I’m on the plane back from a media tour in San Francisco where I demoed Elemental and talked on a wide variety of issues.  This next week I recommend keeping an eye on the Elemental site as most of the coverage will come around there.

A few quick highlights in no particular order:

Re DRM:

I talked to Chris Remo at Gamasutra at length. I explained to him that our anti-DRM policy isn’t because we’re a bunch of hippies. In fact, I told him that if Stephanie (my PR minder who was about to become horrid) wasn’t there, I’d be trying to harvest his organs right then and there. As a greedy, cold blooded capitalist, my job is to maximize profits and I do that by trying to maximize sales. Piracy pisses me off emotionally and if I thought requiring retinal exams would increase my sales I would. But reality is, piracy is an overblown excuse. 

Re Steamworks vs. Impulse::Reactor:

I may prefer Valve to Microsoft as a the gate keeper to digital distribution on the PC but you know what’s better than Valve as a gate keeper? Having nobody as a gate keeper.  The problem is that right now, there’s no real alternative to Steamworks. The publishing market is divided into three groups. The indies who want to sell their stuff in as many places as possible.  The titans who have the capacity to exist within themselves (think EA and Blizzard) and the guys who basically could care less if the PC became a closed platform because they see it as just another place to sell their cross platform stuff. 

The main advantage of Impulse::Reactor is that it doesn’t require a game developer to bundle a third party store with their game which is a pretty big deal. 

Re Elemental:

Elemental is a strategy game that exists in an RPG world. The thing is, Elemental’s release is the beginning of the adventure, not the end.  We plan to keep working on Elemental for the next year or more after release. There’s just so much there we can do, especially with the modding tools and such.

Re Consoles, iPads, etc.:

Huge markets. My main issue is that the games I like to make the most require a lot of memory (by console terms). Elemental uses a gig of RAM to deliver its world. I can’t do that on a 512MB console and I’m not willing to sacrifice the game for cross-platformness.

Re Can NEW (i.e. non-sequel) turn-based PC-only strategy games thrive:

Yes. Our demographic is highly selective. But if you deliver a good game, you will see the sales.

Re Random House:

Having Random House’s Del Rey writing team develop the fictional lore of Elemental definitely made a big impact on the game’s design. I think users will very much like the way the game almost feels like an RPG even though their “role” is to be king (or queen).

Originally, Elemental was going to have continuous turn combat. That effectively meant real-time. Ultimately, after playing around with it, we decided to implement turn based (simultaneous turns based on combat speed) with tiles.

The evolution of tactical combat in Elemental owes a lot to the beta program.  9 Months of public beta testing of the game engine with corresponding debates has led to some important changes that would not have happened otherwise. 

A lot of the discussion resulted in us thinking about the game in ways we didn’t think of before.  Specifically, how do we address game design issues that have plagued our genre for decades now? If you’re a strategy gamer, you know them well.

For us, the challenge of tactical combat has been about giving the player as much control as possible over how long tactical combat should last.  This ultimately led to the realization that the funnest way for us turned out to be to have the strategic elements of combat very clear and well defined.

Elements of Tactical Combat

In no particular order these are the things that matter:

• Combat Speed. Your combat speed determines how many “moves” / attacks you get during a particular turn.  In the begging of Lord of the Rings, what makes Sauron such a bad ass is that he can attack so many units at once. He has, in game turns, an incredible combat speed.
• Morale.  Unit morale matters but for fun purposes, we try to keep it straight forward. Units have High Morale (25% combat bonus), Normal Morale (no bonus), Low Morale (25% combat penalty), and Panic (you don’t control them). It provides a whole new avenue for us to play in.
• Terrain. This is where the tile based part mattered for us (and for the AI). Some terrain, obstacles, and tiles simply provide better offensive and defensive bonuses, Controlling them matters.
• WINNER. TAKE. ALL. This is the part where we want to hear your opinions. We do ask that you keep an open mind on what we ultimately go with.  My opinion is that the attacking player has the onus to finish the battle in N turns. After N turns, the attacker morale starts to go lower and lower at which point the defender can come out and make mince meat out of them.  The question is, what should determine what N is?  Or should we allow retreating? Should we allow draws?  I’m against retreats or withdraws because it’s one of those things that allows the game to drag on. It’s a strong personal preference of mine that two men enter, one man leaves. (Your heroes will tend to escape though).
• Combined Arms. Archers have range. Mounted Warriors have great combat speed. Foot soldiers tend to have better weapons and defenses.  It means putting together your army matters a lot. It also is important to us that players understand precisely why they won or lost a battle.
• Thresholds. Players can set the tactical battle threshold in the menu. That is, they can say it requires 10 units on each side before it’ll actually go into tactical battle.  At any point, players can have a tactical battle auto-resolve.

Remaining Questions and issues:

1. Controlling the length of a tactical battle.  We believe that users should have a lot of control over how in depth they want their battles to be. Should a tactical battle finish in less than a minute or should they last 2 hours? How do we make it so that players can control this?
2. Randomization vs. Richness. I won’t lie to you, we have a trade off in front of us and it’s a big one.  We can randomly generate the battlefields in tactical combat OR we can have it pick from a series of pre-made tactical battle maps.  The randomly generated ones won’t be as interesting but they’ll more accurately reflect the local terrain.  I’m preferring the pre-made ones because we can add some spectacular strategic when we’re crafting them and have hundreds to pull from.

Not only does Delta have WiFi on its flights, but power outlets.  This is heaven.

(written on the plane)

I don't know what to call this but the marketing people will come up with something I'm sure.

Elemental will quietly use lots of cool graphical features to make the game still look good on older hardware.

This is a screenshot of Elemental on a low end ATI mobile card.

While someone looking at it can tell the difference between this and the glory of the latest hardware, it's surprising subtle to casual users.

https://draginol.stardock.net/images2009/ElementalScreenshotMay2010_1130D/image.png

My attitude is thus: If I can't play Elemental on my 4 year old laptop on the plane, then it's dead to me but when I get home and play it on my super mega GTX 480 mega machine and have it look awesome, well screw it then.

This is going to be long. I beg for forgiveness up front.

So for those of you just tuning in, Elemental has just completed a marathon 8 month Beta 1 cycle. The purpose of which was to explore all kinds of new game mechanics and try different things out.  It went so well that in our next game, I’d like to bring the beta people in even earlier. 

For Beta 1, we stripped out the graphics engine forcing users to play on a “cloth map” interface. We went through considerable lengths to ensure that beta 1 was unpleasant to play.  The goal was to get people to think about what makes a good game rather than thinking about graphics or features per se.

From that marathon beta we got a incredible amount of feedback, online discussions, and lots of debates. We read them at length and they made us think about a lot of different things that we hadn’t thought of before.

So what was the impact? Below I’m going to walk you through the tangible differences to the game based on the betas and the beta tester debates.

The Camps

No one will ever agree on the single best way to make Elemental. No matter what we do, there will be dissatisified people. It’s inevitable because (and I consider this unfortunate) the gaming industry has reached a point where there is a severe lack of what we call “new IP”. That is, games that don’t include a roman numeral after the name. Worse, when we do get new games, they’re increasingly designed to work on both PC and consoles which means that their feature set has to work on the lowest common denominator.  As a result, Elemental has a lot of hopes behind it.

But we have to be careful. Anything designed to be all things to all people is doomed to failure. So with Elemental, we’ve had to really consider what the game is about and focus on that game.

Camp #1: The Settlers Camp

This is the camp I’m nominally from.  That’s where you mine resources which in turn get processed into one thing and then turned into another before being used as yet another. The economic system in Elemental was (early on) very much like this.  You mined metal. This metal was processed into metal bars which in turn were turned into weapons, armor, etc. Which in turn were shipped to where you wanted to build the unit.

This was one of the concepts that the beta program jetisoned. Not because it was a bad idea but because A) there is a “Settlers” game already and it would so overwhelm the rest of the game.

Camp #2: The Master of Magic Clone Camp

I am nominally part of this camp as well.  This camp’s input tended to be “Master of Magic had X” and that itself was enough to argue that Elemental should have it.  While Elemental is almost certainly the most similar game to MoM since MoM itself, it is, by no means, a clone of it.

Camp #3: The Fall from Heaven Camp

The popular Civ IV mod has lots of fans (myself included). There’s certainly plenty of items in Elemental that are similar to what is in Fall from Heaven since both ultimately are civilization style games.

Camp #4: The Panzer General /  Magic: Total War camp

This is the group that argued, quite correctly that with a subtitle “War of Magic” that it made sense to focus on the warfare elements of the game.

Camp #5: The SimFantasy camp

The term isn’t meant to be dismissive of those who would like a truly organic world.  At the one extreme, you have Elemental as a board game and at the other extreme you have Elemental as a fantasy world simulation.

5 Major changes from the beta group

So what are some of the big changes that occurred because of the massive beta?

In no particular order:

1. The Economic System was completely changed.  Early on, like Civilizaiton and countless other games, Elemental had resources stored at the city level rather than the “civilization” level. Beta testers successfully lobbied for a system that has turned out to be a lot more fun where resources go into a global pool but if a city gets put under siege, it is taken out of that global pool. This makes siege warfare meaningful while at the same time letting players focus on their Kingdom (or Empire) rather than dealing with a particular city. It has also, in play testing, helped eliminate two age old problems: City spamming and late game grinding.
2. A new technology system.  The tech tree system in Elemental was completely changed based on feedback.  This was largely due to the sense that Elemental’s system should be more about recovering lost techs than “discovering” the wheel.  This is a world where one researches an area and recovers a certain technology.  This has had a tremendously positive impact in making each game feel differently in our internal testing.
3. A better spell system. The old spell system is still in the screenshots. We were married to it but beta testers successfully made the case that spells should be learned through acquiring spell knowledge and then “purchasing” those spells. Since Magic is such a central part of the game, giving players the temptation to grab some weaker spell early (or go for the more powerful spell behind door number 2) was more compelling.
4. Tactical Battles. Tactical battles haven’t been part of the beta but they’ve been heavily discussed. Originally, tactical battles were designed to be RTS. Then Continuous turns.  But as time has gone on, it’s become clear that the gameplay that people (and frankly that we enjoyed the most) was more closest to XCom. That is, turn based. Tile based. Moving units to the best spots. And eventually working to have your units in spots that are easy to spot the enemy while they themselves are hard to find.
5. The role of NPCs. Early on, NPCs were just going to be recruitable fighters. But during the beta, it became clear that was far more interesting to give players the option to go out and find units that could help their kingdom economically versus being forced to build a city on turn 1.  Now, players have a realistic choice between city build up right away versus going out and trying to find some good allies right away. Both strategies have risks but now they’re both viable strategies.

Moving forward

With Beta 2 expected in the next couple weeks, we’ll have a pretty good idea whether release is going to be this Summer or next Winter. (Fall is “booked” at retail).  I personally believe that late Summer is still likely but we’ll see.  Beta 2 will give us a pretty good sense of where things stand.

The big questions in our minds will be the role of the NPCs in the world and the role of quests in the world.  Their inclusion are the most obvious “differentiators” for Elemental.  We’ll be balancing and enhancing those features for years to come. 

During the past couple weeks of heavy *playing* Elemental (as opposed to just coding) I’ve come to the conclusion that Elemental is very different than any strategy game I’ve played before.  It’s different in a very very good way. But that is going to be a challenge for “marketing”.

The Technical Game play Difference

In my view, Elemental is simply the natural evolution of PC strategy gaming IF PC games were being made explicitly for the PC still as opposed to cross platform.  Nearly every new title that comes out these days either is made to be cross platform (i.e. for consoles) or it’s using a licensed engine (that is cross platform).

Being a PC-exclusive game with a PC-exclusive engine means that we can assume that we have at least 1 gigabyte of memory to play with  (the Xbox 360 tops out at 512MB and it has to share that with video textures). 

So for this discussion, toss out the debates on the latest video cards versus what’s on a console and all that. Let’s consider the ramifications of having a gigabyte of memory to play with.  What does that mean in terms of GAME PLAY?

1. It means that I can have lots of unique looking units. This matters because the player, at a glance, can distinguish one unit from another.
2. It means I can upgrade units in game and have them visually look different. This matters again because, players need to be able to see that this unit is different from that unit without having to click on something.
3. It means you can have a much wider range of creatures in the game.  Think about that for a moment. Consider any recent games you’ve played. How many different types of creatures were there in it? Even in an RPG. How many?  Not many right? That’s because it requires a lot of memory to juggle lots of different creatures. 
4. It means you can have a lot of different types of buildings that are visually different.  How many times in recent years have you played an RPG and entered a building or dungeon that was identical in nearly every way to every other dungeon or Inn or whatever? Why was that? Were they lazy? Was it budget? No. That’s not the question. The question was, was that game ALSO available for a console? Yes. It was memory.

BTW, none of this should be considered console bashing. I love my Xbox 360. It’s wonderful for many types of games. But you could not make Elemental for it. Even if you had a $20 million budget you couldn’t make Elemental for the console. It’s not technically possible on the current generation of consoles. 

If I made a game that required a touch screen, that wouldn’t make the iPad a better gaming platform than the console or PC. It just means that particularly game really needed a touch screen.  Elemental requires a PC because of its inherent design. That might change some day but not right now.

The effect on strategy games

In every 4X game I’ve played, the start is pretty much the same. You start building cities/colonies/whatever, harvest resources, build stuff, then exterminate stuff to get more resources and repeat as you explore and expand out. (4X).

Elemental is a fantasy strategy game. In it, you’re in that D&D world you and your friends used to play in. You’re in the land of the Elder Scrolls. You’re playing in Britania, Middle Earth, etc.  But with ONE big difference: You’re not an adventurer anymore.  You’re the King (or queen).  Your attitude towards adventurers (who are IN Elemental btw) may change forever once you see them accidentally unleash a greater demon to rampage across the land.

Now, as a hook (the marketing guys love “hooks”), this is cool but it’s meaningless without players feeling like they’re playing in an RPG world. An RPG world is not simply generic strategy game X with magical units. It should feel like a fantasy RPG world.

At the start of Elemental, like the start of any great RPG (imo) it’s about YOU. Not some abstract kingdom but you are in the game. Beta testers know this.  What beta testers haven’t got to see yet is the importance of recruiting, especially early on, people (i.e. individuals) who have their own backgrounds and histories and most importantly, skills.

Similarly, players have quests they can go on, can get married, have children, arrange marriages, etc.  Now, in an RPG, this is not unheard of.  In Fable, my character got married, had children.  The difference here is that these children will grow up and be able to lead armies or go on adventures on their own.

NOT innovation, just the logical evolution of strategy games

Being able to have a rich fantasy kingdom (or empire) with interesting unique characters, armies, dragons, economics, diplomacy, quests, etc. isn’t some “new” idea. This is where PC strategy games were already heading to or would have if “cross platform” design hadn’t started coming into play.

Starting in Beta 2, beta testers will begin to help us mold the game towards its public release and then, over the next year, two, or three, let is continue to evolve as new concepts and ideas are considered.

Here’s how I use Fences. Each person may use it differently.  I still use a dock (not pictured here) but for my “main” stuff I keep it handy at the bottom.  Then I organize my stuff by throwing them into a Fence.  One of the killer features of Fences is that you can toss a ton of stuff in a Fence and it’ll get hidden. Look closely at the “To Sort later…”. If I mouse over the Fence, a scrollbar appears.

Double click and voila. Clean desktop.

Fences Pro automates the organization of your desktop.

https://www.stardock.com/products/fences

Lots going on this week.  I’m scheduled to fly out on Monday on a media tour to start showing off Elemental in preparation for its anticipated release date late Summer.

Here are some of the things being worked on in preparation for beta 2.

1. Memory use.  We’re consolidating our mapping of how every byte of memory is used in the game. 
2. Performance. We’re setting things up so that we can begin handing over builds to the full QA lab for compatibility testing.  Will the game work on a Netbook? Does the game scale up on the latest/greatest ATI/nVidia cards?
3. Stability. What are the problem areas? They’re almost always due to something not releasing a pointer or not checking the validity of an object. But the text matrices have to be made and handed over to QA.
4. Balance. Yes. Beta 2 begins the phase where it’s supposed to be “a game”.  The AI won’t be very strong in beta 2 since that’s the area I’m responsible for and I have only recently begun coding it. But it should be much further along than in beta 1.
5. Asset integration. This is where we start plugging in screens, units, and other features that were unit tested but not in the main code branch (i.e. they weren’t in “the game” per se). There are still features that won’t be in beta 2 (most notably tactical battles) but things will seem night and day different than beta 1.
6. Sound Sound Sound. A lot of time has been put into getting the sound effects and musical score elements into the game.
7. Map Editor / Campaign. The two are tied closely together. It is our intention to make the campaign in such a way that a modder could create their own campaigns and share with the community. So we’re having to make sure we’re not hard coding things into our campaign.

I’m going to write more about this shortly but having had my iPad for about 3 weeks I have to say that the iPad and other devices like it are going to murder large sections of the Windows based market.