Fall from Heaven Creator Takes Charge of Elemental

Publisher and developer Stardock has announced that Derek Paxton, who is known as “Kael” to gamers who are familiar with the Fall from Heaven mod for Civilization IV, has been hired as a senior producer at the company, working on the development of Elemental and his expansions.

Brad Wardell, who is the Chief Executive Officer of Stardock, said, “After careful internal consideration, it was decided that we needed to bring in someone with a great deal of project management experience. This way, Elemental and our future games would have a dedicated, experienced, full-time producer and I would be able to get back to running Stardock as a whole.”

Paxton has also worked on Beyond the Sword, the last expansion for Civilization IV which focused on offering more non military options for gamers while also implementing corporations, and is listed as having contributed to the more recent Civilization V.

He has added, “This is the opportunity to marry my professional project manager career with my passion for game design.”

With Kael becoming the senior producer for Elemental Brad Wardell will again focus on creating the Artificial Intelligence for the game and on overseeing the entire creation process as executive producer.

Elemental: War of Magic was launched in August and had a rocky first few weeks, with players discovering quite a few bugs and reviewers saying that the entire design lacked focus and consistence.

Despite the strong initial reactions the team at Stardock is said to be committed on creating a worthy game in the Master of Magic mold.

At the moment Stardock is working on a second major patch for the game, which is set to eliminate most of the issues and rebalance the game.

Those who currently own Elemental will be getting the first expansion for the game, which is tentatively set for 2011, for free as a reward for putting up the game in its launch state.