People should not be standing for this. The last 5 or so years too many games have been coming out like this. And now the norm is “well its 0 day release patches are normal, it will get better”, that use to not be the norm. Shit before you use to get a game and it worked, no downloading some patch or anything shit just worked, it was complete. Gamers standards have just gone downhill and we all should not have do be dealing with it enough of the excuses. Everything is a rush now to make a profit, companies have just gotten sloppy.

I hate to say this, but I agree 100% with PCGamer. Let me preface this by saying I love Stardock and REALLY wanted to like this game.

As a long time beta tester and gamer (over ten years with each) it's pretty clear that this game was not ready for its release. You can't release a title with disabled online multiplayer and buggy single player and expect favorable reviews. In the campaign, I'm currently trapped in Act 6, looking for a survivor who (I think) is in a desert nowhere to be found. There are no waypoints or suggestions of where to look (as there should be) just footprints in the ground that tell me I'm looking in the wrong direction. That's not the only issue. I've currently played over 450 turns in the single player campaign, allowing me to buy several of the top tier units with little difficulty, making my sovereign useless. Why level my main hero and increase his hit points by 5 when I can just buy 7 Royal Guard armies with 80 HP each? Additionally, the lack of cutscenes or voice acting during the acts is making for an incredibly dry and difficult to follow story for me.There are plenty of other issues I can bring up regarding the campaign, including invisible walls and no clear direction of what to do, but for the goal of brevity I'll stop here.

And that's all just in the campaign. The skirmish mode has some pretty significant flaws as well. Granted, they're getting fixed, but I am also of the opinion that this game needed a few more months of development. I don't say this as a biased anti-Stardock hater, I've bought all their games in the past and liked them (even Demigod) it's just that thus far I'm not very impressed with the game as it stands.

Get past your anger at how bluntly PCGamer has analyzed the game and coolly look at its flaws. I think over time most of you will agree with me.

there would never have been a 0 day patch if they game didnt break release date.its not easy setting a game up to run on an infinite amount of set ups.people should remember that,..i dont know any games that didnt require patches at all.

Pc gamer gave Spore a 91% score. I rest my case.

Eh, I could play through the entire single player of ETW on release with little difficulty. Obviously, that is just my experience. Also, ETW is a lot prettier than this game, and had a much more cohesive and useful veterancy system (see my post above regarding sovereign veterancy).

Additionally upon release ETW's multiplayer was functional, so IMHO it wasn't "way buggier" than this game.

The reasons listed in this article and by some forum users here are the reasons I do not pre-order games. I don't care if the quote was taken out of context, exactly when is it okay to tell paying customers who are your fans to take a hike because they care enough to bring up missing advertised features, game breaking problems and bugs. This will probably be a nicer review than Elemental will get elsewhere because at least they mention they expect the game to be fixed, that features talked about will be added and at some point Elemental will live up to the promise. Hell this article says in no uncertain terms says the  "Developer and publisher Stardock are generally a great company" yet people here are still so blind by loyalty that they are sounding the charge against PC Gamer and trying to attack this reviewer who could have, and probably should have, just finished the review and given it a terrilbe score. They're holding off a review, not that common to do actually. The responses here... some you guys didn't and haven't been doing Stardock any favors.

I say everyone who buys PCgamer UK and is a fan of Stardock should immediately cancel their subscription. We'll show em.

lol don't know what to say, must be and age thing.

Oh yes the phallic aliens, the DRM , the bugs and the complete lack of gameplay. .. complete facepalms all around.

RAT

that says it all, as a fan of empire of war series and owning them all ,I remember some HUGE HUGE HUGE buggy releases that wouldn't even launch yet the reviewers praised the game as the next coming. Sorry I am all about having a descent release, but this game even on day 0 was better then 2 and 3 of eow. Funny thing is try to get patches for the EOW franchise, people scream, curse, get banned on the forums etc for pointing out those flaws. Eh, whatever, I care not at this point, many of us knew the status of the game and that's no excuse, but they always ALWAYS fix it and quickly, I have to see another company do that. So na, I don't blame stardock for a pre-release fail, I blame the retailers getting them off guard.

I see what happened here, the gold was shipped with issues on it and they knew it was there, quick fix and a patch on launch and no one is the wiser. Issue was the launch was jumped on a day early and people played a broken game. I get it, but then again I also get more developers releasing broken games so people rejister and show they actually own it to patch it up offically, call it the side step of a drm, (thats my theory anyways) but alas, I have seen worse and what was posted about them here was just over the hill and streight out rude.

Don't forget though that a lot of those people had sub-par systems and were still trying to run the game. I had an excellent system (cost over 2000$) at the time and was able to run it at release with practically no issues. I'm trying to remember if I had any problems at all... I think I had some kind of crash once but that was it.

Well it's important to note that WoW's release, while it did have serious problems, was actually really good when compared to other MMORPGs. And the game was actaully far more complete and polished then any other MMORPG released, which of course is not saying that much given that most other games tend to be released extremely incomplete. So the standards were quite a bit different there.....getting a C doesn't look so bad when everyone else gets an F.  So I'm not sure if I would hold them up as an example of a horrible release.