Stardock Tried To Make Star Control, Master of Orion Sequels 125
Gamasutra reports on comments from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell in which he described his efforts to revive two old but popular franchises: Star Control and Master of Orion. Quoting:
"'I actually pitched Atari on a whole idea for a true successor to Star Control,' [he said], noting that the game would follow original series developer Toys for Bob's Star Control II rather than the Legend Entertainment-developed Star Control 3 ('We just pretend that never happened,' the CEO says of that release). ... Novato, California-based Toys for Bob has actually floated the idea of making its own Star Control II sequel, with co-creator Paul Reiche III indicating he has tossed potential design ideas around, but with the company now owned by publisher Activision the proposal seems to be stuck in limbo."
Star Control II (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Star Control II (Score:2, Insightful)
As I understand it, they own the rights to create any game they like in the Star Control franchise, other than the name "Star Control" itself. The issue at hand simply relates to them wanting to get paid to develop it, and the company that pays them doesn't necessarily want to pay for a Star Control sequel.
Are you out of your mind? (Score:4, Insightful)
This game was published in 1992 and it EASILY is still one of the best PC games of all time.
They should base it on MOO1, not MOO2 (Score:5, Insightful)
Take buildings for example. In MOO2 (and every bloody civ-in-space game since) you can erect specialized buildings on your planets that focus the planets production. There is a tiny amount of strategy in the order of building things, but once you figure out an optimal build order for different types of planets it's just an annoying game mechanic that gets in the way of expanding your empire, saying "Nice doggy!" to your would-be enemies while you research a bigger stick, etc..
Really, this sort of thing ammounts to shoe-horning an inferior version of sim-city into a game that doesn't need it. However, it's in every bloody 4X game people make these days, with Stardock's own Galactic Civilizations being one of the worst offenders. In MOO1, you could just set a slider telling each of your planets how much to devote to industry, research, ship production, etc..
This is the philosophy I would like to see the MOO franchise return to:
Create simple, intuitive, direct ways to manipulate a deep and complex system with cleverly balanced AI.
e.g. To allow players to focus production, give them a simple control, such as a set of sliders, instead of a sim-city clone mini-game.
Now, I know a lot of people love MOO2 and building buildings. It's a good game, and the mechanic is now utterly ubiquitous. However, if you liked MOO2 you can go play GalCiv or any of dozens of games that have all the same mechanics. If, however, the MOO franchise were to go back to it's MOO1 roots and try to find other ways for players to interact with the universe, we might finally see the ossified 4X genre evolve a little!
Re:Are you out of your mind? (Score:4, Insightful)
My dream is for someone to finally, FINALLY do this to XCom/UFO - keep the EXACT game mechanics of the original game, but make it run in 1280x1024 with photorealistic (but still manga-esque) graphics.
1280x1024??? If you're doing a remake at least update it so it can run on modern resolutions including widescreen. LCDs in general suck at any non-native resolution, so it's even more important than before.
Re:They also wanted to remake Master of Magic (Score:3, Insightful)
My thoughts on this subject:
We don't really need a MOO2 sequel; the game plays just fine on modern systems, the graphics are adequate, the only things I could really see as improvements would be making the graphics a little higher res, maybe some more variation in ship design, and it would be GREAT if the number of stars could be increased, maybe by a factor of 4? But thats really it; the game still works, and works well.
MOM is just more of a extreme case. While Age of Wonders: shadow magic is probably as close as we've got to a MOM2, it obviously just doesn't cut it. I still play MOM on occasion, and for about 15 minutes it's really annoying trying to interpret what the 320x240 graphics mean. And then you get caught up in the fantastic gameplay and forget about it. We don't need a sequel to MOM, we just need the license holder to improve the graphics and re-mix the fantastic audio to modern standards, and LEAVE EVERYTHING ELSE ALONE.
The same goes for XCOM/UFO; The only thing wrong with the game is that it's old. update the graphics, update the audio, and release it.
3 ancient titles that the license holders could put minimal work into and get 3 best-selling games.
Re:Big whoop... (Score:4, Insightful)
Like Star Control II was such a great game. Who the hell on slashdot even remembers it?
Jerk! Loser! Nerd! Idiot! Jerk! Nerd! Nerd! Idiot! Loser!