Star Trek Legacy's Plot Left Behind on Away Mission

Much like the deleted content from KOTOR 2, Xbox 360 fanboy has word that Star Trek: Legacy's storyline has been cut as well. Derek Chester, a writer for the game, spoke up on the official boards for the game: "[Forum poster] Star Dagger is correct, a lot of what was intended was cut. From rendered cinematics and interstitial cutscenes to a great deal of backstory and events that took place between the eras to tie them together. The total portrayal of the intended story was incomplete. Dorothy and I wrote a lot for this game...but not everything made it in. As a result there may be some difficulty in following the motivations for characters or the reasons for crucial events. The story as was written, tied together a great deal of Trek history and events to make it seem more substantial than it came across in the final game."

Re:Fix: Uninstall Legacy, install Bridge Commander

[Wilson_6500]

First, the link's broken due to an extra slash at the end.

Good luck finding a copy of the game. It's slightly rare, and is going for up to $70 on ebay. People are listing it on Amazon for up to $90 "Like New." There's also some kind of "Extreme 3D" version of the game, but people seem slightly reluctant to bid on it--I don't know why, but it may not use the same patches as the original or something like that.

(Although I'd like to play the game, it's not worth $70-90 to me--especially considering that there are some very disappointing cons listed in reviews.)

Ye GODS! A story that got cut during development?

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked on a truckload of movie- and story-based video games, I'm just aghast that this happened.

...

Actually, no I'm not. I've never seen a game story written during development that wasn't cut by at least 50% or more.

Part of the difficulty stems, I believe, from there being no set limit to the amount of story that a game designer / writer can script in to a game. When you are writing a movie script, you know for a fact that you have 90-120 minutes with which to tell your story, and that each page of script is approximately 1 minute of screen time. This gives you a nice natural boundary to work with.

Game scripts? Not so much. You know that the game needs to be between 10 and 40 hours long... and that most of that time will be taken up by gameplay... but there is a huge difference between a game that has 1 hour of story in it and a game that has 3 hours of story... even though the % of overall time taken up by that story is not dramatically different. So... when do you stop writing? What does a game writer limit himself to? Often, the answer is "way more than the developers can make".

Also, game story sequences are remarkably difficult to actually construct and build in realtime 3D. Constructing in-game cinematics is hard work, there's no getting around it. This problem is only exacerbated on a movie/TV title: the audience has the quality of the show or movie to compare your in-game cinematics to, and thus the production requirements go up and up. This inevitably leads to someone (usually a producer) having to make a call (or, lots and lots of calls) between cinematic quality and story length... with predictable results.

You put all this together, and you get the story dev path of most game projects:

1. The designer/writer sits down and writes what they think is a very reasonable script.
2. The production team forces them to cut that by 50% before they even show it to the developers.
3. The developers confirm that yes, the designer/writer has dramatically underestimated how hard these cinemactics will be to make and that they can only make half of what is left over.
4. During development, time crunches hit and things go wrong, and another 50% of the story gets left on the cutting room floor.

What you are left with is a bare skeleton of the intended story, which is often unintelligible to the viewer.

So, I say to ye old Star Trek writer guy: did more than 25% of what you wrote make it in the game? You're well ahead of many game writers. Quit cryin'.

A Coward's Note About the Length...

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has recently finished Star Trek: Legacy for the PC (last night, actually), I should point out that the single-player campaign itself, on the medium difficulty setting, took me in total maybe three evenings to complete. This is a ballpark estimate due to replay of certain missions. That's 12 to 15 hours.

The major hook for STL with Trekkies and sci-fi gamer officionados is that it was sold by the PR machine to be an ambitious novel-rivaling epic; An era-spanning game that charts the progress of a story from the very beginnings of Trek's Federation to the 'modern day' post-Nemesis. It featured the voice-acting talent of the five most notable captains of those eras, centered around Trek's various television shows. Yet because of time constraints (I have no proof of which, but this game WAS promised to be delivered for Trek's 40th Anniversary), It was distilled to a few evenings total gameplay. If anyone has played Star Trek: Bridge Commander, a game with not so all-encompasing a grasp as Legacy was marketed to be, I would estimate that Legacy's single-player campaign equates to roughly half of Bridge Commander's, and due to other gameplay issues which I will not go into, was half-again as immersive. Certain eras spend one mission in existence before leaping ahead with no explanation on why it was needed in the first place. And when the 'Ohhh, I get it!' moment kicks in, it's much less of a revelation and more of a sense of finally understanding a somewhat overused plot device.

The story was not the only thing cut from the game, but for some of us it's the most missed. Like the aforementioned Knights of the Old Republic 2, the clips in Legacy's in-game story leave the story feeling disjointed and incomplete. It is transparent. It is predictable, distilled to a measure to justify the next interstellar dogfight. There is no intrigue, no suspense, and honestly little replay value in going back to it as it is now. I'm speaking as an owner of the PC version, but if I were an XBox360 owner with that copy of the game I would feel even more cheated, considering..you know...the whole OMG Next-Generation Gaming thing. Legacy's reach is evocative of the Starfleet Armada era of games, not 2006's best efforts.

It was not an issue of trying to keep the game from 'being too long'. You can finish it in a day if you so wish (and yes, I understand that jives well with some of you, but in my opinion I prefer to long savor a game I've waited a year or so for, and three passive evenings just doesn't cut it). But all markers point to this project being rushed to coincide with the same year as Trek's 40th Anniversary (which they missed the original launch day for). Cuts were made to likely streamline the development cycle. Alas, you end up with watered-down Kool-Aid with a price tag of $59.99.

Cheers,

A. Coward

Re:Hard to Find

[Quarters]

The PC version was in stores the week of 12/4. The 360 version was released a week later and has been in stores since 12/11 or 12/12.

Dorothy is DC Fontana

[Anonymous Coward]

The Dorothy mentioned in the forum post is DC Fontana who wrote for the original Star Trek, Star Trek Animated Seris, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Star Trek Books, etc.