Star Control: Origins - Star Control reboot from Stardock

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The Chenjesu most probably know of Humans by this point, but First Contact with them isn't until 2112. In fact...here comes the problematic part...First Contact with any alien species isn't until 2112 by official canon.

So how are they going to make a Star Control game if you don't meet any alien species in it?

They are going for alternative universe route.
So this game (and possible sequels) will happen in their own contained timeline.

 

[Zarniwoop]

All the screenshots posted are from the planetary landing game (those of them that aren't concept art, that is) and it looks good. I can get behind that.

The 2085 setting is interesting: It's the year that the Androsynth rebel against their Human masters and flee into deep space with all of Humanity's orbital space stations. The Androsynth also developed hyperdrives (which the Humans didn't) so I'm guessing they pieced together stole the tech from the Androsynth as they left, and you command the first fleet that explores beyond Sol.

The Chenjesu most probably know of Humans by this point, but First Contact with them isn't until 2112. In fact...here comes the problematic part...First Contact with any alien species isn't until 2112 by official canon.

So how are they going to make a Star Control game if you don't meet any alien species in it?

By anally penetrating the canon in a way that would make JJ Abrams go "that's a bit much, don't you think?"

Did you not read LESS T_T's post? Let me translate a few phrases from developer-speak to English:

Set in an alternate universe - We get to do what ever the fuck we want, we don't have to respect, care about, like, or even know the original story and timeline. But we'll gladly take the name built up by others.

Most people who get into the new Star Control will never have played or even heard of the classic series from the early 1990s - It will be dumbed down as all hell and cater to a bunch of millennial morons with a 5 second attention span. It will hold your hand and present "click here to practice rotating the camera" tutorials in stark, painful contrast to the original games which threw you into the very deep end.

Star Control 3, however, takes place on Earth-Crux - Hurr, we are too stoopid to know that Star Control 3 doesn't contain or take place anywhere near Earth. Let's just phone this one in and set it in another timeline.

The biggest challenge we had was determining what is and isn't canon and how to have new adventures without overwriting what came before. - Yeah guys, better not overwrite what came before. We should probably set it after the last events in the previous game then right? LOLNOPE, before everyfuckingthing where there's a 100% chance of overwriting stuff.

At this point I am convinced the game will suck, and would not be surprised to see a million lens flares everywhere and FTL engines made from brewery tanks.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

All the screenshots posted are from the planetary landing game (those of them that aren't concept art, that is) and it looks good. I can get behind that.

The 2085 setting is interesting: It's the year that the Androsynth rebel against their Human masters and flee into deep space with all of Humanity's orbital space stations. The Androsynth also developed hyperdrives (which the Humans didn't) so I'm guessing they pieced together stole the tech from the Androsynth as they left, and you command the first fleet that explores beyond Sol.

The Chenjesu most probably know of Humans by this point, but First Contact with them isn't until 2112. In fact...here comes the problematic part...First Contact with any alien species isn't until 2112 by official canon.

So how are they going to make a Star Control game if you don't meet any alien species in it?

By anally penetrating the canon in a way that would make JJ Abrams go "that's a bit much, don't you think?"

Did you not read LESS T_T's post? Let me translate a few phrases from developer-speak to English:

Set in an alternate universe - We get to do what ever the fuck we want, we don't have to respect, care about, like, or even know the original story and timeline. But we'll gladly take the name built up by others.

Most people who get into the new Star Control will never have played or even heard of the classic series from the early 1990s - It will be dumbed down as all hell and cater to a bunch of millennial morons with a 5 second attention span.

Star Control 3, however, takes place on Earth-Crux - Hurr, we are too stoopid to know that Star Control 3 doesn't contain or take place anywhere near Earth. Let's just phone this one in and set it in another timeline.

The biggest challenge we had was determining what is and isn't canon and how to have new adventures without overwriting what came before. - Yeah guys, better not overwrite what came before. We should probably set it after the last events in the previous game then right? LOLNOPE, before everyfuckingthing where there's a 100% chance of overwriting stuff.

At this point I am convinced the game will suck, and would not be surprised to see a million lens flares everywhere and FTL engines made from brewery tanks.

Pretty much this.
But I'm completely willing to lynch them after they have fucked up.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I'll admit that it just didn't register for me.

But with that in mind...Stardock is screwed. They'll be the second studio to go under because of the Star Control franchise.

Stardock has on their hands a franchise that's 25+ years old, and has only been kept alive all these years by the fans...a fanbase that's been steadily dwindling in recent years.

Stardock has the license and intends to use it...by ignoring the very essence of what kept the Star Control franchise alive all these years: The world that Toys for Bob built, and its fans.

We're back to 1998 folks, when Accolade decided that the fourth Star Control game was to distance itself as far as possible away from any and all creations made by TfB...a decision Accolade didn't survive.

Alienating the fanbase is not how you build a franchise. No one is gonna give a shit about this game.

 

[Infinitron]

Star Control 3, however, takes place on Earth-Crux - Hurr, we are too stoopid to know that Star Control 3 doesn't contain or take place anywhere near Earth. Let's just phone this one in and set it in another timeline.

Pretty sure that's not what they mean by "Earth-UrQuan" and "Earth-Crux". It's comic book lingo for denoting alternate canons.

 

[MRY]

Having twice tried to create Star Control 2-type games (once a pretty direct clone called Pilgrim and once a more FTL-like game called Star Captain), I am not surprised by some of the moves here.

There are many challenges in creating a setting/narrative that works for a SC2-like, but here are three of them, which are all kind of variants on another: (1) Why isn't the entire sector already totally mapped, with all its mysteries already fully discovered? (2) Why aren't there 10,000 other ships engage in exactly the same adventure you're engaged in? (3) What does one lifeone ship matter in a conflict of this scale?

The genius of Star Control 2 is that it achieved these things without using the Voyager-style premise of a ship cast across the galaxy to some undiscovered region. That meant they could retain the aliens of SC1, and the setting of SC1, while still enabling discovery. They managed to justify #2 and #3 as part of how they justified #1, which is further evidence of the brilliance.

When taking over the Star Control 2 IP, the single most valuable aspect has to be the aliens. If you look at SC3, a big part of why it was so frustrating for players is that it ditched / distorted many of the aliens in order to solve problems 1-3 above. But it's hard to know what other solutions they could have found to the problem. With the distance of even more time, other aspects of SC2 have diminished in value -- not just its brand awareness but also its design. For example, while I love Super Melee to death and would love it no less today, I'm somewhat skeptical that Super Melee and its features are really that valuable. (Another challenge of Star Control 2 cloning: how do you keep the design simple and quick, while not having it being utterly stupid. There's a huge temptation to want to do stuff like large-scale fleet battles, complex planetary settlements, etc. -- again, see SC3.)

Anyway, Stardock has to figure out how to both retain the aliens and solve problems 1-3 above, and the easiest way to do that is to reboot the history while keeping the setting. I think their move is not only smart but possibly the only move available: anything that follows after SC2 and has similar gameplay to SC2 basically requires a Voyager-style premise, and a Voyager-style premise basically requires ditching or minimizing the SC2 aliens, which are its best part. The only alternative is some kind of lame The Force Awakens "sequel that is really a reboot" where something else wipes out everyone's technology and fleets and so forth and leaves the status quo as exactly where SC2 began while still having SC2 in the timeline. If you prefer that, that's fine, but to me it's six one, half dozen another, maybe even worse than that because at least a reboot hypothetically can make things better.

Incidentally, I assume this game will be terrible. Master of Orion II is one of my favorite games ever but I hated Galactic Civilizations 2 because it suffered from exactly the kind of feature-bloat that I complained of in the fourth paragraph above. MOO2 already had a way of feeling accretive and grindy at times, but there was still a chunky, tactile progression at its heart that was totally lost in GalCiv2 (IMHO). I am assuming the exact same will happen with this reboot: it will have superficially similar systems, but they will all be made way more complex so that what is essentially a pulp space opera gets turned into some dense attempt to realistically model space empires, etc., etc., etc. My fear is driven not just by GalCiv but by outlandish facts like this being their most expensive game next and requiring state-of-the-art graphics and ominous statements like "you could make an entire game around Star Control's planet exploration concept."

All this is to say that while I am pessimistic about the game, I'm not pessimistic because of the decision to create a variant timeline.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Interesting points MRY which is why I must ask: Have you looked at the fan-made Project 6014 mod for Star Control 2? Because it rises up to a lot of your points without going down the "Voyager" path.

P6014 (currently only a demo is available) uses the Star Control 2 engine and takes place 5 years after the events of SC2. The New Alliance of Free Stars is stretching its space legs and exploring in all directions after crushing both Ur-Quan armadas. The story is that the Captain is called back to explore a possible new threat in an unexplored region of space, and is given a prototype scout vessel to fly about in.

So where is this "unexplored region of space?" Right behind you, so to say. The bottom-left quadrant of the original SC2 map is now the top-right quadrant, with three new quadrants of space now available for exploration (meaning that the Pkunk homeworld is now almost at the center of the map). This means that old species like Humans, Chmmr, Spathi, Syreen, Orz, Shofixti, VUX and Yehat make return appearances as their space is still in the game, but the Slylandro, Melnorme and Kohr-Ah also make appearances, with the Androsynth also scheduled to return.

So how does P6014 deal with your three points?

#1 has already been answered, the focus of the game is in another direction relevant to Sol. More of the same, plus new stuff.

#2 is the hardest one to answer, but the combo of "unknown danger", "unexplored region of space" and "man with the experience" should suffice for now. Also, P6014 adds convoy ships moving between various Alliance planets, so the illusion of bustling space activity is at least attempted. A further point is that due to internal problems within the Alliance, most of the fleet will be unable to commit to assisting the Captain.

#3 is where the demo ends, oddly enough. The demo ends with the Captain encountering a new alien species that's guarding a Planet of Interest. On the planet's surface is a Precursor battlecruiser, also known as the Mark II (the one hinted at in the end of SC2). This is the ship that the Captain will be flying for the rest of the game, a powerful Precursor warship, though not as powerful as the Sa-Matra. Through that, justifications can be made that the pre-existing modules used on the Precursor vessel from SC2 won't work right off the bat, they'll need to be modified and adjusted...which is where Infinitron the Melnorme come in. "Purchase our upgraded modules for a modest price!"

So yeah...a fan project that sadly looks to be dead in the water has more potential than something that all the king's men and all the king's horses over at Stardock can't seem to put back together.

As for your thoughts on Super Melee - another Star Control fan project may provide an answer: Star Control Timewarp. In short, it's multiplayer Super Melee. Ever tried 4-player Super Melee? It's a fragfest of epic proportions. The last stable build I used (from 2005 or thereabouts) also had tons of new ships, some of them quite clever in design...and some of them not.

 

[MRY]

I was intrigued with P6014, as I've been intrigued by various similar fan projects over the years (TimeWarp, StarFlight 3, etc.). In fact, Pyke and I crossed paths years and years ago when he was making a Star Control 2 game of his own. I never played P6014, though, as it seemed unlikely to go anywhere, and some of the product quality looked a little dodgy.

Based on your description, it seems to run into the problem of explaining why no one had ever looked in that adjacent direction before or during the Ur-Quan war (i.e., the war in SC1) or in its aftermath. Moreover, I'm not sure I'm persuaded that hand waving about "internal problems" is convincing -- it might be, or it might not be, but it smacks of "Death Star III just blew up the entire Republic fleet, so now we're back to the status quo when the Rebels were the weak guys." I'm curious how they justify mining's relevance, for example, given that the (very clever) justification in SC2 was that you were the sole source of raw materials for the sole factory the good guys had. The fact that there are now "convoys" running seems to me to underscore, rather than resolve, the problem of how to keep the focus on the player-character. I'm not arguing with you -- since I haven't played the game, I can't -- but just trying to explain better my own concerns as under-articulated above.

Regarding TimeWarp, I found it initially quite intriguing and then fairly rapidly lost interest. As with many amateur projects, it was fairly cargo cultish and I always felt that it failed to capture the elegance of SuperMelee. But that might also just be a matter of (1) I played SuperMelee hotseat with high school friends, throwing punches whenever you were cheated, and TimeWarp couldn't possibly replicate that experience; (2) maybe I just lost interest in that kind of gameplay?

So yeah...a fan project that sadly looks to be dead in the water has more potential than something that all the king's men and all the king's horses over at Stardock can't seem to put back together.

I don't know. P6014 obviously will feel more like SC2 because it's in the Ur-Quan Masters engine, reuses the original assets, etc. But I'm not sure that this kind of fan fiction is really likely to be better than what Stardock does, and in any event it will never be made, so it's a little like saying that a fossilized dinosaur egg has more potential to make a cool dinosaur than a live chicken egg -- chickens may be pretty lame as dinosaurs go, but at least it might hatch. Ultimately, I'm pessimistic about Stardock, but I'm even more pessimistic about P6014.

I will say that of all the SC sequel mumblings I've ever seen (and I've seen a lot), the best by far are the scribbles of Niklas Jansson (more here). He used to have a lot more showing his story ideas, including an amazing shot involving the Druuge disassembling a colony ship. Wish I could find it. :/

 

[Zarniwoop]

Star Control 3, however, takes place on Earth-Crux - Hurr, we are too stoopid to know that Star Control 3 doesn't contain or take place anywhere near Earth. Let's just phone this one in and set it in another timeline.

Pretty sure that's not what they mean by "Earth-UrQuan" and "Earth-Crux". It's comic book lingo for denoting alternate canons.

Pretty much all comic books take place on Earth though.

And are for children.

 

[Pyke]

I was intrigued with P6014, as I've been intrigued by various similar fan projects over the years (TimeWarp, StarFlight 3, etc.). In fact, Pyke and I crossed paths years and years ago when he was making a Star Control 2 game of his own. I never played P6014, though, as it seemed unlikely to go anywhere, and some of the product quality looked a little dodgy.

I miss the days of PONAF. :/

Nic and I actually met Fred and George at GDC, and had an hour conversation with them after the talk.

God I love Star Control 2.

 

[Beastro]

Set in an alternate universe - We get to do what ever the fuck we want, we don't have to respect, care about, like, or even know the original story and timeline. But we'll gladly take the name built up by others.

That's better than what happened in SCIII...

Most people who get into the new Star Control will never have played or even heard of the classic series from the early 1990s - It will be dumbed down as all hell and cater to a bunch of millennial morons with a 5 second attention span. It will hold your hand and present "click here to practice rotating the camera" tutorials in stark, painful contrast to the original games which threw you into the very deep end.

It won't have timed shit that you need bust your ass to do I bet.

As much as I find that nerve wrecking, it's as much a hallmark of the series as the aliens. The central arch of the game I found is preventing the Pkunk from killing themselves. I don't recall if SCIII had it, but it left a huge impression in II that it'll leave a hole that wasn't as big a notice going from Fallout 1 to 2.

We should probably set it after the last events in the previous game then right? LOLNOPE, before everyfuckingthing where there's a 100% chance of overwriting stuff.

TBH SCIII fucked that with what they did in many places. For me it was what happened to the Orz and tying them as an after thought into the plot with their inexplicable betryal when they should have played a more central role in a later addition.

They're presence in SCII screams of foreshadowing and talking to them you get a strong feeling you're making a deal with the devil that will be a huge problem down the line, either when they get tired of "playing" or when the full effects of their "party" become known.

In that regard, starting off with the Androsynth rebellion is a good place to a pick a new game, then skip to SCII being lagel the same then make SCIII in fresh territory before an SCIV deals with the Orz with the Orz being a presence, directly or indirectly, in all of them as things build up to them going all eldritch horror on everyone.

In the end the story might improve, but i doubt the gameplay will.

 

[rezaf]

Gotta love Brad for always pointing at 20 year old games and explaining how what they created back in the day with a small team of developers to run on computers with laughable hardware is oh SO hard to replicate today.
(In Elemental he excused much of the games' lifelessness by the limitations of 32bit and 4gig of RAM.)

I have little faith in this ending up any good for the same reason Trash pointed out back in 2013 (on page 1) - Stardock is appearently incapable of making games which have a rich atmosphere and are engaging to play.
They can't create light-hearted stuff, both when it comes to interface and to gameplay.
All the things a Star Control game requires Stardock has so far proven incapable of providing.

If I were to pick a studio to make such game, you know who I'd turn to? On of them russian sweatshops churning out one hidden object game after another. They are used to create pleasing, casual friendly artwork, they are used to weave in storylines, they are used to mix in minigames of various sorts, they don't require fancy 3D artwork that they technically cannot afford and thus end up cutting corners with so it all looks lifeless, cheap and bland as Stardock does - they'd just make a nicely drawn 2D game with some polished minigames, populated by wacky aliens and with a half serious/half tongue-in-cheek storyline. That's all it takes.

 

[Callisto]

On of them russian sweatshops churning out one hidden object game after another. They are used to create pleasing, casual friendly artwork, they are used to weave in storylines, they are used to mix in minigames of various sorts, they don't require fancy 3D artwork that they technically cannot afford and thus end up cutting corners with so it all looks lifeless, cheap and bland as Stardock does - they'd just make a nicely drawn 2D game with some polished minigames, populated by wacky aliens and with a half serious/half tongue-in-cheek storyline. That's all it takes.

Let me guess : ERS

 

[Callisto]

All the screenshots posted are from the planetary landing game (those of them that aren't concept art, that is) and it looks good. I can get behind that.

The 2085 setting is interesting: It's the year that the Androsynth rebel against their Human masters and flee into deep space with all of Humanity's orbital space stations. The Androsynth also developed hyperdrives (which the Humans didn't) so I'm guessing they pieced together stole the tech from the Androsynth as they left, and you command the first fleet that explores beyond Sol.

The Chenjesu most probably know of Humans by this point, but First Contact with them isn't until 2112. In fact...here comes the problematic part...First Contact with any alien species isn't until 2112 by official canon.

So how are they going to make a Star Control game if you don't meet any alien species in it?

By anally penetrating the canon in a way that would make JJ Abrams go "that's a bit much, don't you think?"

Did you not read LESS T_T's post? Let me translate a few phrases from developer-speak to English:

Set in an alternate universe - We get to do what ever the fuck we want, we don't have to respect, care about, like, or even know the original story and timeline. But we'll gladly take the name built up by others.

Most people who get into the new Star Control will never have played or even heard of the classic series from the early 1990s - It will be dumbed down as all hell and cater to a bunch of millennial morons with a 5 second attention span. It will hold your hand and present "click here to practice rotating the camera" tutorials in stark, painful contrast to the original games which threw you into the very deep end.

Star Control 3, however, takes place on Earth-Crux - Hurr, we are too stoopid to know that Star Control 3 doesn't contain or take place anywhere near Earth. Let's just phone this one in and set it in another timeline.

The biggest challenge we had was determining what is and isn't canon and how to have new adventures without overwriting what came before. - Yeah guys, better not overwrite what came before. We should probably set it after the last events in the previous game then right? LOLNOPE, before everyfuckingthing where there's a 100% chance of overwriting stuff.

At this point I am convinced the game will suck, and would not be surprised to see a million lens flares everywhere and FTL engines made from brewery tanks.

You forgot to translate this :

" We are working hard to make sure Star Control will run on almost any system that supports DirectX 11, DirectX 12, or Vulkan. "

I think he said : " Fuck your old hardware . Buy a new PC if you want to play this game . "

 

[Zarniwoop]

Set in an alternate universe - We get to do what ever the fuck we want, we don't have to respect, care about, like, or even know the original story and timeline. But we'll gladly take the name built up by others.

That's better than what happened in SCIII...

No one said SCIII was a masterpiece of gaeming history. In fact it was pretty much universally hated.

It had some good ideas that could have made SC2 even better (3D rotatable map, mouse interface, colonies to refuel at), but took a giant dump all over it with things like not giving a fuck about continuity (lel Ur-quans are one race now), turning the wacky, cartoony-looking aliens with surprisingly deep writing into clay puppets with cartoony, unfunny and often downright nonsensical writing.

Ugh. Make stoopid moron Crux. Everyone like killing retard. Winning more fun when opponent dumb as rock. Or, opponent actual rock. We smart. Make enemy rock. Funny.

The central arch of the game I found is preventing the Pkunk from killing themselves.

Not true. It's about preventing ALL the races from killing themselves and/or each other, while exploring the stars and discovering the secrets of long dead alien races, and then using whoever hasn't killed themselves in a final struggle against an overwhelming evil enemy.

Kind of like maintaining the balance of power of pre-WW1 for long enough to stand together against Russians.

TBH SCIII fucked that with what they did in many places. For me it was what happened to the Orz and tying them as an after thought into the plot with their inexplicable betryal when they should have played a more central role in a later addition.

Again with the SCIII. It was shit. Saying that is was shit in no way makes a cash-in by a Windows skin company any less shit.

 

[Infinitron]

(lel Ur-quans are one race now)

You never built another Ur-Quan colony, eh

 

[Zarniwoop]

(lel Ur-quans are one race now)

You never built another Ur-Quan colony, eh

All the time. I would build only those if their reproduction rate was faster than that of a kakapo. It makes them pretty near useless as colony builders.

 

[Infinitron]

(lel Ur-quans are one race now)

You never built another Ur-Quan colony, eh

All the time. I would build only those if their reproduction rate was faster than that of a kakapo. It makes them pretty near useless as colony builders.

Then you would have seen that after a while, the Kohr-Ah rebel and take over half of them. You can talk to them and everything.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

The central arch of the game I found is preventing the Pkunk from killing themselves.

Spoiler

Pkunk don't actually kill themselves.

Not true. It's about preventing ALL the races from killing themselves and/or each other

Spoiler

I was more annoyed about lack of any mention about Yehat in SC3, than Ur-Quan/Kohr-ah plotline.
Though the whole game is just terrible.

 

[Zarniwoop]

(lel Ur-quans are one race now)

You never built another Ur-Quan colony, eh

All the time. I would build only those if their reproduction rate was faster than that of a kakapo. It makes them pretty near useless as colony builders.

Then you would have seen that after a while, the Kohr-Ah rebel and take over half of them. You can talk to them and everything.

Thanks Captain Obvious. I never noticed that in my seven playthroughs of the game.

OK only 3 but I'm being edgy to make a point. The sudden resumption of the Doctrinal Conflict is almost as dumb as the magickal genetic joining of the two that they explain in the game's backstory.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Does Stardock have any experience in making action games?
Much can be forgiven if melee is fun.

 

[JarlFrank]

Incidentally, I assume this game will be terrible. Master of Orion II is one of my favorite games ever but I hated Galactic Civilizations 2 because it suffered from exactly the kind of feature-bloat that I complained of in the fourth paragraph above. MOO2 already had a way of feeling accretive and grindy at times, but there was still a chunky, tactile progression at its heart that was totally lost in GalCiv2 (IMHO). I am assuming the exact same will happen with this reboot: it will have superficially similar systems, but they will all be made way more complex so that what is essentially a pulp space opera gets turned into some dense attempt to realistically model space empires, etc., etc., etc. My fear is driven not just by GalCiv but by outlandish facts like this being their most expensive game next and requiring state-of-the-art graphics and ominous statements like "you could make an entire game around Star Control's planet exploration concept."

MoO2 is one of my favourite games too, but I hate GalCiv 2 because it has a poverty of gameplay, not a bloat of features.
In MoO2, at the end of the tech tree you can blow apart an enemy planet, colonize another planet in the same system, re-build the destroyed planet from the asteroid field it left behind, and terraform it until it becomes a gaia class planet. There are space creatures guarding some systems, there are many planet types all of which can be colonized, there are connections between some systems making travel faster, etc etc.
THERE IS JUST SO MUCH COOL STUFF TO DO
In GalCiv2, half of the planets you encounter will never be colonizeable at all, they're just there and you can't interact with them. What the shit? It's a 4x game I'm supposed to exploit all the things I discover, why the fuck can't I exploit all these planets?
Also, MoO2 has incredible atmosphere and interesting (even though unbalanced) races. Psilons with their multi research, Silicoids who need no food, Elerians who know all the systems in the galaxy from the start. And then you have the really cool custom civ designer which lets you pick all those cool unique traits that actually change gameplay rather than just giving you +X% of some stat.
In GalCiv2, everything is generic. There is no atmosphere, no sense of lore, it's just bland and boring and unimaginative.

MoO2 has all that sense of wonder and discovery and awesomeness that a space colonization game should have.
GalCiv2 has none of this; it might as well just be a spreadsheet.

This lack of soul, and lack of anything fun to do, is what makes this game boring, and what will likely make their Star Control boring too because SC is all about having a lot of cool things to do and having a sense of lore and a thick atmosphere.
I don't trust Stardock to deliver on any of this. They are good at balancing mechanics, but balanced mechanics don't matter if everything is boring.

 

[Beastro]

The central arch of the game I found is preventing the Pkunk from killing themselves.

I meant structurally in the game. The game is fairly standard traveling around until they decide to take their trip, then suddenly it becomes a balancing act keeping an eye on them on the map while continuing on.

 

[rezaf]

Let me guess : ERS

Didn't have a specific one in mind, actually. I hardly played any HOGs, but enough to realize how they evolved from a simple chain of find-this-item-in-a-clutter puzzles, sometimes tied together by a small story wrapper, to a often pretty complex web of minigames of various sorts (usually other casual friendly puzzle stuff like match-3 variants and whatnot, but sometimes also action/arcade-like sequences) with a pretty heavy emphasis on story.
One thing that also matters (and that Stardock really struggles with) is those games are usually extremely polished. The UI is always responsive, fast and user-friendly, there's tutorials for both the main game and the minigames offered ... it's all laid out in a way to be easy to absorb by the typical casual, totally non-tech-savvy HOG player.

Heck, those games usually come with a pretty detailed settings menu when starting a game where you can decide yourself whether you want a timer on puzzles or not, whether more or less hints should be given and all sorts of such things,
I often wished modern games would let me make such decisions myself.
Think in a 3D shooter - do I want to be able to SaveAnywhere or rely on the pre-placed savepoints for more of a challenge? How fast should health regenerate? How plentiful do I want ammo to be? What about my running speed?
Usually there are ways to tweak many things, either by tweaking the gamefiles, by using cheats or a trainer, but why can't I get this as genuine choices in a nicely arranged menu provided by the dev whenever I start a new game?
Why must I envy a bunch of housewives playing out romance stories in puzzle games? *sigh*, but I guess I disgressed a fair bit.

Maybe Stardock should play to their strength and make the story so some mind controlling alien species (like those worms in that one TNG episode or the martians in that classic scifi-horror movie) has taken over everything - and the mind control makes everyone boring and dull. Crafting a universe that's boring and dull - now that's something I have full confidence Stardock can execute extremely well.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

http://forums.starcontrol.com/480099

Stardock Announces Star Control: Origins

By Draginol on October 18, 2016 1:00:00 PM from JoeUser Forums
October 18, 2016 – Plymouth Michigan - Stardock announced Star Control: Origins today. Star Control: Origins is a sci-fi action/adventure game with many RPG elements set in the future where the player is the captain of Earth’s first interstellar starship that explores a procedurally created galaxy, makes contact with various alien races, explores unique worlds, and engages in action packed battles, all while trying to unravel the complex intrigue that has the galaxy on the brink of chaos.

"We Earthlings are the newcomers to the galactic scene," said Brad Wardell, Executive Producer. "The dozen plus space-faring species have been hatching their schemes since before we got out of trees. Now, suddenly, they have to deal with those meddling apes from Sol 3 who threaten to upset the plot."

The game starts in the year 2086 with the unaware humans receiving a distress call from an alien ship that has crashed on the moon of Triton, leading to the formation of Star Control, an international space agency dedicated to protecting the Earth. The player takes on the role of The Captain of Earth’s first interstellar ship whose first mission is to investigate the the distress signal.

Star Control: Origins represents a new start for the beloved franchise. Stardock acquired the rights to Star Control 1/2/3 from Atari and since then has launched a new game studio in Towson Maryland specifically to create the new Star Control title. The classic series is available for sale on Stardock's newly launched StarControl.com website with players also able to pre-order Star Control: Origins and join the Founder’s Program.

"Star Control is ultimately about us Earthlings exploring the galaxy, finding and talking to strange alien civilizations, and hopefully living to tell the tale," said Wardell. "We are hopeful those who remember the original trilogy will like the direction we’re taking here while at the same time introducing a whole new generation to the awesomeness of a game that combined action, adventure, and roleplaying in a sci-fi game simultaneously."

Star Control: Origins is scheduled for release on PC and consoles with the PC release scheduled for 2017.

Players interested in joining the Founder's program for $35 will gain access to the upcoming beta program as well as access to the Founder’s Vault, mod tools, private journals and more.

Visit www.starcontrol.com to join or get more details.

There seems to be a Pre-order button in https://www.starcontrol.com/