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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.
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!
What happened to OSS voice recognition?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all?
Sorry, I tried to use my Vista VR engine to reply.
I meant to say "you can find some info on that subject here"
In 2009, everyone is supposed to have enough bandwidth for audio; that's not the problem. What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely. There are some areas where audio and video are really useful (eg entertainment), but most of the time text is the superior medium for presenting information.
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!
If you want to make a good game based on a series/movie/comic book/whatever, you need to capture the spirit of the base.
Star Trek is about mystery, riddles, discovery, and technobabble. Aside from the technobabble this is difficult to do right - not many games have this at their core. Compare this with Star Wars with is about action with a touch of Mysticism. The action part has been done in a lot of games, and is easy to do right.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
Phasers one-shot targets for one reason, and one reason only: plot. The only times that combat was a going plot concern in any Star Trek series, the phasers were plotted out of existence or plenty of cover and bad marksmanship was provided.
I don't think this game is going to be any better than the array of godawful Interplay releases, but complaining that a weapon in an MMO doesn't kill people outright is ridiculous.
>It IS interesting how one franchise, namely Star Wars, could generate so many playable games while another, Star Trek, produced only crap.
Easy. The creator of the former built its own game studio to make sure the games were made right; the latter whored out its IP to anyone who asked.