Former Interplay Dev Talks "Disastrous" Old Star Trek Games 124
In a podcast recorded at PAX, a former Interplay developer named Thom Robertson talks about the problems he encountered while working on the company's Star Trek titles. In particular, he was the lead designer of the canceled Star Trek: The Secret of Vulcan Fury, and mentioned how incredibly ambitious initial plans for the game were. "Just one of the many reasons why that project was doomed to failure was because the team and the management had really no concept of exactly how expensive a proposition they were imagining when they set out to do it. I saw the plans. They were looking at four to six hours of created video, and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie. Something did not connect." He also discussed how Interplay was "too close to Hollywood," and the problems they ran into while filming for Starfleet Academy The full podcast (MP3) is available from 1Up; Robertson's interview begins 42 minutes in.
Quake 2 Map (Score:5, Interesting)
New Unit of Measurement? (Score:3, Interesting)
and they were planning on doing it at maybe a 1/20th of the budget of a Toy Story movie
But how many Libraries if Congress would it have been?
Doesn't count (Score:3, Interesting)
Arcade games are a different breed entirely. While yes, I did spend a few dozen too many quarters on the Voyager arcade game, arcade games don't have the luxury of using complex gameplay mechanics. If one or two screens (and possibly a few in-game prompts) can't explain the game mechanics, players will lose interest quickly and hop onto the next game. When I go to the arcade, I see DDR, Guitar Hero, air hockey, skee-ball, some racing games, and about a dozen different gallery shooters with various minor differences. The Voyager arcade game fit squarely into that last category. I will say that the Star Wars arcade game I played was better done, so I guess even arcade games can have better gameplay mechanics than others. I don't think it's fair in this context though, because Interplay wasn't making the Star Trek arcade games - they were making the console and PC games.
A better game to compare it to was Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. While it was largely Quake 3 with Voyager styled maps and character and weapon models, was a bit short, and lacked a high replay value on the single player side (beat it in one long sitting the third time), the story was on par with most episodes of the series and the multiplayer is excellent. The sequel involved the TNG cast and flip-flopped it a bit - I liked the single player campaigns much better than the multiplayer.
I might be a bit partial as I do enjoy a solid FPS (loved Crysis, enjoyed Prey, Timeshift, and Halo 2), but as I played through Mass Effect, I kept saying to myself, "This is exactly what a Trek game SHOULD be". Mass Effect did what few Star Wars games do (KOTOR 1&2 notwithstanding), is allow the players to make decisions that impact the outcome of the game, just like the characters of the series do. Quite literally getting to choose which crew member to save is something straight out of any number of Star Trek episodes, but strangely enough never really found its way into any of the star trek games that I played (Except Star Trek Borg, which was basically all decisions and was terribly implemented). The trek universe doesn't lend itself to FPS games and space shooters as much as Star Wars does, so finding the right formula for a killer Trek game with general appeal and executing it properly is a much more daunting task for a game developer. I'm certain that it will happen eventually.