At heart, I’m a modder. So part of me really hates shipping games. I prefer them to stay in beta. Forever. But eventually, products have to be shipped and judged based on their state when they’re shipped.

As a modder, the ship date is irrelevant. As a capitalist, I need the game to be good enough to get sufficiently positive buzz to generate the sales to continue my modding.

Ostensibly, my main coding job on Elemental is supposed to just be AI. But that’s because all our previous games weren’t very moddable.

With Elemental, the world is very moddable.  For instance, tactical battles have a lot of modding opportunities I’ve made use of.

Example: I made a quest today where your group is attacked in a huge temple.  Well, the quest xml lets me specify a map. So I made a series of tiles with the tile editor and then a map that used those tiles to create a temple where my guys were attacked by a bunch of Crypt Warriors. I could even name the individual monsters in the room (I named one Dennis, sorry, I can’t help myself).

But the idea of being able to load up a dungeon within the game from XML is the kind of fun I haven’t had since playing with Never Winter Nights.  Which, I admit, Elemental feels a lot like to me at times in terms of tools.

The evil capitalist in me isn’t totally happy about the modding. As I go through the assets available to modders, I see where the budget has gone.   There are so many assets (artwork, models, etc.) that will never see the light of day in the main game but available for modders that it’s a bit…well upsetting. 

I’m at home right now or I’d show you a bunch of a screenshots of the crazy amounts of stuff.

The team also worked out how uploading would work from within the game so you can share your creations seamlessly with others.  It’ll all be in game. But you don’t have to use our system. People can still set up their own sites for mods if they want.

Beta 3-B should really be called Beta 4 I hate to say it. It’s the most significant set of changes to the game rules since Beta 1. 

Your suggestions do get recorded and looked at. It doesn’t necessarily get implemented immediately but they do get looked at and if we like them, we’re not afraid of radical changes as Beta 3B will make clear. There will be riots I’m sure but it’s so much more fun.

Working at Stardock isn’t for the faint of heart. I have no qualms about making radical direction changes if I don’t like how things are going.  I was finding Beta 3A boring. And I don’t think I was alone in that thought.

The problem with making games is that we tend to always want to look at how others did it and repeat the flaws made in the past.  

Nowadays, it’s very very rare to see a new AAA PC-title that isn’t a sequel. So we have an opportunity to take a fresh look at things.

Thank goodness for the beta community and their constructive ideas.  If you’ve ever had a negative view of Internet forums, I recommend joining our community and reading through the work of our community here. It’s amazing.