Kerbero's Northstar - Space RPG/Trader Game

Games
1

First real news article and screenshots here:

http://www.strategycore.co.uk/pg/northstarinterview

I like this part among others:

SC: We have a whole lot of X-COM fans at StrategyCore and we were all wondering how similar the combat system will be to that of X-COM. Will we see anything analog to time units, stamina and the likes?

MC: X-Com’s action point system goes a lot further back than X-Com itself, in fact all the way back to 70’s fig combat rules and really, we see no reason to stray far from that. We have a set of stats that serve our exact Nstar needs but certainly the faster, smarter and more agile you are, the more things you will be able to get done in a turn.

2

They said the magic word.

It won’t be the first time I paid $30 to have my heart broken by a low-rent Russian X-COM clone. Glad to see there’s still hoodies and Sikhs in the future.

3

oh, wow, this looks great

I was just wondering what happened with this game a day or two ago

4

It’s got that whole Firefly vibe going . . .

5

Fans of classics like Elite, Privateer, X-COM, X universe and Freelancer found Kerberos’ announcement of Northstar very intriguing.

One of these things is not like the other…

In other news, I’m going to make a game that fans of Master of Magic, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament 2004, and MS Flight Simulator should find very intriguing. Can I have some hype now?

6

Are you a Russian developer? I can probably book you on Strategy Core. We can probably pitch davidf and foxstab to make some threads, too.

7

except it takes gameplay from all of those games… which is why it lists them… which you might have noticed if you read the article…

It has ground combat similar to X-Com.

8

But a game that combines features of all them is :) The world is not binary.

In other news, I’m going to make a game that fans of Master of Magic, Starcraft, Unreal Tournament 2004, and MS Flight Simulator should find very intriguing. Can I have some hype now?

When you’ve actually previously developed a game or two, sure. Until then, not so much.

9

How is it similar?

10

Let’s see… It’s grid-based, turn-based, AP based…

11

All of which the developer himself said were not very X-Com-ish features. Might as well name drop Fallout.

Anyway, this looks like an interesting game. I do enjoy space traders. A traveller/firefly-esque one sounds well overdue.

12

Fallout’s is hex-based. But yes, he could have chose any game with similar combat. The guy chose X-Com. whoopdeedoo

13

Throwing any comparisons to X-Com in your game is a sure fire way to make sure people are sorely disappointed when they finally play it.

14

The developer didn’t do it, the guy who wrote the article (on a kind of X-Com/Silent Storm fansite) did to get people interested in the game.

15

Worked for me. :)

16

Looks like it has a fixed roster of named characters, rather than the randomly-generated redshirts of X-Com. So, I suspect the combat won’t have the same appeal. Still, does look like an interesting project…

17

It sounds like you can ditch the initial crew and get new ones.

18

Yeah, but if they’re from a fixed roster of pre-designed characters, then you wouldn’t be expecting to routinely have three or four people die during a mission and be able to come back from it like you could in X-Com… of course, a game doesn’t have to have every game-element that X-Com had in order to scratch some of the same itches… but for me a game that leans on the save/reload cycle is likely to be much less appealing, at least from a strategy gaming perspective.

19

Well, this is more of a regular RPG. and presumably less combat intensive than a tactical RPG like XCom/JA2. The similarity with XCom is more in the mechanic. This will be more like Fallout where you have a few followers, like Fallout for example. I don’t think Fallout leaned on the “save/reload” cycle too much. At least not any more than any other RPG.

20

I hear it will be similar to Breach.