How many players should/can we allow in a game? 8? 12? 32?\

The more the merrier, IMO, though human players will be realistically limited by time (32 people playing a TBS would be painful)

Computers though? 32 large empires, and dozens of tiny nuetrals to gobble up. Hopefully the nuetrals have a little power and influence too, and arent just speed bumps.

How sophisticated can we make dungeons in the game?

Make them super complex and make it an option, like auto-calcing battles. While I would love to go trampsing through dozens of dungeons on a multi-hundred hour campaign, some people would also rather just go in and see results. 

How sophisticated can we make quests in the game?

This is where I have an interesting idea. Make a LOT of quests, huge ones that require a massive time and resource investment, and make them give huge bonuses, but don't just randomly throw them in. Make it so that if I want to, say, summon a dead god, I have to first find out what the world wants me to do (collect this; build this; kill this; beat this dungeon; etc) then do it, over the course of a good part of the game. Maybe make it researchable? Think of all the great fantasy books; sauron wasn't doing a fetch quest, he was trying to gain an item of immense power. Imagine what the game would be like if the other players found out you were trying to summon a dead god, as I said above. You would have a new Lotr dynamically created in a random world.

That said, also toss in lots of basic quests, for early in the game and for players who can't be bothered doing "epic" quests.

How sophisticated can we make tactical battles in the game?

Honestly, I imagine I will be in the minority here but I wan't them to be insanely deep. When the beta comes and I see what your trying to do, I might elaborate on it more, but of all things the battles should be the most "A game inside a game" of anything.

How big of a scope can we give the campaign?

Do you mean a random campaign or some kind of story campaign? I won't play any story stuff, so I would prefer you focussed on the real game. Most people aren't going to ever play it more than once, and many like myself will never play it at all. Work on making your random generation engine create a new and interesting world each time, one that a story will form within. Even if it doesn't have the rail-roadedness of a canon campaign (why some people like that, ill never know) the player will enjoy thier own personal story more as it is unique and dynamic. Make use of a massive amount of events and one-game-in-five quests and monsters to create a fun and new world every time.

I think the idea of an extended beta is genius. If you make the game good enough in time, the wait will be more than worth it. Considering we will be able to play it anyway, I see no downside. This could be one of the few times feature creep isn't a bad thing, but will instead be utilized to create a great game.

Yes.

More dedicated development time with player feedback and the flexibility to change large areas of code without the playerbase whining when you break something? Priceless.

Being able to try crazy ideas out, and not just hit base-levels for complexity for tactics and strategy but see how far you can push it... over a period of months of development with player feedback? Awesome.

Absolutely go for it! I would love to spend a year in Beta, the end result I'm certain will be one of those "history making" games nobody ever forgets.

Regards,

Kul

Since an important goal for this game seems to be community added content, I think the game will grow at a much faster pace after release then before. Take the time you need to get the core features working well, and the let the players fill in what content they want.

I'm also worried about burnout.

I like it. I intend to pre-order the game in the future, and the longer the beta is, the more players can have a hand in the end result. As an illustration student, I value having a bit of a creative hand in tings, and since community content seems a big part of elemental, I want to see that as well supported as possible. So hey, the more time it takes, the better it gets for me

I am imagining that the editors would be testable too, and I can see an entire community spring up around modding the beta. Just because the word beta is stapled to it doesn't mean the game is un-useable. On that note I would hope that the "core" would be done about halfway through, with the rest of the time expanding upon the existing structure and stabilizing it.

I just want to answer this question

Dont make a hardcoded limit.. there isnt much need to do that..

I will use civilization4 as an example: there is a hardcoded limit (that can be changed by chaging the number in the DLL sourcecode and recompile.. but still a hardcoded max number)... a lot of arrays is statically created at game startup at a fixed size depending on this hardcoded limit..(during betatesting of the Beyond the Sword expansion I changed some of the code for Firaxis so that many of these arrays is only created if actually needed, which ended up aving many MB of memory comsumption in a typical game)

the problem here in civ4 is the barbarian player that is hardcoded as player number (max players+1).. if they instead had chosen the barbarians to be player number 0, then all memory structures could have been dynamically created when needed at the size of the number of players currently in game... (and could later be resized if more players entered game somehow)

The result of having having no max hardcoded limit for players could be (if well coded) that the game would consume less memory and run faster if there was 5 players in game instead of a standard 8 (or 16, 32 whatever).. but it would still allow players with monster PCs to play huge maps with 200 players without running into an artificial limit that was created just to make the game playable on old computers...

Alternatively you could allow players to spesify a max limit in setup screens

I never pre-order games. I ALWAYS wait for the finished product. But this game could very well be, as said countless times, that which I've been waiting for since MoM.

*clicks on pre-order*

I vote for a longer BETA.

But avoid feature creep and really use it on polishing.

It sounds like it will be delayed.  Whenever I've seen a SD post on "we're think of delaying to make the game better and here's why" it happens.  I'm not suprised, nor do I think this is a bad thing.  I've learned that SD release dates are very much a perfect world scenario and we don't live in a perfect world.

I'd still love to see more concrete goals of the Alpha/Beta testing conveyed, although the list in the OP are a great start.  I also suggested similar sorts of things in my response to Brad's questions post, mostly along the lines of- what is typical for a player in the game?  # of towns, size of army, # of shards, # techs researched, etc.  Sounds like that is still being figured out.  I just hope the UI and game logic will be programmed well enough to scale from small up to enourmous so it can be played regardless of the scale chosen.

It's a big YES - on the condition that the beta will be an enjoyable experience in itself by February 2010, otherwise it feels more like a delay than an extended user inolvement. But great idea to let the community really get involved!!!

Considering how you guys are looking at it and that you're funding yourself (IE not just delaying to get more money out of the publisher... which would be hard to do anyway) option 2 would be ace!

Nothing could equal a MUCH more complex contribution from the user base than an extended beta/gamma phase for a number of key reasons;

1-) Gameplay would answer needs rather than guessing on pre-release reactions.

2-) Bug free development, by coders AND the hardcore fanbase.

3-) Ironing the flaws and introduction of general extra features skipped by designers but suggested within a longer "testing" period.

I could imagine a feedback loop device so efficient that even the best of polls would fail at producing unanimity on necessary changes. I'd recommend continual tracking & collaboration & swift decisions & approval queries & datasets of opinion... etc.

Besides, everyone PLAYS (or would, progressively) that game already... it's simply a matter of expanding the scope by trusting a crowd of participants to supply ideas - good, bad or even essential.

Superb concept... you'd have to fill pages worth of Credited testers though!

I have to disagree with most people on this one.

I like the idea of more time working with beta testers but I think that in the long run (5+ years from now) Elemental would be better off with the base game being released as planned (As long as it is feature complete) and work continuing on expanding the features mentioned as the first expansion.

I believe that the modding community would be a great source of inspiration and to extend the beta where they wouldn’t have a stable platform to work off of would lessen the quantity and quality of their work.

Allow the modders to help you answer the following questions;
How sophisticated can we make dungeons in the game?
How sophisticated can we make quests in the game?
How sophisticated can we make tactical battles in the game?
How big of a scope can we give the campaign?

Player input happens durring beta and after release.

In my eyes the perfect release schedule would be as follows;

1)  Release Elemental 1.0 when the game engine is stable and feature complete, the game is fun and balanced, and when you are proud to say 'This is my game' (Six months to a year).

2)  Work continues on the Elemental Engine 2.0 after ver 1.0 hits feature freeze, adding new features (Explore able Dungeons, alternate plains, etc), and enhancing current features (Increasing players from 8 to 32, optional Hex Grid for tac combat).

3)  Put together a feature set for an expansion (Explore able Dungeons, 32 players, 1 new faction).  Get an ETA from the engine programmers and give that date to the content creators as an ETA for Beta 1 for the expansion. (Six months to a year).

4)  See what the modders came up with in terms of how big / how sophisticated.  Hire any outstanding talent that shows up.  Challenge your content creators to blow away the modding community with a big / sophisticated content expansion (Four to Six months).

Doing something like this would allow your content creators and modders to always have a stable platform to create for and allow them to inspire each other.  Use the players to help you improve the game, they don’t need to be beta testers for this, just keep the communication channels open and release turnaround as short as you can.

Sammual – All hail The Frog!

I agree.  The only change I would make is from "Are there a lot of new ideas that we have gotten from the community from the betas so far that extending the development cycle to August is going to be worthwhile?" to "Are there any new ideas that we have gotten from the community so far that make extending the development cycle a better idea then using them in an expantion?"

Sammual

Any game that bases its continued success off the hope of a huge upsurge of mods is doomed. Maybe if your a big name like Half life or something with an already established base then you can rely more on mods, but elemental needs to be really good to get modders to warrant a time investment. If you release a "meh" product in 6 months there wont BE a modding community of any consequence. Modders work on popular games because they like to feel like someone cares about thier work. If elemental is "just another fantasy game" 5 months after release, no one is going to invest the time necessary to make a decent mod, even if in those 5 months the game has become great.

I say take the time to perfect the game now.