To Mr. Wardell and the development team at Stardock:
I have been following the development of Elemental: War of Magic since I first read about it on Joystiq, just about two years ago. As a kid I played Master of Magic on a hand-me-down 486 using a boot disk that my dad made for me (had to disable a bunch of stuff because, if I’m correctly remembering, MoM required some insane amount of EMS memory that wasn’t otherwise available on my crappy machine). Never got the sound working, either. But boy oh boy, I played MoM to death and back again. Figured out a half-dozen ways to break it wide open, but steamrolling the map with Torin the Chosen (loaded with so many glowing buff spells that he probably contracted testicular cancer as a result) was always my favorite way of going about things. Maybe three, four years ago, I rediscovered the game on an abandonware site and probably dumped another hundred hours into it – just for nostalgia’s sake. Master of Magic was a deeply, deeply, flawed game but for a certain type of gamer it scratched a very particular itch. So yes, I’ve been following development closely.
Not too closely, though – I chose not to take part in the beta out of a kind of gaming celibacy. I wanted to go into the launch fresh and see everything new rather than taking part in the development cycle.
I hope you’ll forgive me when I tell you that my first experiences with your products were for free. Probably the first game of yours that I played was Galactic Civilization, borrowed from a friend. Likewise for the first Political Machine. I’ve since become a paying customer and a satisfied one.
When I finally went ahead and pre-ordered Elemental, maybe a month ago, I started actively seeking out content about the game rather than passively letting it filter into my RSS feeder. I’ve never participated in the Stardock forums before, so I was not expecting to see Stardock’s CEO (of all people) actively taking part in discussions about his own game. The conversation posted here blew my mind on a certain level. And what I learned is that you, Mr. Wardell, ‘get it.’ You’re a gamer. You’re one of us. You make games that you want to play. I want to thank you for that.
There’s no denying that Elemental has some pretty serious issues right now (I am eagerly awaiting a fix to the multi-core processor slowdown issue that’s being discussed in the support forum even as I type this), but I don’t mind the wait. When I read that now infamous quote of yours (shall we call it QuarterGate?) I actually laughed out loud. I liked it. I certainly don’t feel like I needed an apology but I respect you for offering one.
I can’t wait to see where Elemental is a week, a month, a year, five years from now. I can’t wait to see where Stardock’s talented development team takes it and I can’t wait to see where the talented fan-base takes it. And Mr. Wardell, when you tell me that Stardock will continue to support this game I believe you. Because you get it. So – thank you for what Elemental is and thank you for what it will be. And thank you for this rad little pewter dragon that I am keeping on my desk at work.
Respectfully,
Cale_Knight
