Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been a little quiet on planet Stardock since the Elemental launch catastrophe and the divisive sale of Impulse to Gamestop, but they’ve quietly been staying true to their pledge to redeem their ambitious fantasy 4X game. Sequel Fallen Enchantress is now at alpha stage, and looking pretty delicious too mine hungry eye. Stardock boss Brad Wardell has just snuck out a video, with commentary, showing what they’re up to in this follow-up/reboot. The interface is much improved, the AI’s been overhauled, hopefully it’s a whole lot less buggy and… well, this entirely looks like my sort of thing. Meantime, I’m sniffing at Paradox’s Warlock, which does some vaguely similar stuff (but in a much more Civ-like way), so 2012 looks like a year for being spoiled for fantasy strategy choice.
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We’ve not heard much about the Sins of a Solar Empire expandalone/quasi sequel Rebellion since it appeared on the radar back in March. Today though Stardock sent over a couple of images (below) showing how the graphical overhaul will shiny-up the ships from the original game to give the new game a good dose of polish. And they are at least 25% shinier, according to my Pixelshaderised shinometer. Of course Sins of a Solar Empire has been expanding and overhauling aplenty (and with stuff that matters to the game) since the 2007 release, and became far more interesting to play after the Diplomacy pack. Rebellion gets to build on this with new factions, new ships, and of course the whole rebellion theme – factions will be splinter off the main factions to create “rebel” and “loyalist” sub-factions, which in turn makes the conflict all the more hectic. With that and some AI improvements, well, we’ll be looking forward to it. Still no release date for Rebellion, but apparently it will be digital download only. Convenient for some, as Sins is now on Steam.
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Stardock are running a video developer diary series detailing various aspects of the Elemental expansion, Fallen Enchantress. I’ve posted the first couple of these below, thanks to BluesNews. It’s looking good, and lead designer Derek Paxton has told Gamespot that UI changes will make this game far easier to get to grips with than its troubled parent game. This time around it also has a team better suited to getting an unbugged game out the door on time: “There are dedicated producers, designers, and a formalized production pipeline that we have borrowed from the enterprise software world. The design is focused, fixed (with some flexibility as we iterate and improve), and communicated to the team. Time is set aside for iteration (after we are feature complete) rather than still implementing critical features until release day.”

So that sounds good. The game looks like an improvement on the original, too.
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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 might have broken a few hearts with the whole Elemental launch fiasco (for which they recently offered a remarkably earnest mea culpa), but it’s clear they’re still well aware what’s important. Specifically, an epic comeback for Sins of a Solar Empire, the space strategy game that got RPS’s hive-heart all a-flutter back in 2007. It is to return, in the form of standalone expansion pack Rebellion. Immediately standing out in the list of planned features is “New Titan-class ships: Massive warships for each race that dwarf capital ships, these deadly new monsters are capable of wiping out entire enemy fleets single-handedly.”

Massive. Dwarf. Deadly. Monsters. Single-handedly. These are all mighty promising words. These, truly, are words of space war.
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Stardock have had some more to say about Fallen Enchantress, the recently-revealed expansion for their fantasy strategy game, Elemental – War Of Magic. The game, which will be free to everyone who bought Elemental before 2011, will be a standalone title, and should, Stardock have said, be regarded as a new game. Not least because it has a new team behind it: “Fallen Enchantress gives us the opportunity to have a very different fantasy strategy game than War of Magic. While the original intent was simply to eliminate an unnecessary SCU (we can simply have Fallen Enchantress with an upgrade price for people who have War of Magic), in this case, it lets us make an even bigger break from War of Magic because it has a new Lead Designer (Kael instead of myself) with Jon Shafer helping as well as we begin pre-production of Jon’s new game along with many other changes. It’s still Stardock but it’s a very different Stardock than what made War of Magic (or GalCiv II for that matter).”

More here.

BigDownload scooped the news, using their giant info-bagger (which gnaws endlessly at the heart of the ever-growing internet), that Civilization V designer Jon Shafer has been hired by Stardock to work on Elemental, the turn-by-turn strategy game that appeared last year to a chorus of mixed frowns, but is now probably fine after a bunch of patching, we still haven’t had time to check. Apparently awesomeness is planned for Elemental, so that sounds awesome. Go awesome! That’s what I say, like when a guy playing American football says “Go deep” or whatever. I say that to Quinns when he is racing another blog post to the blog line. Anyway, the Stardockians have also used their cash to hire Dave Stern, a novelist and editor, who will apparently be working on Elemental’s lore. There’s life in the old lich yet, it seems.

Were you interested in Elemental: War of Magic but put off by all the reports of it being buggy? Did you instead choose to spend your week’s shekels getting proper bum-guzzled on the danger liquid at your local alcobuilding? Well, perhaps now is the time to reconsider that lifestyle of yours. Stardock has released its monster 1.1 update for the game, fixing a whole hive of bugs, adding spells and upgrades, changing the mana and population systems, updating the UI and rebalancing everything else. As always, a changelog of this size holds plenty of gems, including “Balanced Children” and “You can no longer drink some quest items (like the magic flute).” Version 1.2 is apparently already underway, and we can look forward to a demo in January. Latest trailer follows…
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In what is hopefully the final word on the sorry release saga of Elemental, Stardock bossguy Brad Wardell has issued another remarkably frank public mea culpa, following the weekend’s awful news that several Stardock staffers were to lose their jobs and a future project may be axed as a result of poor reviews and lower-than-hoped revenues for the roleplaying strategy game. While it’s by now scarcely any secret that the man’s publicly holding himself accountable for the release of a rickety game, the sum total of information and apparent self-flagellation offered has been extraordinary.
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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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