Greetings!

When you get the new beta I think many of you will be shocked at how far the game continues to come.  It is so much more polished than anything we've done before on the fantasy side of things.

That said, the marketing team has put in a request that we MOVE the date to July.  While we have lots of developers and artists, we have finite "biz" people and with Galactic Civilizations III's release coming up along with the Servo and Ashes prep coming up, they have asked if we could hold the release up so that they have time to do a bigger release.

Of course, we would use that extra time to continue enhancing the game and it opens the door up for other improvements to the game that we had not originally intended.  But on the other hand, that would mean more months in early access which is beyond what a lot of people signed up for.

So before I make a final decision on what the release date should be, I wanted to find out form our early access customers what they would prefer.

Thanks!

This week Stardock will be releasing Beta 5 of Sorcerer King.  The last major public beta for its upcoming fantasy strategy/RPG game.

For those of you not familiar with Sorcerer King:

You are the sovereign of a civilization in the fantasy world known as Elemental. Unfortunately, the world has been largely conquered by the malevolent Sorcerer King who is now attempting to gain godhood by destroying the magical shards in which all magic in the world id derived from. The Sorcerer King is immensely powerful (far more powerful than the player) and you must carefully balance your empire’s growth with keeping the Sorcerer King’s immense forces largely unaware of your ultimate plan to defeat him and liberate (or oppress, depending on how you play the game) the lands.

Along the way you’ll want to ally with the various other factions who are struggling to stay free of the Sorcerer King’s influence, protect the shards, craft new equipment for your units, build up your cities and much more.

If you’ve ever wanted to play a 4X strategy game that has pretty serious role playing components, this is it.  Since we’re also the publisher of Star Control, I could probably describe it closest as a fantasy Star Control style game.

It’s available on Steam early access right now: http://www.sorcererking.com/store

More Screenshots:

Drengin are somewhat bigger.

Greetings!

I'm on the plane and have some time to talk a little bit about Ashes.  I've been getting a ton of questions about the game and I'm going to try to answer these questions in the clearest way I can.

First, some house cleaning:

1. If there isn't a subedit on Ashes yet, could someone make it? The nature of this game is such that we really want to be able to talk to the community a lot prior to release. 

2. We are instituting a new Founders system that we will apply retroactively to other games that have had founders programs (like GalCiv III).  In essence, we will be giving Founders more exclusive stuff early on. That stuff may be made available later to everyone but we want people who supported us from the start to get first dibs on things.

Next, Founders info:

a. Re Supreme Commander & TA questions.  Yes, Ashes is probably most similar to those games with one major difference - the maps themselves are broken up into regions.  Thus, you have to control the region (ala Company of Heroes) and the contiguous regions back to your seed (Base) in order to receive the resources of that region.

b. Re scale.  I've seen a lot of people talk about how many units are in other games with an accompanying screenshot.  The difference here is that one of those big battles would just be one of potentially many battles going on across the world.  The difference in actual units is an order of magnitude higher than anything that's previously been done. 

c. Re Managing units.  While each of the potentially tens of thousands of units can be commanded individually, that would be relatively insane to try.  Instead, think of each individual as being a lego and being able to quickly and easily put together these legos into a single bigger unit which we call Meta units.  The meta unit works together as if it's a single unit. You click on one, you have clicked on all of them and all their special abilities are available to use.  They will automatically help each other (since they see themselves as part of a greater unit).

d. Meta units are not control groups. A control group might have multiple meta units in it. A meta unit can be 1 unit or it might be 3000 units depending on what the player wants to do.  

Next, early debates on topics we can have:

a. There are 3 main resources players are fighting: Metal (for constructing stuff), Radioactives (for advanced units and researching), and Computronium.  Comporting acts as the victory point ticker in this game. It's a real word and a real concept.  But we hate the name.  We are open to ideas on a different name.  Computronium is the theoretical name of an idealized computing substance.

b. Map sizes.  Our tiny map is about the size of the Bay Area in California. The largest map size is difficult to describe because it's so big. It takes a hour for a unit to travel across it.  Based on who is reading this post, how long do you prefer your RTS games to last?

Spent some great time this afternoon talking to Niche Gamer regarding Ashes of the Singularity.

Here's their write up:

http://nichegamer.com/2015/03/ashes-of-the-singularity-is-a-giant-sized-rts-that-completely-reshapes-the-genre/

Greetings!

We had a great meeting with Paul Reiche and Fred Ford. Really great guys.  We went over a status report of where the new Star Control stands and emphasized that we would not make any attempt to touch the Ur-Quan continuity.  Paul has given us hope that someday he will return to his universe and make a new game in it (he spoke about this at GDC today).

Day 1

Greetings.

I'm old.

It's official.

It's 9pm and I've skipped out on the various parties and am just laying around the hotel room.  

This year's GDC is unique in that we are seeing the arrival of several sets of new technology simultaneously. Notably, DirectX 12 and Vulkan, the new OpenGL API.  

DirectX 12

There's a lot of technical jargon that will be thrown around but what it boils down to is this: For the first time, PC game developers will be able to communicate to the video card through multiple CPU cores simultaneously.  You know that fancy 4 core CPU you've had? It did dick for gaming until now.  

In our Star Swarm DirectX 12 stress test last month, we showed that on the same hardware, you could get up to 5X (500%) framerate boosts over DirectX 11.  Well, we didn't show it, Anandtech showed it. 

Ashes of the Singularity: Sins of a Solar Empire on the surface? 

Today, we announced a new PC game called Ashes of the Singularity. It's an RTS and on DirectX 12, we got a 70% boost on the same scene over DirectX 11. That number is lower because this is an actual game that has been designed with making sure we support DirectX 11 (we can't just make a game that only works on DirectX 12).  Still, 70% is pretty amazing.

Ashes is an RTS in which players are conquering an entire world (Single or multiplayer). We'll be talking about gameplay a lot more soon.

Servo: User designed Giant robots battling it out in cities

We also got to unveil BonusXP's much anticipated RTS, Servo.  In Servo, players design their own giant robots (called servos) outside the game and then bring them into battle.  So imagine an RTS where the units are constantly evolving as players get better.  We'll be talking a lot about this game soon but it's a total blast to play right now.

Xbox One and DirectX 12

I get a lot of Xbox One questions.  I'm not a console guy but I am a hardware guy in general. So take this with that in mind:

It is easier to get good perf on the PS4 than the XBO because the PS4 uses DDR5.   On the XBO you absolutely must use the esram to get decent performance. But using the eSRAM effectively takes some effort and some trial and error.  This is, imo, the ultimate cause of "resolution gate".

This is where DirectX 12 comes in.  First, they're redoing the APIs to deal with eSRAM based on developer feedback. Second, they have a wonderful tool called "Pix" that now has a feature (or will very soon) that lets developers try out different strategies in using eSRAM and see how it performs without having to rebuild the project (i.e. they can simulate it in the tool).  This too is huge.

Lastly DirectX 12 eliminates the serialization that was in DirectX 11.  Now, don't get too excited about this yet because this will likely become a bigger deal long term.  Right now the ONLY 3D engine I'm aware of that has a fully asynchronous scheduler is Nitrous (and hence, why Oxide/Stardock have been getting so much attention in recent months in the graphics scene).  This means we fill the GPU from all CPU cores simultaneously.  Now, Unreal, Crytek and Frostbite (in terms of "high perf" engines -- I love Unity btw) are working on amazing stuff and their engineers are awesome. But in terms of being able to show the benefits of mass parallelism right now, Nitrous and the Ashe of the Singularity demo are the best way to see it and Nitrous isn't available on the Xbox one..presently.

Vulkan and the PS4

The PS4 doesn't look like it'll be using Vulkan. That's not an official word it's just the info I've gotten from talking to Sony engineers. Their view, presently, is to use GNM which s already very low level. Being "on the metal" sounds all great to a gamer. But as a developer, unless i'm making a platform exclusive game, I really like having an API stack that is readily portable. So I hope they pick up Vulkan support if only as an option.

Links: check these out please!

www.ashesgame.com 

www.servogame.com 

Little known fact: The first commercial game to be sold while it was in beta was called…Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 in 1993.

Since then, every single Stardock game has been made available for sale, as a beta to customers.   I found a link from 1995 for people to pre-order Avarice for OS/2.

Suffice to say, I think I can definitively say that Stardock was the first company in the industry to make use of “early access” for its games. 

Galactic Civilizations for OS/2 early beta (1993)

Avarice for OS/2 (1995) was available as a beta.

Stardock’s Trials of Battle for OS/2 (1996) was available for sale while still a beta

Why Early Access?

The why is the key. 

The reason Stardock has always supported early access is because I needed your feedback. I want your ideas. I want your opinions. I don’t want to ship a 1.0 game. I want to ship the 1.1 game and skip the iffy 1.0 version if I can.  Galactic Civilizations got its starbases from early access users. Sins of a Solar Empire got unlimited resources (the asteroids never run out of resources – originally they did) because of early access.  And let’s be candid, if Stardock had done a better job listening to its early access players we would have pushed War of Magic to the following Winter to give it more time.

Ah, Elemental: War of Magic. There is not enough therapy in the world to get over you.

The problem with early access is when developers try to use it to fund their game.  This is a gigantic mistake.  Early access games do not sell well. This is doubly true of games that aren’t part of a franchise.  You cannot reasonably expect to fund your game from early access.

Why charge so much?

One thing we do that results in lots of criticism is that we don’t give much of a discount (if any) for early access.  We do this to discourage sales. Remember, we aren’t funding our games in early access. We are looking for feedback from people who are genuinely interested in the game and are looking to help shape the game.  The worst thing that could happen is to get casual buyers in the beta process.

How many games are too many?

We have a lot of games in development right now.  The below chart isn’t even the full list.   This next week we’ll be unveiling Servo. It’s arguably ready for early access right now. We’re playing it. But the thing is, we have three games in early access (OTC, GalCiv III and Sorcerer King). We need at least one of those games to ship before we ask our community to get involved. 

Offworld Trading Company went through a similar experience.  We’ve been playing OTC for a year – and it shows. But we didn’t want OTC to be in early access until Sorcerer King and GalCiv III were nearing completion so that our community understood that we’re not just putting half-finished games out there. It was important to us that our customers trusted us that we would see these things through.

Not a complete list of what we have in development

Temptation is tough

Servo is very hard to resist putting out at early access.  Once you play it…well, you’ll understand.  Very fun.  But if you think that’s going to be tough, wait till you see what we announce next week. It’s a game that we’ve been working on for years and when you see it in action (not mockups but actual gameplay) there will be outcry that it’s not in early access because it’ll be obvious how far along it is.  And the answer is: We won’t put it into early access until after GalCiv III and Sorcerer King are both released.

Who Wins

When done right, the customer wins. If anyone reading this has Offworld Trading Company has a moment, please comment to let others know the validity of this statement: By holding back games to make sure we don’t have too many in EA we end up with games that go into EA that are very polished and very mature and yet still ready to take lots of feedback from players.

In other words: The traffic jam of Stardock games in development is allowing our partners and our teams extra time to polish and enhance the games which results in a better experience. 

This is why I think developers need to exercise a restraint with regards to early access.  It is better to wait until the game is far along before putting it out for early access but still early enough that meaningful changes can be made based on player feedback. 

I saw Galactic Civilizations III on Steam on discount even though it's still in early access.  We have really entered new territory as an industry.

When Valve asks if you want your game featured you answer that question the same way you would answer someone who asks you if you're a god. The answer is always YES.

I could spend many articles praising Steam.  It has been a tremendous good for both gamers and game developers.  But game studios and publishers are also going to have to catch up to the concept that once your game is available, it's available and they have a responsibility to make sure their customers never felt like they were "chumps" for getting in early.

One of the things Stardock is going to be doing over the coming weeks and months is emailing our Founders on our various games and making sure there are additional perks available to them as a thank you and show of appreciation for supporting us.  These perks might include coupons. They might include special access to content that we haven't shown anyone else.  They might include sneak peeks.  But the main point is that we will find ways to make sure we demonstrate our appreciation of our customers in new and creative ways that sends home the message that we care about them and that buying a Stardock game is more than just a transaction, you're part of our team.