Because of course we also made a full-fledged RPG game inside of our 4X strategy game… Let’s recap: 16 years ago we released Elemental: War of Magic. A ridiculously ambitious game that came crashing down because it couldn’t fit in 32-bit memory and all our dancing around this made the game incredibly unstable and required us to do terrible things to it to get it to work to the point you can’t even buy Elemental: War of Magic. The sequel, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, was greatly slimmed down and was pretty successful. But we couldn’t really do anything with it because if you even looked at it funny, it would become unstable. We also made Elemental: Sorcerer King which was more of an adventure game (fantasy Star Control as a practice run for Star Control: Origins). Now, with the 64-bit remaster of it all, Elemental: Reforged, we have been able to bring it together. We’ve been quietly working on this for several years (first work started I think around 2018 to, 8 years?). Purely voluntary by the team because we love this game. In the Fall of 2025, we mentioned we were working on this and a number of you asked us to put it into early access and we finally agreed to even though the game was still pretty rough. But support was so strong that we were able to bring on additional engineers who weren’t on the original game. And they have opinions.
So yeah, when we made Elemental, we also built a full fledged Ultima/Baldur’s Gate style RPG engine as well. Anyone who has played with the modding tools can tell you that yea, you could remake Ultima IV with this for instance. Why did we do this? Because, obviously, we are crazy people.
We have been really beefing up the mod tools over the past month along with fixing oh so many bugs and glitches that are the natural result of bringing so many almost, but not completely compatible games together. But one thing I can tell you: Modders could use this to make their own campaigns and such. I’m tempted to make one using just Claude or some other AI tool and let it make the whole campaign and release it just as a test.
Anyway, we have added a new campaign called Prelude. It’s pretty short, but acts as the introduction to this world that most people have never gotten.
As some of you probably figured out, Elemental is Altaria in Galactic Civilizations. The kingdom Relias founds (Altar) ultimately becomes the uniting faction. Elemental and Galactic Civilizations share the same universe, they’re just different time periods. So it’s nice to be able to flesh out all the campaigns rather than just sharing the snippet that was in Fallen Enchantress back in the day.