Fallen Enchantress beta?

[LintMan]

Anyone here playing Stardock's Fallen Enchantress beta?  I'm really curious because I'm hoping Stardock will make good and come back strong after the disastrous Elemental release.  I'm eleigible for the FE beta but despite my curiosity, I'm scrupulously avoiding it, and pre-release betas in general now. 

I fear the Elemental beta scarred me for life: spending several months of the beta seeking out and dutifully reporting bugs and flaws made me all too focused on its problems (and then to watch the game get released without fixes for any of them) so the one time I loaded the game a few post-release patches later, I couldn't get myself out of beta bughunt mode and found myself still fixated on spotting the bugs/flaws and unable to enjoy the game.  Being a software developer myself is probably part of that.  I'm really hoping the FE reboot with a more savvy game designer in charge will turn things around, but don't want to risk getting myself stuck in beta mode again.

Similarly, I've bought AVWW and really wanted to try its beta, but it's probably better for me to avoid putting myself in beta mode.    

[Dizzard]

I was just looking at a video of fallen enchantress on youtube. I'm still a little confused what it's about.

Is it an mmo? Or is it some sort of turn based tile rpg. (like Fire Emblem)

[chemical_art]

I can't take anything about enchantresses seriously.

I blame TV.

[LintMan]

I was just looking at a video of fallen enchantress on youtube. I'm still a little confused what it's about.

Is it an mmo? Or is it some sort of turn based tile rpg. (like Fire Emblem)

Fallen Enchantress is a turn-based 4X strategy game set in a fantasy magic-n-monsters setting.  I've never played Fire Emblem, but I suspectthat's more about the tactical battles.  This is more like maybe Heroes of Might and Magic, but with more city-development/economy emphasis including founding new cities, and a research tree.  It is the apology/follow-on to Elemental:War of Magic, which was somewhat billed as the spiritual successor to a legendary classic 4X fantasy game called Master of Magic (MoM).   (If you haven't heard of MoM, it was by the same people who did the first two Master of Orion (MoO) games, still revered in the space 4X genre.)

After Elemental was released half-baked and with fundamental design flaws, Stardock promised to make it right and to give everyone who bought the game the first expansion for free.  This expansion morphed into a major rewrite and a stand alone product, but is still free for the early Elemental purchasers.

[Souls-Stream]

A bit old but I'm in the beta of fallen enchantress and also sins of a solar empire rebellion.

Well, rebellion is totally badass I every way, it's SOASE but much better !

FE ? Can't really say the same, the beta is practically unplayable right now because it keeps crashing every so many turns ! Never saw a game crashing so much... But the devs know it and will fix it.
As far as the game it's way better than war of magic and they really made a huge progress, it's more like master of magic now. I complain a lot about the magic system, tactical battles and research in general but a couple should be fixed by the release ! The new system is cool and not cool IMHO, so many things I hate and yet so many I love ! Though the devs are really attentive to players but don't dream too much, it's far from arcen games I'll see what it will be by beta 3 in April but I don't know... The different spells are still blah to me and earth magic is a total failure ! Armor / creating mountains and leveling terrain ... Blah thats so pathetic when it could totally modify the battle field with cool stuffs.

In FE you don't research spells anymore, you have to gain them through adventure and I hate it, you just can't stay in your city fortifying and researching until you are ready to rock ! They really force you to go out of your way which is good and not good at the same time IMHO .

So much to complain about but hey, where month away from release date so hopefully it will go well ! But I can tell that they are going on the right track and working hard, just check the main page with the main forum topics, it's pretty awesome

[zespri]

After the Elemental (and before that Demigod) fiasco and after Brad seemed to have lost any interest in the game I have no hopes for fallen enchantress being any good. Which is a shame.

[zespri]

It's now released.

[eRe4s3r]

Anyone got some feedback on this "re-release" is it a good game now? Or did they not fix any of the major design flaws?

[zespri]

Anyone got some feedback on this "re-release" is it a good game now? Or did they not fix any of the major design flaws?

Well according to beta feed-back there were no "major design flaws". Which issues do you mean in particular?

[eRe4s3r]

Ehm, I was talking compared to Elemental

Fallen Enchantress is just Elemental isn't it? So my question was aimed at what changed compared to that...

To me, Elemental and Fallen Enchantress are the same game. I just want to know what changed. And whether they fixed the trainwreck that was Elemental, or whether they continued the mistakes in FE

[zespri]

And this is what I found in my inbox today:

Dear Stardock customer,

My name is Brad Wardell. I'm the President & CEO of Stardock.  Two years ago, you bought a game from us called Elemental: War of Magic.  We had great hopes and ambitions for that game but, in the end, it just wasn't a very good game.

Elemental was an expensive game. You probably paid $50 or more for it. And you trusted us to deliver to you a good game. $50 is a lot of money and companies have a moral obligation to deliver what they say they're going to deliver and frankly, Stardock failed to deliver the game we said we were going to deliver.

While we did update Elemental: War of Magic (you can still download v1.4). Its design just wasn't adequate to make it into the kind of game it should be. So we decided to start over. From scratch. We made a new game called Fallen Enchantress.

So even though it's been two years, we haven't forgotten about you.  This week, we released Fallen Enchantress. It is a vastly better game and, we believe, lives up to the expectations set for the original Elemental.  This game is yours. Free. It's already been added to your account.

You can download and play it by going to http://download.stardock.com.

We hope you enjoy Fallen Enchantress.  Please feel free to visit the Elemental forum at www.elementalgame.com if you wish to talk to me and the rest of the team. We're there and very interested in your feedback.


Thank you for being our customers and your patience.


Sincerely,

Brad Wardell
President & CEO
Stardock - http://www.stardock.com
[email protected]
@draginol http://www.twitter.com/draginol

[keith.lamothe]

Whatever else you can say about Brad, he is genuinely trying here.

[eRe4s3r]

The question is, is it fun? Or is it still a total hit'n miss game depending on your start location (Where without say, crystal mines anywhere near you while playing the mage race means game-over for you)?

Because from the gameplay videos I have seen that seemed very unfun, given that while you have access to normal units, if you plan on crystal dependency (which you have to as mage race, given the apparently incredibly slow research) you might discover by turn 100 that no crystal is anywhere near you....

Hence why I said whether the design flaws have been fixed. Because no "flavor" start system existed. And you can not afford to travel around to find a good location at the start, given the weakness of your starter heroes and units.

At least in CIV4 and CIV5, you still had a viable chance even without say, iron, by building the non-resource requiring counter. But in this game, it seems he who has the luckiest dice throw wins.

[Cinth]

So yeah. I got a freebie copy and I pretty much couldn't sleep. Played all night. From what I remember of Elemental and comparing it to FE, the basics are the same. Instead of being cornered into a story driven campaign, you can choose what faction you want to play as. I haven't encountered anything broken (unlike the first installment ><).

My biggest problem is transitioning back into the style of play that Civ types require. To much point click boom in the last several months

All in all, I think they improved on the original.

[keith.lamothe]

Given the people they brought in after the initial Elemental release, I'd be surprised if it wasn't at least somewhat better