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

That sort of thing is a pretty high percentage of the content.

We are trying to avoid fetch quests but instead have plot and character be part of the motivation.

So for example (I’m changing this a bit to avoid spoilers):

You land on a planet and you discover that there are smugglers living there. It turns out one of your officers (in Origins, you have 5 NPC bridge officer slots that you can recruit during your journeys) is the nephew of their missing leader and asks you to help find out what happened to him. This opens up a whole set of possible topics when you visit (or revisit) characters you’ve met.

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.

Same writer as for Sorcerer King? I liked the writing in that.

I mean, you do realize that you are doing the exact same thing on here, right?

Which is cool with me from an expression perspective, you can express whatever view you want but anyone else here who wants to is going to do the same. But content wise I find it all pretty weird that any attempt to discuss the legal side is accompanied by you throwing a few grenades towards F&R and simultaneously bemoaning that it is being discussed.

I don’t have any particular side in the lawsuit, as I am actually not party to the lawsuit. I have long ago given up trying to armchair lawyer anything and I have no idea which party will prevail for the various claims and counter claims. That said, it seems ludicrous that F&R are not the creators of SC2.

Brad, are you familiar with the West Marches campaign concept from tabletop RPGs (oh look what a surprise it’s Armando Penblade bringing up his wingnut TTRPG shit in a videogame thread again :-D )

It essentially proposes the idea of a vast and unexplored non-wilderness wilderness for player characters to sojourn through in player-driven quests and explorations that follow their interests and concerns rather than a strongly predefined plot. Some GMs use randomized “hexcrawl” mechanics to literally generate some or all of the setting as the players move through it, while others create or borrow a premade setting wholesale from the get-go.

In any iteration, the vast “west” is populated with innumerable quest hooks, factions, NPCs, locales, items, spells, etc., for players to discover and interact with as they see fit. It’s very freeform and easy to run for groups large and small; one of the originators for the concept (linked above) used it to more easily run for a large group of people with very disparate schedules, letting him run a “sandbox”/open world campaign for an ever-shifting group of characters week to week (by giving the players one or more “bases of action,” each session’s story could conclude by returning to this “civilized” place to venture forth from again the next time around with whoever was available).

In any case, I’ve always found it a fascinating concept from a design perspective: spinning up storylines on-the-go based on what players take interest in. Maybe there’s a gnoll encampment located just a few miles from a larger human city, per a random die roll or the setting book you’re reading. Some groups may just clear out the gnolls and be done with it, others may want to see if the humans are having issues with incursions and help defend against them, while others may want to encourage an alliance between the two parties. With strong GMing, any of those paths is possible, and you adapt the precise nature of things to where the players lead you.

Obviously, genuinely changing things on-the-fly in a computer game is not realistic–there’s no AI controlling the world there–but on the other hand, your description of multple paths through these questlines is just about as good, in the end.

I think it’s a wonderful concept for the sake of player investment and a sense of true discovery as compared to just being lead by the nose toward the big boss at the end, and I’m encouraged to tease out what seem like some minute similarities to it in your design as revealed so far :)

Cleve is fat

One is discussing something on a forum he’s been on for ages. The other is making public statements on their website and sending it to various media outlets. I don’t know if I agree it’s “the exact same thing”.

Explained here:

Tldr : they are, apparently, using the term creator to get publicity and present themselves as the indispensable core, which stardock objects to because there were more people involved in creating the product.

Not just thinking it up.

Jesus, can I set an alert on this thread for when the game releases?

I have seen various explanations, I find them ludicrous.

@Lantz I can well understand your stance.

There are always at least 2 sides to a story.

I find it suspicious that F&R are coming out with this stuff now.

Then again I am naturally suspicious.

I also find it tedious and disappointing that the lawyers got called in.

Unfortunately we only have one alert.

It had been in use since 1997 for Grimoire but thankfully it recently freed up. Sadly it was accidentally applied to Star Citizen.

Really? Around the time Stardock started bundling Star Control 1-3 with the pre-order of their new game?

I agree that there are two sides and both sides seem to be escalating. But I can’t agree at all with the narrative that F&R are the only ones escalating things or acting in what seems like bad faith to me.

I wish we had some sort of system where opposing sides could present evidence of their claims and then have a person knowledgeable of the law come to a decision on the matter.

Just to further add on, even Brad was in this very thread saying that Paul and Fred are “the ones who made Star Control 1 and 2 way back when”
e.g.:

I don’t think that’s what I was communicating.

Or if it was then I retract it, I guess?

Basically, the whole thing stinks.

Agree to agree then :)

I’m working on it.

I shall call it the beer chamber.

Everything is better with beer.

Err no.

That’s not how the Internet works.

Disconnect or I shall insult you a second time you son of a woman.

fight

swear

Call someone a nazi.

You’re not doing this right!