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

[Brad_Wardell]

@Rock8man

I’m not sure I like the idea of this ambitious an engineering undertaking. Planetary exploration being this detailed, all these extensive tools to help fans make their own universes, all this is nice, but it’s so ambitious, it’s usually something we see accompanying games where the core experience doesn’t turn out great. Like Neverwinter Nights, for instance. I hear some of the fan made modules for that turned out great, but I didn’t care after the core campaign was so poor.

I guess I’m just saying, I hope it all works out, but the more ambitious this game seems, the worse feeling I get about how this will turn out.

I agree. Thankfully we went through the Elemental debacle already and learned a lot from it.

First, we made Ashes of the Singularity to prove out the underlying technology.

Then those lessons were applied to Star Control.

The main focus with Star Control are the stories.

In fact let’s talk about how the story-focus and the modding go hand in hand:

In order for the quality of the writing to be where we need it to be (and I don’t just mean good prose but engaging, well paced adventures) you have to expand the number of people who can actually create it.

One of the reasons games tend to have terrible writing is because only people technical enough to actually get stuff into the game are able to do it.

So the software side of Stardock has invested a great deal into Adventure Studio, an app that makes it easy for stories to be made so that non-technical people can create their own adventures that are fun to play and easy to iterate on.