Night before beta thoughts
Elemental Forums
With the FE beta coming out tomorrow and the start of yet another fun trip through the rollercoaster that is the Stardock beta process, I'd like to echo a sentiment that is on mine and probably many other's minds as well.
Most of us, including myself, started following Elemental in the first place because we were looking for a successor to Master of Magic. WoM definitely wasn't it and I'm hoping that with the inevitable tweaking that will be part of the beta process that Stardock realizes that the closer the game is to the "good aspects" of Master of Magic, the better. For this I make the following suggestions.
- First and foremost, MoM was a huge deep game, but was NOT a micromanagement hell. What it had was a ton of content... Factions, spells, items, units, etc that made every game unique. That content was presented in a way that wasn't overly complex or overwhelming. Only 3 resources (food, mana, and production). City development was deep but simple (only about 25 different buildings or so, and only one building of each per city). The buildings were powerful though and no 2 buildings did the same thing. WoM was light on content but heavy on complexity exactly the opposite of what made MoM great.
- SPELLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't emphasize this enough. MoM had over 200 spells and they were all unique. Granted the AI didn't know how to use many of them effectively but nearly every spell was interesting and did more then "do x damage" or "heal x hp". Example: Cracks Call, a basic spell that simply opened up the ground beneath an enemy. It didn't simply "do damage" it gave the caster the opportunity (flat % chance) to kill any non flyer. It was annoying when the AI used it but it was great when you were going against powerful ground enemies like paladins. I could go on and on about the unique spells in MoM. What WoM had was a very limited number of spells and worse yet, they were boring, they lacked flavor, and they were mostly variations on the same theme. MoM made me feel like apowerful wizard while WoMs magic was severely lacking. And with this comes.....
- Special abilities and status effects! Something that MoM had in spades. It allowed for units to be vastly different from each other not just "numerically" stronger or weaker. This also allowed for spells to grant various buffs and debuffs to units. WoM was a joke in this regard. Units were boring copies of each other. Monsters didnt feel like monsters just a boring set of numbers. In FE, I hope to see unique abilities and effects for every unit, item, spell, etc..
- Flavor. MoM also had plenty of flavor even though it didn't have a story per say. Every aspect of the game whether it be a summoned creature, a spell, a race, a hero, or whatever had tons of flavor (which were translated in game as unique abilities and effect). Again, this helped to make the player feel like a powerful wizard-king. In WoM even with the backstory thbee simply wasn't much flavor. Like every other aspect, it was bland and didn't add to the experience.
I could probably write a few pages about this but in summary. Stardock please we want a 4x fantasy TBS game that lives up to MoM. You had over a year to turn WoM into that game. I originally gave up after I saw WoM would not be that game but I'm giving you guys a chance with FE. Expect to hear from me again after the beta comes out with feedback and I suggest you look no further then MoM, a game made nearly 20 years ago that took up 5 megabytes on disk and had more "game" then any strategy title before or since.
