14 DAY TRIAL // The upcoming Fallen Enchantress expansion for Elemental: War of Magic, which Stardock is developing internally, is designed to both deliver a good, solid game to players and to show that the company is ready to admit its own mistakes and to make everything in its power to fix them.
Brad Wardell, who is the chief executive officer at Stardock, has spoken to Gamasutra about Fallen Enchantress and stated, “From a business perspective, what we're doing is really dumb. For starters, the Elemental name is tarnished because War of Magic was a mediocre game. So why make an excellent game that has that baggage?”
He added, “The reason is that I feel there's a principle involved. Stardock makes good games. I know people don't like Metacritic, but our averaged Metacritic score is one of the highest in the industry, and we put out what was arguably a stinker, and so we have a duty to our fans to make good on that.”
Wardell suggested that another company might have simply chosen to drop the Elemental name and theme in order to give gamers a chance to start anew with Fallen Enchantress.
But the team at Stardock wants to show that the game universe they have created is sound and that they are able to deliver a very good fantasy strategy experience, even if they need to first fail in order to do it.
Fallen Enchantress will be offered for free or at a steep discount to those players who have bought Elemental: War of Magic when it was launched during 2010.
Stardock has always been known as a company that cares deeply for its customers, although this perception was tested after the launch of Elemental, when Wardell took to forums in order to engage in heated disputes with those who criticized the video game.
Since then the company has sold its Impulse digital distribution service in order to focus on video game and Windows development.