Elemental Reforged

16 years ago we released Elemental: War of Magic. A ridiculously ambitious game that came crashing down because it couldn’t fit in 32-bit memory and all our dancing around this made the game incredibly unstable and required us to do terrible things to it to get it to work to the point you can’t even buy Elemental: War of Magic. The sequel, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, was greatly slimmed down and was pretty successful. But we couldn’t really do anything with it because if you even looked at it funny, it would become unstable. We also made Elemental: Sorcerer King which was more of an adventure game (fantasy Star Control as a practice run for Star Control: Origins).
Now, with the 64-bit remaster of it all, Elemental: Reforged, we have been able to bring it together. We’ve been quietly working on this for several years (first work started I think around 2018 to, 8 years?). Purely voluntary by the team because we love this game.
In the Fall of 2025, we mentioned we were working on this and a number of you asked us to put it into early access and we finally agreed to even though the game was still pretty rough. But support was so strong that we were able to bring on additional engineers who weren’t on the original game.

Fantasy Games for the New AgeMany of you are probably around my age. I’m 54. I was 35 when I started designing Elemental. I was 20 when I began writing the backstories that became Elemental and Galactic Civilizations. I wanted Elemental to mix Master of Magic, Populous, and Diablo. By release, it was a shadow of that. We fought so hard just to make it work that many features had to go. It was painful.Those systems weren’t deleted, just disabled. They’re still here. All that depth and detail is still there. Each day, more of it returns.This was a game made before every feature was analyzed for “market segments” or “engagement.” Does it make sense that every unit has a backstory you can read? That you can modify and customize each one? Probably not, but the work was done.When this is finished, the sheer amount of content will be staggering, even by today’s standards, and that’s before modders get involved. This time, everything uses standard formats. Music files are MP3s and WAVs. Quests are XML. Screens are INI (dxscreen) files referencing PNGs, and 3D assets are FBX. What to ExpectStability should be solid. The main bugs come from ongoing localization work. In the original, text was hardcoded in C++ or XML, so moving it out is a manual process. You’ll probably see some missed spots, but they won’t affect gameplay.The fun is there. It’s already more enjoyable than FE or SK. We’ve done significant balance work and restored many War of Magic items.The UI is still a work in progress; some spells, tooltips, and info aren’t displaying correctly yet. That should be fixed in the next few days. Every day brings big improvements.If you like fantasy 4X games, you’ll probably like this. What’s NextLocalization is our top priority. I apologize to our non-English fans that it didn’t make it into Beta 1. Every time we thought we’d found all the strings, we’d discover something like TreasureWnd.cpp with a hardcoded sprintf().After that comes modding. We want Steam Workshop integration ASAP. Once people see how easy it is to share maps, dungeons, techs, recipes, items, monsters, and city improvements, it’ll be clear:This is awesome.We were absolutely insane in 2010 to build this.Then there’s the Dynasty System: a big deal. Breeding your heirs is a core part of the game.That’s the near term. What happens next depends on how many people join Early Access. Hence the sharking around the office — seeing who I can pull onto Elemental.