Earlier this year, Stardock brought back its Elemental series with an all-in-one remaster project, aiming to combine the classics War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress, and Sorcerer King into one unified game. Less than two months later, the company is back with a major update that it is calling Beta 2, which is adding fresh modding tools, a Dynasty system to create a legacy, opponent AI improvements, and plenty of bug fixes.
With the new Dynasty implementation, players will be able to get their characters married, have children, and create a line of leaders. All these generated family members can become champion units with unique abilities based on their lineage as well.
Another massive aspect of this update is the addition of built-in modding tools. According to the developer, players will now be able to create their own maps, quests, monster lairs, dungeons, and even particle effects to customize the game. Steam Workshop support has arrived for easy browsing and installation of mods too.
"Someone could potentially make a turn-based RPG with these built in tools," said Brad Wardell, the lead designer behind the series. "Between designing maps, creating monster lairs, quests, items, etc. all of which integrate into each other, along with the use of common art formats like FBX and PNG files, players can create and share pretty much whatever their imaginations come up with."
Here are the other highlights from the Elemental: Reforged Beta 2 update:
- Localization Support: The original games were English only. Beta 2 includes support for other languages including German, French, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Polish and more.
- Computer Opponent AI: AI players have been substantially enhanced to intelligently craft items for their champions, design their own units, wisely use spells (including ones players make and share online) and much more.
- Visual Update: While the remaster can"t hide that this was a 2010 era game, the game"s visuals continue to be refined and improved as the original high resolution art assets are restored and put into the game.
- New Monsters, Champions, Quests and much more: Before War of Magic was released in 2010, a lot of content for it had to be removed in order to fit in 32-bit memory. This content has been brought back and restored; players will encounter many new types of creatures and quests that they didn"t see before.
Elemental: Reforged"s Beta 2 update is now available for all players on Steam Early Access. For more information about the project, check out our interview with Brad Wardell about Elemental"s original development troubles and how the remaster is being tackled by the Stardock team.
Disclaimer: Neowin"s relationship to Stardock