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Elemental: War of Magic - Stardock TBS

Bossman

Member
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/elemental-war-of-magic/926527p1.html

This game looks lovely. It's going to be similar to Master of Magic which was a classic game.

elemental-war-of-magic-20081103013726733.jpg


elemental-war-of-magic-20081103013746796.jpg
 
Been waiting for Stardock to unveil this one. Master of Magic was my favorite strategy game back then, bugs and all, so its great to see a talented developer making a game in the same style. And given Stardock's history and their extensive beta programs, I think we can safely assume this one will have just a tad fewer bugs than Master of Magic shipped with.
 

MidiSurf

Banned
scheduled for a February 2010 release.

:(

Anyway game looks and sounds interesting. I hope we will get more info soon.
 

Sinatar

Official GAF Bottom Feeder
JasonUresti said:
Thats the second Age of Wonders game, correct? That was more like Master of Magic than the first, wasn't it?

It's the 3rd one actually, and it's very much like MoM, I'd go so far to say it's better.
 

Acosta

Member
Sinatar said:
It's the 3rd one actually, and it's very much like MoM, I'd go so far to say it's better.

It´s not (for me). But is certainly the closest thing avaliable. AoW:SM has less focus on the "Civilization" part, it felt more a strategy/tactic fantasy game than what MoM was, a more combat focused Civilization on a magical setting.

The vanilla version of AoW:SW is more limited than Master of Magic, but it has a great editor so I guess there is some cool stuff around. However I feel that a MoM campaing is more "epic", it has a bigger scope and it has some wild stuff that made the campaign quite unpredictable (until certain point at least). Don't misunderstand me, AoW: SM is an excellent game and make some things better than MoM, but is still an AoW expansion which looked to MoM for ideas to improve. Master of Magic was new and unique in its day, a nerd dream mix of Civilization and Master of Orion in a high fantasy setting.

I won´t hide that I can be biased and nostalgia driven, so take me with a grain of salt.

In any case, I love Stardock, they know how to make 4x and I love the idea of them preparing something in fantasy setting. Borrowing the Pollination concept of Spore sounds like a absolutely awesome idea on the paper, going through a campaign without knowing what type of creatures, spells or races are you going to find. it makes me terribly excited. I will take a close look to this.
 

Minsc

Gold Member
PC gaming is dying ever so wonderfully. This sounds like a game I will really enjoy. If it is early 2010 that's just over a year away now... not too bad :)
 
Early 2010 with a public beta next spring. Of course, the first beta revision won't be anything like the final game, but there you go.

(Also, I should search more frequently)
 

golem

Member
oh man definitely getting some MOM vibes.. cant wait to try it

that said.. why hasnt anyone done a MOM remake already?
 
"oh man definitely getting some MOM vibes.. cant wait to try it

that said.. why hasnt anyone done a MOM remake already?"


Brad Wardell jokingly called this Not-MOM before it was announced. I believe they actually tried to get the MOM license for this but couldn't.
 

Johann

Member
Teknopathetic said:
"oh man definitely getting some MOM vibes.. cant wait to try it

that said.. why hasnt anyone done a MOM remake already?"


Brad Wardell jokingly called this Not-MOM before it was announced. I believe they actually tried to get the MOM license for this but couldn't.

Wardell said the MoM deal was going to work out until Atari's legal team got too demanding. The legal guys wanted a lot of control over the marketing and overseas distribution of the game. They had requirements such as a Stardock employee having to be in another country to oversee working conditions so that Atari had less liability.
 

Dina

Member
Don't think if I like the washed out artstyle, but at least the HUDs look ace :)

Hope it's as good as Age of Wonders.
 
"Wardell said the MoM deal was going to work out until Atari's legal team got too demanding. The legal guys wanted a lot of control over the marketing and overseas distribution of the game. They had requirements such as a Stardock employee having to be in another country to oversee working conditions so that Atari had less liability."


That's a bit absurd. Honestly, though, I dunno how much pull the MOM name would have these days.
 

Acosta

Member
You can read the story of Stardock trying to get the MoM license here. It is pretty hilarious and illustrates well why Atari is in its actual state (dumb, unconnected of reality decisions from a management and legal team that doesn´t know what to do with their IPs ).
 

Flyguy

Member
OT, but this reminds me that there was supposed to be a new, free, browser-based HOMM out a long time ago. Does anyone know what became of that?
 
Acosta said:
You can read the story of Stardock trying to get the MoM license here. It is pretty hilarious and illustrates well why Atari is in its actual state (dumb, unconnected of reality decisions from a management and legal team that doesn´t know what to do with their IPs ).


"There are a lot of people who liked it, but it wasn't what people expected. I think that if you make something the third in a series, you can't just go on and pursue your own vision."


Thank you!
 

tehbear

Member
Why is Atari being such pricks over MoM? Clearly a shit company with a shit future if they are going anal trying to retain every precious gold coin they can. Cause you know Stardock is going to ruin the great things they are currently doing with MoM.

With that said WoM seems like it'll be a great game, even though I don't dig the art style. Looks like someone went wild with airbrush on everything.
 

CTLance

Member
Eh. Not my kinda stuff (artwork/setting/genre), but hey. It's stardock. As long as they keep their nasty-ass DRM away from my PC I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Definitely on my watchlist.

Parts of this post are not to be taken seriously.
 

Durante

Member
Master of Magic ranks highly among my favourite TBS ever, and there hasn't been anything like it since AoW:SM (which I thought was good but not great) so I'm eagerly anticipating this one.

As long as they manage to recreate the best things about MoM's gameplay it could look like a fifth grader's art project for all I care. (I'm not saying it does, I actually like the style)
 

Bossman

Member
They have released new journals that contain some nice info:

http://elementalgame.com/journals.asp

I especially liked this part:

Some of the concepts we're talking about will be hard to envision without actually having the game but one of the real innovations we're trying to introduce with Elemental is the concept of unlimited expansion.

The key to this is not hard coding civilization capabilities but rather leaving them open-ended.

So let me start at the beginning:

When someone first gets into Elemental, the relationships will be simple between things. A player who wants to design a horse mounted knight will need to have researched animal husbandry which lets them train horses. They will need to have a city that has used one of its tiles to make use of a herd of wild horses on the map. They will need a mine on a metal deposit to create the armor. And once they have all those things, it'll be a matter of training and equipping the knight.

The above example is one of the more complicated relationships one will see initially in Elemental...

But what about users who want to keep making more and more sophisticated relationships?

Maybe I want to have knights equipped with sunfire dread chain mail riding tamed Demon steeds and the knights have a secondary power of carrying tomes of unmaking which vastly increase their damage in battle?

Well, there would be a host of technologies one would have to have researched. There would have to be spells researched as well and new city buildings that produce these tomes and then have been enchanted to make these tomes magical. The demon steeds would require various technologies and the finding of demons to be tamed in the first place and so on and so on.

How do you control the level of sophistication here so that it doesn't become too complicated? The answer is with a new series of game options that are practically games unto themselves.

Because, did I mention, that all the things mentioned in the second example were things produced not by us but by players and broadcast to all other players so that you have access to them automatically? No expansion packs needed. No paying for mini-content needed. It's just thousands of players creating cool stuff and broadcasting it to one another.

So here's how players control it. They have a screen called the Bestiary where they can control what types of creatures are in game. When someone broadcasts content, Stardock moderators rate and define it more closely. From this screen, players can decide what types of creatures they want, the quality of the submission desired (we will rate the broadcasts in terms of production values as well), etc. These creatures will have associated technologies that are attached to them that are required.

There will be additional screens for managing resources, techs, etc.

So for most players, they will probably stick with what we include or maybe a handful of expansions that Stardock provides. Others will insert some content made by other players. And still others will go for a truly huge scope experience. But the point is that players control this.

Now someone might say that a lot of this sounds too ambitious. But Stardock already does a lot of this, today, right now, on WinCustomize.com with its non-game stuff.

Now what is the gameplay result of this? One of the cooler things that will result is that the units that players make use of will really be different from game to game. And there will be a real pay off in the battles for players who have managed to assemble the necessary components to create some of the truly sophisticated units.

In multiplayer, the default it going to be the least common denominator settings. We will probably have other options but we won't know until we've had a chance to play it online with you guys to see what other settings are the most fun.
 

arstal

Whine Whine FADC Troll
Stardock will deliver.

This game needs to be hyped up bigtime. It will do better then Sins.
 

CiSTM

Banned
arstal said:
Stardock will deliver.

This game needs to be hyped up bigtime. It will do better then Sins.

Don't know about that. While this games looks amazing I still think Sins has more appeal to RTS gamers. And sins did very well sales vise (over 500.000 copies sold) so it will be tough job for War of Magic to beat sins.
 
golem said:
oh man definitely getting some MOM vibes.. cant wait to try it

that said.. why hasnt anyone done a MOM remake already?

There have been 2 or 3 serious attempts to remake MOM or make a real sequel which all failed to be released, and about 4-5 games that claim to be the spiritual successor. To date none of them have really matched the awesomeness of the original game.
 

arstal

Whine Whine FADC Troll
Acosta said:
Game of the Fucking Century, I'm calling it now.

Yes, I'm hyped and I don't care!

Hopefully. This game has the potential to fail massively, and probably would if anyone else tried it. Stardock will do it though.

You won't need THAT powerful of a PC. I talked to their lead programmer, and she said my 4 yr old laptop would run the game, though with scaled down graphics.

That said, Stardock games are very scalable graphically- so the more power the better.
 

Doytch

Member
Wow, art looks awesome. And I'm confident the actual game will be quality, so I'm down for this, and will preorder if it gives me beta access.

edit: wtf I just realised this was from november. and i never heard anyone say anything about it.

edit2: holy crap I keep reading more and more, WHY THE HELL HAVE I HEARD NOTHING ABOUT THIS GAME? fucking gaf and 1up podcasts dropped the ball, they're supposed to inform me!
 
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