Quote Originally Posted by Beskar View Post
Also, the datafile is meant to be part of the anti-piracy Stardock have in place for the beta, so it is something they will not be removing. I asked over on their forums anyway.
That sounds like it could be a bit frustrating....

I pre-ordered a while ago and have been playing around with Beta 2 for the last couple of days. I don't think you should feel like you are missing much yet.

Its a very clunky beta with zombie AI and basic issues (innability to save/reload) abound, over half the game is disabled for the Public beta.

That's the thing, they are still running a private beta before passing something out to the public. I can completely understand this from a marketing point of view, but it does tend to make the pre-order Beta a bit less meaty than one might (naively) imagine, and more like a PR stunt. Also, as the IP is still being built up (or in fact dictated by Stardock -not the beta players), there is such a wide constituency of opinions on what type of game Elemental should be that the forum discussions tend to be a bit rambling.

As far as i'm concerned, the game is shaping up to be an interesting 4X city based strategy game. The plans for tactical combat leave me a little cold, I'm not clear how they will work in practice or sure I'm too keen on them (this is one area where stardock has just decided for tiself what to do, which is of course their right!), but then no tactical combat has yet made it onto any public beta.

The game's premise of rediscovering and re-creating mankind and its civilisations (as if an appocalypse had occured in 1400 or so) means that the setting is very much Medieval/early renaissance tech, plus a helping of Magic and a side of pulp fantasy.

I am still highly dubious of the quality of the book which will accompany the game. As i think I posted before, I think its an interesting thing to do, I just don't know if a game designer's comparative advantage lies in novel writing.

I would also be very surprised to see anything released this summer. The repeated and heavy hints about "ready to take the time to make it right" etc strongly indicate to me that this won't be released before Feb 2011.