Finally, some hopeful news....

I've actually never played MoM (gasp!). I'd personally prefer that He keep in mind the things that made His mod successful, Amen.

Like very different factions and strategic depth.

Because, as far as the base for FE goes, I think that it was a decent fantasy wargame, but just doesn't have the heft in game mechanics to be a great 4x TBS. Only my opinion, of course, but the way that culture, religion, civics, and diplomacy interacted in Civ4, and thus FfH2, was exquisite, and I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that FE will have nearly the same amount of strategic depth.

I know that Stardock hates this kind of post, but I think that it's a simple fact that the less nuance there is in a strategy game, the less long-term replayability it's going to have once the Gee-Whiz factor wears off.

That is all, feel free to ignore the sentiment, if you'd like.

Edit: Although I'm not convinced, I'm still cautiously optimistic.

I heard that EFE is going to be better than World of Warcraft.

Supreme Commander 2 did one noticeable thing better than the original... the flow field system which allowed battles to move with less lag and not run into each other nearly as much.  This sped things up tremendously as one of the major problems I had with the first game was the level of lag that cropped up during huge fights.  I didn't notice one bit of it in the Supreme Commander 2 battle videos I watched on Youtube.

That was the only good thing.  They completely butchered the system by adding in a research system to an originally researchless game, and changed the economy system so that you pay for everything up front instead of over time when building.  Supreme Commander is undoubtedly one of the best games ever made and a worthy successor to it's inspiration, Total Annihilation.  But Supreme Commander 2 does not fit that description... and I really hope that Elemental isn't going down that same road.  Things like this, however, keep me hopeful that everything will turn out fine in the end.  Elemental may have been released terribly incomplete, but they seem to have a good developer base who cares about their games and make appropriate patches and tweaks -- the 1.1 and 1.2 patches spring to mind, which made the game immensely more playable.

Derek Paxton, I salute you.  Many have talked about and tried to make a true sequel -- or at least spiritual successor -- to Master of Magic, but none have ever really come this close.  Elemental shows a tremendous amount of promise, and I look forward to seeing what great new worlds you and your friends at Stardock will create for us.

Heard this a lot before E:WOM and during early beta. But it ended up so, so far from that.

It is a great idea to stick to MoM, but it needs less mentioning and more doing. Hopefully with Derek on board we can see that.

This. 

This x1000.

The OP makes it sound like before Derek , SD was shy about mentioning MoM as the gold standard or inspiration they were working towards. They weren't. Fat lot good all that mention did.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I thought Master of Magic was the inspiration behind EWOM?

drrob

If you had been here from 2008 and onwards then you wouldn't let the hype take you over like that.

As Rishkith says, we have read lots of developer journals (primarily by Brad) which were really enthusiastic and made it sound like Elemental: War of Magic was going to be the best fantasy TBS game ever made.

I particulary remember one journal where he posted a video of himself playing Master of Magic (30 sec long) and wrote that gamedevelopers could learn alot from Master of Magic.

Tridus

Brad said that the engine couldn't support the things they wanted to do (but now they've fixed that).

Yeah, but if you're building a new engine for your new MoM-like game, wouldn't you build in what you need? Improving it bodes well for FE at least.

Xia - Yeah that is so me now. E3 this year was one giant sequence of "gee that's a pretty trailer, too bad it tells me absolutely nothing" and "wow that game looks incredibly gimmicky and I can't wait to spend the first two weeks after release reading reviews and forums to see if it's worth a purchase."