Stardock and the non-sequel to Master of Magic

Early screenshot from Elemental

Hot diggity damn.

Stardock, after teasing us for more than a year, has officially announced that they are producing a spiritual successor to the classic Master of Magic. The new title, Elemental: War of Magic, does not actually build off of the MoM license. However, MoM was a Magic: the Gathering / Civilization double rip-off with just enough differences to avoid the infringement police, so turn-about is fair play. :p More on the game in a moment.

Stardock, you may or may not recall, was the software development company that mostly did applications, with gaming as a kind of sideline hobby. Then, they released Galactic Civilizations II without any DRM. A Russian company that makes DRM then pointed to torrents of Stardock’s game as proof that piracy was a problem in their own forums. Widely seen as a blatant extortion attempt along the lines of “you sure got a lot of nice stuff here, be a shame if somebody started a fire or sumthin’,” the story went huge in the geekosphere (slashdot, digg, etc…) which had the secondary effect of giving far more publicity to GalCiv than Stardock ever would have paid for. Since the game was awesome, this led to massive sales and, almost overnight, Stardock was a major game company. Their latest game, Sins of a Solar Empire, has also been rapturously received (it’s a hybrid 4x/RTS, and I don’t have the twitch reflexes for RTSes, so I’ve sadly passed).

Stardock does a lot of things right, in my opinion. They have the most open lines of communication with their players that I’ve ever seen. The updates to their games often amount to what you’d pay for in an expansion pack for other games, and their expansion packs are absolutely nuts. The no-DRM issue isn’t huge for me, but I respect the stance they take. (I suspect the Gamers Bill of Rights is the subject of a separate post.) They also recently emailed their annual report to everyone who has registered with their website.

Back to the matter at hand, though. For a long time now they’ve been only a little coy about the fact that Master of Magic is a game they thought should be remade, and were only a bit more coy about the fact that they were messing around with the idea. In fact, they spent some(?) amount of time negotiating for the license to make MoM2. In any case, the small but incredibly dedicated fan base for MoM should be thrilled to know that a fundamentally sound developer who really, really gets games is developing this title for early 2010.

the company that made a big splash with their no-DRM policy*, which then brought attention to their amazing Galactic Civilizations II,