Slashdot Mirror
Hope for Another Star Control Sequel?
Pluvius writes "A recent post on GameSpot's Rumor Control blog suggests that there may be a chance for a new entry in the classic Star Control series in the foreseeable future. It would be developed by Toys for Bob, the creator of the first two games in the series, and it is implied that the company already holds the rights for the franchise. Quoting from the article: 'But maybe, just maybe, if enough of you people out there send [Alex Ness, producer] e-mails requesting that Toys For Bob do a legitimate sequel to Star Control 2, I'll be able to show them to [Toys For Bob parent company] Activision, along with a loaded handgun, and they will finally be convinced to roll the dice on this thing.'"
Yes, but...
Will it have Frungy?
Will I be able to load in the stats from the latest Frungy season? All the latest players, their colouring patterns, tentacle length and favorite flavour of delicious lichen? Will I be able to customise team-lineup, including the infamous 1-9-18-2 formation? What about personalised limpets? Man, I was so steamed when I found out that we... ah... I mean those funny, yet unutterably powerful, fearsome yet compassionate and all-around great guys the Zoq-Fot-Pik had been cut from the atrocity that was Starcon 3.
All I can say is, you better get it right this time!
I, for one, welcome our new Ur-Quan Overlords. (ducks)
If you haven't played this classic game, then go to http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ . The 3DO version source was released under the GPL and the music and art is free to distribute with the source.
Posted anon to avoid karma whoring...
I highly recommend the open-source "Star Control Timewarp". It's awesome:
http://timewarp.sourceforge.net/
I knew the industry was in sad shape but I didn't think it was that bad, even after 50,000 Madden games.
Nick
Pulsing hot liquid flows through my outstretched tendrils, sending thrills into my interior, The moment has come. I swell and burst.
I spent years believing that Star Control 2 was the very best game of the 90's. Particularly for the plot. Layers within layers within layers, and humour to boot! Side stiching laughter.
Hell, I admit it. I played one of the pirated versions from the 90's whlie I was at university. The ones that deliberately crashed in the starmap because (said the urban legend at the time) it knew if the game was cracked in the "obvious" manner, and crashed a lot as punishment. It didn't matter, I managed to play it all the way through anyways.
I've played the game several times since, including the latest version of the open source Ur-Quan Masters, which is pretty rock solid at this point. I also now own the game (A CD re-release), with the box proudly displayed in my computer room.
I've raved about this game for the past 13 years. Plotwise, the only game I've seen that's beaten out SC2 has been "The Longest Journey" by Ragnar Tornquist, which has a sequel "Dreamfall" finally coming out on Monday. I've been dreaming about a Longest Journey sequel for 5 years, but come to think of it, I've been dreaming about a SC2 sequel, a *PROPER* SC2 sequel, for 13. SC2.1 would have "nerd-squee!" (or "OMG! Ponies!!" if you prefer) written all over it.
Hell, at this point I'd be happy if they used the existing UQM open source engine, and gave us a new plot in the StarCon universe. Hell, I'd be willing to do voice acting for the thing. (UQMites, I'm also hopeing that someday soon we'll see UQM mods with user made storylines. That would be cool too)
The petition referenced at the end of the post is old and busted, and he gave the wrong link anyway. It was part of The Pages of Now and Forever
I know it's not SOP to RTFA, but for those of you that are unfamiliar with the off-the-wall humor that comes out of TfB, you might want to check it out.
Don't put advice in your sig.
Star Control 3 made many of us *frumple*. But if Toys for Bob are *jumping in front*, and hope to bring Star Control back into *heavy space*, I would be a very, very *happy camper*. I imagine there will be much *dancing* to make this a reality due to the *silly cows* who hold the license, but if Toys for Bob can get *many fingers* into *slow time*, I'm sure there will be many *parties* *in the middle*. *Spicy games* are always fun.
A recent post on GameSpot's Rumor Control blog suggests that there may be a chance for a new entry in the classic Star Control series in the foreseeable future.
Now to quote the article:
When pressed for details by GameSpot... He said he does, of course, know what game he's working on, and it's not a Star Control sequel. "It's pretty cool and fun but has nothing to do with Star Control or space or role-playing," he said. "It should be out by the end of the year. My hope was that some time in the future, maybe the next project or maybe the one after, we would get a chance to make another Star Control game."
And to further quote the article, which after reading it, doesn't really seem to suggest all that much, they even bother to neatly sum it all up in one sentence:
Bogus or not bogus?: Bogus...for now.
Pretty weak rumor if you ask me. The guy basically says maybe in the future a project or two from now we'd like to do a sequel. How the hell is this newsworthy? In fact I kinda wish I had the minutes back it took to read TFA.
I'm starting to understand why no one reads the articles anymore. A) they suck. and B) even slashdot appears to be more about sensationalism than actual news delivery.
The funny thing is... sensationalism only works for a while. Yeah it gets people hyped up and interested in the short term, but it only causes dissent in the long term.
I have personally stopped watching or reading traditional news sources altogether simply for that fact. They can't be trusted. Might as well read a tabloid because it starting to amount to the same thing.
I'm 23 years old.
And FFXI it doesn't come close.
I can't even play Japanese movie-fests. Star Control makes you feel like you're a part of something. It's pretty amazing really. Funny, exciting, rich in interesting characters, difficult and has a great battle engine (you can play melee against your friends for hours).
It's easily in my top 5 games of all time, along with MOO2, X-COM, Fallout 2 and Buldar's Gate 2, none of which are 3D.
We really should have age limits on Slashdot...
Well you Star Control people, there are plenty of non-complete projects out there that are very similar to the Star Control concept. First, there's the: incredible looking Infinity
Then there is the Starflight III game. Starflight I & II being very similar, and many feel inspirational to the Star Control series. Starflight III has been in development for bloody ages. They are making progress though, and my bets say we'll have it before long. I can't wait for it to finish.
There are others, and I've even spent about 18 months developing my own unoffical sequel to Starflight with original content. Boy is it hard, despite having basically the full requirements and design goals laid out in the best way possible, the original games. The worst part is the team's motivational considerations. It's hard to work on a game in your own time for weeks on end. I'm probably making a project that no one will play, save the few die hard fans of the old games. I had notions that there may be a wider audience, but after running the game idea past a few 13-14 year olds, I'm not sure the current generation of gamers will appreciate, or even understand a space-opera Star-Trek esq single player RPG since they are not fueled by those romantic memories of games of old. It seems if there is not some military or MMORPG element to games these days, no one wants to publish them. (there's a few exceptions)
On the other hand, there is a counter culture in game development that craves smaller independent type games. PC gamers are all getting pretty sick of 1-2 great titles each year, and the rest, which is pretty much me too crap, from the big publishers.
Of course, rumors are usually just very silly rumors, but why does everyone seem to want the same sequels for the same series over and over, and why are game developers so comfortable in producing those sequels over and over? The results usually don't turn out that great after a few iterations (cough, Wing Commander Prophecy pretty much was Doom all over again, and then Origin Systems died), and unremarkably, most don't feature all that much 'new', let alone earth-shattering plot and character development. Games are a lot like movies, once it's up to Rocky 3, or (darnit) Rocky 5, if you aren't doing much new and innovative with it, it's usually time to just move on. Take the example of System Shock. Now, there was System Shock, it blew, well, the few people who gave it time away. Capitalizing on that, there was the amazing System Shock 2, but because of the slightly unforgiving interface and unique gameplay, it was never really a huge commercial success. Now, with the 'spiritual successor' BioShock hitting shelves next year, it uses some of the same interesting and different concepts, but is a completely different game. Originality? It sure looks like it. But why don't more developers 'take the plunge' and use their famous name and bankroll to do something more interesting and original? Instead of Half Life 3 and X4 and Civilization 5, why not try producing something actually playable, fun, and interesting, like so many of the 'new and original' games of the early to mid 1990s, not to mention some of the great games of the late 1980s? If studios are so 'concerned' about sequels that they constantly put out, then they just need to be strong-armed by big-name studios into putting up for more original and interesting games. There's a reason why 'indie' game quality, despite being rough around the edges, is starting to casually surpass that of big commercial games. Even if the big commercial games are flashier and have 1GB worth of graphics and 50MB worth of content, it often doesn't make them very playable or intelligent, and why spend $50+ on a boring big-name game when you can spend $0-10 on a fun and remarkably polished indie game? Many, even if in the 'same old' genre, do things that haven't been done in similar games for more than a decade now, and do it very well. Nevermind that they also tend to be maintained and patched for a bit longer. It's pretty infuriating when that 'big game' only gets one or two patches, but they never fix the critical issues that some people or everyone are getting, leaving some games even completely unprogressable after a certain point for many people (cough, Knights of the Old Republic). And that's not to say that all sequels are bad, but...if it's a good continuation of the same story, which actually tells that story, and does a good job of it objectively, before fanboyism? Then sure...by all means (just like Wing Commander and WC2, or even WC: Privateer and the lesser known sequel Righteous Fire), but if the primary goal is just to sell an engine, or otherwise make money? Screw you. As a game developer (though certainly not big name), it's just really not right to completely sell a game out, rather than offering something that's actually meaningful, playable, and a fun and unique experience.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
I think it's easy to say Star Control 2 was the definiitive game for the continued fame of Star Control. I'll also say that the PC version is the one people really got, and the 3DO's only legacy is being the one that they still had source code to make UQM a reality.
With this in mind, I would say their target market would be largely comprised of those who were around and immensely enjoyed Star Control 2. While probably many of that market have game consoles of some variety, they all are probably more likely to be heavily into their computer. People who played DOS games in the 90s generally were consistantly computer oriented, probably because it was more of a hastle back then for so many games that required x amount of conventional memory and you had to fiddle with things to get rid of memory resident things not needed for that game and move whatever else you could to 'high memory'. Those were the days...
Anyway, considering the bulk of their target market would be those who already played SC2, the platform that makes sense is personal computers. To go a step further, it should be cross-platform and run on at least Linux/x86 and Windows. Though I don't have definitive evidence for it, I strongly suspect large portions of SC2's fanbase is on linux and that uqm usage statistics may be enlightening. Additionally, developed correctly it isn't that hard to make even a fairly sophisticated game run on different Operating systems, so the cost/benefit ratio should be good regardless.
It's hard looking at their list of games to establish them to now be console-only, they haven't developed enough games, and none of them have been notable enough compared to SC2. Their best bet if they had the opportunity to do a sequel would be to target their old fans as closely as possible. If it is a good game, it would be a nice revival for their name which hasn't seen a big title since 1992.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Because Ness wants you to spam him. Read the article.
Rob
Nope.
Not a thing.
+++ATH0
We at the The Ur-Quan Masters project have set up a web page with some more information and a form to petition Toys For Bob from your browser.
I eagerly hope to see a new Star Control game. The originals were great. I just hope whoever develops the game keeps things simple and is faithful to the gameplay of the originals. But man, there's a lot of potential here.