A quick Elemental mod – Ark’s Magical Millinery

Just popping up for air! I’ll do a proper blog post about my recent experiences soon! Til then, here’s a little mod I just put together for Elemental: War of Magic.

It’s so ridiculously simple a mod, I’m almost embarrassed to post it, but someone else might find it useful.

Ark’s Magical Millinery

I want to play a wizardly type in Elemental, but there isn’t too much in the way of suitable-looking equipment. Any sensible person is liberally covered in plate armour, which seems very wrong for a game supposedly about a magical war.

To install, just drop into your Elemental/Mods folder.

This little mod simply adds a number of armoured hats to the game, for use by characters who want some head protection, but do not want to wear a hulking great helmet. Statwise they’re pretty much just the regular helms, but with the appearance of a fez (A piece of clothing that normally has no stats or defensive properties in Elemental), and they will become available at the same time their equivalent helm does. Thus they should have no impact on game balance whatsoever, but will do wonders for your wizard’s styling!

Elemental Arkenor 550x387

My brightly coloured persona within Elemental.

It’ll take on the colours you assigned for your character during creation, so you don’t have to worry about having my obsession with green inflicted upon you.

The fez is not usually available to every race/sex combination, but after a little testing it looks like it works fine with all of them, provided you don’t mind that hats replace your hair, and come with a set short hairstyle coming out from underneath.

While we’re on the subject of Elemental, this mod should not be taken as an endorsement. Merely as an admission that I own it and thought it needed hats. As it stands I would not recommend it to anybody. The engine is fine, but the game itself is painfully simplistic, with a combat system seemingly devised to challenge a three-year-old. It has been a very odd business, with even the developers admitting that it’s pretty terrible right now. They have sworn to make it right, and we shall see what we shall see.

Here is an example of how some people are reporting Elemental’s launch:

I don’t think people yet fully realize the completeness of Stardock’s fail on Elementa’s launch.

I’m going to write more about this but not only did we think v1.05 was ready for everyone but we felt v1.0 was too. That’s the level of disconnect/poor judgment on our part we’re talking about.

If the game had come out in February, it would still have been a disastrous launch because lack of time wasn’t the issue. It was blindness, sheer blindness. We felt the game was finished. And I speak of v1.0, not v1.05. Blindness.

There will be massive consequences for Stardock’s game studio. I’ll be talking more about this when I get back. But the game wasn’t released early. The game was released poorly. Head in the sand syndrome imo. I’ve read the reviews as much as possible given my hideous internet access up here and I agree with them. We just didn’t see what they were talking about. We thought any complaints would be about polish points or something.

The point is, the issue here is far far worse than many of you think it is. I wish it was an issue of the game being released too early. That’s an easy thing for a company to “fix”. Elemental’s launch is the result of catastrophic poor judgment on my part.

EVERY competent software developer knows that the programmer must never be the one deciding whether the program is done. Yet, my love of Elemental broke my self discipline and I began coding on the game itself in vast amounts and lost any sense of objectivity on where the game’s state was. I normally only program the AI on our games so I can keep a level of distance from the game itself to determine whether it’s “Ready”. On Elemental, I was in love with the world and the game and lost my impartiality.

We’ll do better.

That was the CEO of Stardock in just one post of many in a similar vein. He is just about as close as you can get to the Mirror Universe version of Derek Smart right about now, and on a human level I can only imagine the pain that he and his team are experiencing as their shared hallucination that Elemental is any good comes crashing down around their ears.

At the moment, anyone who is dissatisfied with Elemental can get a full refund. I thought quite hard about doing that, but in the end I decided not to. Not because I want to show loyalty to Stardock. I don’t do loyalty to companies, especially ones that behave in as foolish a manner as Stardock has. I do, however, think it will be quite interesting to watch as they rebuild the game mechanics and content from scratch.

Bah, this was supposed to be a quick modpost. Got sidetracked! I’ll see you anon!

2 comments to A quick Elemental mod – Ark’s Magical Millinery

  • Malkavelli

    I’m in the same boat! Have forced myself through the “campaign” and have a regular single-player game running, but I find it quitetelling that I just always seem to find other things to do rather than play it. I’m also keeping my copy, they seem to be listening to the players so hopefully between the constructive commentators and Stardock something cool will come out of it.