I have to disagree with that statement. I think that a quite large number of people do not see the game's state as "good enough for release", including myself. I think it needs at least 2-3 months as it is. The base is very good, but it's totally unfinished, in my opinion. If you browse the forums, you'll see that quite a few posts criticize the lack of polish, content, and personality on many levels. 

We were worried about exactly what is happening now: a release in a "beta 6" state. That's at least 2 betas too early.

moreover, i don't feel the game offers anything new to the genre. it all feels too formulatic and very familiar. i was really looking forward to the tactical battles, but they feel so straightforward and unimpressive that it's almost depressing. i've been waiting for this game for almost a year, and it seems like a big disappointment to me so far.

Except the majority of those people have only played it for a few hours.  Give it time  - bad news travels faster than good news.

Giant mega-game studios like Blizzard with literally billions of dollars in cash can afford to sit on a game for a couple years and keep polishing (ahem Starcraft 2).

Indie studio like Stardock on the other hand have bills to pay and have to release on schedule, take their chances with the reviewers, and keep polishing and supporting their games for months and years after release (which incidently the big game corps don't bother to do since they already have your money and don't really care).

While Elemental 1.0 certainly has some issues (which I don't think people should really comment on since this is like a free preview and the real release is with the 1.1 patch tomorrow), the game is still fairly fun out of the box. A lot of the griping seems to have as much to with people's inflated expectations for perfection as it does with the legitimate technical or gameplay issues with this version. A strategy game like this is almost infinitely more complex to balance than, say a linear shooter type game. I've never know a strategy game ever to not have at the very least some major balance issues out of the box. The beta-testers are saying this version is much better than beta 4 and we're not even playing the release version yet.

Since I love strategy games, and since not many studios make them because most of the money is in point-and-shoot games that bore me to tears, I'm willing to give the developers a break and view Elemental as work in progress that's only going to get better and better as it ages.

Thanks Xan...we'e working eagerly on the Day0 path still, so any good vibes we encounter are appreciated (as well as constructive feedback)!

Gnrl Tempest, and Tourresh

both of your Debug.err files say "last updated on: Tue Aug 17".  We actually put up an update to Elemental last night at 11pm.  So go to Impulse and grab that.  Then let us know if you still get crashes.


Fillthgrinder,

Turn autosaves back on and I'd like to see a debug.err from you if you get a crash.


Thanks guys,
~C

Have played a little bit now (unfortunatelly don't have much time to play) and I like what I see. Parts of the game are similar to other games, but the game as a whole is not similar to anything I have seen. The technical issues do exist, but they are not so terrible as some people say, and I am confident they will get solved.

All in all, good value for my money.

Eh, where and how do I get the debug.err?

I disagree, it was great out of the box.  Its problems were due to DirectX and PnP were only ambitions at that time.  So the hardward-to-dos-to-bios-to-dos-to-game was much more difficult back then!

Don't trash talk my MoM!

Mentioning Blizzard all the time is getting old.

Blizzard is practically unique.  They are so much more successful (with good reason, all their games kill) than anybody else that they are the ONLY game developer that can get away with sitting on games indefinitely.

Everybody else, including Firaxis (civ), who are pretty damned successful, have deadlines and publisher demands to meet.  And yet plenty of other companies manage to produce good games that are in a good state at release.  There's no lack of poor releases and unfinished games but those games get hammered by the press and fans alike.

It's tough to consider Stardock to be truly indie anymore - they've had plenty of success, get plenty of mainstream press, charge normal/full prices for their games, etc.  They might not be as big as some but they're not exactly indie anymore, IMO.

Anyways, I don't think anyone needs to make excuses for Stardock or compare them to anyone else.

I pre-ordered Elemental based on my love of GalCiv (and GC1) and the way Stardock does things, and I dabbled in beta thru the latest pre-release build just the other day, and Elemental just doesn't really grab me.  I'll keep trying it as the release builds hit and get patched, but my enthusiasm is pretty low at this point.  There seems to be some folks here who think the game is amazing and I'm not seeing it at all, so hopefully it's just me and I'm missing the boat thus far.