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Stardock Tried To Make Star Control, Master of Orion Sequels
Gamasutra reports on comments from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell in which he described his efforts to revive two old but popular franchises: Star Control and Master of Orion. Quoting:
"'I actually pitched Atari on a whole idea for a true successor to Star Control,' [he said], noting that the game would follow original series developer Toys for Bob's Star Control II rather than the Legend Entertainment-developed Star Control 3 ('We just pretend that never happened,' the CEO says of that release). ... Novato, California-based Toys for Bob has actually floated the idea of making its own Star Control II sequel, with co-creator Paul Reiche III indicating he has tossed potential design ideas around, but with the company now owned by publisher Activision the proposal seems to be stuck in limbo."
I understand that they want to make a sequel to Star Control II, and that's awesome. However, I think that ship has long since passed. If they were really serious about carrying on the spirit of the game, they could simply make a new game in the Star Control style with a new background. That's why they're called "spiritual successors." I know that's not a true sequel, but that's about as good to one as we're going to get.
This game was published in 1992 and it EASILY is still one of the best PC games of all time.
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Master of Orion 2 differed from MOO1 in several fundamental ways. Most of those ways involved added minutiae to the game that didn't really add to the strategic depth of the game.
Take buildings for example. In MOO2 (and every bloody civ-in-space game since) you can erect specialized buildings on your planets that focus the planets production. There is a tiny amount of strategy in the order of building things, but once you figure out an optimal build order for different types of planets it's just an annoying game mechanic that gets in the way of expanding your empire, saying "Nice doggy!" to your would-be enemies while you research a bigger stick, etc..
Really, this sort of thing ammounts to shoe-horning an inferior version of sim-city into a game that doesn't need it. However, it's in every bloody 4X game people make these days, with Stardock's own Galactic Civilizations being one of the worst offenders. In MOO1, you could just set a slider telling each of your planets how much to devote to industry, research, ship production, etc..
This is the philosophy I would like to see the MOO franchise return to:
Create simple, intuitive, direct ways to manipulate a deep and complex system with cleverly balanced AI.
e.g. To allow players to focus production, give them a simple control, such as a set of sliders, instead of a sim-city clone mini-game.
Now, I know a lot of people love MOO2 and building buildings. It's a good game, and the mechanic is now utterly ubiquitous. However, if you liked MOO2 you can go play GalCiv or any of dozens of games that have all the same mechanics. If, however, the MOO franchise were to go back to it's MOO1 roots and try to find other ways for players to interact with the universe, we might finally see the ossified 4X genre evolve a little!
My thoughts on this subject:
We don't really need a MOO2 sequel; the game plays just fine on modern systems, the graphics are adequate, the only things I could really see as improvements would be making the graphics a little higher res, maybe some more variation in ship design, and it would be GREAT if the number of stars could be increased, maybe by a factor of 4? But thats really it; the game still works, and works well.
MOM is just more of a extreme case. While Age of Wonders: shadow magic is probably as close as we've got to a MOM2, it obviously just doesn't cut it. I still play MOM on occasion, and for about 15 minutes it's really annoying trying to interpret what the 320x240 graphics mean. And then you get caught up in the fantastic gameplay and forget about it. We don't need a sequel to MOM, we just need the license holder to improve the graphics and re-mix the fantastic audio to modern standards, and LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE ALONE.
The same goes for XCOM/UFO; The only thing wrong with the game is that it's old. update the graphics, update the audio, and release it.
3 ancient titles that the license holders could put minimal work into and get 3 best-selling games.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Like Star Control II was such a great game. Who the hell on slashdot even remembers it?
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