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Star Trek Legacy's Plot Left Behind on Away Mission
Much like the deleted content from KOTOR 2, Xbox 360 fanboy has word that Star Trek: Legacy's storyline has been cut as well. Derek Chester, a writer for the game, spoke up on the official boards for the game: "[Forum poster] Star Dagger is correct, a lot of what was intended was cut. From rendered cinematics and interstitial cutscenes to a great deal of backstory and events that took place between the eras to tie them together. The total portrayal of the intended story was incomplete. Dorothy and I wrote a lot for this game...but not everything made it in. As a result there may be some difficulty in following the motivations for characters or the reasons for crucial events. The story as was written, tied together a great deal of Trek history and events to make it seem more substantial than it came across in the final game."
Its the attack of the trekkies! on that note, it happens, There has to be a balance of story and pure game play, a game can only be so long,
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Sounds like we need a Director's Cut...
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
...that 'Bad Strek Game' tends to be redundant these days. :-(
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
It may not have the All-Star voice acting, but it is fun, and significantly more realized as a game than Star Trek: Legacy.
Blah, forget that, install a true Star Trek classic: EGATrek. Plot? PLOT? We don't need no stinkin' plot! The Klingons are invading, and it's your job to blow 'em up, in spectacular 16-color 640x350 EGA graphics. THAT'S your Plot. (Just make sure that you get the one with the real names, and not the stupid "Mongols/Vandals" version. This page has a link.)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I'm still waiting for Secret of Vulcan's Fury, damnit.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
They should release the full story line on some web page (either in text form, unfinished cinematic scenes, etc). It's like deleted scenes in a movie that actually do add to the movie (ex: Superman Returns special edition dvd), you can enjoy them and have a richer experience if you want it. However, the cut-story should still be made to stand on its own.
Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll leave all the half-finished stuff and voice recordings by the actors on the disc like Obsidian did in KotoR2 and an intrepid mod team can finish the game for them. You'd think they would've learned from KotoR2 though, it's friggin Star Trek, it doesn't matter if you release it during the holidays or the middle of March, the same number of Trekkies are going to buy it regardless. And more people are likely to buy it if they believe it's finished.
For the true classic, you have to go back farther than that:
Super Star Trek.
Although it was reportedly inspired by an earlier version, it will always be the "classic version" for me, as it's one of the first computer games I ever played (the other was Colossal Cave Adventure).
Download and compile it, and experience the awe-inspiring sight of motion rendered on an 80x25 green-screen CRT!
Legacy was supposed to be released on December 5th but it sure has been hard to find. Starting on December 6th I started checking stores on a daily basis and nobody had any in stock until December 11th, at least not in Metro-Atlanta, Georgia. I can't wait to install it and play it.
Too bad about the cut story line, I like it when it seems like a movie sometimes. (Anyone remember Traffic Department 2192?)
... and in the DRM, bind them.
It's really our fault for accepting the low quality by purchasing the games. I do blame production schedules that cut corners for holidays and such. The only real way to fight it is to not purchase it and send email to production companies voicing the displeasure of inadequate games. Change starts with the consumer.
First, the link's broken due to an extra slash at the end.
Good luck finding a copy of the game. It's slightly rare, and is going for up to $70 on ebay. People are listing it on Amazon for up to $90 "Like New." There's also some kind of "Extreme 3D" version of the game, but people seem slightly reluctant to bid on it--I don't know why, but it may not use the same patches as the original or something like that.
(Although I'd like to play the game, it's not worth $70-90 to me--especially considering that there are some very disappointing cons listed in reviews.)
Having worked on a truckload of movie- and story-based video games, I'm just aghast that this happened.
...
Actually, no I'm not. I've never seen a game story written during development that wasn't cut by at least 50% or more.
Part of the difficulty stems, I believe, from there being no set limit to the amount of story that a game designer / writer can script in to a game. When you are writing a movie script, you know for a fact that you have 90-120 minutes with which to tell your story, and that each page of script is approximately 1 minute of screen time. This gives you a nice natural boundary to work with.
Game scripts? Not so much. You know that the game needs to be between 10 and 40 hours long... and that most of that time will be taken up by gameplay... but there is a huge difference between a game that has 1 hour of story in it and a game that has 3 hours of story... even though the % of overall time taken up by that story is not dramatically different. So... when do you stop writing? What does a game writer limit himself to? Often, the answer is "way more than the developers can make".
Also, game story sequences are remarkably difficult to actually construct and build in realtime 3D. Constructing in-game cinematics is hard work, there's no getting around it. This problem is only exacerbated on a movie/TV title: the audience has the quality of the show or movie to compare your in-game cinematics to, and thus the production requirements go up and up. This inevitably leads to someone (usually a producer) having to make a call (or, lots and lots of calls) between cinematic quality and story length... with predictable results.
You put all this together, and you get the story dev path of most game projects:
What you are left with is a bare skeleton of the intended story, which is often unintelligible to the viewer.
So, I say to ye old Star Trek writer guy: did more than 25% of what you wrote make it in the game? You're well ahead of many game writers. Quit cryin'.
As someone who has recently finished Star Trek: Legacy for the PC (last night, actually), I should point out that the single-player campaign itself, on the medium difficulty setting, took me in total maybe three evenings to complete. This is a ballpark estimate due to replay of certain missions. That's 12 to 15 hours.
The major hook for STL with Trekkies and sci-fi gamer officionados is that it was sold by the PR machine to be an ambitious novel-rivaling epic; An era-spanning game that charts the progress of a story from the very beginnings of Trek's Federation to the 'modern day' post-Nemesis. It featured the voice-acting talent of the five most notable captains of those eras, centered around Trek's various television shows. Yet because of time constraints (I have no proof of which, but this game WAS promised to be delivered for Trek's 40th Anniversary), It was distilled to a few evenings total gameplay. If anyone has played Star Trek: Bridge Commander, a game with not so all-encompasing a grasp as Legacy was marketed to be, I would estimate that Legacy's single-player campaign equates to roughly half of Bridge Commander's, and due to other gameplay issues which I will not go into, was half-again as immersive. Certain eras spend one mission in existence before leaping ahead with no explanation on why it was needed in the first place. And when the 'Ohhh, I get it!' moment kicks in, it's much less of a revelation and more of a sense of finally understanding a somewhat overused plot device.
The story was not the only thing cut from the game, but for some of us it's the most missed. Like the aforementioned Knights of the Old Republic 2, the clips in Legacy's in-game story leave the story feeling disjointed and incomplete. It is transparent. It is predictable, distilled to a measure to justify the next interstellar dogfight. There is no intrigue, no suspense, and honestly little replay value in going back to it as it is now. I'm speaking as an owner of the PC version, but if I were an XBox360 owner with that copy of the game I would feel even more cheated, considering..you know...the whole OMG Next-Generation Gaming thing. Legacy's reach is evocative of the Starfleet Armada era of games, not 2006's best efforts.
It was not an issue of trying to keep the game from 'being too long'. You can finish it in a day if you so wish (and yes, I understand that jives well with some of you, but in my opinion I prefer to long savor a game I've waited a year or so for, and three passive evenings just doesn't cut it). But all markers point to this project being rushed to coincide with the same year as Trek's 40th Anniversary (which they missed the original launch day for). Cuts were made to likely streamline the development cycle. Alas, you end up with watered-down Kool-Aid with a price tag of $59.99.
Cheers,
A. Coward
The best Trek game of all time has to be Netrek. Ah, the hours I wasted away in college playing that game.
It was the first graphical real-time multiuser game I played, we used to hog the few NeXT stations on campus (there were only 6, and they were the only color terminals we had outside of the craptacular Windows labs) playing that game.
Please to be demonstrating how this is 'outright fraud'.
Use both sides of the paper if necessary.