It’s interesting, I get a lot of interview questions sent to me from the media that ask when such and such game will be on the console. The answer is usually: never.

I like my consoles. My kids like them. But I’m a greedy capitalistic bastard who wants to make money. And for the large scope strategy games I design it means the PC. 

If I was making an action game or a first person shooter, I’d likely make it for the console. The RPG we have in pre-production (very early pre-production) is targeting consoles as well as the PC.  So I’m not some sort of PC zealot. I just don’t see how I can make the kind of strategy game that *I want to play* on the console without gimping it to the point that it would ruin the game and thus be a financial disaster.

Let’s consider the specs on my favorite console, the XBOX 360.

It is essentially a custom PC running a 3-core PowerPC from 5 years ago. It has 512MB of total RAM that it has to also share with the ATI designed graphics system.

Now, eventually there will be a new generation of consoles that will be much more powerful than this.  But by that time, 64-bit PC games will start coming out that will be able to address many GIGS of RAM (virtual or real) resulting in games that can look lifelike AND have the kind of scope that PC strategy gamers tend to embrace (and from our vantage point more importantly – buy).

There are strategy games being made for the PC.  Supreme Commander 2 is due out shortly and Chris Taylor is certainly a more experienced game designer than I am so maybe he’s figured out a way to make it work.  But *I* can’t see how to make it work. Not for the kinds of strategy games I want to play.

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The Kingdoms of the West are dominated by races of men. While of one species, each race is substantially different from one another in terms of culture, capability, and philosophy.

The Kingdoms tend to believe in power of individuals to set their own destinies.

The Kingdoms

The Kingdom of “New” Pariden (“Paridens”, sometimes called “Amarians”, sometimes derisively referred to as Ama’nir)

The Kingdom of Altar (They are the same race as the Paridens originally from the east. Sometimes called Usurper Amarians)

The Kingdom of Capitar (“Capitarans”, sometimes called “The Diplomats”)

The Kingdom of Gilden (“Ironeers”, sometimes called “Merchants of Iron and blood”)

The Kingdom of Tarth (“Tarthans”, sometimes called the kingdom of something that would negatively affect our ESRB rating by Capitarans but more commonly referred to as the Rebels)

There’s a big Impulse announcement on Wednesday so we’re going to get bumped to the following Thursday. I guess we’ll just be that much more polished.

Sorry about the wait guys.  The Impulse announcement is pretty cool though. I’ve been watching what they have in store. It’s one of those “Duh, why isn’t everyone doing this already?” type things. But IT can’t handle us, this and the Sins of a Solar Empire update next week too.

On the bright side, there will be a TOOONNN of new game info coming out this week.

My wife and I are trying to have our cake and eat it too. A large house that relies largely on renewable energy.

The house is jammed full of both open and closed cell foam insulation.  Every wall and ceiling is filled with this stuff. Even with the house unfinished, it’s had a major effect on keeping the place warm this winter.  This turned out to be a pretty significant investment because of the space involved. But the long-term cost savings will be enormous and result is a lot less heating and cooling being needed.

The Zo-e-shield windows weren’t cheap but even right now in the Winter with the house not done it’s amazing how blatantly more effective they’ve been than the windows we have at our current house.  With our current windows, you touch the glass and it’s very cold. In the new house, they’re cool but not cold. It’s very noticeable.

I agonized about having to clear land to build the house.  There were some black walnut trees, cherry trees, cedar, beech and a few tulip trees.

After talking to the builder, I found out that for a small cost, I could have that wood milled and used on the house. Most of that wood isn’t used in any particularly  flashy way but the wine cellar really benefits from the beech, cedar and walnut mix in giving it an old world look.

In the United States, radiated heat is still not the norm. In Europe, for conservation reasons, it’s practically mandated. It saves a lot of energy heating and cooling the house this way.  Moreover, a closed loop geothermal system with 34 bore holes has been put in (it’s not hooked up yet so right now we have to use the backup boiler until the house is done).

To top it all off, is the 20KW solar array. 

Here’s the thing that most people aren’t aware of: conservation is 10X better than production. It’s cheap and easy to save a lot of waste on energy use. It’s expensive to produce energy.

The 20KW solar array won’t be enough to power the house in the Winter (I live in Michigan) but during peek months it should more than cover it.  So for some months during the Summer, I’ll be a net producer of energy.

Now, there’s a lot of other things being done too such as gray water system, water collection gardening, lots of use of natural light, and on and on.  But these are the “big things”. 

Something not quite related to the house but one of the most expensive things I’ve worked on is removing the invasive species from the 13 acres of property. A lot of people get caught up in Co2 emissions or what have you. But in terms of real world damage human are doing every day that we could easily resolve ourselves? Invasive species. They’re wrecking our forests, lakes, rivers, and yards. It’s a serious problem.  What we’ve done on our property is probably on the extreme side – literally paying tens of thousands of dollars to have the native trees fed, invasive vines removed from them, removal of invasive trees, bushes, etc.  But I think it’s pretty important for the overall ecosystem of plants and animals.

During my daily journey to Digg to see what’s cool and new I usually fail the temptation test of reading the comments on some of the political  articles.

For example:

http://m.digg.com/political_opinion/George_Will_Progressives_and_the_growing_dependency_agenda

The most dugg comment (indicating that the Digg community found this comment to be insightful):

Thanks for that myopic right wing rant-o-rama, George. Just because you have the money to afford private schools for your kids, doesn't mean you don't have to help support public schools. Yes, I read the article, he's misrepresenting the nature of the DC program. The same with health care. Nobody is stopping you from paying for a private room and your own personal doctor if you have the money, but you still have to help provide care to everyone else. Just because we have social services doesn't make us socialist. Most of you don't run your own electric company, water or sewer company, but most of you don't have a choice where you get those services, either. You take what the electric company offers at the price they set. Sometimes as a society we find it's easier to band together for collective services. Water, electric, education, health care, police protection, courts, fire services. And, yes, the list keeps growing because our society keeps changing. Most of you depend on collective water and electric but you have the option of turning it off and going solar if you find it impinges that much on your freedom. After 9/11 we decided to make airport security a collective service, maybe that wasn't such a winner but we know the alternative doesn't work. If you have the money to fly private, you can avoid all that inconvenience. All this teabagger blather is just nonsense.

The world Socialist or Socialism isn’t an insult. It is a specific concept with a specific meaning: The believe that society’s resources should be distributed by the government.

Let’s take a look at this genius’s comment in detail now:

“Just because you have the money to afford private schools for your kids, doesn't mean you don't have to help support public schools”

Don’t have to? In a completely free society, you would not be forced to pay for services that you do not use.  Now, I don’t happen to support a completely free society. I support a certain level of socialism because I do believe that individuals do owe an inherent debt to society. But I’m not going to say that something has to be a certain way.  There’s no particular reason why the government must pay for schools – particularly the federal government.

“The same with health care. Nobody is stopping you from paying for a private room and your own personal doctor if you have the money, but you still have to help provide care to everyone else. Just because we have social services doesn't make us socialist”

Um, yea it does actually. By definition. If you are forcing other people to “help provide care to everyone else” you are executing a socialist policy.

That is the core part of socialism – forcing people to pay for other people.

He doesn’t even recognize the distinction himself when he writes:

“Most of you depend on collective water and electric but you have the option of turning it off and going solar if you find it impinges that much on your freedom”

Yes, and we don’t “still have to help provide” electricity and water to other people. They pay for what they use. If a citizen goes solar then they don’t have to pay for electricity.

By contrast, as the guy originally grasps but then forgets later in his own comment, if you send your child to private school or buy private health care you still are stuck having to pay for other people’s healthcare.  That’s socialism.

When tax time hits, I’m always pained to know that guys like this will be mindlessly voting for policies they clearly don’t understand.

We’ll be talking about this a lot more soon but I wanted to alleviate some concerns on how magic will work in Elemental.

There are over a dozen different books of magic in the game.

When a player selects their sovereign (their sorcerer, channeler of magic), they can choose which books of magic they want. Each book will have a cost to it. So you can spend a lot of points on having lots of books or use those points to make your channeler more powerful.

In addition, based on what race you are, you will get a book of magic and based on which allegiance you choose (Empire or Kingdom) you will get a book.

Example: The Empires get the book of death magic. The Kingdoms get the book of life magic.

Then there are books of magic you can research in the research area.

There are also books of magic spread across the world that you can find via quests and other events.

I won’t even get into how many spells we have. I’m not even sure myself as there are currently many pages of spells.

Some spells are for tactical combat. Others are used globally.

Obviously, what spells you can learn are based on what spell books you have in your possession.  Over time, we plan to keep adding more and more spells to existing books and release additional spell books for free after the game is available as players help us think of new and interesting spells.

We’ll talk more soon about how the magic system works in detail but hopefully this gives you an idea of the direction we’re going.

I never promised that Elemental would be a simple game. I just promised it would be good.

For casual players, there are factions.  Elemental has 10 default factions or you can create your own.

Next up are Allegiances. This is also of interest to casual players.  The Kingdoms and the Empires. Pretty straight forward.

Now we get into the more hard core stuff. For people who are into this stuff like we are. You have the races and the classifications.

First, let’s start with classifications. There are Men and there are Fallen. Men are sentient humanoid beings that are “natural”.  Fallen are beings that were created by the Titans. The Sentient Fallen were created using Dragons and Men in parts – sometimes mixed in with other stuff.

When Master of Magic was developed, such talk of “Fallen” would probably have seemed totally the realm of “magic”. Today, however, we can imagine a day where scientists begin using DNA from various animals to make “better” humans.  That’s basically what the Fallen are as a classification. 

In Elemental, the world of “Men” is a broad classification.  The Ironeers are men but in another universe they might be called dwarves. But Ironeers in Elemental are men.

There are 5 races of “Men” and 5 races of “Fallen”. Each is quite different from one another.

I’m a Tolkien fanatic so let me put it in Tolkien terms.

The Kingdoms would include Men, Elves, Dwarves.  The Empires would include Orcs, Saruman version Orcs, and the Easterlings.

Of course, in Elemental, players can toss all this out and make their own race if they want. I made a Na’vi today in our internal build.  I decided to make them aligned with the Kingdom.  Are they “Fallen”? You decide.

This is a rough draft of the Elemental box. 

Using just bullet points, what were the key, unique elements of Master of Magic that you think helps make it stand out?