Kael and Fall From Heaven

By riadsala on September 23, 2010 4:59:50 AM from

riadsala

Join Date 04/2008

Hello,

apparently the stand alone Fall from Heaven game has been cancelled.

But on the plus side, maybe this would be a perfect opportunity for Stardock to entice Kael over to modding for Elemental... his work his admired by a lot of people, and I'm sure he'd have a lot of invaluable insight into expanding and improving elemental. Stardock just need to give him a reason to switch from modding the hugely popular CiV (he's already produced a couple of small Civ5 mods!) to working on the far less popular Elemental.

Thoughts?

And no, I'm in no way connected to him. I just really like his work in with Civ4-FfH2, and think that he'd likely help transform Elemental into the game a lot of us originally wanted.

Sad news. Kael is one of the most gifted, intelligent and positive people I've ever met on the internet. A gentleman extraordinaire.

Do you know where I could read something about the game getting canceled?

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http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=361727

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Thank you. I totally missed that since I only browsed civfanatics for updates to Rife lately. He,'s a great guy, you can really understand this by the way he explains why the project got cancelled.

And to answer the OP, I would gladly welcome Kael's presence in Elemental. Either as a modder or as a Dev.

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Indeed! Elemental's game mechanics could be the perfect bread for Kael's butter.

His input on improving Elemental wouldn't be bad to have as well.

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Indeed! Elemental's game mechanics could be the perfect bread for Kael's butter.

His input on improving Elemental wouldn't be bad to have as well.

I say, give him a nice little budget, and get him to make a "remix" of Elemental, which could be released stand alone (and preferably free/reduced to us Elemental orders). That would no doubt attract a lot of new customers, as FfH2 is pretty popular, and I imagine a lot of fans would of been interested in Elemental, but were put off by the terrible reviews.

Although, this all seems very unlikely.

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That would be great indeed.

I've learned about existence of FFH2 on this forum and totally abandoned Elemental until it's 1.1, because FFH2 is nearly perfect.

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Kael already asked if he could work on Elemental's backstory but Brad turned him down

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7415642&postcount=2

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Quoting Zawath,

reply 7

Kael already asked if he could work on Elemental's backstory but Brad turned him down

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7415642&postcount=2

A bad mistake on Brad's part I would say. He should of jumped at the chance of getting Kael involved.

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Maybe a mistake, but I think Brad has everything story planned out for this years in advance. Hence the book.

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Quoting arstal,

reply 9

Maybe a mistake, but I think Brad has everything story planned out for this years in advance. Hence the book.

I know, but unfortunately, the book isn't meant to be very good, and from what I can see, very very very little lore has made it into the game. Just a short paragraph or two giving a brief description of each race. While FfH2 has almost too much lore and background!

And there seems to be large group of gamers who wish Elemental was set in the usual sub-Tolkien world.

And most importantly, he might of offered some MUCH needed insight about the game mechanics during development.

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Quoting Zawath,

reply 7

Kael already asked if he could work on Elemental's backstory but Brad turned him down

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=7415642&postcount=2

A lot has changed in two years.

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FFH completely revitalized my desire to play civ for quite a while. Talk about a complete game makeover. Don't know the specific guy, but if he was really 90% behind the design of it, I'd love to see an effort to pull him in. "Here's $1k, Here's our vision, Here are our requirements, Here's what we don't want to see....give us a broad outline of a meaty mod" Great. "Here's $5k, love this, hate this, give us a base design" Great "Here's $5k, love this, hate this, give us a barebones beta" Great "We'll release and get feedback" Great "Need these mechanics, bug fixes, and process changes" Great. "Here's $5k, flesh it out and we'll release as beta 0.9" Great. "Here's 10k, flesh it out, fix it up, and get us a 1.0 and we're going to sell it for $5" Schedule it for 1-3 months, spend $25k on dev (plus internal costs for taking the time to review/integrate/etc). Release it as a stardock sponsored mod @ $5/ea. Hope to make $5-$10k back from it. If sales good, or research shows that a significant # of players play it exclusively - expand it to a v2.

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Please get him over to Elemental!! I hardly play Civ 4 WITHOUT the FfH2 mod!!!!!

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Fall From Heaven2 is so incredibly awesome, I would love to see Kael work on this game.

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My greatest fear is that Elemental python API will not affect enough aspects of the game to make a mod as different from original game as FFH2 from Civ4.

If the scripting will be powerful enough, we can still hope to have FFH-like mod.

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Hate when ppls think they are better than others, Brad shouldnt have turn him down. Dont think i like Brad

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Quoting Zard0z,

reply 15

My greatest fear is that Elemental python API will not affect enough aspects of the game to make a mod as different from original game as FFH2 from Civ4.

If the scripting will be powerful enough, we can still hope to have FFH-like mod.

Well, the core game is changing to rapidly just now that Stardock could probably facilitate any advanced modding requirements. Especially if it would increase the chances of a redemption for Elemental. And I'm pretty sure I read that Fixaris made some changes in a patch and opened up more of the code to help Kael and his team (or maybe just modders in general).

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Agree, Elemental is still too much in flux to support any major modding projects. Too bad about FFH2, Fixaris would be smart to have Kael start working on a Civ 5 expansion pack

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Quoting Redindus,

reply 16

Hate when ppls think they are better than others, Brad shouldnt have turn him down. Dont think i like Brad

Are you serious???? GTFOOH! Elemental is Brad's baby. gameplay is one thing, but story?? The origin story is Bard's bread and Butter. He even wrote and continues to write published books for it. Why would he or anyone else let someone come in and change the backstory?

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Because kael could provide much more than backstory?

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No doubt! The Fall From Heaven mod is in my top 3 games of all time list. I think it goes way beyond being a mod. The FfH2 team wouldn't accept donations for their work, so I took them up on their suggestion and made a contribution to charity (to my local PBS station on their behalf). The mod/game is so good that I was compelled to support it with money.

When I heard the news of FfH3 I had thought that Valve was backing them. Then as I learned about Stardock, I dearly hoped that it was they who were behind the game. Is a shame that FfH3 has lost its funding. I hope this is a temporary situation. And I hope that Kael, AlazkanAssassin, Chalid, Corlindale, C.Roland, Hexagonian, Loki, Nikis-Knight, Ploeperpengel, SeZereth, Sto, Talchas, White Rabbit, Wilboman and Woodelf all migrate to Elemental modding.

Quoting Redindus,

reply 16

Hate when ppls think they are better than others, Brad shouldn't have turn him down. Dont think i like Brad

All Kael said about that is "Brad didn't take me up on it." There is no reason as to why. There are a host of reasons why Brad may not even been contractually, creatively, or logistically able to accept assistance on the backstory. Who knows the reasoning. Brad having a god-complex seems to me, to be the most unlikely reason.

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Dear Kael: please stay away from Elemental. We don't want your crappy game design over here. FFH2 was vastly overrated and felt like an amateur project in every respect.

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Quoting GaelicVigil,

reply 22

Dear Kael: please stay away from Elemental. We don't want your crappy game design over here. FFH2 was vastly overrated and felt like an amateur project in every respect.

Yes. And thousand of peoples playing it over commercial games are idiots.

You never played FFh2, did you?

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We'll never know the full truth due to all sorts of wild rumors +NDA's.

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Yes. And thousand of peoples playing it over commercial games are idiots.

You never played FFh2, did you?

FFh2's gameplay aside, it *was* ameteurish. They ripped off art assets from a bunch of games and used them instead of making their own. There's nowhere that can pass for a "professional" mod. Ten minutes of staring at Guild Wars icons in FFH2 made me set it aside and not play it (I'm a big GW fan).

I love the idea of the mod and there is fun gameplay, but if the team makes it for Civ 5 I'd hope they would make their own art assets..

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