I’m on my phone, so no comprehensive write-up, but basically it was all the rest of it?
I hadn’t really thought of it before seeing the discussions of the starship combat now, but that part of the game is not something I have thought much about when thinking of SC2. Well, I did play the first one too, which was mainly space battles IIRC.
The battles were obviously important and central to the moment-to-moment gameplay, in addition to building the sense of identity for the different species (an interesting parallel here is the ME3 multiplayer).
When I think of SC2 I mainly think about the exploration and sense of discovery, the interactions with the different species and humor, the story and plot progression (especially that it advanced by itself), and prioritizing resources for upgrading the flagship. If I were to summarize what I think was my favorite part was the immense sense of scale that the game imparted. And that it actually managed to deliver on it and live up to the expectations it gave me.
This is how I feel too. I tolerated the combat. I enjoyed combat with my friends but in the game itself, I generally tried to avoid it. Nowadays, we have the ability to have a lot more interesting battles but they aren’t super-frequent in the game.
The story, characters and writing are the most important. So important that a decent chunk of our budget has gone into this:
It’s still not quite ready for consumers but the idea is that we get this application to a state where it’s easy enough for non-technical people to use that we can give it to lots and lots of different writers.
This way, we can have the main story line as well as have almost seemingly endless tiny stories across the universe that most people will never even see. But that’s ok.
As I travel across our area of space I see that the universe is a busy place doing its own thing.
Your whole post was extraordinarily encouraging. I really hope you guys can pull off what you’re describing here, because as someone who’d been pulled increasingly away from videogames by tabletop gaming, you’re saying the words that want to rope me back in. . .
I’d actually call the lander sequences and space fights the things that prevented me from doing the interesting stuff in Star Controls 2 & 3, but I have awful reflexes and tactical analysis skills :)
Your later description of “the good stuff” is about right. While the battles and lander sequences certainly spaced things out and gave your brain different kinda stuff to hook into, I was always there for the exploration, discovery, conversations, humor. . . the fighty fighty and twitchy twitchy were just impediments scattered into a really cool adventure game, from my perspective.
It’s almost worth an article unto itself as to why games don’t do this. And the reason isn’t a lack of creativity but because of how games are made now.
Most games now use an existing engine. So they are tied to doing what that engine can do. As a result, the game is designed around what the engine can do.
Stardock doesn’t have the resources to compete head to head with games made that way. Instead, we try to compete on gameplay which is why so many of our games try to push the tech (sometimes very well: GalCiv, Sins and sometimes disastrously, Elemental).
As a result, Star Control has…well, what might as well be described as the Star Control engine. It’s built using Nitrous (Oxide’s technology) at its base with Cider (Stardock’s various existing and new game specific techs) and then X for handling all the Star Control specific game features (such as having an arcade game, planet exploration, a real time VO for dynamically rendered aliens, hyper space, space exploration, ship design).
Of course, doing so comes with a cost. As in, Star Control costs more than every game we’ve ever made combined.
I lump the lander sequences in with the exploration and discovery. Experiences such as finding the radio stations in the Sol system and visiting the Spathi homeworld. So good.
I was actually a fan of Jorn until he did his cover of “Hotel California”. Nobody should do a cover of Hotel California, not even Jorn.
EDIT: Wait, which thread am I in?
Stardock owns Star Control. That is, literally, the meaning of the title.
Anyway, with regards to the fleet combat portion, the biggest difference is that it defaults to an arena style which early gameplay feedback on is very positive.
There are a couple of differrent modes we hope to get in before release besides 1 on 1 combat.
