SAN FRANCISCO--The original Master of Magic from MicroProse is considered fondly by its fans to be a classic game because of its fun tactical combat, its global magic spell system, and its ever-so-slightly unbalanced gameplay, which, in retrospect, gives it a baroque charm. Since that game, many other studios have offered their own interpretations of what a fantasy-themed, turn-based, Master of Magic-like game should be, and the next game in line will be Elemental: War of Magic from Stardock. We caught up with the studio's frontman, Brad Wardell, to pick his brain on the upcoming game, as well as any other projects his group might be working on.

To begin with, Wardell reiterated his commitment to getting the game into a testable, playable state earlier than usual. Stardock plans to run a "beta zero" phase, where a working prototype of the game, using extremely simple art assets, will be made available to a small group of beta testers to thoroughly test gameplay--pretty art assets, such as the oil-portrait-like textured characters you've seen in screenshots, will be added later during subsequent phases of beta, which will test the game many, many times to ensure that it ends up being a highly polished, well-balanced, and enjoyable finished product.

Currently, most of the major gameplay aspects are locked down, though Wardell confides that he and his team still occasionally come up with "Hey, what if we did this?" inspirations that the team then tosses against the proverbial wall to see if they stick. There's a great deal of implementation and content-building yet left to do, but Wardell is adamant about certain aspects of gameplay, such as having resource-related buildings appear outside of your castle keep, rather than in it. Your castle keep, the base of your operations, will exist in the world as a 3D structure, and you'll build all your farms and barracks and other buildings around your keep over time to eventually end up with a thriving medieval metropolis.

When asked what he most wanted to see in his own Master of Magic-like game, Wardell replied that he'd always enjoyed the global spells of MicroProse's classic and confessed that he was extremely excited by the prospect of using modern computer graphics technology to create some truly spectacular large-scale magic effects.

Elemental will let you create a fantasy fiefdom and try to take over the rest of the known world.

In addition, the team already knows that content customization, which was very popular among players of Stardocks' Galactic Civilizations series, will definitely be in the game. The GalCiv games let you meticulously design your fleet of spaceships with whatever weapons and accoutrements you wanted; Elemental will let you do the same to army battalions as well as to buildings.

Though the initial game will ship with only two playable races, the humans and the sinister Fallen, the team expects that elves, dwarves, and other fantastical creatures will appear more or less immediately as a result of the fan community's efforts with the editing tools, which will let you upload your content to a centralized database. And it's also likely that Stardock will add more playable character races to the game later, since the studio has a longstanding tradition of supporting games post-launch and also since the game's lore is apparently so extensive that Wardell himself is chronicling it all in a book he's writing concurrently with his game development duties.

Unfortunately, the game will not get here until 2010.

When asked about the future plans for this game, Wardell admitted he was uncertain as to whether Elemental would grow by way of full-on $30 expansion packs or through "microexpansions," which Stardock has released for Sins of a Solar Empire. A larger expansion, explains Wardell, will take longer to make and keep players waiting, but microexpansions don't seem well understood by customers and the press just yet. When asked about future plans for Stardock and GalCiv, the strategy series that put the studio on the map, he wasn't shy about admitting that the studio would probably "end up doing a GalCiv 3," most likely using the totally revamped technology that powers Elemental, which has new tech, like an enhanced particle effects engine. Wardell also excitedly shared that the feature he'd most like to add to a GalCiv 3 would be tactical space combat, but for now, the team's efforts are focused on Elemental, which continues to look promising with its offer of epic fantasy strategy and beautiful illustrated graphics. Sadly, we won't be able to play Elemental until next year.