Is Elemental ready for prime time?

its already been "discussed" (read argued and flamed)

frogboy says the game will be ready and they are ahead of schedule

we have no better info so fanboys will trust frog and hateboys will not and there is nothing more to add

imo stability is not that big issue considering the last month will be due to that

I agree with the last part that even if user mods and later patches are the saving grace of this game, its the initial release that get reviewed and if not up to snuff will get shot down.

I wouldnt compare it to MoM anymore. I wish you could. but as of right now i rather stick to playing MoM.... for now.

But love to see some table top war campaigns mods or D&D stuff appear.

Brad has said 100 times that he thinks it will be ready on release and there's no "worry", especially in the stability department. 

Whether he's completely correct remains to be seen, but I think we can give him the benefit of the doubt. As you said, it's his problem really, not ours. We get to play Elemental one way or another, but it's in his interest to launch the game at the right time. 

I'm pretty disappointed in the game at this point. Particularly anything to do the with the way we build and expand cities and with the differentiation of custom sovereigns / custom factions. 

Here is a short run down:

Cities:

Cities are easy to spam.

Selecting buildings for your city is trivial because you're building them all anyway until your pop caps.

City specialization as the cities level do not have anything to do with how you have been focusing your build. You can focus on income generation with building selection and then specialize as a farming city as soon as your city "level-ups".

Catch an enemy with a lightly guarded city and you can raze it that turn.

Sovereign building:

Very uninteresting and the choices you make in the beginning have very little effect on your sovereign with the exception of a few. 

Faction building:

This is the same custom sovereign building. You end up with hearty humans, good researching humans or a unoptimized mesh in between where the differences are so small you should have just selected a default faction. Factions become even more generic in game since you create the units as you play, so everyone has a guy with a club, a guy with a walking stick, a guy with a hammer and some armor etc.

Interface: 

Where to begin? How about with city building. Brad has already commented on how bad the UI is but let's look at a few specifics. When you are adding buildings to your city, often, the building selection screen will block your view of the city depending on your zoom level. This makes it difficult to select buildings and place them.

Turn events do not catch your eye. They are tiny little icons in the NE corner of the screen that you think about clicking on only because they build up and block your view. You have to click through every single event including the multiple event spam from researching something like a weapon technology that adds several new weapons (and events).

Faction comparison graphs live in a small box at the bottom of the screen that is difficult to interpret.

In conclusion:

Part of my disappointment stems from my high expectations. I expected something akin to a blend of MOM, Age of Wonders, Dominions and Civ. Instead I feel like I'm possibly getting a bland Age of Wonders with incredible mod capabilities.

With less than two months to go, I don't see how 3A can turn into the game I've been expecting. I think a lot will get cleaned up, particularly the interface. I've not mentioned any of the balance issues and game play pacing because I believe that is what is going to be the focus throughout July and August. But, Stardock has a huge mountain to climb to fix those issues and remedy the fact that the game is bland, boring and nonintuitive.

I agree with the OP sentiments as I too would like to see Elemental become as well reviewed as GalCiv and be a Top-20 game on MetaCritic, GameRankings, etc.  While I believe it will eventually get to this state through several patches, I do NOT think it will be in that position for a 1.0 or 1.01 release that will be reviewed by IGN, Gamespot, etc.  Given all the game mechanic debates that have been going on, the continued tweaking, the feature shut-down in less than a week, etc. if I were Stardock's business manager I'd tell them wait until February.  Of course, I don't get paid for that priveledge .  And as Jshores indicated above, (YES, I know it is a Beta) I don't see a huge "fun" element yet as I did with GalCiv, MOM, Age of Wonders, NeverWinter Nights, etc.

I'm sure it'll be fine initially. Remember it'll have a campaign too and we haven't seen that. I know that patches WILL be the saving grace of this game because I'm sure it'll be aggressively patched and improved.

I wouldn't mind if they delayed the game to make it great. I'm not in beta so I can't really say but even if I was I would reserve judgement until it's ready. I like the "When it's done" approach. However I wouldn't worry at this point as it sounds like your only testing bits and peices of the final product. I'm sure once they get closer and start putting everything togeather it will start to take shape. Keep up the good work! I really hope it runs smooth and plays well at release.

What do people think of this?

Best regards,
Steven. 

I agree with a lot of what is posted here. Honestly, Stardock is a great company and have made some great games, but Elemental is much more complex than its past offerings and right now it needs to be tweaked a lot. I think they maybe be underestimating how much time it's going to take the polish this game's design. Right now it does not feel cohesive at all; the systems all seem very discrete. I feel like this is embodied by what you said about city specialization. It's totally artificial, as are a lot of other things, like the global resource pool and the strange research system where a lot of techs just aren't interesting.

Dynasties, my personal favorite feature, are totally underdeveloped right now, as there are no domestic issues in Elemental, your heirs don't have personalities, and there are no internal diplomatic events. Dynasties are just a way to get a little diplo bonus and a chance at inheriting a kingdom. There should be cool conflicts between your children and internal power struggles. You should be able to make them governors of provinces, educate them in the arts of your choosing, and the like. 

If it's ready by release date I'm all in, but if it's not I certainly don't mind a delay. I just really want this game to sell so it will continue and I want a Elemental 2 =D

Stardock makes GREAT sequels. (And you can't say that about everyone.)

Beta3A is just what they're allowing us to see, not the actual game. I'm sure their builds are alot more complex and they probably already got all the hard stuff done, now it's just putting the Lego peices together and making it work right "Polish, Screw, Polish, Hammer, Polish DaDa!".

While I haven't really been in the software industry for years like the crew at Stardock I have worked on several projects in College and on the Side. And I do agree with Frogboy's post in another thread about how we as the testers don't see the whole picture. I know I have had people telling me and my group that on some of the projects we were working on how we had all this stuff left to do and we wouldn't get it done in time based on what they tested for us but we still manage to surprise them and get done on time.

That being said that doesn't mean I don't share some of the concerns that the other posters have brought up. Namely my primary one is stability because I have yet to play a game for 200 turns without it crashing. I've usually been able to load auto saves in recent versions and continue on but getting to turn 200 without a crash has yet to happen. Things have improved quite a bit since the Beta 1 days in terms of stability but with all the new stuff getting added it seems to just be adding more things that can and do go wrong. Thus more crash bugs that need squashing and from the sound of it we'll see tactical battles right before the end of beta with little time to give crash report feedback. So I'm more nervous come release date I still won't be able to play for 200 or more turns without crashing.

The other issue is more of one with regards to simply play style mechanics. I mean different people have different taste in regards to how things should work. Some of the things people see as "issues" may simply be mechanic style choices Stardock has chosen. Like there has been a ton of back and forth with ideas on how cities should work. How in depth the building mechanics should be and so on. But I think in the end it may end up being one of those things people learn to live with like in the original Galactic Civ where you planets population kept growing non-stop until the population morale dropped because of over crowding and proceeded to revolt. The "fix" for this was load a ton of people on transports and jettison them into space. Hehe now that's "population control".

Brad has consistently said that the Beta phase won't be 'fun' but I am also worried that there is too much to do to meet the release date in 6 weeks. I hope I'm wrong. Like the others in this thread I want Elemental to have the best launch it can so it doesn't end up trying to catch up after the initial reviews have come in. I want Elemental to continue on and on and on - which means it needs a solid launch.

I'm certainly enjoying aspects of the game but support the general comments in this thread about lack of overall personality and lack of intuitive UI. It is the personality aspect that has me most concerned. Basically I want my orcs and elves. There, I said it!

Keep in mind, what we have in the Beta is only a small fraction of the build Stardock have, and likely a lot of the present bugs/crashes/glitches are already fixed.  We're getting tactical battles this week, and with that I suspect we'll see a host of stability improvements for the stuff added in Beta 3.  As the old programming slogan goes: "Programs are never finished, they're meerly in stages of 'less broken' and if its not broken, it doesn't have enough features."  I have complete faith.

Unfortunately I don't think smaller companies can rely on "aggressively patching to be the game's saving grace."  Too many reviews will occur under few to zero patches.  I recall that Battlefront.com had a horrible release on the Combat Mission Shock Force series after an extremely successful tri-game predecessor ranging from CMBB to CMAK.  They lost a LOT of very enthusiastic followers with that fiasco despite the fact they patched CMSF nearly TWENTY times and it ultimately became a very good game.  Should be a lesson learned there....

If you're so certain the game will be "unready" on release then feel free to wait until some mystical future date to play it.

I'm not sure what kind of response you are expecting. This is why non-technical people are typically not involved in real betas because they don't really have any idea of what's involved in putting together a large software project.

The betas aren't some sort of extended demo. They're betas. 

Each time we do a new game we go through this. But like I said, if you're really worried, then close your eyes and just wait until February or next June or something and download it then and pretend it's brand new.

We've been doing this for a long time.  And while I"m sure the released game will have this or that feature people wanted or have this or that problem on some machine, it'll be as stable and good as any of our other titles we've released over the past 17 years.

I'm not going to further the discussion about when it will be ready, since I don't see the point in us talking about it.

Instead I'll talk about how will it be critically received.

Gamespots direction can be seen here:

"Elemental continues to look promising and will hopefully offer many smart, streamlined gameplay design decisions once it's released later this year." 

Bit of snark there.

IGN is cautious but not unhappy:

"The game's scheduled to be released later this summer, and I'm certainly looking forward to getting some hands-on time with the title to see how it all plays."

Reasonable.

There's a mix of views out there. I think some will be disappointed, some will be happy and I think the launch score will be between 7-8.5 at most places. I didn't bother including the "this game looks like it will be good I guess" from most of the other sites.

well. I'm not bothered by reviews (:

I'm planning on getting the game, playing through the campaign, and LAN it with a few good friends of mine and try to convince them to buy it. Then picking up Civ V, playing that for a little while.

Once a patch or two comes out, then I'll pop it on again, rock on in online multiplayer since my friends will probably have gotten bored and moved on. 

I'm a big fan of Civ and loved MOM and had high hopes for Elemental but at this point I'm pretty sure I threw away yet another $50. I hope Stardock proves me wrong but there's little of interest in the game for me as of yet, regardless of what kind of tricks they pull out of their hat.

Gary

The problem is that you guys don't actually know what goes into making a game. Time wise, after art and sound are collected, games come together extremely quickly. A single person can plow through bugs etc rapidly as they are revealed (hence the point of a beta). I can barely get through a few turns without crashing but thats the way games work.

lol all this gloom and doom is why companies should never do public testing. Little kids have no idea what a "project" is, and patience is also a distant and fuzzy idea to them.

Demo != Beta

Oddly, this is the first post by Brad that rather irritated me (and I'm sure he doens't really care which is fine).  I think most of us GET this is a beta; I think we understand it is not yet going to be bang-up FUN; I think we recognize we are testing various pieces.  I'm not sure, however, you are HEARING what many are saying: all the various pieces don't seem to ultimately reflect what will be a particularly FUN game that will blow Reviewers (and us) away upon release.  I (as well as you and your team I'm sure) have read post after post over many weeks with respect to concerns about various game mechanics; and while it is pretty clear Stardock is hearing us with respect to our technical beta problems, I'm not sure you all are LISTENING well to our points of view on the game mechanic issues we keep repeating over and over in dozens of different posts.  Yes, you are tweaking features, but in many instances I think there is some consensus from many on these boards that some wholesale revisions need to occur in many areas-- and you just don't have the TIME TO DO IT given your proposed schedule of feature lock-down, gold mastering and release in late August.

Bottom line, irrespective of the above, we all want to see Stardock succeed, be rewarded accoringly, and the customers have a FUN game on our hard-drive.  I'll be glad to eat my hat if the game is as you suggest, "As stable and as good as any titles we've released in the last 17-years."  I'm convinced your accurate on the former, but not so certain on the latter.

This is wonderful, but note that most of us are expecting even better. I can't find the exact quote, but last summer you said something along the lines of "we won't release until we feel this game is the best of its kind." We're not expecting a game merely as good as AoW or HoMM or MoM. I'm not saying that we deserve better for our fifty bucks, but we want this game to be as revolutionary as you want it to be. I hope you pull through! 

At some point, it just becomes obnoxious.

If you want to argue this kind of thing, find another forum.

Please don't make assumptions about our experience in software and games, and please take the time to look at the points we are making instead of bristling at what you are misinterpreting as a "flame thread". There is no such thing as a Stardock "hater" on this forum, but some of us are realists. 

If Stardock is able to fix the bugs, make the game fun, balance the game, set the pacing and form some type of cohesion between the functional units of the game, I will be tickled to death. If they are not able to, then I will still enjoy the product  because I am a modding nut. I've built a fairly elaborate office just to mod this game, so I am all in . 

jshores: Please realize that for us, these posts happen every single time we make a game (with the ironic exception of Demigod) and the reason is that people mistake polish for level of completion.