Welcome to Fallen Enchantress

from Elemental Forums

Welcome to the Fallen Enchantress forum!

Fallen Enchantress is Stardock's second PC game based in in the world of Elemental.

In 2010, Random House released Elemental: Destiny's Embers (at a bookstore near you). A month after that, Stardock released Elemental: War of Magic.

Originally, Fallen Enchantress was going to be an expansion pack to War of Magic but the design changes to Fallen Enchantress have been so significant that we decided it made more sense to make it into its own game hence Elemental: Fallen Enchantress (complete with its own domain www.fallenenchantress.com which will be up as its own stand alone sight this Fall).

To understand Elemental one has to know its basic history.

Age of the Magi

In the Hiergamenon, the Book of the Magic recounts the great sorcerers (Ereog, Argynn, Breon).  It ends with the casting of the Forge of the Overlord which attracted the the Elas'nirand the Dred'nir.

Age of the Titans

The age of the titans is broken up into three books (Pariden, Curgen, and arguably the Book of Ezmir). If you have the limited edition of the PC game, War of Magic, then you know much about this.

The age of the Titans ends with the cataclysm, the breaking of the world.

Age of Mortals

The PC Game, War of Magic, takes place in the western continent in the world of Elemental approximately 150 years after the cataclysm.  The West (known as Anthys) is a desolate but relatively tame part of the world. War of Magic concerns itself with the claiming of vital resources and the building of a great kingdom.

By contrast, Fallen Enchantress is much less desolate but a lot more dangerous. It takes place on the eastern continent and revolves around a very different set of circumstances.  The Kingdoms of the West's philosophy was gain control of strategic resources and overwhelm the enemy through superior masses.  By contrasts, the Empires of the East rely much more heavily on magic and intelligent construction of cities, fortresses and so forth. Part of that is that the East is much less rich with strategic resources but much richer in overall terrain (not as desolate).

Moreover, because the Titans dwelt in the East, sorcery is much more developed.

Fallen Enchantress, as a game, will be a very different experience than War of Magic as a result (not to mention it has a much bigger budget but I digress).

...

Destiny's Embers, the book, takes place approximately 8 centuries after the War of Magic has ended and deals with the Destiny's last attempt to thwart the unnatural interference of immortals in the world of Elemental. But that story is told elsewhere.

 

 

 

40,303 views 28 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

New forum!   Yeah

 

Sounds great Brad!

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

is the story of fallen enchantress going to be a campaign or a set of quests in sandbox mode?

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

When is Fallen Enchantress taking place? After the war of magic?

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 2
t

A little of both.

War of Magic had a campaign about Relias, the great hero of the Kingdoms. 

But all the sandbox maps were designed with the west of Anthys in mind. Specifically, barren with key resources.

Fallen Enchantress, from a design point, is much less barren. This means that "terrain matters".  Engine-wise, the continents are randomly generated (in WOM, we had premade continents that were filled with stuff random).

War of Magic, for instance, didn't bother with rivers because, even if they were in, they'd just be cosmetic.  Fallen Enchantress maps have rivers and they matter in terms of providing income and labor bonuses to cities built near them.

Now, to be fair here, it's not that we didn't realize that having terrain details like this have their game advantages, it's more of a matter of budget. WOM's budget had to pay for an engine and a game.  FE's budget only has to pay for a game. So we've been able to add in a lot of our "wishes" into FE.

That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

 

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4



That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

 
 

Aha!  I knew it.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
...you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

If I worked for a News Company - and I don't - this would become the following headline:
"Stardock CEO declares its upcoming title "will suck"."
Or
"New Elemental title is so bad it has strange mutagenic properties that "give you cancer"."

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Post it on twitter, it'll catch on like wildfire

 

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

:digichet:

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

Ha! You know we won't.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

I think the take-away from that reply was that the freaking quest system is going to have some seriously cool story to it. And anyways you can't spell cancer without can! That means that quests will have more triggers and work smoother. That means that FE really is improving the world significantly. That means that my Circle of the Black Thorn mod will be worth finishing. Good day for me.

Now where did I put my cancer blocking foil cap?  :ninja:

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Thank you for the welcome. This is exciting, things are happening! I hope you're not getting into trouble with the PR hounds by giving us info. I can see Brad sneaking around the office trying to post a few informative posts without them seeing.

Reply #12 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4

War of Magic, for instance, didn't bother with rivers because, even if they were in, they'd just be cosmetic.  Fallen Enchantress maps have rivers and they matter in terms of providing income and labor bonuses to cities built near them.

Now that's good news!

Reply #13 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

The best marketing line of all times, that's why we love you dude. Now I can smoke all the time while playing with no remorse.

Reply #14 from Elemental Forums Top

On to new beginnings. Good luck with the endeavour to make FE a better game than WoM was.

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.
Instant classic. :D

Reply #16 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

 

Hah! Very nice, glad you are going the new route. And I'm also glad you are keeping WoM alive at the same time. It'll be nice having both WoMs different design and FEs more classical 4x design (at least that is the impression I am inferring) to choose from.

Thanks for the update Brad!

Reply #17 from Elemental Forums Top

How is FE going to treat memory leaks and the general crappy-ness of the game engine? Is it going to improve upon performance of its predecessor? Because when I hear less barren, I think more computer resources needed to run it.

Reply #18 from Elemental Forums Top

Well, by eliminating support for Shader v2 they have eliminated a good chunk of bugginess.  But we will get to see how much is has improved (or not :P) when we get a go at the beta. =)

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #19 from Elemental Forums Top

When premiere for this Addon FE??:) or when this version is open beta?

Reply #20 from Elemental Forums Top

Fallen Enchantress (FE) is somewhere between an expansion and a full-blown new game in the Elemental universe.  There is information and much discussion in the WOM forums, it is only recently that the Elemental forums changed from "Elemental", to "War of Magic" and "Fallen Enchantress".  The existing forums became War of Magic forums and the new forum group was Fallen Enchantress.  However for a lot of things, the WOM forums still have most of the discussion about Fallen Enchantress, but this may change over time.

It is unknown as to when the beta will start and who will take part, but hopefully it will be this year.

Best regards,
Steven.

Reply #21 from Elemental Forums Top

barring forestallments, we will get beta in fall 2011. the more we post here, the sooner we will get it.

Reply #22 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
Fallen Enchantress, from a design point, is much less barren. This means that "terrain matters".  Engine-wise, the continents are randomly generated (in WOM, we had premade continents that were filled with stuff random).
 

To hear that we have true random maps is very reassuring. I don't know how important this was to you personally but to alot of people this was a huge dissapointment in eWoM. My further hope is one day we'll see rich map and modding tools.

 

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
War of Magic, for instance, didn't bother with rivers because, even if they were in, they'd just be cosmetic.  Fallen Enchantress maps have rivers and they matter in terms of providing income and labor bonuses to cities built near them.

 

Again something really good to hear, having rivers on your land maps is important! I think its crucial that when a player hits the new map button we get a rich fantasy world to explore everytime and eWoM really failed in that regard. I hope, truly hope, the picture of the overall fantasy world map is been carefully considered:

  • Logical placement of terrain
  • Named areas (desert of desolation, Wyrm Wood, Swamp of Tears, etc ,etc)
  • REX'ing , which has no place in a fantasy world
  • a map that your able to expand you empire into but still retains uninhabitable areas. An end game map that doesn't look like a full cultural border encompassed inudstrial era civ map

  It would be really nice to see a dedicated stickied thread devoted to the map, map generation, etc.

Hope to see the game soon!!

Reply #23 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Jam3, reply 22

a map that your able to expand you empire into but still retains uninhabitable areas. An end game map that doesn't look like a full cultural border encompassed inudstrial era civ map

 

That would be awesome.  Interestingly, you could have the caravans / roads create a thin ribbon if influence between cities that would somewhat repel spawned monsters; if you wanted a stronger presence, you could create a fort / garrison to help retain control of the causeway and have slightly wider influence.  I'd also love to see armed outposts to farm resources that are satellites of the more significant cities.

Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Reply #24 from Elemental Forums Top

I like cultural border wars in Civ though, I mean you push culture in a city to take a specific resource that is on the border of your enemies cultural borders. It is like a cold war and adds another layer of strategy into the game.

Reply #25 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Frogboy, reply 4
That said, to keep expectations realistic, you should all assume FE will suck and give you cancer.

So what you're promising is that FE will have magic powers that can alter the very nature of life itself at the molecular level.  Check.  Setting expectations appropriately.

:)