I'm starting to get a bit worried. I've been flipping back through the old beta board, looking at the various timelines and feature lists, and what I'm seeing is that there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between the game that was announced to the press and advertised on the front page and what the developers were actually shooting for. Part of my disappointment with the game (and I suspect others as well) is that the feature set is technically complete but not nearly as robust as I was expecting. Yes you can cast spells, but the spell list is short and lacks variety. Ditto unit design, city building, diplomacy, etc. But all of the team's design goals were met. They have a magic system, they have a unit design system, etc. And perhaps more importantly to the dev team, they have all the modding tools ready to allow users to expand on those systems.
This takes me back to a game I used to have as a kid on my old C64: The Adventure Construction Set. It was a toolkit for creating tile based RPGs in the Ultima/Wastelands mode as were popular at the time, with utilities for creating maps, NPCs, items, sprites and a crude menu-based scripting engine for tying it all together into an actual game. It was clunky and took a lot of work, but with dedication you could make nearly professional (for the time) level adventure games. It came packaged with an adventure made with it, a short game based around the epic of Gilgamesh called Rivers of Light. It was a fun little game, and a great way to show off what the ACS could do, but it wasn't a full product like Ultima or Wasteland.
This is what worries me: The more I play it the more the game we have feels to me like Rivers of Light. It's a great example of what someone can build with the Turn Based Strategy Construction Set, but it's not a full game. The abbreviated spell list, the lack of unit building options and city upgrades, etc: The more I play with them the more they seem like samples, like examples of what a single modder could put together for his game if he really wanted to. That's cool and all, but it doesn't interest me much. I didn't buy the Turn Based Strategy Construction Set. I bought Elemental: War of Magic. Modding is just a single bullet point on the feature list, and for me it's a bonus that I might play around with when I have the time once I've gotten bored with the regular game, not the primary draw.
So here's my question for StarDock: Is there still significant 'fleshing out' of Elemental left as part of the initial "patch yourselves out of trouble" phase of the release, or do you consider the game as shipped feature- and content-complete barring the first full fledged expansion (free or otherwise).
Please note: It's a fools errand to ask something like this, I know, but please: feedback, suggestions, counters and even flames are fine, but unless you're part of the dev team or have a specific quote from them, your assurances as to the direction they intend to take the game will do nothing to salve my concerns. And if your feedback is "Well I enjoy it just fine, you must just suck", please give specifics. I want to love the game as much as you do, but expressing the superiority of your experience without giving some kind of guidance doesn't help anyone.
