Derek (Kael) has been super busy with the general expansion of Stardock Entertainment over the past 3 years. AS I type this, there are 7 concurrent game projects going on. Back in 2008, I dreamt of having a second team. Here we are, 6 years later with seven teams. I’m writing this from the airplane on my way to visit one of the new studios (one that hasn’t been announced yet).
So what does that mean for fans of the Elemental universe? The answer is, lots of good news. While Galactic Civilizations III heads towards its March alpha, the Elemental team is hard at work on a new DLC pack for this Winter tentatively called “Monarchs” which will bring more channelers to the world for players to play with. In addition, we expect to announce the third game in the Elemental fantasy universe this year. It will be dramatically different from War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress.
Without giving too much away about the new game, which we expect to formally announce this Spring, its planned feature set includes:
It’s been in development for awhile, prior to LH. LH was originally supposed to be a minor expansion on FE but as you’ve probably gathered, we really love making these games. The next update to LH is in the works, pathfinding improvements, performance and some other updates are scheduled.
I don't want to see customization fully go- but I think it should be limited. No one ever needed units to have chain helms but leather everything else- one set of armor is fine for troops.
Weapons should be upgradable, and accessories should be purchasable (with crystal+gold), and unit size should be buffable,
Then again, this might be made irrelevant by other changes.
I'm also super-interested in individual heroes having individual trees, that should be awesome.
One thing is for sure, I'd definitely miss the custom designed units.
I never knew how fun it could be until I gained that ability to do so.
I never abused it to create units of doom though
Well mainly is that your enemies have a different objective than the player. It's not going to be like MOM or AOW3 or Civ (or FE) in that respect. I think when we get far enough along to show it off, it'll be obvious that this opens the door to having a very different kind of strategy game than we've traditionally done that lets players have a lot more fun.
I guess the opening questions on the problems with a lot of these fantasy games would be:
1. Why do we always have to wimp out the power of magic in these games?
2. Why do we always have to be "careful" in what we let players craft in these games?
3. Why do we always have to nerf the power of heroes in these kinds of games?
The answer is that we're always having to worry about "exploits". But what if we designed a game predicated on the player being OP'd?
I mentioned this earlier but Elemental fans can probably appreciate this: YOU start with the Forge of the Overlord. And there's only one of those. That led to getting rid of the tech tree. The player starts with the assumption they have all that capability already.
Then ask yourself, what are the funnest parts of FE? If you had to list the 3 key things from the game that you enjoy the most, what would they be? The things you personally enjoy and how might those 3 things be made to be even more fun?
Does this mean no sandbox?
I could see an asymmetric sandbox working, but might be a real design challenge.
I'm not too attached to unit design. The tech tree is cool, but I would much rather have a more interesting system of obtaining spells... but I'm a magic system nut so I'm extremely biased.
You hit the nail on the head with the next part. In a game that is so focused on magic, there need to be spells that pervade every other system in the game. Whether that be geographic or diplomatic in nature, with this type of game you are justified in making spells of any scale (subtle to spectacular) as long as they touch on different systems in meaningful ways. Having more interaction also affords you with the opportunity of creating more interesting combinations of effects. Also, there is nothing wrong with more subtle spells. As long as the balance of the game allows for it, it makes the theme more interesting and also makes more impressive spells... more impressive. There also need to be more high risk/high payoff options as well.
I've never been crazy about crafting systems. To me they always feel too formulaic. It also feels like just a layer of busywork (instead of getting cool stuff, get a ton of boring stuff, then plug that into this device, then get cool stuff). Usually by the time you get everything you need for said cool item, it's obsolete unless you're farming for the stuff you need. But farming stuff is just a huge fun-killer for me (some people do love it).
The only thing that I feel strongly against is that the sovereign doesn't leave his stronghold. I usually play the entire game with my sovereign, and relegate city defense to the many heroes that I find. Personally the sovereign I created is more interesting to me than the random heroes I come across, simply because I created them. It makes it more fun to develop the character as opposed to other characters. I feel like it would be better to have the choice whether or not to keep the sovereign holed up, but it would be cool to have more severe gameplay differences (consequences, pros/cons) between having them out adventuring or citing in the stronghold. You could add some interesting play style differences that way.
Anyways, this is all just my 2 cents worth... You guys already have my attention, and I can't wait to hear more about it!
For me, my top 3 aspects are:
- Heroes - Uniquely designing them as they level, adventuring with them (and their supporting units) and the tactical battles that result along with the cool loot that they find along the way.
- City Development - Finding the good locations (prod/food/essence/resources/shards), creative construction (though I don't like building near hills and mountains because they flatten) and multi-tile expansion (with snaking enabled)
- Spell Casting - Awesome spells with awesome effects. Strategic decision making into your spell path choices and working with your choices to impact the overall game state.
Honorable mention goes to Cutscenes. I really go love reaching milestones throughout the game....small ones as well as big ones...and being rewarded with those single screen cutscenes. Really wish there were more of those.
Sounds like the game I had hoped the current Elemental games would be. The current units and factions never felt really much different than one another to me, that was my favorite part of MoM and what made it fun to replay for so long, using different races and different magics.
hope there's more asymmetry than the current elemental games have.
the 4X model of starting with similar stuff and then racing towards victory just doesn't work when the AI needs massive cheats just to stay in the race
more emphasis on magic / rpg-things / monsters would be better than some empire-building which the AI can't do
1. strategic spells - more weather control plz
2. i wish there was a real reason to manually layout my cities - some fun meta-game
3. changing the geography of the map over time - "terraforming" / outposts, roads..
Yarlen noted over on the Steam forums that the next Elemental game isn't going to use Nitrous: http://steamcommunity.com/app/267130/discussions/0/558746745692944849/
The next Elemental game sounds fun. Overall I found LH to be a good game but not a excellent one.
It's strengths were:
-A solid city building system with excellent city specialization.
-Lots of interesting lore and monsters.
-Solid tactical combat.
-Lots of well differentiated champions and items.
-Lots of stuff to do with champions early game.
It's weaknesses were:
-Basically nothing to do in empire building beyond improvement and unit building. No trade or espionage or even micromanagement.
-Shallow diplomacy and victory conditions. Every victory condition was just a slight variation of conquest.
-No water transportation.
-Somewhat visually empty worlds. I mean seriously you use pre-created map sections , why not spice them up? Throw some ruins, doodads, cool looking rocks, and landmarks into the background. Like in the campaign. Just throwing some rocks into the water would break up the maddeningly always the same coastline.
-The whole upgrading unit's armor and weapons thing played havoc with the scaling, especially against monsters.
-Designable units were incredibly hard to balance and made all units very similar. This could have been fixed with a lot of balancing, some redesign and a lot of new content but I'm fine with it getting dropped.
-By LH races were somewhat differentiated in how they looked and had a few cool bonuses but they still played the same. Like for the Undead some abilities that changed or added basic mechanics is needed for real differentiation.
Getting rid of custom units will fix a few of the problems but I hope the races in the new game will also have different basic mechanics. Then races will be very unique.
This really makes me think we are getting more of a Player against the World type game with less focus on other teams. That would be very interesting and a much better fit for the Elemental world. I hope you still get to fight other players though.
Another possible take is that factions will have different victory conditions which would be cool but somewhat unlikely.
Sounds great to me.
Good post DsRaider, I concur on pretty much all accounts.
something like AI war perhaps?
where player and AI play by totaly diferent rules
Looking forward to learning more about the new game.
Elemental's customization, while great on paper, worked against it in many ways so I'll be happy to see it gone. Not because customization is always bad or can't be "done right" but simply because I want to see what SD can do with a more tightly designed game.
I just hope that "designing around OP-ness" doesn't end up being an annoying gimmick.
If the 'next game' was in dev even before LH, then it makes sense that Oxide wouldn't have been part of that picture.
That's kinda interesting... How does it compare to something like AI War? Which has the learning curve of a brick wall but has a kind of opposite design philosophy of the players vs 2 utterly superior AI opponents?
Why is unit design working against elemental? There's barely any traits to choose from, heck even the AI have way more choices than you do starting on Expert Difficulty.
Sounds exciting! I wonder how you intend to start the game off with an OP player and yet retain challenge. I would guess the use of power comes with some sort of tradeoff or escalation mechanic.
Because even though it lacked in gameplay balance, it felt good to give your units combinations of stuff instead of having pre-canned options. It was a rather unique feature, and many people listed it as a strength of the games. In fact I can't think of any other RTS or TBS where equipping some new armor on your champion actually changed their graphic. Although Heroes Might and Magic 6 did have some family heirlooms that altered the hero model's equipped weapon, it was extremely limited and rare.
The main problem with unit design for us were he visuals. Our animations and the detail of the units had to be genericized to allow for lots of equipment Options. Now, we could, for instance, have non humanoid races if we want. The visual difference is pretty massive.
It helps that the new game has a lot of the civ v art team involved. You will be able to really notice the influence when you see the maps.
But because the game is so different, we are going to continue to enhance LH separately. We are also back porting fixes and improvements from the new game into LH. Performance in particular. I wouldn't be surprised if we get an LH 2.0 at some point.
speaking of which, would you guys be willing to give up the rotating camera in LH in exchange for a massive boost in performance and visual quality?
yes!
I would be willing to give up rotating the camera on the strategic map for a performance boost, but would such a lack of rotation hinder view of the terrain. Say large mountain is on the map, and a unit is behind said mountain. Would we lose complete site of the unit or are we going to lose beauty of the terrain?
On the order of losing unit customization: I am okay with not customizing my units from head to toe. But, I would like to be able to edit my units with a unique look or style. Say you have a sword unit, would be nice if there were a choice of 3 - 4 different swords that you can choose and maybe a symbol to placed on a cape or chest piece or even a tattoo with a symbol. Something that gives the player the sense that - these units are mine and unique. That is something I would prefer not to lose in the customization of the units.
I don't play it anymore, but I would say no. Performance isn't a problem for me, and I don't think you can increase visual quality by the flip of a switch? What exactly are you talking about there - better shaders, lightning, AA, other post process stuff?
Like, if you were to tell me that without camera rotation you could vastly increase the amount of objects on screen I would say yes! For example you have the tile designs that are set to show certain things only when the camera is up close, some when it is a little farther away, some when you are almost zoomed out, and some all the time. If you were to say - no rotation = we can show almost everything all the time, I would say heck yes.
There is a shit-ton of detail poured into the tile designs by your artists that the game really doesn't do justice.
Or maybe you'd say "we can drastically increase at what resolution we show the .dds texture", ie the mip-maps. Again you'd have my "yes" vote.
Heck yes.
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