Octopus Overlords

I wish I could get in on this.

Well, I'm in at least. Not that I expect much to show for it until early 2016, but you never know.

If you are a Star Control Lifetime Founder then be sure to submit your planet names. We've opened up the submissions today and they'll be open until next month.

http://forums.starcontrol.com/479371/

Star Control: Origins was announced today along with the opening of the Founders program!

http://forums.starcontrol.com/480099

Ars Technica also has a first look.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/a ... e-in-2h17/

I hate to go all nerd rage, but what? A prequel? With none of the alien cast of SC1/2, but a bunch of all-new aliens instead? Yes, I read about the "intellectual property rights" issue. I shudder to think what kind of mental contortions you'd have to go through to make all the new aliens disappear after the game is done. Why even call it Star Control anymore at this point? That article is pretty disappointing.

Also, I hate prequels on general principle.

On the plus side, the gameplay looks pretty neat.

Edit: It's the same "wtf" reaction that I had when an "X-Com in the 1950s prequel reboot" was announced. At the end of the day, the game turned out to be ok, but the name really threw me for a loop. Why reuse an intellectual property if you're not going to actually reuse it?

I thought everything in the article sounded good. While of course it would be nice to have all the same aliens as before, I understand why they can't do that. On the plus side, it means that they have free reign to make up any sort of crazy aliens they want. Star Control 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time; if Stardock can make a game even close, I'll be pretty happy. Especially since they are bringing it to the consoles!

Looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't touch their Founders Program after Servo (People paid money and then Stardock dropped the developer and the game was canceled, without refunding the money).

Lee wrote:Looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't touch their Founders Program after Servo (People paid money and then Stardock dropped the developer and the game was canceled, without refunding the money).

Ugh, I had not heard that. Glad I did not back it.

I will probably be in at the lower tier. Stardock makes games I like and I like the original SC2 a ton. I see that this is more a spiritual successor than an actual one, but that is fine with me.

NickAragua wrote:On the plus side, the gameplay looks pretty neat.

I don't know. What they show in the vid is just the planet exploration and resource gathering mini-game and that sure looked underwhelming to me. I hope they have more to do there and that's not how it's going to be in the final version of the game. SC2 followed very closely the Starflight mechanic (which I loved) for this part of the game. It was pretty immersive and fun and the planet below that you were surveying felt like a real planet. In this version it looks like you're landing on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko or something. It looked tiny and pretty boring.

At this time I must say NO to this.

I am a HUGE SC2 fan...I even really really liked 1 and 3. But I didn't bother with the last GalCiv because it seemed more of the same so Im tired of StarDock space games it seems.

This game seems to be SC in name only..which is right as that is all they own. The video looks cutsie ootsie for consoles which it is. Nothing else SC is there. And I even heard someone mention turn based? Is that true??

Not right now. Maybe my opinion will change with time because 2 of my all time favorite space games are Starflight and Star Control 2. They contain things I find essential in a great space game......real time, exploration, multi ships, planet scanning, lander with mining ability and scanning, crazy funny aliens and such. The mining and being able to scan and mine from the surface is a HUGE thing to me...same with Starflight. Also a big mystery to solve with history to uncover and such. Also I want derelict spaceships to find orbiting say a dead world and find out a story to it....dead colonies on planets with the same type of story and history to them...not just static crap that says "you find a dead city..oh well"

So for now I will keep my eye on it and worry.

Stupid consoles.

It was pretty immersive and fun and the planet below that you were surveying felt like a real planet. In this version it looks like you're landing on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko or something. It looked tiny and pretty boring.

DING! DING! Dead spot on with that assessment mate.

ColdSteel wrote:

NickAragua wrote:On the plus side, the gameplay looks pretty neat.

I don't know. What they show in the vid is just the planet exploration and resource gathering mini-game and that sure looked underwhelming to me. I hope they have more to do there and that's not how it's going to be in the final version of the game. SC2 followed very closely the Starflight mechanic (which I loved) for this part of the game. It was pretty immersive and fun and the planet below that you were surveying felt like a real planet. In this version it looks like you're landing on comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko or something. It looked tiny and pretty boring.

Well, you need to strike a balance between realistic scale and fun. Too much planet means the player is spending too much time rolling over boring terrain *and* you probably need to go to procedural generation for your planets (which, again, generates boring and probably impassable terrain), or introduce some scanning mechanism to narrow down where you should put your ground vehicle. Too little planet means that, like in the video, the land rover looks to be about half the size of the planet being explored.

Also, thinking about it some more, I'd probably be ok with a "reboot" rather than a "prequel". It's pretty tough to follow up the story of Star Control 2. I mean, where do you go after you've stopped a galactic civil war twenty thousand years in the making? And before Star Control 1, there's nothing to tell, really. But it's fine to just tell a brand new story with the same beats. I love me a good space exploration game with ethical dilemmas, mineral surveys, alien ruins and first contact. Just... there's no need to shoe-horn it into an existing setting. It's pretty tight in there already. Spread your wings, fellas!

ColdSteel wrote:SC2 followed very closely the Starflight mechanic (which I loved) for this part of the game. It was pretty immersive and fun and the planet below that you were surveying felt like a real planet.

I can't agree with this for SC2. All of SC2's planets were just flat planes with no terrain (only colored ground), occasional tectonic and weather related things to dodge, and big "power pills" like Pac-Man representing minerals. There was nothing "realistic" about this in the least. I still enjoyed the minigame of SC2, but it was simply a game of "grab the colored dots before the lightning, circles, or fire hits you."

This:


Is a far cry from the much more realistic Starflight, with cities, pyramids, more realistic creatures, and "mines:"


I have a nostalgic attachment to SC2's planetary survey, but I would never call it realistic. I think the Stardock version is more realistic by far (and has about the same surface area as you had in SC2).

If you want more realistic planetary survey, Approaching Infinity's planets with toxic, radioactive, arctic, and other biomes and terrain features is a far better example.

I played both SC2 and Starflight on the Sega Genesis and it was much better. The Starflight one is the best. And you could upgrade your ship with more cargo and weps and all kinds of stuff and one was a better scanner. The Starflight scanning and mining was 1000x better than the SC2 one but it was still better than anything since. I guess the closest since then has been Mass Effect 2 and thats god awful boring. I want to replay Starflight on Genesis but dont have one. Sigh.

May reinstall UrQuan Masters.

Emulators are your friend.

Dont need an emulator for SC2.

Ur Quan Masters

baelthazar wrote:I can't agree with this for SC2. All of SC2's planets were just flat planes with no terrain (only colored ground), occasional tectonic and weather related things to dodge, and big "power pills" like Pac-Man representing minerals. There was nothing "realistic" about this in the least. I still enjoyed the minigame of SC2, but it was simply a game of "grab the colored dots before the lightning, circles, or fire hits you."

When I say "felt" like a real planet I meant in terms of feeling like you're traversing actual planet sized terrain. The flat plane to me is what planet sized terrain would look like if you were looking down on a window of it with your sensors from miles up in orbit which is how I always imagined it. That was how scale was established. In those previous games obviously a lot was left to the imagination because of the graphics limitations of the time but they did a great job of establishing the feeling that you were exploring a planet surface.

This is perhaps another instance where 3D is not going to be the friend of a game in this genre because 3D makes that much harder to do. It's just too defining and limiting at the same time. The world in the video seems way too simplistic and traversing it looks more like some kind of arcade game where you pick up power pills or something. Plus, rather than making space and the planets and systems within it seem immense, to me (at first glimpse at least) it makes them look trivial and small instead. Part of that may be the size of the ships compared to the system they're in and the lack of any telescoping in to another level of scale down on the planet. The scale just feels way off to me. I think part of that is because of the 3D assets.

Its why i called the graphics 'cutsie'. I don't care for that type of scaling.

I definitely hope they make planet exploration less Spore-y. Exaggerated 3d features on tiny things that should be immense don't work for me.

Daehawk wrote:I want to replay Starflight on Genesis but dont have one.

Don't need one (unless you're really focused on "on Genesis" rather than "replay Starflight").

Lee wrote:Looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't touch their Founders Program after Servo (People paid money and then Stardock dropped the developer and the game was canceled, without refunding the money).

Servo Founders will be transferred to the Star Control program in the next few weeks along with a coupon for our store.

Island Dog wrote:

Lee wrote:Looks pretty cool, but I wouldn't touch their Founders Program after Servo (People paid money and then Stardock dropped the developer and the game was canceled, without refunding the money).

Servo Founders will be transferred to the Star Control program in the next few weeks.

Just came here to post that. Sounds like you guys are going above and beyond. Good to hear.

Count me in as one of those that liked what I saw. Yes, the scale if off, but so what? I already know how big space is and how long it freaking takes to get anywhere. I don't want a game that simulates that by showing that the distance from one planet to another takes up 1.5 screen displays. Or gods forbid, 2 or more screens of empty space. I don't want to have to press the spacebar and thrust the spacecraft for 2 minutes of my time instead of 20 seconds of my time just to go from planet to planet.

Ditto for the planet surveying. To me Star Control was always about resource management, fleet building, alliance building, and the main quest. The planet surveys were a means to an end and making the planets bigger just results in more empty space (see above) or requires the developer to fill it with more resources (which could break the resource management).

I would agree that making the planets be more than just resource piles could make the game interesting. Perhaps the planet might contain intelligent life that hasn't developed spaceflight yet and you're presented with several choices about how to affect their development. Maybe they are being hunted or oppressed by another alien race and need a McGuffin, which you then agree to find?

Bottom line, I'm looking forward to more videos and gameplay.

killbot737 wrote:I definitely hope they make planet exploration less Spore-y. Exaggerated 3d features on tiny things that should be immense don't work for me.

Spore! Thats what came to mind.

Daehawk wrote:Dont need an emulator for SC2.

Ur Quan Masters

Or even better, Ur Quan Masters HD

I saw that but wasn't sure what to do with it. It says BETA on it. Plus the other one allowed me to add the pak files ihto it on install..voice and music and such.

I sure as hell would not download any .exe from SourceForge anymore.

Man, can't see putting 100 bucks out there for this, but 35 might be a price point that they will get me to buy in at. Love Stardock games, so I know this one will be decent and I am willing to give them my money in advance....

Daehawk wrote:I saw that but wasn't sure what to do with it. It says BETA on it. Plus the other one allowed me to add the pak files ihto it on install..voice and music and such.

The HD version already has voice for the characters and music. Looks like both the music remasters and the original 3DO music.

baelthazar wrote:If you want more realistic planetary survey, Approaching Infinity's planets with toxic, radioactive, arctic, and other biomes and terrain features is a far better example.

I went and took a look at this and then realized I'd checked it out before. It was a $10 kickstarter a few years ago and then the dev then made the really bad decision of choosing Shrapnel as his distributer for some reason. Being Shrapnel it's $40 now with a draconian DRM (3 install limit). Needless to say, this did not fly well with potential buyers. He then tried to Greenlight it on Steam only to have Shrapnel tell him they had sole rights to the game for the foreseeable future and he couldn't sell it elsewhere. So he shut it down on Steam and told everyone he would have to wait until he had rights to his game back again one day and then he would make it available on other distribution platforms.

It boggles my mind that the dev apparently didn't even know he was entering into an exclusive agreement and signed away his game rights away like that without knowing it. It also boggles my mind that Shrapnel is still doing business the same way they did in 1999. It's too bad because there are games there I'd like to buy including this one. It looks great. I'd gladly pay up to $20 for Approaching Infinity on GOG or Steam. But, no way I'll ever buy anything from Shrapnel again, though I bought quite a few from them 10-15 years ago. Times have changed. Too bad they haven't.

I actually quite like it and got my $40 value from it. I understand that Shrapnel certainly created a mess of the whole thing (I'm glad Illwinter got away from them and can distribute where he wants and charge lower prices). It is sad that people will miss out on a really creative space-based roguelike because of a bad publisher.

I've been burned by stardock in the past and I don't like this Star Control in name only stuff.


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ColdSteel wrote:the dev then made the really bad decision of choosing Shrapnel as his distributer for some reason.

Shrapnel: killing fun since 1803. I have a hard time understanding why anyone smart enough to program a game would be stupid enough to use a service like that. Wow.

There's an interview with Brad with [a]listdaily on Star Control: Origins.

http://www.alistdaily.com/strategy/star ... trol-back/

New Star Control dev journal is here with some screenshots and new info on development.

https://forums.starcontrol.com/485276/S ... 017-update

Well hopefully in two weeks we can see, read more about this. Still one of those games I really enjoyed back in the day, I hope they capture that same spirit of the game I loved back then.

It's good to see the ship designer from Spore getting some action. One of my favorite parts of the game was designing things.

It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

Paingod wrote:It's good to see the ship designer from Spore getting some action. One of my favorite parts of the game was designing things.

It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

I liked the game, but was not a fan of the ship building/fighting game outside of the main campaign. But I can choose to not play that, and just play the main campaign.

Star Control: Origins pre-orders begin today! You will get a limited time pre-order discount price and access to the Super Melee beta coming soon.

Moreinfo: https://forums.starcontrol.com/485338

Pre-order trailer:
https://youtu.be/L1bgnu-JTgc

Looks good to me except those tiny planets to mine. I prefer a more serious planet mining part. the best ever made was Starflight on the Genesis.

Daehawk, did you play the original Star Control? The mining is anything but serious. This actually looks more serious than SC2 planetary exploration.