Elemental and what I dont understand (what if)

For the record, I bought the game last night and played several hours of it.  NO CRASHES.  NONE.  Of course, i heard not to ALT-TAB and I have not ALT-TAB ...  so no crashes for E: WoM (yet).

 

You think it logical that a game freshly released a week ago should be similar in polish to a game which was polished over two installments, several expansions, and countless patches?

 

Yes I do.  I dont expect it to be perfect, though.  However, that is the problem.  I think that most people do EXPECT it.  However, I do expect polished game.  I would probably have enjoyed this game more if it was GalCiv II modded to be Elemental: War on Magic.  When Fallout Las Vegas comes out, if I can not play it without crashing or the AI just mindly does nothing as I shoot it...  I would stop playing it.  If I was playing Dawn of War II and the AI just attacked me without a purpose and without cover on Primarch difficulty.  I would have stopped playing it.  I remember I got frustrated at that game when I lost three times in this one level...  If Mass Effect 2 was glitchy and buggy or Dragon Age...  I believe people would have been in an uproar. 

 

 

I would pick EWoM over GalCiv2, because I thought GalCiv2 was garbage.

No, but I'd think that given their pretty long experience with 4x games they'd have a pretty solid handle on the base mechanics and how to mesh them together.  Elemental shows none of that.

Were I to come to this game knowing nothing of the history of Stardock and their long-term and dedicated support to their games, I'd be incredibly angry at my $50 being basically thrown down the drain.

Easy answer: because they had two possible release windows to put the game on the shelves: August 2010 and February 2011. They decided to bring it out this August regardless of the final touch because of Civilization 5 and (I am assuming here) because they had not enough money and verve to wait another 6 months.

Logic suggests that is the answer to all of your questions.

 

 Just because you made a successful 4x game before does not mean all 4x games you make from there on will be perfect on the first try.

i have also had no technical prolems. aside from the mini map displaying the old games' map when i start a new one.

on an aside, i love GC2, but i don't think it is really finished. i really hate some of the presentation and the amateur elements. the game has little atmosphere and the space aspect seems underused. production is a fundamentally awful mechanic, as evidenced by the all-factories strategy. the snathi make me cringe horribly every time i see them. the "weird radiation from space! population doubles!" messages are so horrendously tacked on. the UP is an afterthought and a total mess. even the morality system is completely unintegrated (glad this is not a feature of elemental).

a lot of the problems are shared between the two. i hate the boardgame based approach to mathematics. roll-within-your-value is a horribly over randomised combat mechanic. this is evident in elemental where a lighting bolt can do anywhere between 2 and 28 damage for a character with 14 int and a shard. this is, imho the main reason for the poor unit customisation in elemental. there are too few stats, and many of the ones that do exist seem to be hidden away. where is my spell resistance mechanic? why are fast units and units with high number of attacks effectively the same? why is their no difference between ranged and melee defence? you can't parry an arrow!

i actually really like the art style of elemental (though the fallen do, admittedly look horrible). the performance should be perfect on a 2.4ghz quadcore with a GeForce 9600. it is not. the game has a borrible case of the jaggies and really needs anti-aliasing. there seems to be no option for any.

 

You can enable antialiasing in the options menu(video tab)

 

There is a difference between perfect and not polished and full of glitches and odd AI behaviour and the lack of true map randomization and the lack of a fashion design on the customization.  (Okay, maybe the fashion design is pushing it.  But come on, NO ONE AT Stardock seen women's clothing before?)

They didn't transplant GalCiv 2's mechanics into Elemental. They could have, sure, but they decided to take the high road and start fresh, using what they knew from GalCiv 2 to guide them. If they'd just slapped GalCiv2 wholesale into WoM, that would have led its own problems.

I expected the game to be more polished, and to be more thoughtful in some aspects (magic) than it is in its current state. (Technically I've had few problems other than the non-cloth map frame rates.) I expected bugs and tweaking, but I didn't expect them to basically be working to fix bugs and hastily added content that should have been 95% at release.

Still, comparing it to GalCiv2 isn't fair to them or the game. Every game is a new set of obstacles, bugs and lessons. Even Blizzard will tell you that. They simply jumped the gun on release and underestimated how much that was going to piss some people off. Which was short-sighted of them.

As to why they jumped the gun on release, whether they needed or simply wanted the cash flow earlier...I dunno. But in retrospect, it seems like reaching too far, too fast to get distracted with stuff like book deals when you're going into unfamiliar territory in your games and they haven't even proven themselves on the market. That already had one of my eyebrows up when I began following Elemental. It always does when game devs decide they need to ship fiction with their product. And now it seems like somewhat of a /facepalm.

I'm not disputing that.

My point is that having expectations for elemental's polish a week after release based on what galciv's polish was several years after release is... unreasonable.

So Sins of a Solar Empire was in this shape?  Mass Effect 2?  Dragon Age?  StarCraft 2?  Fallout 3?

Everyone jumps on the StarCraft 2 and Blizzard bandwagon.  Did you know that when WOW (The World of Warcraft MMO) started it was a disaster?  It probably made Elemental:  War of Magic look like a perfect polished game!  it was the worse.  Servers crashed. People unable to pay for WEEKs after launch.  There was word it was going down and Blizzard will be bankrupt in months.  A few years later, Blizzard is laughing every time they go to the bank.  The fears of the past has been forgotten and people expect Blizzard products to be polished when it comes out now.  People compared StarCraft 2 to 1 instantly.  If Starcraft 2 was unpolished it would have been bad, I betcha.  Again, this is that bandwagon thing.  Bottom line:  I expect current games to learn from the mistakes from previous games.  I expect it and demand it.  I will let slide a few glitches and errors.

Let us talk about vehicles.  When a new company makes a new vehicle.  Do we expect it to have to be recalled within a month and for some systems not to be working?  Or do we expect it to have the same quality as a previous model or vehicle made by the same company?  I wonder what people would say if the 2011 Ford vehicles was not polished enough to include brakes (or what ever car company you can think of).  Let us hope they have patches for them brakes within days?

How about food?  I go to a new restraunt and eat a really good dish from the chef.  The chef says he has a brand new dish next week.  I go back.  It is a bit raw, not enough flavor, spices are off, and whoops veggies are spoiled.  Will I tell the chef, "hey I am going to eat this tomorrow, try to improve it?"

How about airlines.  I go to an airlines to fly from X to Y and back again.  On the first flight, there are several problems.  It was hours late, the flight was overbooked, it was AS expensive as other airlines that were not overbooked or late, I had my luggage lost, and valuables were missing and never recovered.  The next year, I want to fly from X to Y again.  I see the same airlines.  This airline is the same price as everyone else.  I guess I should try them out and hope they improved.  But if they had not, its ok there is always next year?  Worse yet, that airline gives me no discount or voucher for my troubles the first or second time.


If I understand correctly, you are saying that I should forgive companies who make the same mistake again and again and again at launches with my money and time?

We expect quality from everything else, but with games... it is okay to be buggy?  Even expected and not unreasonable?  Is that how I understand this?  Is that the general feeling is that:  It is even expected that Stardock will have buggy games at launch and even expected, but dont worry?

Do you need someone to tell you to tie your shoe when it's untied before you make your decision?

I'm not saying I agree with you; this seems more like a chance for you to rant. Give them your money or don't, if you knew better, then you should be kicking yourself instead of ranting at Stardock. If you've had any familiarity with their games, you should have known you're paying for the 6 month+ development, not just the release product. Be upset about the lack of polish, but quit trolling for people to agree with what you already believe. There's nothing worse than a unhappy customer who just rants and raves while (in the same breath) asking when the next patch is coming.

That's revisionist history at its finest. WoW at launch was actually one of the least buggy MMO launches of its time (compared to the utter shit that was EQ 2 at launch, Vanguard, Age of Conan, or Warhammer). WoW's problem was strictly server capacity: it was too popular. Soon as they got that sorted out the game played great.

They were able to survive the server mess with their playerbase in tact precisely BECAUSE it was such a fun game. People wanted to play it enough to put up with the nonsense.

Blizzard as a company wasn't ready at launch to go from a 1 game a year (tops) studio to a large MMO studio with the infrastructure and support that requires.

 

Elemental seems to suffer from a similar issue of growth, in that Stardock put it out unfinished like an indie studio can do, but is now well known enough to be judged against the big boys where that simply isn't acceptable. Next time around, they need to add a phase in between "assemble game systems" and "release" called "gameplay beta".

I believe that is the most true statement I have seen.  I do judge Stardock with the "big boys" of Blizzard and Bioware and all them others.  Maybe that is my problem.

 

 

No. I am not saying you should not expect a polished game when you buy it, or forgive anyone anything.

I am just saying that expecting the polish level of game A(which was just released) to be equal to the polish of game B (which has been polished for several years) is unreasonable.

Well, for IGN as I understand it it's as easy as giving them a couple of grand "advertising" money ...

Why do people insult things they don't understand?  Common human nature?  Of course Starcraft 2 isn't like Elemental, neither is Rise of Nations (an "empire building" RTS) or Age of Mythology (fantasy world).  They're not supposed to be, but there DEFINITELY is strategy in them, not just a clickfest.  Did Bobby Fischer not use strategy when he played speed chess, which I believe he played a lot of?  SC2 is like playing 3 games of speed chess at once: 1 managing your resource income, 1 managing your unit production, and 1 managing the battle, which adds the 4th dimension of decision-making: time management, which TBS's have unlimited of.  Which unit path do I take, what is best to counter my enemy's units, what is the best time to expand without being vulnerable, when and where do I attack my enemy, and which area do I focus the most of my time on?  These are all strategic decisions, and then you have to add the tactical decisions on top of that (when do I use my unit's abilities, or Orbital Scan, or Chrono Boost).  Yes, there is usually only one strategic path to victory: Conquest in the lingo of TBS, but it doesn't mean strategic decisions aren't used to get there.

SC2 and Elemental are not substitutes for each other, so I don't know why I keep seeing it on these forums.  They're so different, they're not even apples and oranges.

EDIT: By the way, I didn't play Starcraft 1 when it came out, and when I first played it a couple of years ago, I hated it compared to other modern RTS's I played at the time, like Company of Heroes, Rise of Nations, and Supreme Commander.  And I don't play WoW, and I never played Warcraft 3.  But no one can deny that Starcraft 2 is an extremely polished game on release.  I wanted to hate it because of all the hype, but it is well put together and mostly balanced.

I cannot for the life of me understand why people are constantly trying to come up with the most ridiculous comparisons to make a point. Comparing the development of a computer game to preparing and selling food in a restaurant or arline services is so out of this world it is beyond funny.

What baffles me even more is this predominant sense of entitlement among gamers. Like playing games is a human right and not a hobby, not a choice. Sometimes I feel like there are gamers out there that intenionally buy games on release, knowing perfectly well about the risks, just so that they CAN get worked up about it.

Everyone who played computer games knows at least the basics about the conditions and specialities of that hobby. Everyone who knows about games also knows that he/she should wait for the initial customer reviews/feedback before buying a game if he is not willing to pay for an unpolished, unfinished, bugged piece of work. Yeah, I forgot. We are all forced to buy games, because that is the birthright of our digital generation...