Journals
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]
Dev Journal
We like sandbox games. We are not interested in telling you a story. We are interested in you creating your own stories through gameplay, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have lore - lore that has published books about them and decades of development in them. Today, I want to share a little bit of the backstory for Elemental. Note: minor spoilers mentioned . In the Beginning There were the Mithrilar . These were extremely powerful guardians with no native shape or substance. Placed in... [read more]
Dev Journal
Let's Talk About 2010 I'm going to be straight with you - Elemental: War of Magic didn't look good in 2010, and Elemental: Fallen Enchantress didn’t really improve on that. Time has not been kind to it. The Elemental games were our first non-space game at Stardock. We'd been making Galactic Civilizations and publishing Sins of a Solar Empire , and we thought "how hard could it be to make a fantasy game?" Turns out, pretty hard. Terrain. Animation. Magic. The biggest challenge wa... [read more]
Stardock Entertainment Announcements
Steam 4X Fest: Get up to 80% off Select Stardock Games
Up to 80% off Stardock 4X real-time and turn-based strategy games Now through August 18th [read more]
Dev Journal
Dev Journal #3: The Great String System Overhaul
How Fixing 15-Year-Old Code Finally Opens Elemental to the World By Brad Wardell August 2025 Localization: How to double your market size Here's a business truth that haunts game developers: English speakers represent only 40% of the strategy 4X gaming market. The other 60%? They're playing games in German, Chinese, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and so many others. For 15 years, Elemental was locked out of that 60%. That was because back in 2008, when we were developing the g... [read more]
Stardock Entertainment Announcements
Announcing: Massive Scale RTS Game Ashes of the Singularity II
Highly anticipated sequel features larger battles, advanced units, and a new campaign to lead humanity against hostile AI takeover Wishlist Ashes II Now Stardock and Oxide Games today announced Ashes of the Singularity II , the highly anticipated sequel to the groundbreaking, massive-scale RTS that redefined real-time strategy gaming a decade ago. Set to release in 2026, exactly ten years after the original, the game invites players to engage in strategic battles of unprecedented scale,... [read more]