This week was the release of the fantasy based Turn based strategy game Elemental: War of Magic. The first day it was released to say it lightly it was a complete disaster, and that’s putting it nicely. It was unable to be played for much time at all without crashing, it was missing much of any tutorial and was just a big steaming pile of crap.  What’s even worse is Stardock’s CEO Brad Wardell was quoted when venting to a friend with saying “please stay away from our games in the future. I consider it ready for release and if others disagree, don’t buy our games.”

   This needless to say, pissed off A LOT of gamers myself included. The game was obviously flawed and release a bit too soon. Stardock has released a bunch of patches this week since launch and the game seems to be fixed and working now. Wardell has even come out with a press release saying  “They were words spoken out of frustration and sleep deprivation” and that’s “not how I honestly feel”. On one hand I kinda want to give him the benefit of the doubt and let him have a mulligan for launch day, but then on the other hand it took him 4 days to say this so is it true? Is he really sorry or has he gotten enough pressure from advisers that he needs to bite the bullet and say he was wrong. I am not sure how much I believe him but at least now I think they are going to look at the game more and listen to the masses and try and fix it. The game really looks good and I really want to play it but I will wait for PC Gamer and gamespot.com to review it and see if then I want to play it. An already confusing game with very little tutorial, or in game help is going to be a tough sell to me.

NOW, I want to get on my soap box as usual about something that is entirely too common in the gaming world. Too many game companies these days are releasing games as either boxed copies or downloads in beta builds or crappy states. They use the next little bit of time to rush out a patch that is supposed to fix everything to a playable state, but it is often another few months before a true playable build is patched in. Is the corporate world and public money grab pressure that overwhelming that they have to get out what they can ASAP and pad their pockets? Sure, why do they really care about a few days of bad press, they can just flood the forums with their own people saying “It works great for me!” to try and combat all of this. And while the board battles wage out there they release a statement saying “we are looking into this” blah blah and then patch it up. It’s not only PC games either. More and more console games are using the online connection of their platform to give you the great message of “an update is available for the game please update now”. And these “updates” take out all the bugs and such that the new owner of the game might not even be aware of, but the non online person is just screwed.

I really hope this ongoing trend starts to go away and we see an improvement in the quality of launches. It’s alot to ask for though, since we are going to have a bunch of big name MMO’s to be released in the next year.  MMO’s tend to be bad launches just for the sheer number of people trying them and the hype surrounding them. All I can say to the public is try and be patient with developers as best we can as long as they don’t slap us in the face like Mr Brad. My own policy these days is wait a month at least for any release but with some of the titles coming out it’s harder and harder to resist. Hell, I love TBS so much I am even having to hold my self back from getting Elemental:WOM lol.  Sept 21st (Civ V) cannot get here fast enough.

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