Pnakotus

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

After the eighty-ninth time, I think the reaction would be 'ho hum, tower of time, let's see five archers and two guys with maces, oh look I won, how thrilling'. Once you start randomising the content and events around things, guess what? It's not story based anymore - it's INTERESTING instead. I would find seeing the same things regularly at all quite boring, and I have no interest in my games being hijacked into 'another amazing event around the Tower of Time' I do

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

That's an interesting sentiment - adding a toggle would be hard. You'd think making certain game elements optional would be pretty easy (aside from critical mechanics, anyway). I've often thought that in many cases - particularly 'realism' - many features should always be optional, to prevent driving away certain players. For instance, I wanted a really complex econ model, because I've hated simplistic crap for twenty years of Civilization. Obviously this isn't

Reply to Don't chintz on the opening videos and trailers in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Yeah, as a business they're not interested in selling more copies of their games...? Saying such things is ridiculous. They make neat games, but as others have said there's no reason why having crap graphics makes your game better, and a great game ten people play isn't a worthwhile investment of millions of dollars. There is a reason GalCiv2 outsold GalCiv1. :) I have to agree this isn't really applicable to Elemental, which alr

Reply to Steam Overlay and Elemental in War of Magic Elemental Forums

The implementation is certainly complete balls, but if MS didn't suffer from serious inter-division competition it'd be a good idea. They recently made it an external app (finally), but it doesn't actually let you do anything. They've got it so hopelessly wrong you've got to wonder where all that funding went. EDIT - Oh, sorry for not posting an unsupported one-liner.

Reply to Don't chintz on the opening videos and trailers in War of Magic Elemental Forums

And you're in the very small minority. People can still play StarCon2, but it's hardly making anyone any money. If you want to compete in the market, you need to meet market expectations. Talking about the tiny group of people who honestly don't care about graphics (or whatever) isn't really helping - unless the game wouldn't appeal to anyone else anyway, which is patently false. Stardock games are interesting and complex, but they're not glorified spreadsheets like (s

Reply to Steam Overlay and Elemental in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Shhh. Let's see if anyone asks for them to implement Games for Windows Live (which would actually be pretty cool) before we break out too much realism. I'm replacing 'steam overlay' with 'MSN' or 'AIM' and giggling at the idea that it should be implemented in game by other developers. Remember, steam is 'how you stay connected to your friends when in-game'! :D

Reply to Don't chintz on the opening videos and trailers in War of Magic Elemental Forums

It's even less appealing if the ridiculous pre-rendered silliness is full of things you can't actually do in the game.

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Thankfully it will have an interface, unlike DF, so this possible detail will be usable by mortals. :) That is the kind of dynamic scripted stuff I certainly thought of earlier in development; I'm concerned that it'll be -too- specific to whatever story the campaign has, while I'd prefer sandbox to be totally divorced. I actually really hope the scripted stuff works as you describe, since Brad has been eager to get that kind of dynamic story event thing going for a while. &nbs

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

My concern was brought about by an more recent journal, the 'Elemental Story Update' on 6th August which you quoted above. Brad talks about the story (for campaign mode presumably) and then says that the 'scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into'. The scriptable content system is good (it drives the quests, world events, and other things I imagine) because it mak

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Aesir Rising - I don't know how to link directly to dev journals (I imagine they're in the forum somewhere but the software really hates Chrome), but the journal dated July 23 (the Elemental FAQ) involves a reiteration of the statements I had in mind regarding units. Q: Will there be priests? A: We do not include pre-built units. What players choose to call their units is up to them. However, a channeler can cho

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Hilarious. Strawmen AND hypocrisy; it's wrong for me to dislike something (ie, strong stories in sandbox games, GalCiv2's backstory etc) but it's okay to describe people with differing opinions as 'hostile and insulting' and they deserve 'hostility and denigration'. The point is that I'm eager to have sandbox remain sandbox-y, and yet recent statements could be interpreted to mean they're using their strong story and background to inform sandbox mode (somehow, maybe, etc).

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Really? Brad has expressly said - even in recent dev journals - that the game doesn't ship with units because you create them from equipment during the game. The game clearly has building appearances, but I'm not really sure how the 'lore' is going to intrude through the appearance of a barn. My concern was the dynamic, scripted 'event' stuff they talk about being 'this week on Stardock's silly fantasy story' instead of actually freeform, like other sandbox games. The

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

No, it really isn't. Successful games don't necessarily have stories at all (let alone strong ones) so the statement a story is needed is false. Chronic balance issues, broken diplomacy (kill xyz person who is dead or lose friendship lol) and near-irrelevant economy are real problems. If Sins had a story, I'd never see it, particularly if it's communicated in heavily-scripted missions that are always the same. A bunch of problems story-wise whic

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

That's all good stuff - the way they talk about the scritpable content definately suggests the sandbox will be more than 'start at turn 0 and play the same way again'. It would simply be a shame if they lost flexibility (which they're really focusing on designwise for in-game content and external modding) because of irrelevant story. I also hear games need strong stories. Games like Civilization and the Sims. :) Sins has a lot of problems, but I

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Sure, and I haven't been keeping a close eye on development. That's why I made the thread: so more informed people could let me know what was the go. It did sound to me like the story (which is significant to the developers, if they're printing a book) was somehow making the sandbox stuff part of the fantasy worldbuilding they're doing. Which isn't what sandbox is about, to my mind. EDIT - and my quote button doesn't work. It's probably a Chrome

Reply to What was the Magic of MoM? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

For me it was the combat. Not the tactical nature - that was old even then - but the way it handled units and squads and modifiers. Different races had character through not only empire-wide bonuses, but changes to how their generic units worked. Squads took casualties that reduced their ability to attack. Powerful monsters could sweep away several units. Throwing axes, striking first, all that stuff. This was great stuff in the day of 'cha

Reply to Diplomacy in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Obfuscating typical 'game' elements that are really very complex or unknown (like how someone REALLY feels about you) is good. The GalCiv2 system is good for feedback, but that should be the public face of diplomacy (ie we condemn your military buildup etc) and behind closed doors your enemies should have actual agendas beyond 'we don't like his military score'.

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Try reading what I actually posted before you fire off the knee-jerk torpedoes, buddy. I simply have no interest in some fixed story; I want a sandbox game. If you think sandbox games are 'dry' and lack character or have 'all the appeal of chess pieces', that's great. I actually enjoy these games, but I'm concerned sandbox may loose it's freeform nature to 'work in' with a story I simply don't care about. GalCiv2 has a story that I totally ignore, preferring the storie

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

I haven't read much about the quest scripting, events, etc, so I imagine there's some scope for it to 'tap into' lore there aswell. The concern is that sandbox gets railroaded by lore/the book/etc in some way - I'm not interested in sacrificing anything scope-wise to the story. I'm the kind of guy that is irritated by being unable to make GalCiv2 custom races that get as many bonuses as the base races. :) The quote above seems contradictory; he's saying that

Reply to Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

That's what I'm hoping, but when Frogboy says " The scriptable engine allows each so-called sandbox game to have a truly unique life of its own because there’s just such a massive amount of lore to tap into." it makes me wonder if the game will ship with 'default content' based on their story. I played some of the ToA campaign and I don't really want to see this; I'm concerned sandbox-ness might be sacrified to communicate some st

Elemental and story focus in War of Magic Elemental Forums

Since the dev journals have moved away from discussing the interesting complexity (much of which seems to have been cut now anyway) and to discussing the story, I'm very interested to have some things clarified. Will the story really inform the scripted content system for sandbox? Does this mean we'll never be able to play a 'proper' sandbox game? GalCiv 2 had - excuse me - the worst story in recent videogame history. Ignoring it was easy, however, so it didn't matte

Reply to Elemental: Internal debates made external in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

So my post ended up in the map editor thread instead... oh dear. Looking over this thread, it's interesting that the population that cares enough to pay attention before launch seems to prefer the more complex approaches. That said, the idea of doing both (while attractive) is probably bad; while it's generally a good solution, this is a core system in the game that is going to need a lot of work (the more complexity you have the better you UI needs to be or you end up with Euro

Reply to Making your own worlds in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

The fourth idea is terrible. More iron = makes iron things faster roffle. That's Starcraft-level simplification. While it's true that complexity turns away players, let's all be honest for a moment - people who don't want a certain level of complexity will not EVER buy this game. Remember in the early 21st century when RTS games turned their back on ever-growing resource lists to go back to the standard 2 or 3? The people who drove that aren't going to buy a fa

Reply to [MOD] Bailknight`s Graphic Mod for Entrenchment ver 1.02 Fixed 1 in Sins Modding Sins Forums

Turns out the mod makes 1.03 crash? Bah. :)

Reply to Why squares instead of hexes? in War of Magic Elemental Forums

The reasons for using grids in tabletop systems are obviously tied to issues of usability and bookkeeping, which given a decent UI are -totally irrelevant- for a computer game. It is pretty funny to see a bunch of people respond to a serious question with 'rar rar I like squares so there'. Frankly, though, they're right; using squares makes essentially no sense (the arguable eyeball estimate advantage being obviated by the whole 1.4x cost for diagonal movement, wh