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

Games
1268

The resource collection is mostly blocked based on planetary conditions.

In fact, it’s a good topic to bring up as I wish you had been in the beta to defend some of the decisions we made. :)

Most planets you can’t really land on right away. Let’s take Venus for instance. You can land on Venus or any planet…in the same sense that you can eat anything once. But you will die quickly.

In the video I showed in an early post, you saw that the one planet that was filled with valuable stuff I couldn’t stay on because I hadn’t upgraded my lander tech enough to withstand the radiation.

But on top of radiation, heat and other general issues there’s electrical storms, earth quakes, static plumes, volcanoes, and lots of other things that will kill you.

Your lander’s job is to identify high concentrated clusters of resources and then collect them. The challenge isn’t the collection itself, it is surviving to get to them in the first place. :)

1269

This will run on a potato basically.

We’re working closely with AMD and it’s an interesting experience because everyone wants to show off their high end stuff it seems.

But maybe I can succeed explaining to you guys what I have failed, utterly, to explain to others:

A typical modern PC game engine will have a thread dedicated to graphics. Another for physics. Another for particles and another for interaction. That’s pretty normal.

Our engine, based on Oxide’s Nitrous technology, is core-neutral. That means you could potentially have 3 threads handling graphics when it needs to rather than just 1.

This means that the game actually runs on much lower end hardware than is the norm. Like, think lower end than Surface Pro 4 (which is where some of my videos come from because that’s my main box I use – which marketing doesn’t approve of. Seriously, if I disappear from QT3 one day, it’ll because marketing reads what post here and…well, “dealt” with me. ).

But the tech we’re using allows us to run on really, REALLY low end hardware provided it has at least 4 logical processors (so duo core with 4 threads).

1270

But wait. That means that, gasp, you’ll sell a lot more copies of your game. To people who really want it. Madness! :)

1271

Hah.

Well, it’s been a very passionate debate internally.

The fact that Nitrous is core-neutral allows us to do two possible things:

A. We can make games that could just not be done with any other engine (Ashes of the Singularity).

OR

B. We can make games that could be done with other engines but on much lower end hardware at a fraction of the cost (Star Control: Origins).

I would still say the visuals of SCO are as good as anything out there. But you can get those visuals running on what amounts to a potato because we can have multiple CPU cores doing the work at the same time.

When I was out in San Fran demoing the game, I made a point to demo it on my Surface Pro 4.

1272

I’m kidding of course. I have no Idea what that would cost or if it would even be possible. But it just reminded me of those different versions of World of Tanks. You can download the base game or a version with much better graphics.

1273

I remember Brad saying that review code went out this week, and saw one place posting what I initially took to be a review, but then the end makes it sound more like demo impressions? I really dunno.

It does highlight some stuff I was worried about, but it also sounds like it comes from someone without much experience in the series, so their threshold for, for instance, the vagaries of the 1v1 combat system may be lower than expected

1274

Agreed. Seems like the game just isn’t the reviewer’s cup of tea, which is perfectly fine. As someone who adored Starcon 2, nothing he described as a drawback seemed to be an issue at all.

1275

I mean, as someone who still hasn’t beaten SC2 myself because of, in part, how annoying I find parts of it, I’m a little more worried, heh.

But I’m a StarCon 3 loving heathen!

1276

http://cdn-static.denofgeek.com/sites/denofgeek/files/styles/main_wide/public/images/306529.jpg?itok=FA0aQsqs

Still, that’s a fair concern if there were parts of 2 which bounced off you.

1277

Oh wow, you should totally beat SC2. It has such a great ending. I know you don’t have time to game these days, but as soon as you get some time!

1278

I actually tried to record my most recent playthrough attempt a couple of years back, treating it like a “blind man’s” trip through the game (just due to hanging out here, watching some other videos, and reading lots of StarCon material over the years, I’ve actually got a decent idea of what happens throughout the game, but don’t know any of the particulars of how to get there myself). Like most of my great projects, it absolutely fell apart :)

1279

Boxquote right there. :-)

1280

He had access to the August first-chapter preview. I get the feeling he was expecting it to be a strategy game or something. The comment on “fleet battles”, for example, being a tell. Which is fine, no game can be all things to all people.

1281

No, he wasn’t. He likes the writing, but not the actual game. Look here:

That’s the very best bit of Star Control: Origins – the part reminiscent of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which recognises the potential of an infinite universe for a monumental clash of cultures, strange asides, and above all comedy. It’s such a shame that the rest conspires to drag it down into the bargain bin – less stowaway than throwaway.

He liked the story. He just didn’t like the wrapper, i.e. the actual game. Why’s that? Because he was expecting something more akin to a serious space sim:

In PC gaming, when I say ‘space’, you say ‘simulation’. And there are good reasons for that: space exploration is intrinsically linked in the public imagination to incredible feats of science and engineering. It’s only right that our games should reflect that, and they do – in Elite Dangerous, Kerbal Space Program, and 100 others besides.

Then he compliments Stardock on stripping out the complexity and making it simpler:

It’s to Stardock’s credit, though, that Star Control: Origins travels in the opposite direction at hyperspace speed. Every aspect of its play is as simple as can be.

What was surprising to him, was how shallow the game is at present. Here, let me cite him again:

But very little of that is currently accessible in the demo build of the game. Frankly, it was a shock to discover that Star Control: Origins has been in development for five years.

He didn’t like the look of the game:

It simply doesn’t have the hallmarks of a game late in production – not least in its surprising lack of fidelity, which leaves planets bare and key characters looking like refugees from the low-budget Christmas spin-off of a Hollywood animation.

And concludes:

I want Star Control: Origins to be as good as its writing, but it’s not – and with a release date on September 20th it’s almost run out of time to get there, with or without a hyperspace drive.

So he likes the writing, but feels that the rest of the game doesn’t live up to the standard set by the writer(s). He most definitely didn’t expect it to be a strategy game.

1282

The preview adds some evidence to something I’ve been surmising from the gameplay videos like Brad’s above: The lander gameplay looks loose and floaty to the point of being unfinished. There’s no way to say for sure until one get their hands on the controls, but the way the ship spins and slides and jumps seems to be lacking the tactility an action game needs. Jumping, in particular, feels like a feature that might have been added to spice things up; maybe it feels right when you’re playing, but it looks both weird and pointless in the videos. Also, you pick up items from a long way away. I assume it just wasn’t fun to have to pick those up by driving precisely through them. But then the visuals of picking them up don’t communicate them being collected by your ship, they look like they just explode into the air like fireworks. The “gulp” sound makes no sense along with those visuals.

I shouldn’t be too critical until I get my hands on the game itself, if I ever do. These kinds of “game feel” features are one of the things that are enormously hard in arcade game development, because the factors are so nuanced and when things are just a little off in implementation they end up feeling way off in play. But, the previewer had a build from awhile ago, so it’s possible this is some of the polish work that’s occurred in the meantime. I’ll be keeping my eye on this in final gameplay videos and reviews.

1283

This reflects my feelings above. Do note that if you play with a more distant camera, they actually do get sucked into the ship, but it happens behind you. That was visible in one of the other videos. See here:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AuBwidOf1nOui4Ic5LXEsn6daVfooQ

As for that review, expecting every game to be a hardcore sim is asinine. If they don’t like the art style, fine, but that doesn’t make it unfinished or unpolished. That’s ignorant, insulting, and a terrible way to review anything.

And because I feel it is a moral imperative to bring this up at least a couple of times a year…

image
image1050×515 177 KB

1284

Ah, yeah! I was missing those streams coming in from behind. Too bad all that juicy player feedback is happening off-camera most of the time.

1285

He actually says he likes the fact that the game is far simpler than a sim.

I think it’s fine if someone says he/she doesn’t like it. Personally, I don’t care much for what they’re going for here, either. What I think he meant, referring to fidelity, is that he feels the planets are a bit too barren. That seems a valid criticism to me, considering the screenshots, videos, etc.

1286

This mirrors my thought. Videos I’ve seen of lander and battle gameplay feel lacking the game feel punch an arcade game needs. There’s little sense of weight, impact of friction other that so-so particle effects.

But those can be added relatively quick, specially with a decent size team, so I’m looking forward to reading final reviews. It is a little bit concerned it’s not there yet so close to release, though. For arcade gameplay you want to develop game feel as early as possible.

1288

I think a couple of you would be better off returning to the “other thread” rather than pretending you have some sort of objective opinion to share.

I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to my own opinion on that. It seemed pretty clear to me he was expecting a very different type of game. One can imagine the gameplay of the first 30 minutes of their favorite RPGs being described by someone who was expecting something else.

There’s several previews of Star Control: Origins already.

https://www.gamespace.com/all-articles/previews/star-control-origins-tywom-scryve-and-probing-oh-my/
https://explorminate.net/2018/08/20/star-control-origins-preview/

None of that discounts whether a given person enjoyed the preview build or not. They like what they like. But the sudden influx from the legal argument thread, all from one side of the argument, suddenly acting like they are concerned is too much.

Star Control: Origins is a story-driven space action/RPG. Trying to land on every planet and explore it is akin to walking into every house in town and rummaging through it in Skyrim. You can do it. But is that how you want to spend your time? I guess that depends on the person. With 4,000 or so planets, I’d be surprised if someone explored more than 5% of them during the course of the game. This isn’t a game about exploration for exploration sake.