Look on this as "The beginning"?

More or less, yes. It would've been great if they had an extra month with a completely finished game that needed only polish and nothing else, but they did the best they could and managed to put out a good game that has the mechanics down pretty solid. After all, it's easier to balance and polish minor issues after release than fix a completely broken mechanic There's no doubt that the game will improve, despite being less-than-I'd-like polished on its release. The best we can do is help them identify areas that need the attention.

This game is about where GCII 1.00 is, maybe a little better.

GCII through the patches and expansiions improved tremendously.  GCII six months after release was nothing like GCII on day 1.

I was there for both.   The thing with Stardock is they tend to approach games not from a gamemakers perspective, but from an application-makers perspective, which I feel  is a huge help down the line, but sometimes hurts day 1. 

 

 

Well I don't think anyone, even the SD crew, would disagree.

 

The game is 'unfinished' because it's planned to have multiple content enhancing releases over the coming year+.

 

I dunno, I made the decision a while back not to buy the game until after a couple of these 'patches' come out, just because I don't want to bother with the initial release, since I knew this was going to be the initial product.

 

It's a bit of a shame though that the initial reaction seems to be so 'negative', I think Elemental may have wound up trying to do too much, rather than focus on the core mechanics (whatever those are...) and leave the rest for later.  It does feel to me from a lot of the discussion and even Brads AAR and other journals that there is just too much content to deal with properly, and some areas suffered a lack of attention to make sure that they worked as desired (or at all?).

 

Oh well, my birthday is in a couple months, so I'll just wait til then

Well I think it's still important to review the game as it is now, not how you imagine it might be in the future. This is the version they felt fit to put on the shelves and sell to people. Keep in mind too that while the expansions did fix a lot of the problems with GalCiv II, they were not exactly free.

Content patches should be extras: thing that make a finished game that's self-sufficient even more awesome and to extend its life, not to make the transition between a beta and a final release. That's disrespectful of the customers. I don't know what happened here, and I don't feel the need to flame Stardock for this (the reviews will most likely be quite negative when they should have been awesome; no need to add to this), but I will say at least that I do consider this to be bad behavior.

Brad says that he  "would be very surprised if the reviews of Elemental are negative".

 

It'll depend on how big the changes are in the Day-0  patch.  I can see reviewers having lots of issues with the lack of user feedback and other non-polished areas.

 

I'm also going to reserve judgement on the game until I get the patch as well (fooling around with the game still though)

I don't agree with the original assessment and I don't believe this is Stardock's plan. But it also depends on what you consider "unfinished". Nearly every game adds new features in the expansions, does that mean the original was "unfinished"? As long as patches fix up the issues that need fixing and  the expansions focus primarily on expanding gameplay (rolling in some fixes is to be expected along with gameplay/content additions), I don't think it'll be a problem

Nearly every successful game has all its core features at release. As it is, it doesn't stand the comparison to day 1 Age of Wonders 2, or day 1 HoMM V, to give a few examples. A lot of the core mechanics are broken or very sketchy. That's what "unfinished" means. 

An example: X3:Terran Conflict was pretty much a finished game at release. There were a few issues here and there, but all the core gameplay features were already in. What they added later on were huge content patches, but that didn't mean the game was incomplete at release: they just released extra features as time went on. This is not the case with Elemental: what's going to be in day 30/day 60 patches is what should have been on day 0.

(Also, I haven't seen any announcement about a patch tomorrow, and I don't believe in miracle build with a zillion bugfixes, with spellbooks being what they should, etc.)

I would expect the reviews will be very negative for this game. Reviewers do not usually wait for patches and the  current state of the game imho will not be well received by reviewers. 

 

Frankly, I am quite surprised. This game needed another week or two of good solid bug squishing and polish before release. The game right now is not horrible but feels "un-finished". I look forward to seeing how this develops. However, if Stardock is just pushing the fixes and balances over to the modders like some bigger game developers do (ex. Ubisoft).  This will be the last stardock game I will ever purchase. 

Okay, but what core features aren't in Elemental? Bugs means it's unpolished, after all, not unfinished.

 

Bugs and other unpolished stuff will lead to a bad game, and poor reviews.  

I'm not disputing that. But his original statement was that it's disrespectful to customers to charge for expansions that fix the game. That's definitely true, but that's not exactly what SD is doing. If free patches fix the game, and expansions improve on it and add new things to it, that's exactly what every other game does.

The UI (the whole thing, not just the buttons: the way the game is presented) is totally unfinished and unintuitive, a lot of the content is bland and barely there (spells, abilities), the maps are not really random, and the balance is poor. In other words: it's a good beta. But not a finished game.

The bugs are just another layer of frustration over the large number of issues. I'm not trying to be insulting to Stardock, a company I had immense respect for after GalCiv 2 and SoaSE. But I don't think it's a finished game, no, even if it was without bugs it would still be missing lots of pieces.

- Custom faction creation was removed from the standard user experience and "moved" to modding, where "moved" means "instructions or documentation on how to do this have not been provided".

- Random map generation was removed in favour of a very limited number of "seeds", with only post-release uproar resulting in acknowledgment of this and promises of additional seeds to come.

- Brad acknowledged some time ago that many of the Spellbooks are both repetitive and bland and this has yet to be significantly addressed.

I've enjoyed what little time I've had to play so far (and I'm posting while tired, having stayed up too late to get that playtime last night, so perhaps I'm being overly negative) but the more I think about the game and read today, the more I'm coming to agree with the argument that the game is "unfinished".

- Ash

 

seriously magic and combat arent really well thought

champions neither

 

special abilities are very weak

 

and those are all the things  we didnt test enough (or not at all) and stardock had too low time to correct/rethink

 

im not saying combat is bad

 

just not as good as it could be with few more weeks of test and feedback and work on it

Galactic Civilizations II didn't have tool tips on release. Let's keep some perspective here.

Some people want to have console level production values in a game made exclusively for the PC in a niche genre.  

I've spent some time playing it now. I really want to wait for the first patch before I announce my feelings about the game too strongly, but so far I like it. It's a fun diversion. I will say that I'm expecting more than just a little diversion from this game.

 

Most of the games I have mentioned belong to niche genre. X3:TC, AoW 2:SM... and SoaSE too, actually. Or hey, Victoria 2 (wow, Paradox released a functional game on day 0. Hell is freezing over.)

 

Functional is not the same as playable unfortunately...

 

Victoria 2 did have some serious balance and design issues that emerged later on.

I think the game is good.  It's providing a solid game experience in a genre we all know and love.  I'm not looking at what isn't there and what might be there, but instead I am focusing on all the great things SD has given us.  And it's going to get better.  Kudos to them for winning.

Been waiting for this game since I read about it in Game Informer like 2 years ago.  I'm not disappointed one bit.

I'm enjoying this my money was well spent and i know that it will get better. 

Pretty much being unplayable late game.... oh the agony of finding out that.

I'm sad to say that Elemental will almost certainly get bad reviews from mainstream sources.  My review?  Most certainly bad, even by newly released game standards.  Not only will it have to recon with some of the hype that it generated by its proclamations (successor to Master of Magic, RPG feel, etc,) but it will suffer for being, what many will declare, an unfinished title.  In about 5 days after the enthusiasts have played the game sufficiently and the features of the game become more clear, this will become more and more evident.  I'm not saying this out of bitterness or to be meanspirited, but it's just the plain, very evident reality.  Aside from the persistent crashes, lack of instruction, and very lopsided imbalances, the game mechanics itself have some very deep flaws.  There are too many dangling game features that don't share consilience with one another.

Can it be fixed?  Possibly.  Will it be fixed?  Certainly, if it is possible.  I think Frog and team bit off more than they could chew on this one and ended up wedged between their own aspirations and the cold, hard reality of budget and deadlines.  I've seen it happen a thousand times before, so I don't blame them.  However, I've played almost every Stardock game, so I know that creating a good game is more a philosophical imperative rather than a crass "extraction of profit" from the public.  This gives me a lot of confidence that we'll end up with a good and playable game yet.  So if it can be fixed, I'm perfectly willing to wait.