The new Elemental game.
So Fallen Enchantress is the standalone expansion/sequel/do-over for Stardocks Elemental. Hopefully they learned their lesson. They restructured their game development studio, hired on a bunch of people (like the creator of the Fall From Heaven mod for Civ4), and whatever else they did.
So why am I not simply ignoring this release? Well, I get it for free. So does anyone else that bought Elemental in 2010. We all also get beta access which is starting now. Preorders are first and starting today, then everyone else in a week from now.
Here is a recent dev blog about the faction differences, which sound great. A big problem in Elemental was the different factions all felt pretty samey.
Wardell
posted about the beta. Some interesting and surprising information in there. There is no NDA, so you can freely talk about it, make videos, etc. The other is the lack of multiplayer. Not just for the beta, but for the game entirely.
While internally we have multiplayer, we’ve turned it off. The release game won’t have it either. The reason is that tactical battles would have to be rewritten to support it (MP code needs to be message based but the tactical battles all call directly to internal variables which makes it easier to have greater performance but it means no MP). We decided it would be better to have no MP than gimpy MP for FE. Don’t bother arguing this point as it’s already been hashed out endlessly internally and it’s decided. We may bring it back in some future expansion but no promises because rewriting tactical is a non-trivial endeavor.