I’ll be giving some demos of Elemental this week at PAX.  Visit http://pax.stardock.com for an official schedule.

The 30 minute presentation will be broken into two parts.  The first part will talk about the game itself.  What our goals are. Inspirations for the game (Master of Magic, XCom, Civilization, etc.) and what makes Elemental new and different.

Here are some in-game screenshots.

As pretty as this is, the thing to remember here is that this can be run on a 2 year old laptop (non gamer laptop) and still look like this with 30fps.  How this this possible? Well, part 2 will talk more about the technology underneath Elemental that is new but in short: a 3D engine designed from scratch as a PC-only engine for land based strategy games (as opposed to FPS).

Full free camera to zoom in to see little people or zoom out and see the world in a single motion.  When I visited the game magazines, a comment that kept coming up is that I was able to demo this on my ThinkPad T400. No slouch but certainly not a gaming laptop.

When you zoom in, it almost looks like some sort of role playing game.  But as the demo will demonstrate, that’s intentional – your role is the sovereign of one of the kingdoms that you and your friends used to wreak havoc in when you played D&D or Fantasy Hero or what have you. 

Zooming out a little bit shows that cities aren’t icons on a map but grow based on your decisions.  The land is fully morphable via magical spells (Which I’ll be demoing).

More to come…