Stardock Entertainment has just announced that Fallen Enchantress producer/designer Derek Paxton, who will take over as vice president of games development and production. Stardock CEO Brad Wardell will remain with the company, shifting his focus toward the software and business side of the operation. We had a chance to chat with Derek about his time in the industry so far, what kinds of changes he'd like to see, and what's next for Stardock.

PC Gamer: How did you end up at Stardock?

Derek Paxton: I worked in business software. I worked for a company called Novell for 12 years. In my off hours, I was making video games. It’s always been a passion of mine. Playing video games, making video games. I made a mod for Civilization IV called Fall From Heaven, which was a fantasy version of Civilization. I had a lot of fun creating it, and It did very well.

Stardock, meanwhile, has a long history of making great strategy games, and at the time they were working on Elemental: War of Magic. They finished that at about the same time I finished Fall From Heaven. I was looking around thinking what I would do next. I enjoyed what I was doing, but I liked my job too, and I’d never thought I could get into game development as a real career. There are a lot of people that want to be in game development and not nearly enough jobs for everybody.
"If I was ever going to go make games, this is the kind of place where I’d like to do it."
Stardock had just released Elemental, and it didn’t go well. They wanted to change some things. It got Brad Wardell, the CEO, to step back and take a look at, “All right, what are we doing? How are we doing it? We want to keep making games, but if we’re going to do that, let’s do it right.” So he contacted me and said, “Hey, why don’t you come up and see the studio and chat with us and see what we’re doing?” I only lived a couple of hours from there, so I came out and hung out with the guys for a little bit and was amazed at what they were doing. The thing that really impressed me was, Elemental wasn't a great game. It didn't meet Stardock’s quality bar, what they expected out of their games. And so Brad went to the community and said, “You know what? This game wasn't good enough. It isn't as good as it should be. It doesn’t meet our quality standards. We believe that if you buy a game from Stardock, you should never regret that decision. So what I’m going to do is, the next two games in the series, you’re going to get them for free. We’ll make good on this and make sure you never regret a Stardock purchase.”

I was just floored by that. I don’t know if that’s a particular brand of craziness that would lead you to do that, but I was impressed by it. I said, “If I was ever going to go make games, this is the kind of place where I’d like to do it, where the company really does stand behind its games.” He offered me a job at the time, to be a producer and designer of those two games—the next games in the Elemental series—and to come in and help them make those and get those teams running. I jumped at the opportunity to come in and take what I’d been doing in my free time and had been my passion and do it as a career.



What have been your main responsibilities on the Fallen Enchantress games?

DP: On Fallen Enchantress and Legendary Heroes, I was the producer and designer, so everything from getting the design together… At Stardock, it isn't like, “This is what one guy says, so that’s what we do.” It’s a very collaborative environment. One of our sayings is that everybody is on the design team. But we still need a lead designer who can say, “I like your ideas. Those are all great ideas. But they aren’t right for this game. We can’t choose everything. This is the way we’re going to go for this game.”

That was my responsibility. Working with Brad was fantastic, too, because he would pitch ideas, but at the end of the day he would still let me make that call. You can have two ideas and they’re both good ideas, but only one is good for the particular bullseye we’re trying to hit with that game. So I was responsible for the design side, making sure the design was good and the game was fun, and I was the producer as well, making sure that everybody understood what they were doing, why they were doing it, when they were going to do it, and what our final goal was.

With your new position, which of Brad’s former responsibilities will you be taking over?

DP: As head of the game studio, my responsibility is to manage everybody here on the team. Brad wears a lot of hats. He’s the CEO of the company. He’s my boss. There are a lot of things that Stardock does. We’ll be talking about more things we have coming down the pipe in the next few weeks. But for me it’s taking care of the Stardock Entertainment side—anything to do with gaming. Hiring people, managing the various teams we have, and making sure that they’re all taken care of so that Brad can focus on more big picture stuff.

What are the biggest changes that you would like to make with Stardock going forward?

DP: That’s a good question. We have some things that we’re going to be announcing here that I can’t talk about yet… So that’s a very sneaky way to ask the question. I think that more of a focus on process… Brad’s always loved games, so he hired a few friends and had a small team—six, seven people—and they made Galactic Civilizations together. It was a side project alongside what Stardock did. If you have a small team, you don’t have to focus that much on communication or structure. The games didn't have dedicated producers or designers. The designer, typically Brad, was also the AI programmer who was doing UI design and a million other things.

The big change that I would like to make at Stardock is really organizing those roles. Once you have as many people as we have now, and as many different teams as we have now, making sure there’s a producer devoted to that job, somebody scheduling things out and talking to all the various people and seeing what can be done to make their jobs easier, really, producers are what allow the wheels to turn at companies. And that we have dedicated designers, so the designer isn't doing that as a side job along with something else. Someone, every day, should be playing the game and focusing on, “Is this fun? Is there a better way that we can do it?” That would probably be the biggest change that I’ll be making at Stardock.



Stardock has gone through ups and downs, in terms of publicity. What do you think the studio represents to the PC gaming community right now?

DP: I think that Stardock is in a unique position. We’re bigger than you’re typical indie. We’re smaller than a triple-A. We are privately owned. We self-publish everything. We’re not on store shelves. What that allows us to do is to create games that we love and that we’re passionate about. They may be more niche-y. We see lots of games that we could make, and some of them would frankly make more money than the games that we make. But we love the kind of games that we make.

So I feel like we can appeal to an audience that isn't necessarily getting addressed in the marketplace, by and large. That’s not to say that there’s no other company out there like Stardock. There is. There’s a wide variety. But I like that variety. I know where the business tends to go. You see the games that have $20 million, $50 million budgets. If you’re going to make a game of that size, you have to sell 2 - 5 million copies to break even. If you’re going to sell 2 million or 5 million copies of your game, there are certain things you have to do to appeal to that wide audience.

We make games with more reasonable budgets, and because of that, we don’t have to sell millions of copies. We can sell 200,000 copies of our games, and that means that we don’t have to go for that mainstream appeal. We can create more niche-y games that have more minutiae or details, the kind of games that we love. We fully understand that not everybody loves them, but we do think that there is an audience out there that loves that and is looking for it, and it isn't necessarily being addressed by some of the bigger releases out there. I don’t think that we shouldn't have those bigger releases. I play games like that too. I just think we should have a mix. That’s the beauty of the PC community.

Would you say that you’re happy with where you stand in the PC community and how you’re perceived right now, or are there other places you’d like to be in that sense?

DP: I’m really proud of what Stardock does. One of my biggest moments at Stardock was… Because we don’t have an external publisher and because we’re not publicly traded, we don’t have quarterly revenue that we have to post and that affects our stock price. We don’t need to be on store shelves at Target on November 12 or whatever date. We’re able to take the time with our games that we feel we need in order to make a great game.
"If you do the game and you do it right, the business case will come afterward."
One of my hardest days at Stardock was when I was working on Fallen Enchantress. Brad had originally hired me to make those first two games after War of Magic, and there were a lot of things I wanted to do to make that final game. It was too big to do in one year. He’d spec’d out one year for the first game, one year for the second game, and then we were going to give this game away for free to lots of people. So I’d broken the total design into two pieces. One dealt with everything outside your empire, and then the other year, that second expansion, would be everything inside your empire—the economy changes and the faction differentiation and all that stuff.

We started working on that first piece and got it all in. We sent it out to our MVP community and they said, “Wow, we really like the new stuff, but it still feels a lot like War of Magic.” Because all the stuff inside your empire hadn't changed. I played it and realized, “You know what? Unfortunately, they’re absolutely right.” So I went to Brad and said, “Hey, you know that game we’re giving out for free, and then there’s the second game we’re giving out for free? I can’t give it to you and have it be good enough in one year. I want to take two years for the first game, and then after that we’re still going to need to make another game and give that out for free too.” And Brad said, “Go ahead and do it. That’s fine. Just make a great game.”

It’s fantastic. I love working at a place where making a great game is the goal. We've learned that lesson over and over again from GalCiv, which is a game that continues to sell incredibly well. If you do the game and you do it right, the business case will come afterward. It’ll make up for itself. But if you make a bad game, you hit your release day, and then it just disappears off the face of the earth. I’m very proud of everything Stardock’s done. Making hard decisions like that… They’re not in the public view. Most people don’t see that. They weren't in that meeting with Brad and me. But it does really impact and show in our products, I think.





Are there any other studios or studio runners out there that you admire or might want to emulate in your new position?
"I want us to be the Telltale of strategy games."
DP: I love Telltale. Telltale is an amazing company. I don’t know anybody there and I haven’t seen the way that they work inside, so I can’t speak to any of that, but the thing I really love about Telltale is that they've committed to one particular genre of game. They've been very successful at it. But it hasn't caused them to go crazy with, “We had a game that we made for $3 million and it did well, so now we’re going to make a game for $30 million. Hey, that did well. Now we’re going to make a game for $90 million,” until one of the games doesn't sell well and they go bust and shut down the studio. That’s a trend that I see happening way too much in the game industry.

knows exactly what they do. They’re constantly working to deliver better and better versions of it through their various games. They always remain true to what they are. They have a sustainable business model. They keep coming back and creating memorable games. They’re the company that I look to most frequently as a kind of model for Stardock. I want us to be the Telltale of strategy games.

What do you see as being the biggest pitfalls that a studio like Stardock has to watch out for these days?

DP: We ride between the indie games and the triple-A games. I think the biggest temptation I see for studios like us is that you see success from your game, and you have the budget to go ahead and make a $20 million or $30 million game, and you think, “Wow, imagine what we could do with a game like that,” and you go for it. That’s not what Stardock is interested in doing. We don’t want to put all of our eggs in one basket. We have a lot of games that are in the pipeline right now, and we’d much rather do many games that we’re passionate about. We don’t believe that you need $30 million to make a game great.

We want to focus on the gameplay side. So resisting that temptation is a big thing for companies like Stardock. I think that’s something we have under control. Things that we do have to keep an eye out for on a day to day basis… Indies have certain advantages. They’re very mobile. They can try all kinds of crazy stuff.

I was at PAX last week, and I spent almost all my time in the indie sections—both the iOS side, looking at all those little games, and the PC side. Just seeing the creative things that they can do once they’re unshackled from, “Well, we gotta sell 5 million copies, so let’s make sure we have a design and a model that we know will work and we know players will buy en masse.” They don’t care about that. They’re going to make games that they love. We try to draw on that for our games.

But we always have to keep an eye on it. Indies can do that better than us. They’re more flexible than we are. What we have that indies don’t is some real marketing muscle. We have a player base that knows us. We have some name recognition. We try to leverage all the things that the triple-As have, where they have community and PR and information about them in the media. When they put a game out, you’re going to take notice because of who they are. We try to draw on that from the triple-A side, to get those benefits.

In competing with the triple-A games, it’s the amazing polish—the millions of dollars worth of graphics and trailers that often cost a lot more than our entire games do. We aren't going to be able to compete at that level. When you’re making a game for a more reasonable budget, you can’t spend millions of dollars on CGI stuff. We believe that doesn't make the game any better. All those millions of dollars don’t necessarily add up to more fun. We’re hoping that our players believe that as well.



If all of your dreams come true, and you meet all of your goals and then some, what does Stardock look like five years from now?

DP: Stardock isn't a huge company. We do a lot of things here to make sure we stay under 50 people. I don’t have any desire for the company to be a 400-person operation. I would much rather stay small and keep creating great games. I’d like our back catalog to support our burn rate. We’re able to hire the people we want to hire and have our back catalog sales cover all of our costs, so that we can then just take all the time we need with our games. If it takes another six months, that’s an easy decision, because we’re making a profit every month as it is. We can do that.

Thanks to Derek for taking the time to talk to us. For more, check out Stardock's official site.

On August 16 - this Friday - Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes will emerge from the magic interpipes of the World Wide Web and sit on store shelves in a fancy-pants box. In celebration, Stardock have put out a new video showing off Fallen Enchantress' fantasy-flavoured turn based battles, empire-building, dragons and giant evil glowing Python fiends. I hate those guys.

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is a standalone expansion for Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, itself a re-worked and polished version of Elemental: War of Magic, which came out back in 2010. It adds two extra factions, reworks the way you hire heroes (formerly they'd loiter on the map like super-powerful hobos), adds more magic, more maps, more monsters. Anything beginning with "M" has received attention. They've even put in a new mevelling mystem!

As the trailer mentions, there's a reversible poster in the box that you can flip according to mood. It's the first time that Legendary Heroes will be available to buy in physical form in Europe, so if you do pick up a copy, be sure to hold it close to make it feel all warm and appreciated. You'll find the trailer below after the gong.

GONG.

Sometimes a sequel wants to say more than the original ever could. Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, a new standalone expansion to the Stardock strategy game, puts you at the helm of a fantasy empire in a hostile world filled with flaming corpse monsters and wailing undead banshees.

The game was released on Steam and elsewhere yesterday and while it's being called an expansion to 2012's original Fallen Enchantress game, Legendary Heroes appears to be something of a reboot for the title.

“Fallen Enchantress gave us a lot of great feedback,” said Derek Paxton, the lead designer of Legendary Heroes in a press release. “With Legendary Heroes we wanted to take that feedback and deliver a deeper, more polished and more welcoming game than what we started with.”

The champion units have seen what looks to be a major change from the original game, in that instead of being encountered randomly throughout the game map, a player earns champions by gaining fame through successful empire building.

Some of the other updates in the expansion include a new leveling system, more factions, and an improved graphics engine. For a complete list of detailed changes to the game, check out a an abbreviated—but still lengthy—changelog assembled by Paxton. It's also worth pointing out that at $39.99, the standalone expansion is $10 more than the original title. Be sure to check out Tom Francis's detailed review of the original Fallen Enchantress.

You get the impression that Stardock are trying to bury the memory of much maligned 4X strategy Elemental: War of Magic - possibly while whistling a nonchalant tune, hoping we'll not notice the fresh patch of disturbed earth and the shovel in their hand. First there was Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - the standalone expansion that went a long way to fixing the ill will caused by its predecessor. Now we have the second expandalone, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes, conveniently dropping that troubled prefix altogether for its May 22nd release.

Some light historical revisionism then, but it's hard to mind when there are so many extras being added to the game. Legendary Heroes brings new monsters, champions and maps, along with an expanded role for heroes. It's free to owners of the original Elemental, $19.99 for those who have Fallen Enchantress, and $39.99/£24.99 for everyone else.

You can find out more on the expansion's features in our previous announcement post.

It's a little-known fact that CEOs love writing reports. The whole reason that many companies become publicly traded is so their CEOs can spend their time writing endless reports for shareholders. For Stardock boss Brad Wardell, this poses a problem: as the head of a private company, there's no-one to report to. Rather than forlornly wandering the corridors of Stardock HQ, bothering staff with pie charts, he's instead decided to scratch that report itch by drafting a frank and honest address to their customers. In it, he talks about the company's performance over the last year, and hints at what they're planning next.

Wardell claims that 2012 was Stardock's biggest year financially, although points out that it's likely because they released more games than in any other year. He reveals that Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, Ironclad and Stardock's 4X expandalone, enjoyed far more success than either team anticipated. "I suspect there will be more news on this front as we go forward," Wardell teased.

Previewing the company's upcoming plans, Wardell says "I suspect we will have at least, two new game announcements in 2013." He also mentions Soren Johnson's (designer on Civ IV) role at Stardock - saying that he'll be working as a designer on their games over the next few months. "The emphasis on dedicated game design has resulted in greater confidence that new franchises will not have to go through the rocky experience that Elemental: War of Magic went through."

Wardell addresses the sale of Impulse, Stardock's digital distribution platform, to Gamespot, saying, "We suddenly had enough capital to do essentially anything we wanted." Rather than expand the company, Stardock will instead be creating an investment fund, designed to help game developers, found new studios, and enable new software ventures. "Over the next couple of years, some of these new ventures will start to become known. Hopefully, their success will help spawn new opportunities for the next generation software and game developers out there."

The report also included Stardock's 2012 Customer Survey, which provides and interesting statistic on the rapid growth of digital consumption. Of the surveyed customers, 82% said they preferred to buy their software digitally. This is compared to Stardock's 2008 survey response, in which only 42% expressed a digital preference.

For more stats and info, you can read the full report here.

Thanks, Joystiq.

Stardock have announced *deep breath* Elemental: Fallen Enchantress - Legendary Heroes, a standalone expansion to their standalone expansion. But while Fallen Enchantress was Stardock's mea culpa for the problems surrounding Elemental: War of Magic, Legendary Heroes promises to expand upon FE's solid foundation. It promises new maps, monsters and an enhanced levelling system.

The purpose of the expandalone is to change the way Champions work. According to lead designer Derek Paxton, "In Legendary Heroes, the champions seek you out based on your fame. Your kingdom gains fame through a variety of means and as a result, the player’s affinity with champions is now tied to the choices their Kingdom as a whole makes."

"Players will immediately recognize that the world has changed," Paxton continues. "Besides just looking a lot better, the battles are far more intense. Units have a lot more skills to choose from in battle and the maps are much more varied. We redid virtually all of them."

A post on the developer's forum runs through the new features:

"A new Champion progression system. Instead of random traits your champions have a trait tree that they can select traits from as they level up, grow your champions the way you want."
"The ability to recruit special non-human champions. Champions aren't just humans anymore. Rare opportunities or quests may unlock champions of various monster races that can choose traits and use equipment."
"New tactical combat options. Swarm gives a bonus for every ally that surrounds the enemy you are attacking. Be careful where you stand as even weak creatures can become dangerous in groups (especially those with traits that improve their Swarm bonus). Weapons all have special abilities and every faction has a special ability they can use in combat so even lowly spearmen have 2 special abilities they can use in addition to their normal move and attack options."
"New monster types like the Banshee who is immune to physical weapons, or the Garagox who knocks enemies back with each hit (which makes it difficult to get swarm bonuses and control the battlefield)."
"New spells and abilities. New range types have been added that allow for adjacent and line spells and abilities. Use Wall of Fire in tactical to create a line, 7 tiles long, to block allies from enemy units. Master necromancy to summon up to nine different skeleton units at once with the Raise Skeletal Horde spell. Use Resoln's Wraith Touch to drain life from a nearby enemy or Altar's Rush ability to forfeit their attack to get an extra action."
"A new scenario. Relias has returned to warn the kingdoms of what he discovered in the East, but there is little time left. The war has begun."

Due in April, the expansion will be free for anyone who bought War of Magic before 31/10/2010, cost $20 for owners of Fallen Enchantress, and $40 for everyone else.

Thanks, VG247.

This might be the first game I’ve ever been given as penance. It’s a standalone expansion for the turn-based strategy game Elemental: War of Magic, which was released in such a shocking state of disrepair that Stardock decided to make this expansion free to everyone who bought the main game at launch. It’s an extreme gesture, but the right one. Elemental: War of Magic was patched drastically and often, but the constant state of flux made it hard to get into. Fundamental game mechanics were being changed, and savegames were usually incompatible between versions.

Those of us who loved its potential were willing to wait for Stardock to take a proper second stab at the idea: a turn-based fantasy strategy game about building an empire while your hero fights monsters and levels up. But yeah, we would have balked at having to pay for it.

Like Elemental, Fallen Enchantress is a game about building an empire, and among your armies are a few special units who can take on quests and find magic items. Enchantress does add new features, but they’re not the main attraction. The maps you’re fighting on sometimes have big Wildlands areas, which are rich in resources but dominated by powerful creatures. They’re not really worth the effort: if you’ve got an army strong enough to clear them out, it’s usually better spent clearing out your actual opponents.



There’s also a new story-driven mode that strips out all the base building and restricts you to a couple of heroes. In effect, it cuts out most of what makes Elemental interesting and replaces it with pages of ponderous fantasy wank – I strongly suggest you ignore it.

The reason Fallen Enchantress is exciting is simply that the main game is fixed. It hasn’t crashed once for me, the AI is much more aggressive and challenging, and clunky systems have been ripped out and replaced by more elegant ones.

You can only build towns on scarce patches of fertile land now, which makes the terrain much more interesting to explore and squabble over. As they grow, your towns each have to pick an area of progress to focus on, giving your empire distinct production, research and military centres. And the faction you choose to play as has a much bigger influence on your playstyle.



Playing as stealthy hunter faction Tarth, I could explore the map without being attacked by any creatures I didn’t want to fight. But I wasn’t quite ready for how much better the AI was at expanding and building up a military. By the time I encountered the other two factions, one of them was more than twice as powerful as me, and immediately started demanding money for my continued survival. I cosied up to the weaker faction, and eventually persuaded them to be an ally. And then, in my travels, I found a boat.

There’s still no naval combat, but neutral transports can be used to access isolated islands. And on one island, I found a dragon shrine. I devoted my whole empire to researching it, hoping for a dragon ally, and years later one stomped out. I escorted it all the way back to the mainland and declared war. Then another one popped out. By the time my sovereign reached my rival’s capital, she had six dragons in tow.

It was exactly the kind of comeback Elemental’s blend of strategy and RPG promised, but nothing like it happened to me in War of Magic. Fallen Enchantress still has issues: a single big army of archers seems to beat every balanced or distributed approach, and the AI still isn’t very aggressive in war. But I was never dreaming of a perfectly balanced strategy game, just one with lots of interesting possibilities, and one that actually works. Fallen Enchantress finally manages that.



Expect to pay: $40 / £25 (free for Elemental owners)
Release: Out now
Developer: Stardock
Publisher: In-house
Link: www.elementalgame.com