Remasters and remakes are a common occurrence in the current gaming landscape, with everything from classics from decades ago to hits only a few years old receiving revamped releases. While most, if not all, these projects focus on games that received critical acclaim or a massive fanbase, there is a surprising release coming out of Stardock that aims to revive a technically challenging game: Elemental: War of Magic.
Elemental was envisioned as a unique strategy game with a deeply customizable RPG sandbox, letting you create everything from your faction to your characters to fill the fantasy world. However, the release suffered immensely under the 32-bit memory limit, leading to a large backlash against Stardock at launch due to bugs and crashes. The company even went on to give away the next game in the series, Elemental Fallen Enchantress, and its expansion, Legendary Heroes, free to owners of the original.
15 years have passed since the franchise began, and the Elemental core team at Stardock has reunited to bring it back to life.
Announced last month, Elemental: Reforged is slated to ship with an upgraded 64-bit engine with DirectX 11, modernized graphics, and combined gameplay elements from games in the entire franchise.
We recently managed to ask some questions of Brad Wardell, founder and CEO of Stardock Corporation, about this ambitious project:
Elemental: War of Magic had a massive scope during development. What do you think made it special compared to other games in the strategy and RPG genres?
Brad Wardell - What made it special and was its technical downfall was that every unit in the game was unique. Normally, in a strategy game, there is very limited customization or distinction. Maybe a given race has their own set of units but you wouldn’t have it where every single unit is unique with its own inventory. So the game was like having armies of RPG characters playing in a strategy game.
The Reforged edition is now 64-bit and has DirectX 11 updates. Were these difficult implementations? How have they improved on the original experience that was marred by the 32-bit memory limitation?
Brad Wardell - It was fairly challenging to move to 64-bit. The DirectX 11 part was somewhat easier but a lot of the libraries we used back in 2010 didn’t have 64-bit versions so we had to write a lot of equivalent 64-bit libraries. The folks at Havok, who made the 3D model engine we used, were incredibly generous and helpful, I don’t think we could have done this without them.
Now, having 64-bit means that we can actually make the game, albeit 15 years late, that we wanted to make. Elemental was supposed to be a modern take on Master of Magic but with expanded features. But the 32-bit memory constraints tied to having every character being unique meant that we had to alter the design many times and thus released 3 different games based on parts of the original design (War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King).
So with Elemental: Reforged, we can have the dynasties and quasi-Valar level powers of the leader that War of Magic had, the strong strategy 4X foundation of Fallen Enchantress and the crafting system that Sorcerer King had all in a single unified game experience as it was originally intended.
You"ve said Reforged merges mechanics from War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress, and Sorcerer King. How did you decide what to keep and what to throw out if those systems were designed to be standalone?
Brad Wardell - We looked at each game"s strengths and what resonated most with players. From War of Magic, we kept the core vision of channelers and the magical essence of the world. Fallen Enchantress had superior tactical combat and city development systems, so those became our foundation. Sorcerer King brought innovative asymmetric gameplay and compelling quest design. The key was identifying systems that complemented rather than contradicted each other. For example, Sorcerer King"s crafting system meshes beautifully with Fallen Enchantress"s champion system. We cut redundant systems and anything that felt like unnecessary complexity without adding strategic depth.
The most important thing was to ensure that the resulting game feels like the features come together naturally.
Can you give an insight into your remastering workflow for the original assets?
Brad Wardell - Our initial scope for Reforged was to get the source art assets and reexport them. For example, in 2010, textures were 128x128 and icons were frequently 32x32. The game was designed for 1024x768 screens. Now, 1080p is the norm. Luckily, the original art assets were made at much higher fidelity. But because interest is much higher than originally expected, we’re working on doing a full 3D asset uplift. The game’s graphics weren’t great in 2010 and time has been unkind. So we’re pretty excited to revisit that.
What has turned out to be the biggest challenge has been remaking the way we handle text (strings). In 2010, localizing and modding were not as big of factors as they are today. So all the text in the game was in with data files or hard coded in C++. This meant that if we wanted to fix typos, we blew away mods, which is a terrible thing. So we’ve made heavy use of AI to help us in finding all those text strings in code and data and moving them to proper string table files and then having the AI fix the code to use those string tables.
Looking back, it’s pretty amazing how popular this game was given it was English only. Now we can make it support as many languages as we’d like and modding is much easier.
Elemental: War of Magic came out at a time when gamers" expectations were different. How has this affected the Reforged version"s development and end goals? Is it riskier? easier?
Brad Wardell - Modern gamers expect more polish, better UI/UX, and quality-of-life features that weren"t standard in 2010. In some ways it"s easier - we have 15 years of genre evolution to learn from, better tools, and clearer player feedback channels. But it"s also riskier because the strategy market is more crowded and sophisticated. Players have experienced games like Total War: Warhammer and Civilization VI. We"ve had to ensure Elemental: Reforged doesn"t just meet 2010 standards but can stand alongside modern strategy games. The advantage is we"re not trying to invent everything from scratch, we know what worked and what didn"t.
How far along is Elemental: Reforged"s development, and can we expect to see more gameplay soon?
Brad Wardell - The original plan was that we’d release the game before the end of 2025 (15 year anniversary and all). But with the interest being so much higher than expected, we are looking at a later release with possibly an early access period this Fall depending on what the players want.
How did you get around to the idea to make this Reforged edition? Has this been on your mind for a long time?
Brad Wardell - For a long time I’ve posted online that not a day goes by that I don’t think of Elemental. It was the single best game design we ever had. It was, by far, the most ambitious game. Even as a technical disaster, a lot of the concepts from it are now standard in games today – strategic zoom to a cloth map, the way the game blended quick tactical battles with strategic gameplay, the genetic trait inheritance dynasty system, mini-quests in a 4X game, built-in custom faction creation, built-in modding tools, building improvements on the map, custom unit design, and much more. It was just a bit too ahead of its time.
So we’ve been gradually porting the underlying engine to 64-bit and DirectX 11 for a long time in-between projects in the hopes that one day we could go back and at least make the game we wanted to make.
For those who are completely new to this series, would you say Elemental: Reforged will serve as a good pick-up-and-play experience without any prior knowledge?
Brad Wardell - Absolutely. Today’s players have a bit of an advantage because a lot of the “crazy” features we had in 2010 are typical now. For example, Elemental was our first game to feature “Chicks” tech (what we call a rich tooltip system), which today is commonplace in games, but back in 2010, a tooltip bringing up a bunch of info was relatively new.
One nice thing about having it today is that we can integrate the modding into Steam Workshop. The original game was designed around sharing creations inside of Impulse, which was sadly gone by the time Elemental: Fallen Enchantress came out.
But overall, we are talking about a game that we could have called Fantasy Civilizations, and thus anyone into that genre will immediately understand the game.
How has the reaction been regarding the Reforged edition by those who remember the original as well as brand-new fans?
Brad Wardell - The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. But not totally. The game’s graphics do not hold up well, and so some people have pointed that out. So we know that if the game is going to be more than a cult hit, we will need to really improve the visuals.
Did you consider going for an Early Access route for this release?
Brad Wardell - The team wanted to do Early Access but I had vetoed it. I’ve personally had a lot of negative experience with early access in the games I play. However, now that the scope has been increased and the fans seem to want it, we are going to have to revisit the topic.
I noticed that Stardock has confirmed that AI is being used for some texture upscaling work in the new release. Would you say that the use of AI-generated content has benefited the Reforged version"s development in a significant fashion?
Brad Wardell - Definitely. Most of the images we can just use the source art. But some art, particularly some icons, were made for the resolutions of the time and looks pretty blurry. So being able to make sure that our buttons and icons are crisp without having to dig up every Photoshop file in the archive is handy.
We also managed to throw Wardell some extra quick questions about Elemental: Reforged and the future:
- Are any more platforms planned for Elemental: Reforged other than PC?
- Probably the only other platform I’d like to see this put on is the Mac. But we are intent on making sure this works on a Steam Deck.
- Any goodies or easter eggs planned for original customers?
- Yes. We are hoping to do some cool stuff for those who had the original game but we haven’t quite figured out what yet.
- A switch to swap between original and modernized graphics?
- Oh I wish. I love that in Diablo 2, but in this case, it would be too difficult.
- Any pricing hints?
- Well since this isn’t a truly new game, and it will most definitely not look like a 2026 new title, we are looking at pricing it at a much lower price than a typical strategy game.
- Are post-launch content or expansions planned in the roadmap?
- Yes. In fact, if I have my way, we’ll never stop!
- Would Stardock like to do a completely new Elemental game?
- Definitely. I think the Elemental setting is pretty amazing. So much background lore was written for this game starting in the 1990s. There’s even a book (Elemental: Destiny’s Embers). If Elemental: Reforged does well, we’d like to look at making a proper new fantasy 4X strategy game. We also have great interest in doing other games that make use of the unique mechanics and lore of the Elemental universe.
- Are any more remasters/remakes planned for the future from other Stardock series?
- Probably not in the near term. I’d love to revisit The Corporate Machine at some point. Maybe when AI gets further along and we have it do the heavy lifting for updating the code.
If there"s one thing you would like fans of the Elemental: Reforged series to know, what would that be?
Brad Wardell - Probably this: This is a labor of love for us. Whether it sells 0 or super well doesn’t change how hard we’re going to work on this. It is just such a joy to work on this game with such an amazing community. We are grateful.
Elemental: Reforged is available for wishlisting on Steam now.
Disclaimer: Neowin"s relationship to Stardock