Elemental: Reforged is a turn-based strategy game where players create their own heroes, their civilizations, and explore a procedurally generated fantasy map. The team from Elemental: Reforged reached out to me for an interview, and given the fact that I have been doing fewer of those recently, and you guys seem to love them, I was like, “Sure, why not? Let’s talk about Elemental: Reforged, and see what makes this turn-based strategy RPG so special”. Below, the team at Stardock discusses what it took to reforge this new title, which comes out of Early Access today!

For readers who may be discovering the game for the first time, what is Elemental: Reforged?

Elemental: Reforged is a turn-based 4X fantasy strategy game set in a world that has just recovered from a great cataclysm. The player is one of a handful of beings capable of channeling magic from scattered magical shards distributed across the world. The player’s goal is to found a civilization, tame the wilds that have entrenched themselves, deal with allied and opposing civilizations who have their own agendas, and eventually either unite the world under your rule, complete one of the quests of mastery, or construct the forge of the overlord.

The name “Reforged” suggests something being rebuilt. What exactly is being reforged?

Indeed. Elemental was Stardock’s most ambitious game design ever. We envisioned a living fantasy world where every character was unique, the environment could be molded, and we would blend strategy with RPG seamlessly. Unfortunately, the game was something of a technical disaster for us in 2010. The game had to fit in 32-bit memory, and we developed a really innovative but ultimately flawed memory management system that resulted in the game being very unstable. So then we released Elemental: Fallen Enchantress a couple of years later. We took out most of the features that were in the original Elemental: War of Magic release. That game was very successful, but it was still a shadow of what we originally had in mind. A couple of years later, we took the pure adventure/RPG parts and made Elemental: Sorcerer King, which wasn’t as successful because it traded the strategy elements for adventure, and our core audience really prefers strategy. Over the next decade, the team at Stardock gradually ported our engine over to 64-bit. We updated the graphics system to DirectX 11 and began the painful conversion of migrating all the 3D assets to modern FBX formats. The end result is something of a super-remaster or reforging: Elemental: Reforged.

What are some of the core gameplay systems players can expect?

The game is still very cutting-edge in terms of gameplay mechanics. Players can establish cities, go on quests, and level up their characters. Those are features that were in the popular Fallen Enchantress game. But what we think players will really enjoy, and be shocked that all this was in a game from 2010, are things like the dynasty system where characters can get married, have children (and yes, half-human, half-dragon can happen with blended graphical textures), the crafting system, lots of new creatures and content that we had to remove, lots of new spells, and better tactical battles.

What sets Elemental: Reforged apart from other, similar titles?

I think the key thing about Elemental: Reforged is that it is unapologetically inspired by Master of Magic in that this is a fantasy civilization-style game. While it has tactical battles, they are short and sweet and don’t occupy a major element of the game. It’s a very different pacing experience where you’re building a civilization in a fantasy world while also being able to design your own units, equip all your characters with crafted or quest items, and so on.

What was some of the players’ feedback during EA, and have you addressed it?

We’ve had two real challenges during the beta period. The first one has been balanced. War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress, and Sorcerer King all had very different items, quests, and units with different balances, and that resulted in some really challenging pacing problems on what to get when. The second challenge has been technical. The data formats between these games were similar but not the same. So it took a while to get the stability of the beta where we wanted it. There has also been the challenge of the amount of art we have. This game has a lot of art, and finding all the source art from 15 years ago, made with tools that don’t exist anymore, has been a challenge. Nostalgia is a helluva thing. I don’t think people realize just how rough the visuals were in the Elemental games. It took a lot of effort to get them to be reasonable.

Any plans for the future? Such as expansions or DLC?

Definitely, we have a couple planned for this year. The community has asked for a lot of new features and content that we definitely want to do. We did all this work to create what amounts to a modern fantasy civilization game engine; we’re excited to do some things with it.

Something else you might add?

It has really been a pleasure to dive back into the Elemental world. For us, this has been a labor of love. It’s also a reminder of how much older we are. The “associate” devs who worked on it back in 2009 are now senior/lead developers here, and seeing them all get to work together on the same project has been a blast.

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