DerekPaxton DerekPaxton

Baking a cake

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Baking a cake

from Elemental Forums

How do you make a great game?  Take everyone's great ideas, put them together and it will be great!

Wouldn't it be wonderful if it worked like that.  But it doesn't, it's not even close.  I like to think of it like cooking.  You can't cook by putting all the things together that you like.  Putting all the things everyone likes together would be even worse.  One guy wants cake, another wants pizza, another wants a steak.  Throw them in a blender and....

Even for standard cake there are a lot of variations and preferences.  What might be the perfect cake for me might not be enjoyed by someone else.  Games are no different.

At the end of the day Fallen Enchantress cannot be the exact game everyone imagines.  There are too many different things that are hoped for.  And it's not to say that all the things hoped for are bad.

Explorable dungeons are a good example.  They would be cool to have, but they don't belong in Fallen Enchantress.  It's not just a resource issue (though that's part of it, the more we do the less we do well), it's about where do we want the player spending his time.  What is the actual game?  Done well explorable dungeons would break from the main game and have the player play a "minigame" for 10/20/30 minutes after which he would be returned to the main game (assuming he remembered what he was doing there).

There are some players that would enjoy that.  But the break would be a hurdle for most players.  We would lose players who didn't enjoy the 4x game and players that didn't enjoy the dungeons game (unless we made the explorable dungeons optional, in which case the time spent developing them becomes even more questionable).

So we have to decide exactly what Fallen Enchantress will be, and make the best version of that game that we can.  If you have read the press release you already know some information about Fallen Enchantress's direction.  It's about bringing the world alive.  Not green and fertile and happy, but alive as in there is always something new on the other side of that mountain.  Something unknown, wonderful or terrible out in the darkness.

It will be a lot of work.  We could have focused on other things.  But the cake we are making, the game that we want Fallen Enchantress to be, requires an interesting, dangerous world.  The ingredients have been ordered, the chefs are working, artists are preparing the frosting.  It's going to be fun.

ps. For those interested in explorable dungeons, I would argue that the wild lands in Fallen Enchantress deliver on that goal in way that's less jarring, more ingrained with the rest of the gameplay and doesn't use a separate map.

 

283,735 views 77 replies
Reply #76 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Bellack, reply 75

Quoting Alstein, reply 13 I was thinking the same thing about those dungeons myself.  I knew it wouldn't work in MP period, and I knew I wouldn't like it personally in SP- so glad it's not in the game.

 

Hoping you guys hit it out of the park with Fallen Enchantress.

 

I really tend to dislike mini-games with my games, so fewer to no mini-games is a good thing.

Actully Dungeons would work in MP and SP if done like a tactical battle. In the Original Age of Wonders they had several sites that were called dungeon that you explored on a tactical map. They had monsters and treasures and generally would not last any longer then the normal Tactical battle in AOW. Granted these may not be in-depth dungeons like many of us would like to see but they were fun. There were several different types as well like prisons where if you defeat all the guards you would free the prisoners and hve a change for them to join your army. You had Crypts where if you killed the creatures they would rise again as zombies or other Undead a turn or two later etc.  These were a blast and worked well in MP and SP.  This is what I would like to see in FE.

I think that would be cool too! :thumbsup:

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #77 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tim-Bur, reply 60
I have really mixed feelings about this expansion pack. It sounds like it will have lots of great stuff, and I really appreciate the thoughtful realism in Derek's post above. However, I'm a little confused and disappointed by the fact that this will be a separate product.

I feel that the stuff which is planned for the expansion is all stuff which ought to have been in the original game. A living world? Heck yeah! But why is it coming in an expansion, instead of a patch/fix to the original game? Elemental ought to be a living world. We shouldn't have to exit Elemental and emigrate to FE in order to find a living world.

Just to beat this into the ground, I want to recall Frogboy's words on these fora (Sep 2, 2010). He pledged that there would be no new game next year (meaning 2011), and that he would make things right. Even though FE is a branch of Elemental, it is not Elemental, and FE sounds dangerously close to a new game.

Frogboy and folks, please be careful. If you want to branch off ... well ... that's your choice. But please don't forget your commitment to Elemental. Don't rush off too fast. Don't let your visions of the future get in the way of what Elemental could be.

Well I think they know that War of Magic was a failure and they want to start from scratch with a new and (hopefully) much better game.  Yes they will keep supporting War of Magic but there is only so much you can do when a building is engulfed in flames to put it out.

Personally I think it is a good move.

 

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