We've heard multiple statements now about the Elemental franchise falling just a fraction short of it's potential. It's a very good game, but it can always get better.
No.
It would be better to make completly new game of the similar type.
just make the rts thing with your oxide engine
You've spent enough time on Elemental games imo. Time to look to the future. Unless you want to add the dynasty system to LH or something.
No. Please don't waste your time on this old product. Keep working on Legendary Heroes, especially the UI. I'd rather see you redo the UI than re-invest in an old product that got horrible reviews.
Without knowing what the next Elemental game will be like and how it differs from LH and a new WoM this question is kinda easily misunderstood and hard to answer. Really we the community can't properly answer it with the information we have. How would a new WoM game differ from LH?
I would go in for a newer WOM if it brought a large scale to things. WOM when released--and even the much better FE--just felt too small. Battles with hundreds of thousands of participants, cities that feel like more than walled villages, etc. while still allowing for individually powerful participants would be ideal. I wanted The Silmarillion, and got something much less.
I'm interested in MoM 2.0
I'm cautiously optimistic that this will be it: Worlds of Magic
I did the first kickstarter, it's going to be interesting to see what they come up with. They say the right things most of the time but there are some bits which really puzzle me such as using the D20 ruleset for tactical combat. If they pick the right concepts from D20 then maybe that will work but otherwise it seems like a really bad idea for a strategy game. We'll see I guess.
Dude! You need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.
I read the forum more than I play the game. And I love the game.
Today when I got off work, and actually for the past couple days, I've been checking the Journal section for some of your knowledge about anything related to anything. You could tell me about your wife and kids and I would read that!
I know you cant do a massive PR campaign for your next game, but the one you have now LH is awesome. Sure bugs pop up and issues pop up, but you have to be the BEST DEVELOPER I have ever seen, or read about.
(Make a game where you control the game developer, and I would play that too.)
Just cuz,... Im going to give you a slight example. If you like it like it, or if you dont, meh.
Quickbooks ONLINE went down the other day for way longer than they said. You know how much real world damage that did to millions of people just trying to make a living and getting their sh*t done so they could enjoy the evening playing your game? For me, a lot!
Your making a great game, and its a game. Let it be that way. Including for you.
You have been a great part in helping me understand business from different perspectives over the years. I really appreciate that!
Build the game you want to make and "If you build it, they will come".
How you can possibly re-brand the Clinton's in (Insert Political game I cant think of) is way above my pay scale though!
Singed~
Loyal Fan
Matt
Merry Christmas!
I think Brad should definitely read the previous post. Excellent points!
Do what you love, and love what you do!
I'm all for it if the game can be given the great depth and "just one more turn" feel that FE and LH have. I own the deluxe version of War of Magic and it never really grabbed me. I was among those who were terribly disappointed in the purchase, but the formula was perfected with LH. I absolutely love the game. A total overhaul of War of Magic would be quite an undertaking, but I'm intrigued.
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