Definitely grab Ur-Quan Masters and get ready to fall in love all over again!
I still find it astounding, if strangely unsurprising that this whole mess appears to have been easily avoidable if Stardock had recognized it didn’t in fact have the rights to distribute 1, 2, and 3 and asserted it would make sure it removed any IP infringing elements from Origins.
Instead Stardock has engaged in provocative escalation, which paradoxically, under the supposed motivation of protecting Origins, is instead putting it at grave risk of injunction. Which seems to have been very, very easily avoidable.
Paul and Fred’s public statements also clearly read like they have been created with input from their legal team. The darkly amusing thing about the settlement offer is having just experienced a bloody nose from encountering the PR aspect of lawfare with the initial filing, Stardock and its legal team apparently learned absolutely nothing from that initial exchange.
I’m just going to wait until the trial wraps up before I start making judgments as to who is in the wrong and who should have done things differently.
This is the only sensible approach, really.
Star Control: Origins looks great so far. I’m looking forward to playing the finished product.
Re to legal nonsense, the end results will speak for themselves. I suspect Linoleum will be disappointed.
I recall a previous lawsuit that was discussed heavily here with the usual suspects making dire predictions that didn’t turn out as they expected because, surprise, people who choose to fight their legal battles in the court of public opinion usually do not have the facts or law on their side.
The problem with trying to harm someone via PR in a court case is that it distinctiveness the other side from throwing the proverbial book at them and the court doesn’t like it either.
At the end of the day, we’re focused on making a great game. A lot of things that make it good are things that have come from listening to peopleon QT3.
I still remember a conversation with Mark years ago about blandness in Stardock games. For Star Control, we didn’t mess around and brought on a top Cracked.com writer who is just amazing along with other writers that we are bringing on board once the Adventure Studio tools are made easy enough for non-technical people to use.
Agreed.
PR is just another weapon, and one Reich etc are using well.
And one with consequences because it can be, and often is, used to calculate damages. And will be here.
I meant to comment on this yesterday, but this kind of statement really excites me. What I’m hoping for here is that we will regularly stumble across these in the course of “exploring for exploring sake” so there’s a kind of feedback loop. For example (this might not fit the actual game structure, but you will get the idea, I think):
You are toodling along and see a planet that looks interesting. Landing on the planet to check it out, you bump into an npc that offers to give you a cool piece of tech if you do them a favor. That favor sends you over to a new area you haven’t visited and you make note of a spot to go explore after the quest is done.
So, exploring leads to adventuring, which leads to more exploring, and so on, all in a way that evolves organically, but always gives you something new to do.
It struck me that you forced a settlement with a bully countersuit. Frankly you were lucky that went down when it did because I suspect those tactics may not have worked if it had dropped in the middle of the #MeToo movement.
Yep, I am very okay with some more RPG in my strategy game/adventure game/space shooter game/planet lander game.
I have no doubt you believe that. But no, what ultimately ruined her was admitting to making false statements in her filing during her deposition. It was settlement on our terms or perjury. Wiping our network drives was also a factor as well but there was no happy ending for her case.
I suspect most people who have suffered actual sexual harassment would not look kindly on someone who tries to ride a single mean email to a cash pay out.
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