Elemental: War of Magic

Elemental: War of Magic is a game being made by Stardock which is the company that made Sins of a Solar Empire.  It is a game much like Age of Wonders if you ever played it.  Players start with a small kingdom and grow it over time in turn based fashion.  The player also controls his armies and heroes who travel across the huge randomly generated maps and wage war.  There are global spells, and the game is being created to be extremely modable by the fan base.  You can zoom out from the map seamlessly into a rendering of a world map seen below.

Due to the game maps being randomly generated, the heavy focus on modding tools, and the already dedicated community the game should have insane replayability.  It's 1-8 players currently with AI.  Preorders are open and will get the player into beta which starts in September.  The game is scheduled to launch sometime around February.  I am really excited about this title.

I will update this post throughout beta with information and into launch so those of us that play can get together.  I already have a group of about 7 that will be playing so we can have some good fun. 

I was more a Age of Empires kind of guy or heck even Empire Earth. I guess its worth a shot though.

 Its spiritual predecessor is acutall Master of Magic, that is the reason why i am looking forward to this game although that is a very large game to try and live up to.

Testing was supposed to begin in June, i wouldn't hold my breath on the Sept. date.

Well on the schedule it still looks like they are definitely going to be starting Beta 1 soon.  This is a dev journal posted on July 31st (Like 2 weeks ago):

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In my mind, the fun of Elemental resides in the fact that you’re not just trying to conquer some fantasy world but the world itself is designed to be so organic and unique from game to game.

A lot of the difference between games is a result of things like a tech tree that has different techs in it, a huge library of special content that is integrated into map generation randomly each game, quests, integrated community content, and the divergent paths to victory.

Now, as some of you know, Stardock’s bread and butter isn’t from game development. Our desktop software and enterprise software have always given us the luxury of being able to take as long as we want to develop our games as well as take “risks” on the way we release our games (no copy protection for instance – which, in case people are wondering, the retail version of Elemental will not have copy protection).

And that brings me to a question I wanted to pose to you folks. Would you be interested in us extending the beta? Since anyone can join betas by pre-ordering, we could try something that really hasn’t been done before as far as I know – make the beta experience something truly outstanding unto itself.

Right now, the schedule is this:

* Beta 1 in August
* Beta 2 in October (adds tactical battles)
* Beta 3 in December (polish)
* Gamma (private) in January
* Release in February

This is pretty much the same schedule we’ve been doing since Galactic Civilizations I back in 2003.

But imagine this kind of beta instead:

* Beta 1 in August
* Beta 2 in January
* Beta 3 in May
* Gamma (private) in July
* Release in August.

So what would be the point of this? The point would be to make it a lot more fun to develop the game with the beta testers. Rather than have v1.0 come out in February and then have v1.1 in say April and so on, we simply keep working on the game with the beta testers.

Then, when we release the game, it’s got a ton more stuff.

Here are some thoughts that come to mind:

How many players should/can we allow in a game? 8? 12? 32?

How sophisticated can we make dungeons in the game?

How sophisticated can we make quests in the game?

How sophisticated can we make tactical battles in the game?

How big of a scope can we give the campaign?

We don’t have the financial pressure to release the game in February and because of that, we have an opportunity to try something we’ve not done that we think might be really special and that is vastly increase the contribution of the beta players into the game than what we’ve done before.

The end result would, I think, be a game that could very well be a classic. A year’s worth of player input before it was released to the general public.

Tell us what you think.

I've been following this game since I saw it at E3 around last year, or some game convention last year. I want it. NOW.