Journals
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #11: Modding your own Fantasy World
The Elemental series is, by far, the most expansive that Stardock has ever made; most of it was barely exposed to the player base in our quest to reduce memory. This time, not only can we expose it all, we can enhance it and integrate into Steam Workshop. The dated visuals of Elemental: Reforged do have one major advantage: It makes modding a lot more approachable and easier. Let’s take a look at what we have and what we want to do. The Tile Editor Every cup, every barrel, every table... [read more]
News
Early Access Coming to Elemental: Reforged on October 23, 2025
Remaster of Classic Fantasy Strategy Game Series, Elemental: Reforged , will Enter Early Access on October 23 Elemental: Reforged combines War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress and Sorcerer King into a single unified fantasy strategy game experience Add to your Steam Wishlist Stardock Entertainment announced today that its remaster of the Elemental fantasy strategy game series, Elemental: Reforged , will enter Early Access on Thursday, October 23, 2025. Th... [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #10: Gameplay Updates
This Dev Journal covers what we are doing and what we are thinking of doing with Elemental: Reforged . We want to hear your thoughts! Change #1: There are NO premade characters Procipinee, Relias, Verga are still in the game, but they are no longer playable characters. We want this game to lean much more heavily into the sandbox, so you start the game by creating a character. Change #2: You start out alone No entourages. You are alone. The starting area monsters have been ... [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #9: Visual Progress
We are working on improving the visuals for Elemental: Reforged . While we can’t get it to “AAA 2025” levels since this is a 2009-era engine, it’s amazing how far you can get only with stone knives and bear skins. Since this is a Remaster++ and not a sequel, I think most people will understand if our goal is to make the graphics better. New bullet point: Graphics now 25% less bad! But with modern hardware or even old hardware (by today’s standards), there’s a lot we can do with the old e... [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #8: The Benefits of 64bit
What 64bit means 2GB of RAM is enough In MY day, a megabyte was a lot of RAM, so when designing Elemental , the 32-bit memory limit meant nothing to me. I knew what it was, but it was such a gigantic number (4GB, but 2GB in practice) that I didn’t consider the ramifications of the design. This was going to be a PC-only game, so what did I care? Ah younger, naive me. I wanted to make Master of Magic , but I wanted an RPG world where every unit, city, and being was unique. Every character h... [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #7: Early Access and the Game Industry
The team working on Elemental: Reforged is essentially the same team (plus some new faces) that worked on Elemental: War of Magic 16 years ago in 2009. Back then, my colleagues were mostly associate-level developers and artists, right out of college. Today, of course, they’re leads and normally distributed amongst various projects. It’s unusual for a project of this size to have multiple senior or lead developers on it, but we all desired the opportunity to show what we wanted to do with the... [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #6: Crafting for Fun and Profit
The general philosophy for the Elemental games is that they are strategy games in RPG worlds, and part of this means that units could be designed and equipped like you would in an RPG. The one thing we couldn’t do for War of Magic or Fallen Enchantress was have crafting. We just couldn’t fit it. In Sorcerer King, however, we did add it, but we had to remove other things to make it fit. In a 64-bit world, we can have our figurative cake and eat it too. Recipes and Ingredients Throughout t... [read more]