[PC] Elemental: War of Magic (Stardock)

Pure Anarchy

Pure Anarchy

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Foi anunciado o mês passado o novo jogo da Stardock, que aparenta ser bastante ambicioso. Apesar do jogo estar previsto para 2010, a public beta será lançada algures durante a Primavera de 2009, permitindo a todos os utilizadores experimentar o jogo e contribuir para o seu desenvolvimento.

Elemental: War of Magic is the new 4X turn-based strategy game in development by Stardock, the company that has released such award-winning PC games such as Galactic Civilizations, Ironclad's Sins of a Solar Empire and is nearing the release date of Gas Powered Games' Demigod. Stardock has set the retail launch date of Elemental: War of Magic (www.elementalgame.com) for the first quarter of 2010 at $49.95 with a public beta starting next Spring.

Like all Stardock titles, Elemental: War of Magic will include no on-disk DRM and will be available for re-download and updates through the Impulse digital distribution platform (www.impulsedriven.com) regardless of wherever it is purchased.

Elemental: War of Magic is set in a world filled with magic and ancient lore. As the ruler of your kingdom, you must expand your empire through a combination of magical power, military might, diplomatic skill, technological advancement and bold adventuring. Your worlds will be of your choosing, or players are free to create their own.

As ruler of your land and a channeler of magic, you must decide how much of your power to imbue into your heroes as you build new cities, explore dungeons, perfect spells of ever-increasing power and negotiate with friends and foes alike. Other channelers in the world, whether they be of the race of Men, The Fallen or the Beasts, are also able to access magic and may not share your vision of the world.
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IGN -/- GameSpy Preview - Development Journals

Alguma informação que achei muito interessante sobre o grau de liberdade que estão a tentar alcançar com este jogo:

In Elemental there is no such thing as a knight or a wizard or an archer. Instead, players design their own units. If you wanted to call a unit a knight, you might take a man, equip him with some armor, give him a helmet, arm him with a sword, and pair him up with a horse.

The armor, helmets, swords, etc. are things you manufacture and thus have some control over how they look. Normally, customizing an individual unit falls only in the realm of role playing games. And what they tend to do is called texture merging. That is, they simply blend various textures together.

In Elemental, what we're doing is actually giving each item its own heft with its own physics. The trick is to find a way to do this that still lets it run on lower end hardware so it has to be done smartly. At the same time, you want the guy with that new Core i7 with the latest nVidia or ATI card to look at it and go DAMN that's cool. ;)

The example we have going is a knight that we've equipped with armor, a sword, a helmet, along with a horse with its own armor. When they move, each item moves as if it were real. That is, the armor on the horse when the horse is running moves like you would expect. The knight riding the horse moves on the horse as you'd expect and even the sword dangling from the side moves as you would expect.

Normally, to get such an effect, you would have to model/bone/rig/animate the entire unit together. The breakthru here is that these elements are all independent and created by the players and they just work together. I'll try to get a little video or something to show this in action next time.

This will really make the tactical battles really compelling. Since so much of the game revolves around the premise of massive unit differentia, you will see some really breathtaking battles I think.
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When someone first gets into Elemental, the relationships will be simple between things. A player who wants to design a horse mounted knight will need to have researched animal husbandry which lets them train horses. They will need to have a city that has used one of its tiles to make use of a herd of wild horses on the map. They will need a mine on a metal deposit to create the armor. And once they have all those things, it'll be a matter of training and equipping the knight.

The above example is one of the more complicated relationships one will see initially in Elemental...

But what about users who want to keep making more and more sophisticated relationships?

Maybe I want to have knights equipped with sunfire dread chain mail riding tamed Demon steeds and the knights have a secondary power of carrying tomes of unmaking which vastly increase their damage in battle?

Well, there would be a host of technologies one would have to have researched. There would have to be spells researched as well and new city buildings that produce these tomes and then have been enchanted to make these tomes magical. The demon steeds would require various technologies and the finding of demons to be tamed in the first place and so on and so on.

How do you control the level of sophistication here so that it doesn't become too complicated? The answer is with a new series of game options that are practically games unto themselves.

Because, did I mention, that all the things mentioned in the second example were things produced not by us but by players and broadcast to all other players so that you have access to them automatically? No expansion packs needed. No paying for mini-content needed. It's just thousands of players creating cool stuff and broadcasting it to one another.
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Algumas imagens:

elemental-war-of-magic-200811030137.jpg

Battle_Close_Up.jpg

Kingdom_Knight_Snow_1280.jpg

Kingdom_Scout_influence_1280.jpg

Empire_Fire_Shard_1280.jpg

Kingdom_City_Select_1280.jpg
 
Última edição:
Parece-se mais com o Master of Magic (um clássico de 1994), que foi uma das principais influências para o Age of Wonders. Senão me engano o Brad Wardell (CEO da Stardock e Lead Designer do Elemental) chegou a confirmar que era um dos títulos em que se tinham inspirado.

Vindo da Stardock espero um grande jogo, de preferência ao nível do Galactic Civilizations II. Podem ler aqui uma breve entrevista que ainda não tinha postado.
 
Última edição:
Impressive! 8|

Jogo de estratégia, com um visual refrescante e ao saber que estão a dar importância às animações. Não conheço o Master of Magic mas, relembra-me também o Heroes of Might and Magic como foi referido em certas características, o que é claramente bom na minha opinião.

Espero que seja um excelente jogo como aparenta pelas informações :)
 
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