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Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games
In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
What happened to good old bandwidth-friendly text?
Circumcision is child abuse.
When they talk about OLD star trek games and you see them talking about Fury and not 25th anniversary... or the freeware/shareware enterprise simulators of the dos era...
Now get of my damn spaceship!
It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap. Of course, third person shooters, even if your weapon is a lightsaber, are much easier to make than space fighter simulations, especially when there actually is not one dude commanding and piloting the ship himself but a whole bunch of people working together. Nobody ever accused capturing that as being easy.
I was putting high hopes into STOnline... until I saw that video from E3, I believe it was. Two Klingons standing across the hall from five Federation type people. One of them stands directly in front of the Klingon. So what happens? A short bout of Phaser fire and perhaps a bit of one on one? No. It took them like thirty seconds to take an unmoving target down and surely somewhere among ten to fifteen Phaser blasts.
So basically, they copied WoW. You have your stats, the enemy has his and you just trade blows until the weaker one dies.
WTF?
When did that EVER happen in ANY Star Trek series or movie? They use weapons that kill instantly (or at least stun, unless you are Borg). Not swords or axes that may be excused with glancing blows.
So yes, making this somewhat 'realistic' is harder than a fantasy game for the masses. You should have realized that even before you began.
I believe Star Trek games are crappy because the developers feel we ST fans are somehow pretty dumb. That we'll gobble up any game that even hints as letting us play as our heroes. So they slap some crude Star Trek graphics on the cheapest source code they can find. They cut corners when something is harder to do.
So what do you expect?
Why can't they just make more Starfleet Command games? Forget the third dimention of outer space for a second. Yeah, it might have well been old earth sailing vessels, but those games did a good job of simulating battles between heavy-hitting space cruisers at a reasonable pace. The only problem was the incredibly boring and repetitive missions in the single player.
I especially enjoyed the 3rd game in the series for bringing it up to the more recent era of Trek and adding in customizable ships.
The Quake 2 fan-made map of NCC-1701-D remains, by far, the best Star Trek game experience I've ever encounter. It had the bridge, captain's room, working transporter pads, a sickbay, Jeffries tubes and if you shot the warp core in engineering, the ship will blow up and game over.
That quote made me smile:
He points out other roadblocks to development, such as Christmas party planning distractions
Yeah, because had everyone ordered supper and stayed late instead of going to the party and got in early the morning after instead of over-sleeping from alcohol intoxication during a Saturday, they surely would have made their deadline! Hey, they even provided the sleeping bags.
Oh, and Bob and Cindy spent a couple of hours planning the party each few weeks prior to it. 30 minutes of video footage lost right there!
Management primer: if you're seriously thinking about making your employees skip a Christmas party, the schedule started slipping a looong time ago!
Hi,
The game Birth of the Federation has been an
excellent Star Trek game. Friends of mine still play it on a regular basis
even though it's a decade old.
CU, Martin
You know, "Old" Star Trek games by Interplay, which captured the spirit of the Original Series perfectly all the way up to the end-of-episode's philosophical discussion and/or ragging Spock.
Wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(1992_video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Judgment_Rites
If you can find these on somewhere and like adventure games, get'em.
I can'na change the laws of software development captain!
[signature]
1. It's usually the bigger companies that get them, not smaller ones.
2. Licensed properties are seen as licenses to print money, the fans will buy whatever slop goes on the market.
3. Consequently the push for the developer is to get something with the licensed faces out the door, no matter whether or not it's any good.
4. Fans go on to purchase these games, living down to the expectations of the publishers.
5. A dependable if not spectacular profit is made from the game.
6. Publishers greenlight another unimaginative, unenjoyable, underdeveloped, hackneyed licensed game.
There was a game based on the old Starfleet Battles tabletop game. Came out yonks ago. It was pretty much half-completed. It had a lot of ambition, you could tell it had the potential to be a good game, but it was seriously only half complete! Sure, the graphics were pretty, single ship and small fleet actions played out fine, but the entire strategic element was obviously spanked together in a weekend. They released a sequel not too long after that. Was it the game they originally planned, this time completed? No. If anything, they broke what did work and replaced the half-baked strategic mode with the distilled essence of pain and suffering, squeezed from the souls of the unborn.
Terribly disappointed.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie
But how many Libraries if Congress would it have been?
caritj.org
So they managed to turn Star Wars, Batman and Indiana Jones into amusing takes on the respective franchises. Who wouldn't want to play with the Star Trek universe in Lego form as well? There's certainly enough TV series and movies to make games out of.
Arcade games are a different breed entirely. While yes, I did spend a few dozen too many quarters on the Voyager arcade game, arcade games don't have the luxury of using complex gameplay mechanics. If one or two screens (and possibly a few in-game prompts) can't explain the game mechanics, players will lose interest quickly and hop onto the next game. When I go to the arcade, I see DDR, Guitar Hero, air hockey, skee-ball, some racing games, and about a dozen different gallery shooters with various minor differences. The Voyager arcade game fit squarely into that last category. I will say that the Star Wars arcade game I played was better done, so I guess even arcade games can have better gameplay mechanics than others. I don't think it's fair in this context though, because Interplay wasn't making the Star Trek arcade games - they were making the console and PC games.
A better game to compare it to was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. While it was largely Quake 3 with Voyager styled maps and character and weapon models, was a bit short, and lacked a high replay value on the single player side (beat it in one long sitting the third time), the story was on par with most episodes of the series and the multiplayer is excellent. The sequel involved the TNG cast and flip-flopped it a bit - I liked the single player campaigns much better than the multiplayer.
I might be a bit partial as I do enjoy a solid FPS (loved Crysis, enjoyed Prey, Timeshift, and Halo 2), but as I played through Mass Effect, I kept saying to myself, "This is exactly what a Trek game SHOULD be". Mass Effect did what few Star Wars games do (KOTOR 1&2 notwithstanding), is allow the players to make decisions that impact the outcome of the game, just like the characters of the series do. Quite literally getting to choose which crew member to save is something straight out of any number of Star Trek episodes, but strangely enough never really found its way into any of the star trek games that I played (Except Star Trek Borg, which was basically all decisions and was terribly implemented). The trek universe doesn't lend itself to FPS games and space shooters as much as Star Wars does, so finding the right formula for a killer Trek game with general appeal and executing it properly is a much more daunting task for a game developer. I'm certain that it will happen eventually.