Elemental: War of Magic Interview

The guys over at FiringSquad have brought us an extensive seven-page interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell that covers just about everything you’d want to know about their soon-to-be-released turn-based strategy/RPG, Elemental: War of Magic, as well as their Impulse platform. A few snips:

FiringSquad: A lot of people compare it to Civilization, and their new game is coming out next month. How are you making Elemental stand apart from that?

Brad Wardell: Well, outside of being land-based, turn-based strategy games, they are completely different from one another. I’m an old fan of Civilization; I mean I designed Galactic Civilization, so obviously I’m a big fan of Civilization *laughs*, but in terms of game mechanics, they’re so different from one another. For example, Elemental literally has tactical battles, but with Civilization it’s all on their hexes. Elemental has quests that you go on to get special items for units, so every unit in the game looks different.

In Civilization, it’s much more abstract, where if I build an archery unit, there’s just a bunch of guys on a tile, whereas in Elemental I design that archery unit to be just mine, I control how he looks, and I may never see that unit again if I play a thousand times. Each person is different in the game, visually, so when you go into battle and you have 6 guys, it’s literally 6 guys. When I found a city and the population is 73 people, that means I can’t build more than 73 [units] because those people have to come out of my pocket. I’m not simply making a (knight) unit, there’s no such thing as a (knight,) for example, in this game. What you research instead are things like long swords, bastard swords, battle hammers, that kind of thing, as well as platemail, and go into your unit design screen and put together the unit you want to have fighting for you.

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FiringSquad: You’ve already committed to extended post-release support, with free updates and such. What sorts of add-on content do you envision coming out with?

Brad Wardell: Oh, we’ve already got a ton of it planned. We want to see what the players would like us to do, but we’re going to have a spell pack so you can download a bunch of new spells. One of the things we’ve barely scratched the surface on. I’m finishing up the quests for the game and the quest system we have for Elemental is insane. To be honest, it’s overkill for a strategy game, as powerful as any RPG system I’ve ever played. Every quest that’s in World of Warcraft or whatever could be done in Elemental in the current version. All of our designed quests were done on the assumption that it didn’t have all this capability, so the quests in the game are pretty fun, but they’re much shallower than what you’d get in an RPG, in my opinion. So that’s something I really want to explore a lot more.

The quests we’ve designed already didn’t even take into account that our system supports triggers because we didn’t think we’d be able to implement a trigger system in Elemental. That’s something you’d put into a shooter or an RPG, or actually StarCraft has triggers in their single-player game, but that’s almost like an RPG, too. Anyway, I digress; the point is there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff we want to get into after release. I’m going to take some time off in the fall, and all I want to do is work on AI stuff. I don’t want the AI to stay the same as it was on release day because in two months I’ll be so much better at playing the game, so I want to incorporate that. We’re going to be tinkering with this game for the next 3 or 4 years.

Quests are the big thing I want to work on for the players. And it’s not just because we’re nice guys; if we show people how to make really cool quests, then people will probably create their own mods. Then people can see, (Oh, so that’s how they do that, well then I can create this!) We love to be able to see people making this kind of stuff. Somebody already made a Lord of the Rings map, and that’s from the beta.

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FiringSquad: A lot of major titles these days are using or will use Steamworks (Modern Warfare 2, Metro 2033, Mafia II, Civ V, New Vegas, others). Are you worried that there soon won’t be very many new games to add to your store?

Brad Wardell: Oh, absolutely I’m worried about it. I know publishers are worried about it, too, and who can blame them? I don’t think Steamworks is evil or anything; On the contrary, what Steamworks does is important, someone needs to be doing this. It’s too bad Microsoft didn’t get their butt in gear and do this from the start because features of Steamworks are something that we game developers need. Stardock is doing Impulse Reactor; Elemental, I think, will demonstrate its parity with Steamworks. That said, I think it’s pretty ridiculous that a company the size of Stardock is the one having to put up the competitor to Steamworks.

If the entire industry decides they’re going to use Steamworks, which in the short run [would be] good for gamers, as long as Gabe Newell is running Valve. I trust Gabe Newell, he’s a good guy, but then again, I remember when everyone loved Microsoft back in the ‘˜90s. If I knew for a fact that Gabe Newell was going to be in charge of Valve for the next 20 years, then screw it, I’ll use Steamworks, too, but I don’t know that.

That’s the reality, I don’t want to be in the position [of being told] (Yeah, it’s free now, [but later] you have to put in this feature [if you want distribution] and make your customers subscribe to Steamworks Elite, which is $5 a month.) That’s the natural progression, but as long as there’s an alternative for publishers to Steamworks, Valve or whoever can’t ever go and say (Well, now you have to get a Steam Gold account.) I mean, look what Microsoft does now because of their monopoly on Xbox 360, you have to pay what, [almost] $10 a month for Xbox Live Gold.