Stardock owns Star Control and is planning an "XCOM-like" reboot

Looking forward to more on this!

Hm, beta this fall, eh? Sounds good.

The Ur-quan Kzer-Za was one of the coolest anthems ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VNul2QETPE

Would love to hear that kind of music in this release :)

Amiga trackers were bad-ass back in the day. (SC2 soundtrack is all Amiga tracker stuff)

I’m just thrilled with the confirmation on the modding tools - Star Control just wouldn’t feel right without Fwiffo.

Wow. The crafting/modding system–based off what little they said about it–seems like a big ambitious swing for something more than just a great action-adventure space game. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s hard enough to make a great new Star Control game. Why bog yourself down as developers with tools, interface, online functionality, etc. that you don’t have to, when the heart of Star Control is exploration of a galaxy, talking to fun aliens, and sometimes shooting things with your spaceship?

If the tools they’re creating for players are the same ones they’re building the game with, then that might be another thing–I’ve always wanted to work on a project that’s creatively handed off to the community like that. But that makes it even more ambitious, since the tools then need to be released capable of building the high-water-mark content of the game.

Star Control 2 had a lot of content. Maybe that’s why this is the strategy for SC: Origins? Is Stardock not quite equipped to make that amount of content, so they’re looking to engage a community that can?

Well, it’s an intriguing development, either way. I guess we’ll see how things shape up.

I’m not too thrilled about the modding news, mainly because I’m a little concerned about bloat in what was a straightforward little game. I’m willing to give it a chance to win me over though.

Somebody remind me- is the writer for this one Chris Buchsomething (Bucholtz?), the guy who did the writing in Sorcerer King? Because I really, thoroughly enjoyed that.

Yeah, I think I agree with all that. Remember they included modding tools with Elemental/Fallen Enchantress and that didn’t really catch on because the tools were difficult to use and there was practically no decent documentation for them. These kinds of tools are only broadly embraced by a community if they are either a) well documented or b) intuitive/easy to figure out. NW Nights did both well. The modding tools for Divinity OS were great tools functionality wise but met neither criteria above and therefore bombed.

I think multiplayer in what are otherwise SP games is a scourge on modern gaming. Every SP game out there these days must have MP or people on the game’s official forums scream about it day and night. Never mind that adding MP not only costs extra but also usually largely destroys the fun in the game because then the devs have to make sure everything is “balanced” (my new gaming curse word).

Stardock seems to consistently bite off more than can be delivered with focus on their projects. The result being buggy messes like Fallen Enchantress, which is a very fun game, but even now still has a lot of issues. Sadly, I think this project is not going to end well.

Looks like yes:

Like you, I loved Sorcerer King. Like those above, I found its greatest downside the relative paucity of content, despite being designed as a replayable game. My hope is that Star Control is receiving a budget capable of producing what it should be. . . but yeah.

Still, Chris’s writing in SK gives me great hope for the dialogue/interactions in StarCon.

Well, balance will probably be a problem in Star Control anyway, multiplayer or not. Star Control 2 had Super-Melee mode for multiplayer, and certain ships were really great against some ships, and really weak against others. So in order to counteract ships on the other player’s fleet, you had to pick some counter-measures. But then he saw you picking your counter-measures, and he would then pick counter-measures to that. It was a whole lot of fun picking the fleet to go into battle in the first place.

But then in Star Control 3, they made the new Sector’s gray ships, and some of the newer races didn’t have that same kind of imbalance of being weak against some and strong against others. There was this dog-like race whose ships were big and strong and badass against nearly ever ship. It made Hyper-Melee mode in Star Control 3 not very fun compared to Super-melee in Star Control 2. This also had an effect on the single player game. Once you got those strong ships in your fleet, you felt kind of invulnerable, and unbeatable.

I’m missing the announcement of MP in this. Did they make one?

I pretty much directly ripped off the Droogs for a race in one of the RPGs I run.

Then again I pretty much straight-up ripped the Chenjesu, Mmrnmhrm, and VUX, too. . .

How did you pronounce this in your head btw? I always read it as Mermermer.

I haven’t played Star Control, but I’d think the obvious answer here is that fans can make mods for the races that Stardock isn’t legally allowed to use.

I go with “murnhurm”

IANArmando, but I always went with “Mermer-rim”

Murn-murm.

My race is more pronouncably called the Vandross. They almost certainly didn’t murder their biological creators and take over the planet.

Almost certainly, eh? I like those odds!

One of my favorite moments in Star Control 2 was finding the Chenjesu and the Mmrnmhrm, and finally getting all I needed for them to join the fleet with their new combined-race ships, reportedly specially designed by the two races to fight the Urquan threat. I hadn’t even played Super-Melee at that point, which was a separate executable. So the new ships were a complete surprise to me, and well worth the build-up and the wait. Honestly, they weren’t super strong either, were they? It’s not as if they were as good as the Chenjesu ships or the Mmrnmhrm ships in certain circumstances. But those orbiting point defense satellites and that badass short range beam laser? God, that felt so badass if you could close with the enemy ship and let them have it.

Bzzzzzzzzttt Beam laser slicing the Ur-quan and Kor-ha ships. So satisfying. And yet, so hard to do if the enemy pilot is competent and stays out of the range of your beam laser. You had to try to do your best to use planets to slingshot close to the enemy and hope they didn’t notice your maneuver.