Been playing Demigod recently, first game I've played from Stardock (I realise Stardock is just the publisher), which of course has gotten me hearing about Elemental.
All I'm really looking for is if could shortly tell me what Elemental is all about. Maybe just a few quick bullet points explaining how the gameplay, winning conditions, etc are going to work.
I had another question, since I'm a bit confused about this. Stardock has been saying that Elemental will have full multiplayer support, with multiplayer functions, such as arranged matches and whatnot, but then Brad basically went on to say that he doesn't care about multiplayer, and its a single player game. My question is basically, Will multiplayer be meaningful and fun, or is it just another "feature" thats only there to sell more copies?
Any information, or links to good posts would be much appreciated, thanks for your time.
Hello Xakath!
Check out the journal section:
https://www.elementalgame.com/journals.asp
There is plenty of information.
As far as I understand, Elemental will be some kind of "Fantasy Civilization". They are currently discussing the economy aspects and included the forum members in the talks (https://forums.elementalgame.com/352821).
We know, that players are supposed to be able to design their own units, spells, equipment, buildings and things like that. For this purpose, there will be a couple of distinct "sporelike" creation tools available. Players can decide which content they want to make publicly available. After a quality check, this will be downloadable for every player. Frogboy once stated, that technically it should be possible to create a "Settlers of Cattan" as computer game if you thus desire. Meaning, the tools will allow for you to create all kind of different settings.
The focus will be on the human race: there are 6 "normal human" civs and 6 "Fallen" ones (Modding will for sure create many more. However, due to programming time, the devs focus on just one race so far. This has a lot to do with the tools just mentioned. If you as a player, design a plate armor for a human soldier, you can't use the same armor for a bear race as the sizes simply won't fit. If there would be an additional fairy race, you'd have the same problem.).
Being a fantasy setting and leaning strongly towards "Masters of Magic" (although Stardock did not get the license from Atari) there will be plenty of spells included (more then 100. The tools allow to create any additional spell you like). Magical creatures will play a role, too. However, they will be rare and extremly powerfull (dragons!). Thus, unlike the Heroes of Might and Magic, you will have to rely on normal troops. Once you get access to a dragon, this will be a "one dragon army" by itself and deal with most soldiers.
Armies seem to get a touch from the total war series. Remember, however: We are talking about a TURN based strategy game.
The focus will be on single player with a basic story written by professional authors. There are going to be multiple winning conditions (take a look at Galactic Civilizations 2: I highly recommend it. There you can see, what Stardock is capable of doing with an AI. It is truelly amazing!). A Sandbox mode as well as a campaign setting has been announced.
There is going to be some multiplayer functionality to it.
One additional thing: In some ways, you will be able to play it a bit like an RPG. You have to decide for yourself, if you will be the king of your empire, or if you just stroll along in the world solving quests and exploring dungeons.
That's as far as my little brainstorming can come up for now. You see, this is a highly ambitious project. If it will just come a bit close to what it claims to be, than it will be one of the best games ever. Of course, high expectations can also mean a big fail... But if there is anyone who can pull this off, it is Stardock, I think.
In general, there is a lot of general statements with nearly no detail on the mechanics. You can't really expect anything else as the game is in the alpha stage and might enter public beta (for those who preordered) in July/August or perhaps later, depending how things are going along.
Hope, this helps.
In terms of multiplayer, you *will* be able to play multiplayer. Since it uses the same lobby code that Demigod does (Impulse Reactor), once they add things like pre-arranged matches to Demigod, Elemental will also get them. (Elemental games are server hosted though, so there should be fewer connection problems then with Demigod's early days.)
When Brad says he "doesn't care about multiplayer", he's talking about balance. This kind of game is primarily played single player, by people who often like huge, epic games that can go on for days. If there's a conflict in game balance between that type of game, and short skirmish multiplayer games, the single player side will win. I believe his exact wording was "we won't sacrifice the single-player experience for multiplayer."
I don't expect it to be a huge problem.
A good preview of the game is here which should answer some questions (and raise many more):
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/elementalwarofmagic/news.html?sid=6207014
And thats only on the 32 bit version! The 64 bit version you could potentially make a map so big it would take litterally generations to play through it all. After all, 16 exobytes of RAM is alot of map potential...
Here is the statement from the Elemental journals which has struck fear in hearts of ALL multiplayer gamers on this community:
==================================================================
BRAD:
That said, here are a few things that multiplayer in Elemental will have:
1. Multiplayer games will be hosted by us. Period. No peer to peer. Not even hosted on the user’s box. Our servers. No ports, no proxies, nothing. We’re hosting it.
Basically it means all Elemental:WoM multiplayer gamers MUST rely on the stability of each players ISP involved and the stability of the servers at Stardock for playing multiplayer games. I'm shocked such a sudden harsh decision was made from a company of developers who reportedly love playing Civilization_IV together... a game which clearly offers many multiplayer options and it's sad Elemental won't receive the same love.
The game is single-player focussed, just as Civ 4 is. There will be a multiplayer but its not the main focus, just as with Civ 4. So stop ranting about the multiplayer given what this game is about. Elemental is not Demigod!
I have no problem with Elemental being single-player focussed, but the fact that Elemental cannot provide the same multiplayer functionality as Civilization_IV is disheartening.
And nobody ever said Elemental is Demigod or even compared the two games... the two games are enormously different. It's like you just wrote, "Elemental is not a Fish". [e digicons]o_O[/e]
We haven't gotten an answer about LAN play since that first quote was said by Frogboy. I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that its gone quite yet.
Clarification would be helpful though.
I hope you're correct, but the statement seems to indicate no LAN: "No peer to peer. Not even hosted on the user’s box. Our servers."
Yeah. I'm hoping he means that for Internet games. Not having LAN play at all is pretty lame.
Appreciate the post GHenrikG, very informative +1 to you
@ all the multiplayer comments: I suppose after understanding it more, it does seem like this type of game may not be all that enjoyable as a multiplayer game anyways, so I guess its not as important as I first though.
you're in the wrong place. You won't find any information on Elemental around here. The people above all lie, don't listen to them. They certainly can't point you in the right direction.
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