Demigod/Elemental Status Reports

Stardock’s Brad “Frogboy” Wardell has posted new end-of-year status reports to the official Demigod and Elemental: War of Magic forums.  His Demigod update reveals what’s to come for 2010:

Clan Wars

The Clan Wars feature was originally going to be something that we done sooner rather than later. Instead, it was decided we’d improve the in-game overlay and get modding support in sooner rather than later. We’ll talk about modding in a minute but let’s talk about the clan system first.

Now, the first thing to understand is that a lot of these features will be coming via Impulse Reactor. The idea is to put together an SDK that will allow game developers to easily add their own achievements, clan support, account info, etc. Demigod will benefit from these new features.

The way it’ll work is that players will be able to join a clan and each can will gain points when one of their members wins. That’s the first stage which is obviously pretty easy to do. The more challenging stage is something we hope to develop for Elemental that will be brought back to Demigod where users will be able to essentially set up entire games through the overlay bypassing the existing Demigod lobby so that we can keep adding new types of match-making and game modes without having to interrupt GPG’s development schedule (GPG is working on Supreme Commander 2 right now).

Modding

There’s already some pretty good balance mods being made for Demigod that sound interesting. We’re going to create a modding library early in the New Year so that it’s easier to find and download mods made by the community.

I know one of the personal things I am hoping we can get in are some additional maps but we’ll have to see what is possible. There’s a few of the bigger maps that I’d love to see chopped down for more intensive 3 on 3 play but that’s just me.

More Balancing

We do plan to continue to enhance Demigod itself. We’d like to see the Queen of Thorns get a bit more love. She’s a powerful demigod in the right hands but in the wrong hands, she can become an online (feeder).

And his Elemental: War of Magic update takes us through the game’s beta schedule (with the added bonus of a new screenshot):

.lessons and trends.

If I were pressed to list what the biggest trend in the beta feedback has been so far it is this: Make sure the game has a soul.

Nearly all of our changes in Elemental thus far have been to increase the opportunity to inject story and life into the game play.

.The remainder of beta 1.

So Beta 1 will have at least 3 more updates which will take us well into February. The good news is that people who pre-order the beta and are currently waiting for Beta 2 will likely get one of the updates because the Impulse team wants to test out the (pre-load) features of Impulse and we lobbied for Elemental to be the test case so we could let some of the people who have been waiting in.

Now, as a reminder, Beta 1 isn’t fun (to play). It’s less a (game) than it is a public game proto-type.

The screenshot you see above of the beta engine isn’t even in the game yet because we don’t want the game to have to rely on being pretty to be fun.

What’s coming up next are the quests, the magic system, and the dynasty system. We’re talking to players right now about specific quests they’d like to see. We’ll have lots of journals on that.

The Magic system should be very fun to work through. Though, the tactical battles are where I imagine magic duels being the funnest. Still, being able to morph the land and change it Populous-style should add a layer of strategic depth that will be very fun.

The dynasty system is something we’re all very excited to play around with. I suspect it’ll go through a lot of iterations through the beta as we discover ways to make having characters in the game more fun.