Elemental: War of Magic - Fallen Enchantress Interview
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RPS: Magic was a bit underwhelming the first time around, wasn't it?
Paxton: Yes. We've gone through all the spells for Fallen Enchantress and looked what they did. We had a decent spell engine in War Of Magic, it could do a lot of things, but maybe not with as much as variety as we wanted. Many of the spells felt too similar. Some of them did the same thing with different numbers, so this time we are looking at each spell individually and we're coding these spells specifically. That'll give us unique effects from each of them, different reason why they are used. We also want larger impact spells in Fallen Enchantress. If you have 1000 mana stored then that's a Civ player sitting on nuclear weapons. If you see someone creeping up on that, you might want to deal with them. Magic will be a significant part of this game, as it was in Master Of Magic.
RPS: Is this game a direct response to the criticism of the original game, then?
Paxton: I think Stardock learned a lot from the reception of War Of Magic, and they did an excellent job of understanding what went wrong and then making sure that was fixed for Fallen Enchantress. One of the reasons I came to Stardock after the release of War Of Magic was that they are passionate about making sure these issues are addressed. I love the fact that if you bought War Of Magic before December 31st 2010 you will get Fallen Enchantress for free. Where a lot of companies would have just said (oh, well, this game didn't deliver, so we'll shelve that), Stardock said (no, we believe in this game), and we've had developers on it for months afterwards. New features, not just fixes. And also giving away that new game at considerable cost to Stardock! Well, that's all about saying that if you had faith and you believed in the Stardock name then here you go, give us another chance and we'll pay for it.
