Elemental: War of Magic - Fallen Enchantress Development Update, Videos
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And then I'll do some generous quoting from the update:
And so, Fallen Enchantress has been a real joy to work on. And I apologize to all of you for the long wait as we have.indulged ourselves a bit with it. Free from any sort of economic constraints, we've been able to do things that, from a business point of view, ridiculous from a turn-based PC strategy game point of view. But the end result is that we've made something that we're really proud of. I hope players see what we see a strategy game unlike any other.
That said, you should assume it'll be horrible. Keep those expectations low. LOW I say!
A general overview: Bringing Game Design to Stardock
Lead Designer and Producer Derek Paxton has combined both his Fall from Heaven experience and his years of professional project management experience into our game design philosophy starting with having a game design philosophy.
Designing games is something that I always disliked quite intensely. I much prefer to work with other people's designs and take them to what (to me anyway) seems to be their logical conclusion.
The basic requirements of Fallen Enchantress are as follows:
1. It is a strategy game that takes place in a very very hostile magical world
2. That magical world has a rich history but also wants to kill you.
3. There are several other factions who want to dominate this world but are also struggling against the world.
4. Your tools are magic, technology, diplomacy, and questing.
Derek's leadership on the project has ensured that the team has been focused on these 4 things.
To support Derek's mission, I have been helping enforce 4 engineering requirements:
1. Stability. At all times, the game must be rock solid. No (fixing later). Beta != crashy.
2. Performance. Games that are slow aren't fun. Coding should be looking at being as efficient as possible.
3. Memory. Where is every byte of memory going? Can those running 64-bit get more? (answer: Yes)
Now, these points are a gross over simplification but they cover many logical sub-components to make these things work (game balance, good AI, lots of in-game lore, an interesting campaign, a tutorial, etc.).
With that out of the way, let me show you where things stand today. Below you will see what would have been in the public beta had it gone out as originally planned as well as some discussion of what will be changed prior to Beta 1 in January.
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One of the challenges in a fantasy, turn-based, civilization-style strategy game is the tech tree. First, we wanted there to be two very different tech trees one for the Empires and one for the Kingdoms. And we wanted players to very easily see the difference in them and this led to some.interesting choices that I would never have thought of without Derek and Jon.
Anyone who's ever played GalCiv knows my view on techs: More is more. In FE, however, Derek and Jon showed that less is more. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of techs here. But each one gives you a lot of stuff but they also take a long time to get to.
The number to the right of a tech is how many turns it would take your current kingdom to research. The result is that players come to really appreciate the tech they have rather than blowing through techs to get to the ultimate. The other effect, which was what Derek and Jon were going for, was to make (mop up) for whoever was winning much easier. The players who can get good stuff will wipe the floor with those who simply can't.
