The beta group has had an immense amount of influence already on the course of the game’s development.
One example of this has been in the way we’ve been thinking of implementing magic in the game. Often times, users don’t necessarily make specific suggestions but instead get us thinking on a different track than we previously were.
With Magic, originally players had 5 different types of mana – life/death, earth, fire, water, air. Controlling a shard would, each turn, put mana of the appropriate type into a sort of mana bank.
So what’s the problem with that? Plenty. First, it means that the guy who sits on the shards is going to win the game. It really aggravates our biggest pet peeve in these kinds of games – the game being won in the first 10 minutes and then spending the next 2 hours going through the motions.
Then there was the spell research. Originally you would research spells much like you research tech. You’d build academies and the points would go into whatever you were researching. Besides being boring, it took away a lot of choices.
So instead, your academies generate spell knowledge (spell points) which you can then spend, at any time, to learn a particular spell. Much much more fun.
THIS is why the open beta works so well though. Without all the discussions and brainstorming here on ElementalGame.com we might have gone down the original path we had designed and then been committed to it (i.e. – once the expensive visual assets are produced, you’re pretty much stuck with it, that’s why we’re doing the cloth map and such because it’s cheap to make radical changes).
Update: Just realized that I didn’t talk about what we’re doing with the shard systems.
Spells require mana to cast but will also need certain shards (earth, air, fire, water) as well. So a spell may require 200 mana and control of 2 fire shards and an earth shard.
