Elemental: War of Magic – Fallen Enchantress Interview

GameSpot offers an interview with lead designer/producer Derek Paxton about the upcoming Elemental: War of Magic expansion Fallen Enchantress, discussing how it’ll add to the original and avoid repeating its mistakes.

GS: What other lessons from the development and release of War of Magic are you bringing to the development of the new game?

DP: We touched on this in the first answer, but to expand on a couple tangible areas that directly affect the players, the UI and tech trees are two really good examples. When you look at the options, features, and sheer amount of data in War of Magic from a player perspective, it can be quite confusing to newcomers.what they should be paying attention to. When we revamped the UI, we only provided necessary information. It’s definitely a more intuitive experience and one that was born from lessons learned from War of Magic.

And, if you look at the tech trees in War of Magic, they work for that game. But when we set out to restructure the player progression in Fallen Enchantress, the old system just didn’t work. So we completely overhauled that system to better match what we were making.

GS: What are the most commonly cited community requests for War of Magic? How will Fallen Enchantress address those?

DP: The most common [request] is more interesting spells. Because we believe this is critical both to War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress, the War of Magic post-release patches have dramatically improved the spells the game offers. Fallen Enchantress goes far beyond what War of Magic offers, with new spells, new types of spells and it’s all built to be easily modable.

The second most common request is to make the world more interesting. Without variety, risks, and rewards, it feels very similar and bland. In Fallen Enchantress, the player’s first challenge is to conquer and civilize the world around his starting area. Send out scouts to explore the world. Many may not return, but those that do may bring back valuable knowledge, experience, and treasures.