Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We’ve just spoken to Stardock’s boss regarding the story we just reported, that GameStop has purchased Stardock’s digital download service, Impulse. And no, it’s not an April Fool. The megacorp plans to integrate Impulse into their own website in the coming months, although Stardock say that at least for the foreseeable future Impulse will still be run by its current staff.

This is certain the case in the “near-term”, explains Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to us, who thinks that the purchase could be good for independent developers’ profiles. You can read his comments below.

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Stardock’s Brad Wardell has given an extraordinary mea culpa in response to the furore surrounding the release of Elemental. Posting on the official Stardock forums, he explains that he doesn’t think people have yet to “fully realize the completeness of Stardock’s fail on Elemental’s launch.” He goes on to say that, “Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.” The problem, he says, is not one of having released unfinished or buggy code, but of the development team having lost sight of the game, of “blindness”. It’s a fascinatingly honest comment, and one that must surely affect so many teams after years working on a game. Wardell has gone on to write more on the subject, while still on his holidays, here. In it he explains that there will be no new Stardock game next year – just more Elemental content. He promises more on this matter when he gets back to a proper internet connection.

You can read the original comment below. Don’t forget Kieron’s thoughts on the game, over here.

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Following yesterday’s energetic discussions of Elemental’s release state, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has issued a statement which can be read in full below. In it Wardell addresses comments made on the Quarter to Three game forum, saying that the remarks about people not buying Stardock games if they disagreed about their state of completion were simply a heated remark to a friend: “This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel.”

On the issue of the Gamer’s Bill Of Rights, which we initially thought deleted from the Stardock site due to a broken URL, Wardell says: “We stand by it. It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is.”

RPS remains uncomfortable with industry practices that involve shipping incomplete gold code, requiring – and assuming – day zero patches as a standard.

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…as narrated by Brad Wardell. We’re pretty excited about Stardock’s forthcoming role-play strategy, not least after this interview, and this video gives you a bit more of a taste of what to expect. It’s going to be a great big feast of a game, albeit for a slow-eater. This is not going to be a game for impatient folk, but it’s almost certainly going to be for Kieron. The big nerd.

The game is having a beta of sorts over the summer, and is set for an August 24th release. Anyway, go watch the video, below.
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Stardock’s forthcoming strategy game, Elemental, is looking rather interesting. It kicks off with the player mooching about, alone in the world, and ends up with you directing a colossal dynastic 4X empire-building game with user-generated content and a hefty multiplayer offering. Last week we talked to Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to get a bit more information about the user-generated content, multiplayer sessions lasting six months, and the world-building collaboration with publisher, Random House.
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Last week I had a chat with Stardock boss Brad Wardell, and I’ve chopped the transcripts into two bits to be posted today and tomorrow. In this first part we talk about Impulse and Stardock’s attempts to rival GFWL and Steamworks with its Impulse Reactor tools. It’s an interesting response to living in the shadow of both Steam and Games For Windows Live, and it’ll be even more interesting to see how many developers and publishers now adopt them. Does all this promise, as one reader mailed in, “Steam, but better?“
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Speaking to Shacknews, Brad Wardell says:

“I started out as a big Games for Windows Live advocate. I intended for Elemental to be on Games for Windows Live, but then as we got closer, the Xbox group took it over more and more. And they have things where, oh, if you want to use Games for Windows Live to update your game, you have to go through [their] certification. And if you do it more than X number of times, you have to pay money. It’s like, “My friends, you can’t do that on the PC.” … If Games for Windows Live maintains that strategy and they take over, I’m done. I’m not making PC games. I would be done.”

I hereby declare this slagging thread for GFWL open!

Well that cocks up my release-day review, doesn’t it? Thanks to Gamestop inexplicably releasing the game early at retail in the US, the release of digital download versions of Demigod have been brought forward to yesterday. Brad Wardell explains the kerfuffle over at his Impulse blog, as well as pointing out that this whole mess should, in theory, “maximise” piracy rates:

“…it was Easter weekend. And many of us had just finished a good solid 8 weeks of massive crunch and were looking forward to the weekend to recover. Instead, we found ourselves back at work having to turn on and configure the multiplayer matchmaking servers… we’ll get to actually see the effects of piracy. Since we know Demigod is an outstanding game with a wide appeal with equal retail and digital distribution to other titles that came out this year with similar demographics we can see how well it sells compared to them.”

Thoughts? I’m liking Demigod very much. Rook SMASH! And if you’re going to get it before you read a more sophisticated verdict than that, buy it on Impulse. We’ll post some more detailed thoughts later in the week.

The mighty Brad Wardell of Stardock has done a lengthy narration of in-game footage for Demigod, and it’s been hosted over at GameTrailers. I’ve embedded that after the jump for your eyebrow-raising consideration. Wardell is playing as one of the demigods we’ve not seen before: the Oak, who has some splendid necromantic talents. The man from Stardock also talks about the Pantheon, which is Demigod’s “persistent world” battle tracking system. That will basically allow you to put your efforts into fighting for a particular faction, pushing one of the demigods towards ascension to full godhood.

Anyway, go take a look. Demigod is due to ascend to digital retailhood in April.
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Ever since RPS’ inception, Stardock done nothing but to do things to further endear themselves to PC Gamers. A fountain of Gal Civ splenditude. A move into publishing with the brilliant Sins of a Solar Empire and the looking-brilliant DemiGod. Even pushing a gamers bill of rights. This is simply their next step, a Master-of-Magic inspired fantasy game which they’ve been working on for years but only finally gave it a name towards the close of the last. It’s time we all learned it. It’s Elemental: War of Magic and looks set to becoming the next PC-strategy game du jour. We talk to Brad Wardell about it…

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PCG have lobbed up my interview with Stardock’s El Presidente Brad Wardell. For example, here’s Brad on why their attempts to licence Atari’s old games like Master of Magic fell through…

“We all agreed on everything but the lawyers just killed it. All kinds of requirements. We’re very open about things, and every time we wanted to say something we’d have had to run it by Atari Legal. We couldn’t even put out a news item. And it’s not like we’d be using code. Which was another point – the lawyers didn’t understand we were just doing a trademark licence, and they wanted the rights to the code of anything we wrote. Which was obviously a deal breaker too. It was so incompatible with how we do things.”

He also talks about the myth of old-school PC sales, why he’d love to do a Baldur’s Gate 2 style game, what people in marketing think about the Germans, being an Engineer not an artist and loads more. Read it here. I also now remember I’ve got quite a bit of material left over from this interview, which I’ll whip into shape sharpish.