Stardock's new game -- Elemental: War of Magic

[Martok]

Well either Brad deliberately misled us about the date so as to surprise us, or someone let the cat out of the bag a day early, because Gamespy has released an (apparently) exclusive first look at Stardock's new PC title.


A fairly interesting feature is your leader/avatar, known as a "channeler". He's an immensely powerful character, but you can -- if you so choose -- to portion away some of this power to hero generals (whom you can hire as wandering NPC's), and also to grow your empire in the founding of new cities and whatnot. It sounds like it should be an interesting balance between having an individually strong leader, or sharing out his abilities so as to expand your realm.


There's five schools of magic: Life, Earth, Air, Water, & Fire. Of course, each school imparts its own bonuses and penalties. Your leader will also have a choice about being a positive or negative channeler -- apparently positive channelers will create verdant, lush land around their cities, while the empires of negative channelers will see something along the lines of Mordor-like terrain. Also (to directly quote the article): "Each type will receive various military bonuses or penalties based on the kind of terrain they're fighting on and which school of magic it's most connected to."


I have to admit, this part sounds particularly cool:

The world map also plays a significant role in the way the game plays out. One of the design team's mantras is that everything the player sees should be "real." That is, everything in the game should represent a real strategic factor the player must take into consideration. Cities aren't just single-tile icons. Instead players can grow their cities according to specific strategic dictates. As cities expand, players can choose how to spread their cities across the map and can locate individual city elements within those tiles. This can lead to cities being used as fortresses to block specific mountain paths or a situation like the classical Greek cities of Athens and Piraeus in which the Greek city-state's naval power was extremely dependent on maintaining a thin, vulnerable strip of land that let them control the port city of Piraeus.

I suspect I'm going to have a lot of fun with this aspect of the game.


There's some excellent news for modders as well:

Elemental will also mark Stardock's entry into the realm of Spore-style game broadcasting. The game will do much more than offer support for modders, as the company is developing a back-end infrastructure through its proprietary Impulse service that will let players seamlessly integrate new races, units, spells, technologies, buildings and much more into their game. Every time a player starts a game of Elemental, they'll have the opportunity to seamlessly incorporate new content straight from the fertile minds of the game's biggest fans.

Can't wait to see what people come up with.


Finally, the bad news:

Elemental: War of Magic is currently scheduled for a February 2010 release.

Gah! Over a year. I may very well go mad before then.

[Xiahou]

Gah! Over a year. I may very well go mad before then.

Well, they usually allow pre-orders to beta well before release. So that may be your best hope for sanity.

Demigod isn't being released til Feb and I've been playing the beta for over a month now.

[Togakure]

Cool beans . Thanks for the heads-up, Martok.

[seireikhaan]

Seems interesting. I wonder if I'll be able to play it on my current rig when it comes out.

Either way, I'm fine with the late release date. Better to play it safe than haphazardly release it as fast as possible regardless of its state.

[Martok]

Well, they usually allow pre-orders to beta well before release. So that may be your best hope for sanity.

I know. Problem is, I'm no more patient when it comes to beta-testing than I am with waiting. That, and I just like the idea of purchasing a game without knowing beforehand what the experience is really like -- I enjoy that "fresh and new" feeling.

Seems interesting. I wonder if I'll be able to play it on my current rig when it comes out.

I'd say it's very likely you'll have no problem on that score. One of Stardock's selling points is that they optimize their games so that it can run reasonably well on a wide variety of machines. (It's one of the reasons both GalCiv2 and Sins of a Solar Empire have sold so relatively well, despite both titles having very modest budgets.)

If you check out the two screenshots on the Gamespy preview, I think any concerns you have will be quickly mollified.

Either way, I'm fine with the late release date. Better to play it safe than haphazardly release it as fast as possible regardless of its state.

Oh, I know. The fact that they take their time and don't rush their games out the door is another reason I'm such a Stardock fanboy.

That doesn't change the fact, however, that a year can still be a long time to wait.

[Martok]

By the by, here's the link to the game's home page. There's some more articles and previews linked under their News section as well.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go read up on the game more while I try to stop myself from salivating.

[Veho Nex]

2010... Ohh man how am i going to wait...

[Martok]

Links to a couple more previews:


Edge-Online

Gamasutra



Some excerpts I found particularly interesting and/or cool:

Elemental, which has been described by Wardell as a "franchise," will feature random map generation, integrated modding, city building, unit design, tactical combat, multiplayer and most of all, magic.

As for multiplayer, Wardell said that there will be two modes: standard skirmish with simultaneous turns and a "Wars of Magic" mode. The latter is a persistent mode hosted on Stardock's Impulse Cloud servers, and offers a "variety of different game types."

On the technical side, the game runs on an internally-developed 3D engine that’s been in the works for “a couple of years,” according to Wardell. It’s made specifically for strategy games. In Elemental, gamers will be able to zoom out and view the world as a cloth map that strategists can play on or zoom in for greater detail.

“If you like Civilization or are a Master of Magic fan, this is a must-get," he claimed. "I’m zealot of those games, so I’m kind of a target audience for it."

As with all of Stardock's games, it is targeting low system requirements, but also features an engine that dynamically scales performance to the number of CPU cores on a given machine.

As more cores are available, says Wardell, "the world just becomes richer. In the most extreme sense, this engine's been designed as such that at the lowest end with a really old machine, you can play almost with icons. But at the high end, you can zoom in and see squirrels running around in the trees. It all depends on your hardware."

Gah! I know I'm fawning over this bloody game like some idiotic love-struck teenager, but I can't seem to help myself. There's just so much good stuff to get excited over.

[seireikhaan]

So...

Its going to be like a cross between Civilization and Might and Magic? Interesting, very interesting...

[Martok]

Yeah, looks like it. Should be a fun combination!



IGN now has a preview up as well (along with more screenshots). A couple excerpts:

You can capture and control cities on the map, and the game lets you zoom from the world map down close enough that you can see tiny people walking around your streets. Cities are built on tiles, and what's neat is that when the city grows and expands you can select which tile you want it to expand to. That way, you can create cities that mold the terrain, like rivers, instead of having sprawled out blobs of cities that are common in strategy games.

And while things such as the map look like they were hand drawn, the cool thing is that the maps are randomly generated or user-created. Not only that, but most of the content in the game like units and buildings can be modified or replaced by users. The random map generator ensures that no two games are exactly the same, but users can type in their own names for major geographical features, such as forests, to make the map look like something straight out of Tolkien.

There's so much coolness in these two passages that my head just might explode.

[Zenicetus]

Gah! I know I'm fawning over this bloody game like some idiotic love-struck teenager, but I can't seem to help myself. There's just so much good stuff to get excited over.

Well, you're not alone at least. It helps that this is the company with GalCiv2 under its belt, so we have some idea of what to expect in terms of turn-based strategy goodness.

Also, they know how to do a good public/pre-order beta, with the TA expansion for GalCiv as the model. I.e.... don't release the beta until it's fairly solid and fun to play, and keep the beta period interesting by dribbling out the new features (like race tech trees) over time. If they follow that model with Elemental, I'm jumping right on the pre-order beta. I was a little nervous about doing that with the GalCiv2 TA expansion, but it worked out fine. These are complicated games, and the beta period is a good time to learn the new rules and strategies.

So where's that beta, Stardock!

[drone]

Me likey!

[Martok]

So where's that beta, Stardock!

Sounds like you'll have to wait til spring, possibly June.


Incidentally, I wonder how big the campaign maps are. They look pretty sizable, but it of course it's hard to tell when there's no scale to compare it to.

[Martok]

Gamespot has a preview up:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Elemental: War of Magic is one part Master of Magic, one part Civilization, and one part Total War, with a dash of The Lord of the Rings fiction sprinkled in for good measure. And from our brief first look at the game, Elemental is also one of the more promising fantasy strategy entries to surface in a long while.

The powers of darkness continually encroach upon the land of men in Elemental.

That said, Elemental has no relation to Master of Magic, though rumors swirled in 2007 that publisher Stardock was attempting to secure the license. That didn't pan out, but the rumors of a new Stardock fantasy strategy game are a reality. Elemental takes place in the world of, um, Elemental. A great war ravaged the land, destroying almost all life. Powerful crystals that harnessed the power of the elements were shattered and scattered across the land. As life has slowly returned, beings known as "channelers" have arisen, able to access the magic of these crystal shards.

As the population of Elemental slowly gains in numbers, the world is being divided into two sides: men and the fallen. Men embrace farming, technology, and are generally good. The fallen embrace dark magic, combat, and adhere to a hierarchy of power. Naturally, men and the fallen don't care for each other.

In Elemental, you take on the role of one of the magical channelers and gather men or the fallen to your cause. You begin with one city and are charged with growing your kingdom. Much like in Civilization, you gather resources and grow your population. Unlike in Civ, you can grow your cities how you like, attaching a new land tile adjacent to any existing city tile. Should you want to grow a city in a long, straight line along a coastline for additional resources, you can. If your city is in a war-torn region, you may be better off surrounding your city hall with new tiles. Cities are only captured when city hall is taken, and these additional tiles add a defense bonus against invading armies.

Your kingdom can also be stylized however you like. In a separate Creator mode, you can edit city buildings to resemble medieval castles, like something out of a fairy tale, or crystalline structures that resemble Superman's Fortress of Solitude. As you gather resources, your population will grow and increase your military might, which can be used to further expand your kingdom.

There are several ways to achieve victory, such as simply defeating all your enemies in the world. You could also achieve a diplomatic victory by gathering all to your cause (sometimes under threat of force). If you are able to collect all the shards of magic hidden throughout the world, you will earn a magical victory. Finally, you can recruit enough heroes to your banner to complete a campaign called the Quest of Mastery.

Heroes, in fact, are everywhere in Elemental and range from classical knights to ultrapowerful dragons. By using skills of diplomacy, you can convince these heroes to fight for your cause, giving you great bonuses in battle. And because you are a channeler, you can imbue these heroes with magical abilities. There's one catch: You are not only a sovereign overlord with a handy top-down view of the world; you're also a character in the game, capable of moving to other areas and joining in every battle. If you die, it's game over. As a channeler, you have a large amount of magic to disperse among your cities and population. You even have to use a bit on the countryside if you want to build a new city there. Your heroes will be able to recover powerful magical artifacts from dangerous spots in the world, but you still have a finite amount of magic.

Armies are moved about on an overworld map before zooming in for massive battles.

Much of Elemental is played on a large overworld map. Zoomed all the way out, it resembles the hand-drawn maps of Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. If you zoom in closer, you'll notice a battle line where the darkness of the fallen's territory encroaches on the sunny and green territory of man. Sooner or later, these opposing forces will collide.

Battles play out similar to those in the Total War series. You'll move armies across the overworld map and then zoom into a 3D battle map. Battles do not play out in real time per se but are continually turn-based. You could pause the game to queue up various attacks or let the battles play out, issuing orders on the fly and playing the battles out as if they were in real time. Stardock is hoping the battles are as large as those in Total War as well. Company president Brad Wardell envisions thousands of units onscreen at once, ranging from infantry to archers, with dragons soaring overhead. If your channeler has sufficient magic and weapons, he will be able to cut through the opposing armies like a knife through butter, knocking dozens of foot soldiers to their doom with a single blow. The inspiration for these battles is none other than the prologue in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring when Sauron dons the One Ring then attacks the armies of elves and men. If that's too hectic for you and you prefer to manage your kingdom from afar, you could also choose to auto-resolve your conflicts.

We didn't have much time with Elemental, but we did learn that Stardock is planning at least two multiplayer modes, including a skirmish battle mode in addition to a full competitive campaign mode in which empire building is also a focus. There are a set number of maps in addition to a random map generator, ensuring you never fight the same war of good versus evil twice, if you so choose. Also, Stardock is encouraging user-created content in the vein of Spore, allowing you to use a creator tool to build structures, races, maps, technology, and magical items to insert into the game.

Much could change between now and the estimated release date, but the lofty goals of Elemental should be enough to intrigue any fan of fantasy strategy. Elemental is currently slated for release in February 2010.

Also, Brad has released additional details about Elemental here (on the game's official forums). I loved his tongue-in-cheek response to the question about what kind of copy protection the game would include:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Most important question: what version of SecuROM will be used?

It's using a combination of SecuROM and Starforce so that the game will require a CD in the drive, a USB key to be inserted and the reading of a particular word on a particular page of the user manual (which won't be hard since it'll only have a 2 page manual naturally).

The docs, which we expect to be written by fans, will be online only which will be fine since the game will require players to be on-line at all times due to the by-the-hour activation checks the game makes to the single player mode.

Also, the game won't work if you have any CD-ROM burning software including the built in media player software (users will naturally need to uninstall any media players including iTunes in order to play).

All of this will be integrated into the game by our eastern-european CD manufacturer (the copy we send there will be completely clean of course) so we're confident that no pirates will get it...
















(incidentally, this Q and A was a joke)

[Quirinus]

Also, Brad has released additional details about Elemental here (on the game's official forums). I loved his tongue-in-cheek response to the question about what kind of copy protection the game would include:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

It's using a combination of SecuROM and Starforce so that the game will require a CD in the drive, a USB key to be inserted and the reading of a particular word on a particular page of the user manual (which won't be hard since it'll only have a 2 page manual naturally).

The docs, which we expect to be written by fans, will be online only which will be fine since the game will require players to be on-line at all times due to the by-the-hour activation checks the game makes to the single player mode.

Also, the game won't work if you have any CD-ROM burning software including the built in media player software (users will naturally need to uninstall any media players including iTunes in order to play).

All of this will be integrated into the game by our eastern-european CD manufacturer (the copy we send there will be completely clean of course) so we're confident that no pirates will get it...

For a moment there I thought he was serious.....

[seireikhaan]

"Elemental: War of Magic is one part Master of Magic, one part Civilization, and one part Total War, with a dash of The Lord of the Rings fiction sprinkled in for good measure"

Pinch me...

[Martok]

@Zenicetus: Ah, okay. I more or less see what you're getting at. Thanks for the explanation.

For a moment there I thought he was serious.....

Sorry. I forgot to add in the line (which Brad deliberately posted after a long blank space) where he specifically says he's joking.

Yeah, he's said Elemental will come with no copy protection, just like GalCiv2 and Sins of a Solar Empire did. You only need to enter your serial number, and that's only in order to receive patches and updates.

Pinch me...

It does almost sound too good to be true, doesn't it? Still, I have faith in Stardock -- they can pull it off, if anyone can.

[Martok]

Incidentally, for anyone concerned about the game's visuals: Brad has also said that the screenshots are from a very early build, and that they'll look "100 times" better than they do right now. While even I take that statement with mountainous piles of salt, it's still makes me look forward to what the end product will look like.

[Martok]

Okay, this is way too cool to *not* share. Brad talks about the game's persistent universe multiplayer mode:

Elemental, like Galactic Civilizations, will have a very in-depth single player world. In fact, in terms of the single player game, it will have a lot more "stuff" to it than GalCiv had (such as a virtual persistent single player opponent which we'll talk more as time goes on).
But it will be in multiplayer that we really hope to bring new fans to the genre.
I love multiplayer games. But I am not an advocate of them in terms of taking resources up from the single player game for most types of PC games. That's because, as a practical matter, relatively few people play on-line. Not because they can't but because it's just usually not worth the hassle.
Playing on-line can take a long time, it can be frustrating and it can often end up as a total waste because of dropouts, crashes, whatever.
To address this, Elemental is going to add some new multiplayer options that we think will really help expand the interest in multiplayer.
One of those options is the persistent world: Empire vs. Kingdom. In it, players choose a side - The Empire or The Kingdom. Having chosen that, players then play on-line with various other players who are trying to help their side - The Empire or The Kingdom conquer the world of Elemental. Each battle takes place on a tiny part of the overall world of Elemental. Their opponents and friends are a mixture of real users and AI users based on what is necessary.
The AI work in Elemental is a little bit beyond what we've done before. We are aiming to provide virtual AI players who are competing in the game like a real player would. These virtual AI players would be able to join games (if no one else is available, real people get first dibs on joining games) and would play much like real people do (GalCiv players have an idea of what we mean).
Part of my work, as the AI developer at Stardock, would be to create lots of these virtual players, each with their own personalities and strategies, so that they're prepared to join up in games and provide varying degrees of a challenge to human players.
The idea here is to let people be able to get into games on-line and play without a lot of hassle remembering that this is an additional option to the other multiplayer modes available.
We'll be talking more in the future about how the Kingdom vs. Empire persistent multiplayer experience works later.

Damn. I have to say, even I'm now curious to play MP in Elemental. And most of you know that that's usually not my cup of tea -- I'm generally a singleplayer-only type of gamer.

But this....this, I just might have to check out.

[Martok]

Another interesting bit. It looks like Brad's going to do beta-testing, AI code-work, and MP modes somewhat differently than what seems to be the norm (and all at the same time):

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

One of the first things we're going to be beta testing for Elemental is a new way of doing computer AI. As some of you know, the main reason I got into development in the first place was to write computer AI for games.

Elemental is an opportunity to try some new things. For example, the initial betas of Elemental are going to require the user to be on the Internet to play. The reason is that the computer AI won't be inside the game itself but instead be implemented as AI players on the Impulse game cloud that we're building.

So you would, in effect, start up Elemental like you would a multiplayer game except that the people joining your game wouldn't be people. They would be AI people. And the AI work won't just be in how they play the game but how they behave -- in the lobby and elsewhere with the goal to make them feel like real people (except not jerks).

These AI players will have their own Impulse accounts with their own standings in the rankings, their own achievements, etc. The code won't execute on your machine, it'll be all server-based.

The final version of the game, of course, will not require the user to be on the Internet. We will bundle a number of the AI players in with the game to play single player, off-line games.

But what I hope to do is to build a cloud of multiplayer AI players that I can constantly be updating and enhancing in near-real time based on the data I get back from them on how they were beat, what exploits were used against them, what chat messages were sent to it that it needs to respond to (I'll probably have it respond "no speako English" for the most part).

In the final version of the game, these AI bots will be out there ready to join on-line games. We will give players the ability to discriminate against the robots if they have some sort of anti-robot issue and don't want them joining their multiplayer games. But the match-making system otherwise won't know which players are controlled by humans and which are controlled by the robots.

The nice thing is that for people who are used to playing with strangers on-line, the robots will help fill out the on-line community with people to play against who are explicitly designed to play like people (well like decent people not the people who drop immediately).

I expect the first version of this to be included with Beta 1 of Elemental (i.e. this isn't some "future" thing) which we expect will be out this Spring.

[Xiahou]

The final version of the game, of course, will not require the user to be on the Internet. We will bundle a number of the AI players in with the game to play single player, off-line games.

Phew.
That makes it sound much better. For a moment, I thought they were gonna require you to be online for single-player. I wonder if the offline AIs will be update-able to match what their online versions "learn"?

[Martok]

Phew.
That makes it sound much better. For a moment, I thought they were gonna require you to be online for single-player.

Heh. Yeah, I was wondering there for a minute as well.

I wonder if the offline AIs will be update-able to match what their online versions "learn"?

Probably not, unless there's a special "online singleplayer" mode you can run the game in (which I highly doubt). Given the frequency with which Stardock usually releases patches/updates, though, I suspect the offline AI's will be able to keep up well enough.

[Martok]

With the game almost ready to go into beta-testing and all the new info that's being released in the last few days (much of it in preparation for the run-up to PAX), it seemed an appropriate time to resurrect this thread.

So with that being said, we've got some new articles and previews! Myself, I found the Kotaku article and IGN's discussion with Scott about the game's art to be particularly interesting:


IGN preview

IGN article -- Art of Elemental

Gamespot preview

Kotaku preview/interview


The newer screenshots (especially in the art conversation) look pretty friggin' sweet IMHO. They've come a long way just in the last 3-6 months.

As for the Kotaku preview, I'm extremely interested in how these royal families and their dynastic politics will fit into the game's diplomacy system. It sounds like it's somewhat similar to that in Paradox's Crusader Kings, although admittedly I don't know have first-hand knowledge of CK. Still, I admit to being quite intrigued.

[Veho Nex]

Im getting all gitty waiting for this game.