Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes Released
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On to the press release:
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes released
Expansion to Stardock's popular fantasy strategy game transforms gameplay, adds more factions, bigger worlds and champions
PLYMOUTH, MI. -- May 22, 2013 - Stardock released the expansion pack to last year's hit fantasy strategy game, Fallen Enchantress today.
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes takes place on the world of Elemental, a land that is recovering from a cataclysm caused by the war of magic that saw the great civilizations of the world destroyed.
While the world and people have begun to recover, foul creatures, bandits and worse have come to dominate the land. The fledgling civilizations of the world must first vanquish the monsters that freely roam the world before their kingdoms will flourish.
Legendary Heroes is a stand-alone expansion pack to Fallen Enchantress. Thanks to digital distribution, players can either upgrade from Fallen Enchantress for $19.99 or buy new at $39.99. Nearly every aspect of Fallen Enchantress has been improved, reworked and enhanced.
"While it was tempting to create a traditional expansion pack that focused on new, we wanted to use this opportunity to take Fallen Enchantress, a good game, and make it into a great game," said Brad Wardell, President & CEO of Stardock.
Legendary Heroes starts with the features that made Fallen Enchantress so well received, such as the sovereign creation system, the empire building features and the role playing elements - and then set out to refine and expand on them.
"Fallen Enchantress gave us a lot of great feedback," said Derek Paxton, the lead designer of Legendary Heroes. "With Legendary Heroes we wanted to take that feedback and deliver a deeper, more polished and more welcoming game than what we started with."
As part of the game's updated design, the champion system was revamped. In Fallen Enchantress, champions were randomly placed on the map. Given how important they are to the game, Stardock felt their random placement put too much of the player's fate in the hands of chance.
"The blending of a 4X strategy game with role playing elements was one of the features that made Fallen Enchantress so different and interesting," said Paxton. "But those two elements did not always feel well integrated. With Legendary Heroes, champions are earned through fame which is generally achieved through the deeds of your civilization."
Similarly, a number of unit stats were reworked to make the relations between the stat and their consequence more direct.
"The development of Fallen Enchantress was very much an iterative process," said Wardell. "It took over two years to make and we had a lot of dangling design concepts like encumbrance and pierce vs. blunt attack along with other elements that worked in Galactic Civilizations but were just convoluted here."
The team therefore went through the game top to bottom to rethink how existing mechanics could be cleaned up to make way for the new features in Legendary Heroes.
"For example, in Fallen Enchantress, a piece of chain mail might weigh 60 pounds which on a soldier with 15 strength would result in 40% encumbrance which results in -2 to that unit's initiative," said Wardell. "In Legendary Heroes, that chain mail has -2 initiative."
Some of the highlighted new features in Legendary Heroes include: '¢ Champions get a skill tree when they level up '¢ The tactical battle maps have been completely redesigned '¢ Champions are earned through fame '¢ Upgraded 3D engine for faster, better looks visuals and animation '¢ Two new factions '¢ Gigantic-sized randomly generated worlds added '¢ Lots of new monsters including a host of undead class units '¢ A new, massive scenario '¢ Dozens of new items, spells and quests
Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is $39.99 new and $19.99 for users who have Fallen Enchantress already.
It is available direct from its home page as well as on Steam, GameStop, GamersGate and elsewhere.
