I've recently discovered a British show called Merlin. Anyone watch this?

So who has been keeping up with this?

As some of you know, the concept for the family tree in War of Magic was inspired by this series. Great series of books.

Greetings!

First, thank you everyone who in previous journal entries who have submitted questions to be answered. Anything that reduces my work load makes me happy. Frankly, eating and breathing on my own is a continuing resentment.

So let’s dive right in:

Q: Does the Gamestop acqusition of Impulse affect the free expansions to the Elemental universe customers of War of Magic were promised?

A: Not in the slightest. Stardock Entertainment is a separate business (Stardock Entertainment, Inc.) from Impulse (Impulse, Inc.).

Q: Where does War of Magic stand?

A: We’re still working on v1.2 of it. Without getting too technical, the memory issues that the game has boil down to what is called heap fragmentation. Sins of a Solar Empire pre-allocates its memory and then dishes it out from there.  Elemental: War of Magic grows and shrinks in real-time.  Over time, memory becomes fragmented and eventually a block can’t be allocated.  There are differences between Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 on how this is handled as well as very different effects based on how much memory is on a given video card and the driver model in question.  Suffice to say, that’s why v1.2 is taking awhile is that we really want to do it right.

Q: What happens to War of Magic after v1.2?

A: v1.3 is being developed concurrently with v1.2.  That’s because v1.3 is pure features so v1.2’s delays don’t affect that.  It just means that v1.3 will come out a lot closer after v1.2 than originally planned.

Q: If Fallen Enchantress is in development, why continue with War of Magic?

A: There’s a lot of mundane reasons. But when the beta program for Fallen Enchantress starts, users are going to quickly realize that Fallen Enchantress isn’t an expansion pack. It’s like like Dark Avatar was to GalCiv II.  It’s radically different.  The second reason is that War of Magic has a lot of potential to continue into the future on its own track. The third reason is just because we like working on it. Our games are labors of love.

Q: When will Fallen Enchantress be done?

A: We don’t have a set complete time.  The full team is working on FE right now other than myself and my mini team which is working on v1.2/v1.3.  We are not going to have an early public beta of Fallen Enchantress.  Its beta will come out largely feature complete. So right now, it’s likely to be a Fall 2011 thing but it could be later.  The requirement for Fallen Enchantress is it won’t be released until we are certain it be an overwhelmingly positive experience for our customers. To that end, we have eliminated as many conflicts to that objective such as sacrificing a retail date for it.

Q: Are the hardware requirements for Fallen Enchantress going to be the same as War of Magic?

A: Fallen Enchantress will use Pixel Shader 3 instead of Pixel Shader 2. One of the reasons for this is because Pixel Shader 2 drastically restricted the amount of environmental texturing we could do (i.e. brown brown brown) in Elemental: War of Magic.  In Fallen Enchantress, we want the world to be visually much more enchanting and interesting and not be restricted by a hardware requirement (the current pixel shader version is v5.0 to put things in perspective).  DirectX 9c is still the standard used here.

Q: Any news on the modding front?

A: Yes.  Jon Shafer and I have been working on the mini-campaigns for Elemental: Destiny’s Embers. And so as we work on those we uncover weaknesses in the modding tools that we have been trying to get addressed which in turn should make modding even easier in the future.

Here's a good article that goes into some detail on the Gamestop / Impulse / Stardock team up.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/31/stardocks-brad-wardell-talks-about-selling-impulse-to-gamestop/

For those of you who have the book, Elemental: Destiny's Embers you can soon download the first in a series of mini-campaigns that have been produced via a collaboration of Stardock and Random House.

The campaign is heavily story-driven and written by Dave Stern who I worked with during the writing of the novel.

The story takes place prior to Elemental: Destiny’s Embers and recounts the early days Lord Ambrose when he was a young adventurer.

The release date hasn’t been set but the plan is to release several of these mini-campaigns to readers of Destiny’s Embers. The first one will require War of Magic v1.3 or later (we’ve been making changes to the game to expand what we can do in the campaigns, that’s why we haven’t released these sooner).

One of the most common series of questions I’ve been getting over the past month is what the difference between War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress will be.

The marketing folks want me to keep the specifics to a minimum so I’ll focus on broad terms. 

The Plague Cat you see on the right would never have been in War of Magic. That’s because War of Magic was much more broadly scaled.  Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, is much more tightly designed.  Put another way, Fallen Enchantress isn’t an expansion pack for War of Magic.  It’s a new strategy game that takes place in the Elemental universe (hence Elemental: War of Magic, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, there won’t be an Elemental II for example because it would be like having a Star Wars II).

War of Magic, hence focuses on building a kingdom where your primary competitors are other kingdoms and empires. It’s very much like Galactic Civilizations in that sense.  The terrain itself in War of Magic is of only minor importance and the individual soldiers and heroes are heavily abstracted.

Fallen Enchantress, by contrast, has the world itself as one of your primary antagonists. The cataclysm has ruined and in the vacuum of civilization other…things have taken hold of the land.  From a lore perspective, War of Magic broadly takes place in the West of Anthys, far from the epicenter of the cataclysm.   Told largely from the point of view of the men of the West, the races of the East, collectively called “The Fallen” are treated as villains.   By contrast, Fallen Enchantress largely revolves the much more hostile and dangerous East.  There, we learn that there is a lot more nuance to the various races fighting for survival. The world itself is as much your enemy as Magnar or Kraxis.

Fallen Enchantress is a much more personal experience. Winning is not just about building up the most lethal civilization but also adapting to the environment. As a result, weapons, magic, and technology are much more specific. You’ll need to look at what your opponents are up to and focus on countering it. Biggest mob != Win.  You don’t have housing in Fallen Enchantress. City Building is much more specialized. You won’t be building the same kinds of things in every city but instead of customizing your cities such that they can meet the threats and environments they exist in.

Stay tuned.

There’s been a lot of debate in our industry in the past year about the so-called “middle market”.  This is the class of games between say Call of Duty and Angry Birds.  Not quite AAA (i.e. not $25 million to produce) but also not $250,000 to make the game. The middle market is the world that Stardock and Paradox thrive in. And both of us have done very well in this market.

The argument against the middle market basically boils down to market size.  That the middle market just misses the “sweet spot”.  Retailers don’t want to carry middle market products because they don’t sell as well AAA or the casual market.  The thing is, digital distribution changes all this. 

I contend that a game like say Baldur’s Gate (with updated graphics but no where near Dragon Age) would likely sell very well at a fraction of the cost of Dragon Age.  The same is true on a whole host of games.  The challenge, of course, is for developers to carefully budget their title based on their best guess on the market size.  A game like War in the East may not sell a million copies but they also didn’t cost that much to make.

What’s your take?

Programs in use:

• WindowBlinds for GUI skinning
• DeskScapes for animated wallpaper
• Tiles for task management
• Fences for icon organizing

Other things on there…

Chrome is my browser. Skype I use constantly. Impulse of course for managing my games and utilities. CVS for source control (not pictured is SVN and PerForce for other projects). Visual Studio 2005 for coding. Excel and Word of course going there.

Why is IE9 so ugly?

Next week we plan to release Elemental: War of Magic v1.2 which is largely a rewrite of how War of Magic deals with memory.  So the change log in v1.2 isn’t that long but involves a lot of work.

v1.3, which mostly gameplay, will begin its journey immediately following.

Follow this blog for a status report of where things are.

War of Magic v1.3: Changes Implemented

• Base HP lowered from 10 to 2 for trained units.
• Minimum trained unit group size changed from 1 to 4.
• Base map movement speed increased.
• World Difficulty will set the default difficulty of the AI players
• When a sovereign dies, its faction is inherited by the player with the best relationship with them.
• Improvements that can repeatedbly be built (studies, workshops) use increasing numbers of citizens
• Tile limit per city level reimplemented with housing no longer using up tiles (so you never get "stuck")
• Random Events
• Notable locations no longer require a tech level
• Quests no longer require a tech level
• Champions are now rare to find on their own
• New notable locations added
• Low level notable locations more likely to provide equipment
• Harbors (sea faring techs) eliminated until further notice
• Special buildings no longer required to special units (but they'll be helpful)

War of Magic v1.3: To-Do

• Champions will offer to join you automatically when your faction meets certain milestones
• Minor Factions are going to go bye-bye until they can be loved more by us
• Tactical battles: AI re-design
• Major AI updates to general strategic areas (unit design, city management, unit and army movement)

War of Magic v1.4: Tentative To-Do

• New Setup option: Notable Location frequency 
• New Setup option: Random Events [enabled][disabled
• World Generation will now place exotic things far away from starting points.
• Clairvoyance (Channelers can cast spells from remote but the cost is based on the distance
• New Random Events

More to come. Stay tuned. List will grow and shrink and change over time as we determine schedule as well as make adjustments.

LAST UPDATE: 5/29

v1.4 is a tentative build as the Fallen Enchantress beta will likely start after v1.3 is released but before v1.4. So we'll have to see what the demand for v1.4 is since virtually everyone who has War of Magic will be getting Fallen Enchantress.