Elemental: War of Magic from Stardock

[mysterd]

Here's a VERY EARLY Beta gameplay vid showing off gameplay for Elemental: War of Magic at GDC 09.

IMPORTANT NOTE on the video:

To begin with, Wardell reiterated his commitment to getting the game into a testable, playable state earlier than usual. Stardock plans to run a "beta zero" phase, where a working prototype of the game, using extremely simple art assets, will be made available to a small group of beta testers to thoroughly test gameplay--pretty art assets, such as the oil portrait-like textured characters you've seen in screenshots, will be added later during subsequent phases of beta, which will test the game many, many times to ensure that it ends up being a highly polished, well-balanced, and enjoyable finished product.

Gameplay Elements

Currently, most of the major gameplay aspects are locked down, though Wardell confides that he and his team still occasionally come up with "Hey, what if we did this?" inspirations that the team then tosses against the proverbial wall to see if it sticks. There's a great deal of implementation and content-building yet left to do, but Wardell is adamant about certain aspects of gameplay, such as having resource-related buildings appear outside of your castle keep, rather than in it. Your castle keep, the base of your operations, will exist in the world as a 3D structure, and you'll build all your farms and barracks and other buildings around your keep over time to eventually end up with a thriving medieval metropolis.

When asked what he most wanted to see in his own Master of Magic-like game, Wardell replied that he'd always enjoyed the global spells of Microprose's classic, and confessed that he was extremely excited by the prospect of using modern computer graphics technology to create some truly spectacular large-scale magic effects.

In addition, the team already knows that content customization, which was very popular among players of Stardocks' Galactic Civilizations series, will definitely be in the game. The GalCiv games let you meticulously design your fleet of spaceships with whatever weapons and accoutrements you wanted; Elemental will let you do the same to army battalions as well as to buildings.

Some of the Content:

Though the initial game will ship only with two playable races, the humans and the sinister Fallen, the team expects that elves, dwarves, and other fantastical creatures will appear more or less immediately as a result of the fan community's efforts with the editing tools, which will let you upload your content to a centralized database. And it's also likely that Stardock will add more playable character races later to the game, since the studio has a longstanding tradition of supporting games post-launch, and also since the game's lore is apparently so extensive that Wardell himself is chronicling it all in a book he's writing concurrently with his game development duties.

Sounds good to me.

Elemental's FUTURE

When asked about the future plans for this game, Wardell admitted he was uncertain as to whether Elemental would grow by way of full-on $30 expansion packs, or through "microexpansions," which Stardock has released for Sins of a Solar Empire. A larger expansion, explains Wardell, will take longer to make and keep players waiting, but microexpansions don't seem well understood by customers and press just yet, either.

Here's some screenies of what the final version should look like...

[Elliot Kane]

Nothing loses me faster than 'turn based' normally, but this does look quite interesting... Definitely one to watch...

[mysterd]

From Shacknews -- Elemental, interview w/ Brad Wardell of Stardock.

I'm not one to really get super-excited over say a strategy game -- but damn, some of the stuff in this game just sounds awesome.

[Elliot Kane]

Sounds like Total War: Fantasy, which I have been wanting to see since... Well, since Shogun.