Stardock Game Roadmap, Elemental RPG Resumes Development
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Elemental: Strategy GamesAll of this it outlined in a handy little roadmap image, too.
The effect of this is that we'll eventually have War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and . This isn't really very different than what we did with Galactic Civilizations II with the exception of the intention to have them be stand-alone and thus allowing the separate entities to continue to be potentially developed on their own path based on what players ask for. If the strategy games were primarily multiplayer games, we obviously couldn't do this because you'd be fragmenting the player base. But these are primarily single player games that happen to have (fairly crummy) multiplayer support.
One nice thing about this is that it gives us, and players, a lot more design flexibility. Fallen Enchantress is a pretty radical departure from War of Magic. Based on what I'm seeing, I suspect most people will prefer that by far to War of Magic but only time will tell. But in any event, we will be making a v1.3 of War of Magic that will be on its own code branch.
As a game developer, I can tell you that this is pretty exciting stuff. Consider the challenges other strategy game franchises have. Some players would have liked to see Civilization V be more along the lines of Civilization IV. Others would have preferred it to be far more complex and others would have preferred to have it streamlined.
Elemental: RPG games
Now, as some people may recall, after War of Magic's difficult launch, we had to re-evaluate our staffing levels and reorganize. This meant some painful layoffs back last Fall which came from people slated for the RPG title. After War of Magic, it was recognized that the game studio was being run like a hobby and not as an engineering process like our enterprise software unit. This meant we needed to bring in full-time designers and full-time project managers onto the studio. Thus, the second studio team, designated for the Elemental: RPG, got largely zapped. This year we will begin to reconstitute this team as we bring in a lead studio developer and some senior developers to help ensure that we don't have another War of Magic episode.
