Soulfire777

Join Date 03/2003

Elemental will EVENTUALLY be a really great game.

I really love and respect Stardock and have eventually come to love every game they have created. You guys do a LOT of things better than anyone else in the industry, but I also feel you consistently make the same mistake and I wonder how much this hurts you in the long term. This letter is my attempt at constructive criticism and I sincerely hope it helps.

You guys make AMAZING games with a lot of great ideas, but in the initial release of your base games, they tend to lack a lot of polish (IMO). I always come away from a new Stardock game feeling a little bewildered and wishing very strongly just a few little things had been tweaked and polished (and usually documented) better. For me, this usually prevents me from having FUN with your games right out of the box (although I always come to really LOVE them eventually)...

Instead of coming away from my fist few sessions feeling something like, "WOW that was really FUN", I usually come away feeling more like, "Wow, I think I would have had a lot of fun if only I understood just a little better how to play, how this game mechanic worked, and if they made it a just little easier and/or more intuitive to do such and such...". I was among the first in line to buy GalCiv, GalCiv2 and all the expansions, and Elemental (I pre-ordered every title). With every base game however (the expansions never have this problem for me) I always end up trying to play it a couple/few days and then say to myself something like, "I think I'll put this game away for a few weeks and wait until they fix some things and release some tutorials and/or I can find such and such information in a forum somewhere...".

My advice:

When you think the game is done, hold it another 30-60 days and focus almost exclusively on just POLISHING the game. Don't add a lot of features or content at this point (unless it addresses a specific common complaint), because everything new you add that does not go through this polishing stage is likely to turn into similar problems to what this polishing stage is trying to correct in the first place.

Pick 5-10 guys from your beta group who have consistently provided the most helpful feedback and suggestions, plus maybe another 5-10 "regular guy" gamers (because each type of gamer will provide very different but equally useful perspectives), and sit them down in a room with the latest version of the game together with a few of your developers for 2-3 days and write down every question they ask about how to play the game and every suggestion they make about improving the game. Then focus the last 30-60 days or so updating your documentation to include answers to the common questions, create quality PROFESSIONAL tutorials to help people understand how to play (not just two guys zipping through playing the game while chatting casually and quickly closing any windows that pop up before viewers have any hope of understanding what those windows were about), and address the most common/helpful interface suggestions to make the game easier to play.

Please consider INCLUDING all this documentation and the tutorials with the SHIPPING version of the game as opposed to just putting up links to this kind of stuff after the game is released and obligating customers to fish around on the web to learn all this stuff (It will make the presentation of your game SO much more professional).

Finally, I think you might be really shooting yourself in the foot by releasing multiple versions of the game at launch? You only get one chance at a first impression, so do you really want reviewers writing about and paying customers getting their first impressions of your game from older, out-of-date versions that you don't feel are the very best that you have to offer on the day of release?

I really believe Elemental could eventually become my favorite TBS of all time, but I also feel concerned that the initial reviews and impressions of the game might not be nearly as impressive as they could have been if the game was polished just a bit more than it was the day people first got their hands on it...

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I doubt SD deliberately choose not to polish their games. Things happen as they do for a reason. I don't know fully understand what those reasons are but apparently game development is an enterprise fraught with difficulty and setbacks especially in this "modern age", but at least SD do their best to fix all the issues and improve their game.

It's not like FB's gonna see this and go, "But of course, we should take some time to POLISH the game! Why didn't I think of that?" It's a dog's world out there.

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I strongly support this. I understand the commercial pressures that push for release, but you are doing no favors when the version that reviewers use has not been sufficiently polished, even if that polish comes in the month after release.

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I'd rather take a buggy and unpolished but playable release that allows me to get my hands on the game earlier.

I can't stand how Blizzard releases games.

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Quoting Tyveil,

reply 3

I'd rather take a buggy and unpolished but playable release that allows me to get my hands on the game earlier.

I can't stand how Blizzard releases games.

That's fine and dandy for you and me (we were going to buy the game regardless) but for those people on the fence or who haven't even heard of Elemental: War of Magic they'll see poor reviews and stay away.

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The OP captures my feelings with the game. Yes, there are timelines and pressures, but there seems to be a long pattern here of releasing a pretty rough game and then polishing it during the first year of actual play. I am also very tempted to put the game down for several months...

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I dont believe there were time line pressures, i recently read that they expected to spend 5million to develop the game and instead they spent half that.

I see the result, a game that has very little fantasy in it, no documention and a super simplistic comabt system. I really dont like how spiders that join my side can cast all the spells I can, and that an ice bolt does damage to a ice elemental?

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Quoting Tyveil,

reply 3

I'd rather take a buggy and unpolished but playable release that allows me to get my hands on the game earlier.

I can't stand how Blizzard releases games.

ActivisionBlizzard is a giant. It is unfair to compare pretty much any development house with them. ActivisionBlizzard may do some dubious stuff, but giving them a bad rap for the insane amount of polish their releases receive seems just a tad silly though. Their games are more polished at release than most games ever become, and it is a practice I would like to see more present in the industry.

So far I have only played through the campaign, and it left something to be desired. Partly because it was not polished enough and partly because I found it too short. However, I will wait until the day-0 patch gets out before I get into the meat of the game (which most certainly does not seem to be the campaign) and can pass any final judgement. The game is not worthwhile if you only wanted the campaign out of it, but then again, I do not think the campaign is the selling feature of the game.

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Quoting Tyveil,

reply 3

I'd rather take a buggy and unpolished but playable release that allows me to get my hands on the game earlier.

I can't stand how Blizzard releases games.

You are definitely part of the minority with, most likely, a good amount of time on your hands and most of that time spent playing games. You're the type that makes a really good beta tester as you're itching to get your hands on the new game and play around with it.

For someone like myself, I'm with the OP here. And I haven't bought Elemental simply because there are far too many issues with the game so far.

As the OP says, first impressions are a big deal, especially from a marketing perspective. It's unfortunate that Elemental's first impression will probably not be so great as, I do agree with the OP, Stardock will most likely fix all of these issues and make it into a good game.

Blizzard is actually one of the few companies that does things right; they wait until they have a finished product before releasing it. And that is one of the main reasons that they are one of the major gaming companies out there.

That being said, I do look forward to how this game shapes up and will be keeping a close eye on it.

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Huh, I'm an university student so I most definitely do not have "a good amount of time on [my] hands" and I agree with him, I'd rather have an unpolished game now than wait for the ultra-polished version in a year. It's simply a drawback of Stardock's open development policies, it's far easier to take your time and "release it when it's done" when nobody knows what you're doing until you make a big press release about it ala Blizzard, but with Elemental where a lot of people, not just QA employees or magazine editors, could play with the initial builds and report to us, the rest of the community, about its progress it's pretty hard not to want it 'right now'.

Besides, as it stands it's still a very good game, it just doesn't compare (yet) to Stardock's previous title GalCiv 2 which, after three expansions and God knows how many patches, stands at the top of the TBS genre. I've no doubt that Elemental will eventually measure up to it, it's just I'd rather have something to play 'til then.

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I wonder, what ever happened to the Gamers Bill of Rights that Brad proposed years ago. One particular part I feel is completely, one hundred percent ignored here and that makes me lose a LOT of respect for them:

Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.

This game is not finished, it lacks a tutorial, the campaign is a puny pitiful sub-5-hours-mess, performance issues and bugs are everywhere, and worst of all, it seems like Stardock has been doing their best to SUPPRESS criticism on the forums to make themselves seem better. Big thumbs down on this behavior by a company that claims to be on the gamers side.

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The reason blizzard can do that sitting is that they make billions off world of warcraft....but you know all companies are the same

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Quoting Rune_74,

reply 11

The reason blizzard can do that sitting is that they make billions off world of warcraft....but you know all companies are the same

They did that long before WOW. The reason that WOW was a huge success and their other games, is that they do that.

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I have no idea how to play this game and probably never will.

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Quoting Zorbane,

reply 4

If only reviews had that kind of power

Key thing to remember before complaining is that the game is not technically released yet, and generally even reviewers have the sense to patch up a game prior to playing it, at least if the publisher/developer gives them the option.

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Quoting Ian Welsh,

reply 12

Quoting Rune_74,
reply 11
The reason blizzard can do that sitting is that they make billions off world of warcraft....but you know all companies are the same

They did that long before WOW. The reason that WOW was a huge success and their other games, is that they do that.

BS wow was a mess at release....then it got better.

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Anyone who assumes this game is going to poor reviews is making a pretty rash assumption.

Elemental is a beautiful game. It's fun. It gives a very good first impression for most people.

I think the OP's view of the world is highly messed up. Is he seriously trying to say stardock should have just not released it until the 24th and let all of us beta testers and pre orde rpeople rot while people who bought it at retailers that broke the street date and pirates got to play it early? That would be ridiculous.

There are lots of folks who think gal civ and SoaSE are bad or boring or whatever.

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Werewindlefr

Join Date 03/2007

+28

Quoting Rune_74,

reply 11

The reason blizzard can do that sitting is that they make billions off world of warcraft....but you know all companies are the same

Yeah, they went back in time and gave their past selves money during the development of Diablo 2, Warcraft 3, and the aforementioned World of Warcraft.

Starcraft 1 was released in an extremely good and polished state. Hell, so did Warcraft 2. But anyway, finished games are sometimes released by much smaller companies. I've seen mods (impressive ambitious total conversions, like the ones for the Total War series) in a more finished state at release.

What I don't understand is that money was supposed not to be an issue here, since Stardock's main sales come from their non-gaming software. Also, pushing the release has made it very likely that it'll get bad reviews, and thus will bring back a lot less money than if they had waited 2 more months. I fail to understand what's going on here.

BS wow was a mess at release....then it got better.

World of Warcraft was released in a previously unseen state of polish and content abundance; Compared to what people were used to (and compared to what the vast majority of the games are like at release), it was a huge improvement.

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Quoting Werewindlefr,

reply 17

WoW was not released in pristine condition. There was what, an 8-10 hour que just to get into the game on day 1?

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