Elemental’s Drama Thoroughly Purged

Stardock’s Brad Wardell posted a “Drama Cleansing Thread” on the Elemental forums recently, hoping to finally lay most issues to rest and directly address a lot of the issues surrounding the game’s release. Wardell first provides a summary of the game’s release and the subsequent issues, freely admitting that the game’s engine wasn’t ready.

“The new engine that Stardock developed turned out to have a lot of compatibility problems resulting in crashing and out of memory errors for a significant percentage,” Wardell said. “Nowadays, most companies just license their engine from Gamebryo (Civilization V, Oblivion, Fallout 3) or the Unreal engine. You are now seeing why they do.”

Beyond that, Wardell promises that they will continue to support Elemental and monitor player feedback as an indication for what they should enhance or fix. While some have suspected / suggested that Stardock should re-issue the game once it’s stable as a “Director’s Cut,” Wardell is opposed to this action.

“NO. While we do intend to release future new versions of Elemental beyond the War of Magic series, we will not be re-submitting Elemental ‘patched and fixed’ for re-review,” Wardell said.

Wardell then fields some common complaints he’s received since this issue has exploded:

Q: Brad Wardell: You should just kill yourself! [I actually did get this]

A: I’m sorry our recent entertainment product didn’t meet your expectations but I don’t think it would be helpful if I manually modified my date of expiration.

Q: Brad Wardell – you have a martyr complex! You always take personal blame for everyone! Get off your cross! [yes, got this too]

A: That is my job. If you’re going to spend years railing about CEOs not taking responsibility when something goes wrong, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me not to take responsibility when things go badly on a launch.

In addition, some of the issues are directly related to my specific decisions.

He then concludes his post by stating that Elemental is the best game that Stardock has ever released, but it sadly didn’t live up to consumer expectations in many ways. The most fist-pumping moment came from the following:

Q: My post was hidden on the forums! I have a right to post my anger!

A: No. No you don’t.  Believe me when I say I speak from first hand experience, there are entire forums dedicated to letting people post about their anger about something.  The Stardock forums have never ever been some forum of free speech. And they never will be. If you’re looking for that, you should go elsewhere.  I’ve been moderating ‘forums’ since my Commodore 64 days as a ‘Sysop’ and ‘Subop’. A few toxic users can wreck a community.

Damn straight. If you want to be a whiny bitch go do it somewhere else. Check the full thread for all the details.

[via Elemental Forums]