Finally getting to actually PLAY the game some.  I’ve got a huge list of tweaks already for the day 0 build.

I play at really high resolution so this is what my screens looked like:

In this game, I’m slowly wearing Kraxis down.  Which means I’m unhappy because it means I need to do more AI work. Bear in mind, when I play I play at normal where the AI gets the same resources. If I wanted to get creamed, I’d just push up the difficulty but I want the AI to be very intelligent at normal.

This screenshot is full of win.   The beta group pushed hard for special abilities for units and they got their way (the fire giant has 3 actually).  This is something we plan to expand on over the next few months a lot (don’t worry, these things will be free updates).

We’re just incredibly excited about how things have turned out. Though, like all the other games we’ve done, we have a long list of things we want to add and improve on over the next several months. Though, for now, we’re going to stick with polishing so that we can hear what our customers want first before we commit to anything specific.

Availability

Now, one thing I think I can say (and I’m not promising this because all things are ultimately decided by the IT gods) but it is our plan to make the “gold” version of the game available a bit early to those in the beta and those who pre-order will also likely get it a bit early.   We hope to start pre-loading Elemental onto machines early to mid next week to reduce strain.

At retail, Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, EB, etc. should all have it in strong supply. Just make sure you update to the day 0 version (via Impulse) because you will need the day 0 version to play multiplayer or do the mod tools stuff not to mention we’ll have a ton of new stuff in it as well. The download should be pretty small though.

What’s next

Well, for this week, I plan to have fun working on the AI and making some more quests. How much will make it into the day 0 version is hard to say.  The writing team at Random House and us have been brainstorming lots of new quests we can put into the game and I really want the AI to play “in character” (no snarky dialog like in GalCiv).