Elemental: War of Magic Interview, Part One
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Elemental looks like the PC game of the 21st century. It draws its inspiration from the combined progress of decades worth of strategy gaming, but it does so in an elegant, approachable way. It takes the depth of a Galactic Civilization and melds it with a modern design sensibility. This is no more apparent than in its world map, or lack thereof.
From the furthest zoom, Elemental looks like a Tolkien illustration, a Total War-style map drawn in an elegant cloth-like style. Zooming in, the engine adjusts to a full 3D view akin to Civilization, icons shifting into tiny armies and sprawling landscapes. As the camera approaches the ground, forests separate into trees, individual units viewable from a near-third person angle. This is all done so smoothly that you can barely tell where one level of detail ends and the other begins.
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Shack: On a basic level, you start out and have to build your city...
Brad Wardell: There's also combat. There's quests in the game. There are NPC adventurer parties running around this world. Your army will be a guy; you'll see this little party of adventurers run into a dungeon. Something will go wrong, and pretty soon a giant dragon emerges from it chasing them off. And you're like, oh crap, now there's a dragon loose in my kingdom that I have to deal with.
And so the game does have quests you can complete to get items. You can also research spells that make you ever more powerful. One of the things that we're really going for is making it not obvious who's going to win the game until the end. Too often in strategy games, the first half of the game is fun, and the second half is not at all.
Shack: And the experts know immediately who will win the game after ten minutes.
Brad Wardell: Right. Whereas in Elemental, you won't. I'll give you three examples that I think people will recognize. The marriage thing I was talking about. Let's say throughout the game I've maintained a relatively modest empire. I don't seem very powerful at the base of it. But throughout the game I've been breeding my daughters, for lack of a better word, that have high beauty, which makes them very desirable to various players.
So I have slowly become a major part of everyone else's family, so that player X, he thinks he's just more powerful than everyone else. But then these guys just start surrendering, but they're all surrounding to me. So now I've inherited 20 kingdoms, and I'm huge. This guy thought he was going to win, but now actually I'm going to win.
