Development To Begin Soon On New Star Control Game

In 1990, a development studio called Toys for Bob created a game called Star Control, a fun little space combat game with a bit of strategy added in. In 1992, they released Star Control 2, a full-blown space adventure RPG, which became one of the seminal works of early PC gaming. (Later open-sourced and released for modern systems.) After that, creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III lost control of the franchise to Accolade, who botched Star Control 3 and eventually abandoned the series. Last July, Stardock, the studio behind Sins of a Solar Empire, acquired the rights, and they're now discussing their plans to resurrect the classic series. They'll be using Star Control 2 as a template and an inspiration for all aspects of the game, though they won't be using any of the IP from Star Control I & II. They've also contacted Ford and Reiche and will try to hold true to their creative intentions. (The two currently run an Activision game studio, so they won't be involved with the new game.) Production will begin this winter.

Comments

The fog of time

[hubie]

It adds credibility to include them, but I wonder if Ford and Reiche can remember what their creative intentions were after 20 years.

Re:The fog of time

[ultranova]

I do worry that they'll have to dumb it down for a modern audience and that worries me. SC3 suffered from this a bit. For example, you really had to take notes to complete SC2 unless you'd played it a dozen times before -- someone would mention a planet and star system in the middle of the conversation and if you forgot it you may never be able to get back to it. I LOVED that aspect of old games, but with pop-up maps and waypoints listed in auto-populated journals, newer games put this aspect on auto pilot. That's fine for many games -- it puts you deeper into actual gameplay, but it's an aspect I would sorely miss in SC2 if it weren't there.

I wouldn't. Automatically log every conversation and mark any coordinates mentioned, with a link back to the log. Why in blazes shouldn't the computer handle a simple and, frankly, tedious bookkeeping task? Removing manual copy-pasting of text is not "dumbing down" a game.

Re:The fog of time

[ZahrGnosis]

The problem is that there's a fine line between "convenient" and "mindless", and a lot of (perhaps most) games cross it.

I think this was a better way to state my point, so hat's off... I agree that a game shouldn't be tedious when something like automatic logging is implemented and doesn't detract from gameplay, but yes, my complaint is that too many games "cross the line". WoW is a great example, and I agree. I was mostly musing that since with SC2 the exploration was even more important since there's all but nothing nearby to get you started (the Spathi on the moon and a vacant star map was wildly less leading than the carefully crafted WoW story lines for each race), it is far more fragile to this sort of tuning. You could just wander into the stars, get lost, run out of gas, or fall afoul of an enemy you weren't prepared to defeat, lose the game and have to find a 20-gameplay-hour-old savegame to usefully recover. Games that have that sensation are few and far between (and many people prefer it that way), so I was mostly just musing about why I loved it and how difficult I think it is to find that balance.

Thanks for helping to clarify.

Re:The fog of time

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just wander into the stars, get lost, run out of gas, or fall afoul of an enemy you weren't prepared to defeat, lose the game and have to find a 20-gameplay-hour-old savegame to usefully recover. Games that have that sensation are few and far between (and many people prefer it that way), so I was mostly just musing about why I loved it and how difficult I think it is to find that balance.

Yeah, that sort of thing is a pain in the ass to do without being frustrating to a lot of players, because nobody likes getting stuck, even if it's your own damn fault you got stuck. Especially if it's your fault you got stuck, because it feels like the game is mocking you for screwing up. It generally needs some sort of graceful fail condition for certain problems, such as distress beacons, or a bad-ass auto-save feature that snapshots your progress so you don't have to constantly muck about with multiple saves unless something goes massively wrong. Or maybe a difficulty selection along the lines of "treat me gently" -- some sort of punishment for failure without it being a game-over -- along with a hardcore mode that crushes you for failure.

Related: that sort of "you're screwed, start over" thing is why roguelikes are a niche thing despite being generally awesome. Hardcore-style "die and start over" is a hard sell. Though, there is one roguelike that lets you respawn: Elona. Every time you die, you respawn but lose stats. This means that fluke deaths are less rage-inducing, but if you just suck at the game you eventually end up in an unwinnable condition.

Back on the exploration/railroading topic:

My preference is somewhere in between the two extremes, leaning more toward avoiding hand-holding. I like having an idea of where to go to make the story move on, but that's so that I know where to avoid until I'm ready. I note the next place to progress and then try to go everywhere except that place. Still, I don't mind when it's a bit vague, like "go to this sector" or "go west", at least for the important stuff. Gives you a reason to find new things while you look, you know? The problem is when EVERY bit of progress is like that, it stops being about what you want to do and turns into the "needle in a haystack" problem I mentioned.

The first two Fallout games were good for that. For example, in F2, they directed you to the first town, to the east, with some plot and a lack of interesting things north and west, but there was no requirement to stop there, or anywhere else. If you followed the plot you generally leveled with the content, but you could skip as much as you were able to survive. I wandered south one day on a new character and, through sheer RNG luck, got to the last quest hub town without a single random encounter (which would have splattered me in one hit). Didn't even know it was there, hadn't beaten game before, so it was pure chance, and made that playthrough unique in a way fully linear games fail to do.

I also think it's important that, even if you decide to go off on your own and ignore the plot, it should be possible to pick back up where you left off with minimal difficulty. If the game doesn't provide a way to easily find where the storyline was, it can discourage someone from exploring, because they're afraid of losing the plot.

Thanks for helping to clarify.

No problem. It sounds like you and ultranova don't necessarily want different things, just that games don't balance it well, even when exploration is a key aspect of the game. That mention of using Zim for games is 100% personal experience: it's incredible for keeping track of things that games don't provide any automatic tracking mechanisms for. The Minecraft book got a lot of use for a while, though now it's the Starbound one that's getting filled up with coordinates and other useful information.

Starbound gets a pass for now, since it's early access, but Minecraft's lack of any worthwhile navigation tools is completely unacceptable in a game that's as much about finding cool scenery as it is about playing virtual legos.

(same AC as before)

I am *expanding*!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is so *squishy* to make me a *happy camper*. I cannot wait to *smell* it.

Re:I am *expanding*!

[Stormalong]

You guys are so lame. Its just a video game.

Why don't you go outside and play some Frungy?

Some musings

[Akratist]

I wouldn't necessarily agree that SC 3 was "botched," although 2 was a better game. A real botch job was Master of Orion 3... That said, it should be interesting to see what Stardock does with this, given their track record with Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire. They need to resist temptation to make the game too "heavy," too -- no real need to turn it into a cartoonish version of SFB or something.

Re:Some musings

[Anubis IV]

So true.

MOO2 remains to this day my favorite game of all time, and MOO3 was such a letdown. I followed most of its development since the developers were extremely open during the entire process, but the fact that colonization, development of infrastructure, and most other detail-oriented actions were fully automated took the fun out of playing. As you said, it felt like watching a simulation that we were just there to observe, since we had very little actual ability to influence things. That feeling was only reinforced the first time I lost the game without ever establishing contact with a single other race...the game had decided I lost the simulation before I had ever had a chance to even influence it in a meaningful way.

Utterly absurd.

Re:Not in Debian...

[geminidomino]

Sure it is. Accolade still owns the name "Star Control 2", so the open source release was rebranded "The Ur-Quan Masters"

apt-get install uqm

Have any modern resurrections been very good?

[jollyreaper]

The closest I can think of is Civilization Revolutions. It's streamlined for console play, hardcore fans will probably call it kiddified, but I think that they really cut to the heart of the game without larding it up with too much cruft.

Beloved game sequels usually fall into two categories:
1) True fans who love the game and want to make their mark but end up cluttering the clean and elegant design of the original with entirely too much crap that bogs things down. See Master of Orion 2 to Master of Orion 1, later Civilization games on PC, etc.
2) Franchises purchased for IP name recognition but fundamentally different games are built, equivalent to when studios buy a stand-alone script and beat on it until it can become yet another sequel. Max Payne 3 was an entirely different game that they then stuck the Max logo on, sharing none of the original's atmosphere, play mechanics, or fun.

I can at least respect the true fans even if their efforts turn out like caked shit on the hairy ass of gamedom. I heard the new X-Com kind of straddled the line by being made by true fans who also tried to shift the genre and failed.

Re:Have any modern resurrections been very good?

[Hatta]

X-Com succeeded brilliantly.

Impressed I am to see such a following

[ackthpt]

I have the Amiga game in a desk drawer, which I tried playing a couple times, but found it far more time consuming than I was willing to commit to. No idea how involved it is, but it did look like a serious time sink, after reading the manual and wondered how such a game would fare. Perhaps I should dig it out and have another look at it.

I was more interested in a freebie little c compiled game called Conquest, which had something like 20 stars, each with between 0 and 2 possible planets, which could be played in about an hour per session. Variations on that game included one where AI included certain personalities - Dwarf, which tended to colonize slowly but built heavy defences, something else which was aggressive as heck, but didn't defend itself much at all and at least one other which tended to throw a lot of resources at developing highest tech weaponry and starcraft.

I'm more of a casual gamer now and tend toward games I can play in less than 2 hours, but have had a soft spot for the old Trade and Conquest type games (such as Elite) since I played something on a mainframe in college.

Star Flight 1 & 2

[LongearedBat]

I would really like to see Starflight (and Starflight 2) resurrected as well.

The various aliens and the story provided perspectives of human issues/problems with humorous ways. But they were fun! And they were inspirations for the Star Control games.

Please, pretty please, perhaps after they've revamped Star Control, could they revamp Starflight? Pleeease!

Re:Star Flight 1 & 2

[Sowelu]

Yes! Those were my favorite games growing up (aside from Zork). I'd love that.

Just...just as long as they make flux nexuses less of an exercise in confused terror.

Re:Star Flight 1 & 2

[mark-t]

Ditto on the Starflight recommend. SF 1 had an amazingly detailed story that required some real-life skills with regards to problem solving and knowing how to take good notes from a conversation that isn't going to get recorded, with a climactic plot revelation that honestly made me gasp in total awe right where i was sitting when I discovered it shortly before the end of the game. I

Starflight 2 was equally compelling in terms of story, and shared many of Starflight 1's strengths, it's biggest flaw was in the endgame, which, in retrospect, felt more like a final boss fight than a carefully calculated set of actions chosen by the player to produce the intended conclusion. After the fight, the game was just over, with nothing more to do. The biggest "oh my god" moment (at least for me) in that game actually came as expository text after that battle, so I felt more disappointed with that game than the first. Overall still an excellent game though, and I would sorely love to see a continuation of the series that was true to the spirit of the originals, and especially had as much continuity with them as SF2 did with SF1.

Re:Star Flight 1 & 2

[pthisis]

I wouldn't even say they were "inspirations". Star Control 2 was a spirtual successor to Starflight, except for some cool arcade combat added in--aside from that, the game is mechanically pretty similar with the same kind of intergalactic maps, system maps, planet exploration, etc.

They're close enough that I'd almost say SC2 is a rip-off of Starflight, except that Paul Reiche was one of the lead designers on both and I'm not sure you can rip off yourself. But it's a much closer relationship than just "inspired by".

Reiche also the primary guy responsible for Archon (which is in some ways an inspiration for the combat arena part of Star Control 2, though very much more a loose inspiration than an obvious predecessor) and was one of the early TSR Dungeons and Dragons guys.

Re:Star Flight 1 & 2

[bored_engineer]

Ah, how many untold lost hours I spent on those two games. I filled notebooks with information about areas to avoid, resources, et c. I was a little more fond of the first than the second, but both were great.

Alas, though, I don't have the time to spend on these any more. I wonder how many people of an age to remember the games still enjoy gaming? I've bought Humble Bundles three times, intending to have a little fun, but still haven't even bother to install anything I bought. These days, I might spend a few minutes on Slashdot, but my kids, wife, work and chores all conspire to fill my waking hours.

Already disappointed

[duke_cheetah2003]

They'll be using Star Control 2 as a template and an inspiration for all aspects of the game, though they won't be using any of the IP from Star Control I & II.

Sorry, it just won't be Star Control without the Arilou, Yehat and Pkunk. No original IP means it's just not going to be Star Control. Just a totally new game hijacking the original name.