Stardock Entertainment has released Beta 2 for Elemental: Reforged, the remaster to Stardock’s classic fantasy strategy series. This early access update introduces significant enhancements, featuring a new Dynasty system for character legacy, customizable modding tools including Steam Workshop support, a massive set of bug fixes and new content and support for non-English languages.
Elemental: Reforged is a 4X turn-based fantasy strategy game in which the player founds a kingdom, explores a devastated world going on quests, battling monsters and contending with other kingdoms and empires that are also spreading across the world.
The game is a remastering of Stardock's trilogy of War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King, all of which were limited by 32-bit memory limitations. Now, thanks to a rewritten engine, the game now supports modern graphics hardware with 64-bit memory space and can fully realize the original vision for Stardock's ambitious Elemental game design.
"The original Elemental game design was ambitious beyond belief," said Brad Wardell, lead designer of the Elemental series. "The first game, War of Magic, was released in 2010 and supported a 'living world' where players could zoom in and see people living out their lives in cities. Every unit was unique, characters could be equipped with different weapons, armor and items and visually change on screen, characters could get married and have children that visually inherited traits from both parents; this is a game where a human and an Ogre could potentially have children together. If that sounds too much to fit in 32-bit memory space in 2010, the answer is, it was."
The original design was famously mired with technical problems in an effort to fit into 2GB of system memory in 2010. As a result the design was split into 3 games, War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King, each of which focused on a different aspect of the original design.
"Now, with Elemental: Reforged, we can take the entire design and put it into a single game, albeit, 15 years later than we wished," said Wardell. "This has been a labor of love for us as most of the original team from 2010 is still at Stardock. We've been working on this for the past 8 years in our spare time so players can get a glimpse of what we wanted to do."
Elemental: Reforged Beta 1 was released in Early Access in October. Despite being very rough in terms of bugs and incomplete content, the game has received Very Positive reviews on Steam and a committed fanbase.
"Beta 1 was horrendously buggy," admitted Wardell. "Not wipe out your hard drive buggy but still very buggy. We have been grateful to the fans for putting up with the glitches as we've been trying to bring so many lost features back together, as well as make the game available in non-English languages which has been a challenge unto itself."
Beta 2 brings back the most famous feature from the original design, the Dynasty System. In it, player characters can get married, have children and those children can have children and so forth. These new generated characters, in every sense of the word, can then be brought onto the game map as unique champion units with traits (both visual and gameplay abilities) based on the parents.
In addition, the built in modding tools, which support map creation, quest making, monster lair creation, dungeon creation, particle editing and much more have been brought into Beta 2. They are now localized and integrated with Steam Workshop so that players can make and share their creations.
"Someone could potentially make a turn-based RPG with these built in tools," said Wardell. "Between designing maps, creating monster lairs, quests, items, etc. all of which integrate into each other, along with the use of common art formats like FBX and PNG files, players can create and share pretty much whatever their imaginations come up with."
Dynasties: Players can now engage with an innovative Dynasty system, allowing them to marry, have children, and nurture their offspring into champions, thereby expanding their legacy across generations.
Fantasy Studio: Players can create fantasy maps, spells, monster lairs, spell effects, quests, magical items, etc.
Steam Workshop Support: Right from the in-game main menu, a UI for managing mods and sharing them online is now available.
Localization Support: The original games were English only. Beta 2 includes support for other languages including German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Polish and more.
Computer Opponent AI. AI players have been substantially enhanced to intelligently craft items for their champions, design their own units, wisely use spells (including ones players make and share online) and much more.
Visual Update. While the remaster can't hide that this was a 2010 era game, the game's visuals continue to be refined and improved as the original high resolution art assets are restored and put into the game.
New Monsters, Champions, Quests and much more. Before War of Magic was released in 2010, a lot of content for it had to be removed in order to fit in 32-bit memory. This content has been brought back and restored; players will encounter many new types of creatures and quests that they didn't see before.