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

I think to be fair you are a little different from the usual 5-second attention span gamer (like me!). I imagine that we are seeing some attempt to create a real world where not everything is interesting. But if you have the gaming time and are entertained trying to smell every flower no matter how ordinary, more power to you! There’s no wrong way to play a game. I don’t have a lot of time for gaming so I do like have my gaming time advance my in-game progress significantly (yes, I am a horrid min-maxer).

@Brad_Wardell - when should we expect the rest of the reviews to drop? I like the look of the game from the teasers so far…

There’s no such thing: opinions are by their definition subjective. Also, please don’t drag baggage from another thread into this one. I’m posting here as a member of the Founder’s Program for Star Control: Origins; my opinion about the lawsuit I limit to the other thread.

Not a question of opinion, but of reading comprehension. The preview in question really doesn’t say anything too different from the other previews, for which you’ve helpfully provided some links. If I were to distil those, it would be that almost everyone likes the graphics and the writing so far receives universal praise. Considering that writing is central to the Star Control experience, I’d consider that a huge plus.

Criticism is so far limited to the gameplay: namely that controls seems a bit loose and that the game itself may become repetitive, with one previewer expressing hope he’ll be able to automate the mineral gathering process at some point later in the game (which indicates this person hasn’t spend much time playing SC2). I imagine it’s useful information for Stardock, and actually quite flattering, since you can easily complain about the same issues when it comes to SC2.

Sure. But I did land on every planet in the solar system. ;-)

Probably on the 20th. We’ve asked everyone to wait until the game is released so that no one feels rushed.

Probably the biggest thing reviewers who know us are going through is that the production values and polish on this are on a different level than anything we’ve done before.

Though to be fair, I used Tom as a bit of boogieman to get that Codex system in (the in-game encyclopedia). I think most people who have played GalCiv III will agree that that game really would have benefited from a Galpedia type system.

One of the biggest challenges from coming from strategy game design is the immersion factor and the importance of not breaking it. For example, even the concentrated resources have an explanation in the Codex.

Where I often got my design…preferences challenged is when I started to try to get strategy game features in.

Let me give you a specific example:

Me: Shouldn’t I be able to mouse over a solar system from hyperspace and get a list of what planets are within it and their types along with if there’s anything noteworthy on them.

RPG Team: And how are you, Captain, able to know that?

Me: What do you mean?

RPG Team: We mean, how are you, Captain able to look into a solar system from hyperspace and tell what’s on the planets?

Me: Well, sensors or something.

RPG Team: What sensors? It’s 2088. Even in 2018, we can’t even see all the planets in our solar system.

Me: I think we’ve seen Pluto.

RPG Team: Pluto’s not a planet.

(3 hours later)

RPG Team: It’s not a strategy game. It’s an adventure game. If you want the ability to look into solar systems like you describe you will need some alien tech you find to do that.

Then you get into the discussion of the feel of playing the game. Things like, should you be able to just point and click where your ship goes as opposed to flying it with a game pad or keyboard? There isn’t supposed to be an “optimal” way to play the game versus say a strategy game. There’s no “build order”. ;)

Same for other fuzzy things like what’s on a planet. A lot of the fun (speaking just for me) is discovering new things about the game universe and being able to apply it or finding some tech that lets me do something that I didn’t know I could do.

What’s the reason you didn’t put one in? Lack of time? Design/rules too much in flux?

That was part of it. But mostly it wasn’t considered until too late in development as being “necessary” – which was a mistake in hindsight.

HA! Only 3 hours? Who caved? :)

Edit: While astronomers don’t consider Pluto a planet, planetary scientists, exoplanet astronomers and galactic astronomers still do. They also argue a lot.

In fairness to the game devs there, at least the early portion of the game (which I’m assuming I can vaguely allude to since press people have) seems to portray the humans as very scrappy, low tech super noobs to interplanetary exploration who lack even fairly basic scifi goodies yet and are totally strapped for R&D money.

So it could feel a little incongruous if they can barely limp out to Neptune but can also scan while systems with high accuracy from the FTL dimension they literally discovered a week ago.

Making something like that an upgrade you’ve got to get from aliens would make sense (to me), though!

I would hope the dev team’s real argument was not primarily about realism (save that hard-science nonsense for Starflight!) but about the patterns of play that are created by pushing information up to a higher level in the game loop like that. The real reason I would guess you probably don’t want to do so is that Star Control is an exploration game, and you just yoinked about 50% of the exploration out of the game! Suddenly I don’t need to actually GO to most of these worlds. And there’s a real satisfaction in physically arriving somewhere to be able to see what it’s all about (see: Star Trek), and that feeling would be lost if you gave that information via interface while in hyperspace. That’s the main “sin” of too many strategic views in a game like Star Control: you’re letting the interface have all the fun!

Oh, I wasn’t trying to correct you or anything! We have the same point: Realism shmealism!

I actually love the fact that @Brad_Wardell and his devs argue about things. Instead of Brad just using a fiat vote to make things happen.

Also this thread. Best transparency. Great stuff.

It has been really hard to put on an RPG hat for this. I knew that would be an issue from the outset which is why we hired so many people with RPG backgrounds to keep me from injecting my love of stats all over.

@Nightgaunt: It’s not about realism. It’s about being consistent with the rules you’ve set up for your universe.

There are two types of people in this world: The people who were okay with Ant Man and the people who were not and can explain why. ;)

Consistency is important in world-building, but I would still say the gameplay questions precede the world-building ones in this case. Strategic-level information is going to change the player’s behavior. Do you want that? The fictional question can be side-boarded until you know how you want the player to digest the content and whether, say, there’s a point in the game where you believe players will find it tedious to visit every system, so maybe then you want to introduce a new ship upgrade that gives you that system information in hyperspace. The timing of that upgrade would then give you the parameters to decide where that tech comes from. Maybe you’re just meeting a particular race at roughly that point in the progression. Would it make sense for them to give you the blueprints for that upgrade? If that would be inconsistent with the fiction, then you’ll have to look elsewhere, but it seems to me in an essentially cartoon world like Star Control, there are probably more than a handful of possible fictional solutions.

Sorry, I’m not trying to mansplain (designsplain?) at you.You’re an accomplished designer, and I’m sure you have a lot of others on your team. This is all stuff that they wrangle with every day. The question of whether that strategic information should be available to the player is actually a really interesting design question. I do think it exposes high-level differences between how strategy games operate vs. other games. So it’s fun to dabble in someone else’s design-world for a bit.

LOL - I’m going to have to use that, sometime

I’m okay with Ant Man. Is this a problem?

Ant Man is a problem. He is changing his size but I would have to assume not changing the number of atoms in his body. As well he seems to change his mass only when it’s important to the script.

In real life, changing the number of atoms in your body would mean that at some point you no longer have the required atoms to continue basic bodily functions.

So he somehow shrinks the atoms in his body. This is a form of science unheard of even in the MCU. How do you shrink that which is small as it can possibly be? Shrinking atoms can only work if you make electrons closer to the neutron/proton core. You are essentially making neutronium. When electrons and protons are forced together, they combine into neutrons.

Thus Ant Man is actually, at some point, Neutronium Man. Then he is dead. And then he is in the center of the Earth. As neutronium is the most dense material in the universe.

And when he grows? Do I really have to explain this? He is expanding the size of his atoms until he essentially has no atoms at all. He becomes a cloud of random particles and either explodes or simply evaporates.

Edit: Compared to Ant man the Hulk is simple science.

You are assuming that the laws of physics are the same when Ant Man activates whatever-gizmo-tech.

If the gizmo changes the constants regulating the basic forces. strong, weak, gravitational, electromagnetic, then the effects we observe can be explained.

He must be hiding something.

Cool! We just identified members of both groups! I’m okay with Ant Man and RichVR isn’t and can definitely explain why!

It’s a good explanation. My view (which is relevant to Star Control, as well) is that some fictional universes construct scaffolding for their worlds that is not so robust or inflexible that it doesn’t allow some hand-waving in areas like atomic physics (or future technology). That’s not to say they won’t make claims about the physics involved in their storylines! That’s the hand-waving part, because if it totally contradicts what Thor said in Cosmic Wars #14, neither the writer nor most readers care. That explanation is there to establish the rules in that issue/run/character continuity, but there’s some rough boundary there. No one’s going to try to compare it with the physics of Dr. Strange (not until the crossover).

Star Control, I would say, is an even more cartoony world than Marvel, or roughly equivalent. (Granted, one factor with Marvel is the amount of material and number of different contributors, while Star Control until recently has had a lot fewer of both–to the degree that the lore for SC1 & 2 was mostly held in a single head at some point!) So I do think consistency is very important. It can’t feel like the universe is arbitrary at every turn. But the standards for that consistency are relatively flexible and can stretch to accommodate a lot of things.