Star Control 3

Star Control 3 is a 1996 action-adventure game developed by Legend Entertainment. It is the third instalment in the Star Control trilogy. The story takes place after Star Control II, beginning with the mysterious collapse of hyperspace. This leads the player to investigate a new quadrant of space, joined by allied aliens from the previous games.

Star Control 3
Cover art of the DOS version
Developer(s)Legend Entertainment
Publisher(s)Accolade
Director(s)Michael J. Lindner
Producer(s)George MacDonald
Designer(s)
  • Jim Tyler
  • Mark Poesch
Programmer(s)
  • Michael J. Lindner
  • Mark Poesch
  • Glen R. Dahlgren
Artist(s)
  • Heather Capelli
  • Michael J. Lindner
  • Steve Riley
Writer(s)
  • Daniel Greenberg
  • Michael J. Lindner
Composer(s)Andrew Frazier
Platform(s)
ReleaseAugust 31, 1996 (DOS)
February 23, 1998 (Mac)
Genre(s)Action-adventure
Mode(s)Single player, multiplayer

The single-player mode is similar to the previous game, combining space exploration, ship-to-ship combat, and alien dialog. In contrast to Star Control II, hyperspace flight is replaced with fast travel. Planetary exploration is also replaced with a colony management system, inspired by the original Star Control. Combat offers more detailed steering and aiming, as well as additional player versus player multiplayer options.

Game publisher Accolade hired Legend Entertainment to create this sequel, after the series creators Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford decided to pursue other projects. The game was considered a critical and commercial success when it was released. However, the legacy of Star Control 3 would suffer from comparisons to the award-winning Star Control II.

Gameplay

A view of a planetary system in the game after colonization and ship construction.

Star Control 3 is an action-adventure science fiction game with strategic elements.[1] The gameplay combines features from the first two Star Control games.[2] Whereas all three games feature ship-to-ship combat,[3] this game recreates a colonization system last seen in the first Star Control,[4][5] with story, exploration, and dialog similar to the second game.[2][6]

In contrast to Star Control II, hyperspace flight is replaced with fast travel, in the form of an instantaneous "warp bubble" device.[4] The player's allies create this warp device in response to a hyperspace collapse, which becomes the subject of the player's investigation.[7] They must follow the origins of this mysterious collapse to the galactic core, where they encounter new alien friends and foes.[4] The player can warp between locations by clicking on a SVGA star map with a mouse,[7] which is both faster and safer than the hyperspace flight of Star Control II.[4]

Where the previous game had the player gather resources by landing on planets, Star Control 3 has the player earn resources through a colony management system.[2] This builds upon the colonization system seen in the first Star Control.[4] Eventually, a planetary colony will provide resources such as fuel, ships, crew, and artifacts.[7] The player can manage each planet's priorities,[8] and each planet is better suited to a different alien race.[7] Overall, colony management is simpler than other strategy games of the time,[4] mainly offering a convenient way to refuel without returning to a central star base.[2]

All three of the original Star Control games feature 2D "melee" ship combat.[9] Star Control 3 offers the overhead viewpoint from the first two games, as well as a new 2.5D pseudo-3D viewpoint.[4] Each alien race has a unique ship, with a unique weapon and secondary ability.[7] Combat allows more degrees of rotation than the previous games, with more detailed aiming, steering, and scaling.[4] The multiplayer player versus player mode also returns from previous games, with new options for network, modem, and serial connections.[2] However, multiplayer combat only features ships from Star Control 3's story, leaving out some ships from the first two games.[4]

Much of the game involves dialog with alien races, each with unique personalities.[10] The dialog screens feature digitized full motion video of mechanical puppets, instead of the 2D animated pixel art of the previous games.[11] The soundtrack is also a change from sample-based module music of the second game, opting for a more standard MIDI score.[4]

Plot

Shortly after the end of Star Control II, hyperspace mysteriously collapses throughout the galaxy, stranding most spacefaring races. The Captain develops a new Precursor ship on Unzervault, with an experimental "warp bubble" drive that allows the ship to travel between stars without using hyperspace. The Captain contacts several alien allies, and they trace the origins of the hyperspace collapse to the galactic core in the Kessari quadrant. To investigate further, the Captain is sent to the distant quadrant, accompanied by colony ships from several other alien races.

In the Kessari quadrant, the captain clashes with the local power bloc, the Hegemonic Crux, led by the Ploxis Plutocrats. The investigation also reveals an even larger threat, the imminent return of an ancient race called the Eternal Ones, who consume the energy of all sentient beings once an eon.

The Captain discovers that the Precursors genetically modified themselves to a non-sentient state, to hide from the Eternal Ones. The Precursors also created semi-sentient robots, the Daktaklakpak, to reverse the process after the Eternal Ones left. However, the Daktaklakpak malfunctioned and forgot their purpose, leaving the Precursors stranded at that intelligence level. The Captain temporarily reverses the process on a single Precursor, who explains that the Eternal Ones will collapse the galaxy due to their unnatural use of interstellar fatigue. Before the Precursor dies, he tells the player to stop the Eternal Ones.

The Captain also solves various problems in the Kessari quadrant. They persuade the Owa race to stop dumping their antimatter waste on Rainbow Worlds, which was preventing them from performing their function of mitigating interstellar fatigue. The player also breaks the power of the Hegemonic Crux, culminating in the defeat of a Crux Precursor battleship at the galactic core.

The Captain finally meets with the Heralds of the Eternal Ones at the galactic core. After defeating them, the Captain discovers that the Eternal Ones are using highly inefficient technology to gather the sentient energy they need to survive. The Captain finds a way to harvest the required energy in a non-lethal manner, combining the Eternal Ones' technology with various artifacts and technology from the Precursors and the Daktaklakpak. The Captain finally gathers sentience from several Kessari quadrant races, and uses it to satisfy the Eternal Ones.

Development

Hiring and continuity

Bob Bates of Legend Entertainment was a massive fan of Star Control II, leading Accolade hire his team.

After the success of Star Control II, Accolade offered Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III the same budget to produce a third game, which they turned down to pursue other projects.[12] As Ford and Reiche had retained the rights to their characters and stories from the first two games,[13] they licensed their content to Accolade so that the publisher could create Star Control 3 without their involvement.[14] Producer George MacDonald from Accolade decided to work with Michael Lindner and Daniel Greenberg of Legend Entertainment, after hearing about their love of Star Control from Legend president Bob Bates.[15] MacDonald and Lindner would lead the game design,[16] and the story would be written by Lindner and Greenberg.[15]

Legend Entertainment's writers were arguably "some of the best writers in the game industry at the time", with veterans from acclaimed adventure game developer Infocom.[4] To guide the project, the staff at Legend assembled a "bible" about Star Control based on the series' manuals and scripts, with the fan community providing corrections and additions.[5] The new team also consulted with Ford and Reiche to answer open questions from Star Control II, such as the true fate of the Precursors, and the relationship between Earth and the Arilou.[11] Legend wanted to continue the previous story while adding new characters and plots, so they set the game in a new area of space.[5] The story expands on the mystery of the Precursors' disappearance, and introduces new enemies in the form of the Hegemonic Crux.[17][7] MacDonald described the game's relationship between gameplay and narrative, explaining that "Star Control is at its core a giant story, and you have to find this story and explore it".[15]

Design and production

Early in development, a concept document was created by Legend Entertainment founder Mike Verdu.[11] Legend also compiled an inches-thick binder of letters, faxes, and e-mails, with fan suggestions for the next Star Control game, which they incorporated into their plans.[15] A major target of fan criticism was the tedium of the planetary resource gathering from Star Control II,[11][15] as well as complaints about returning to Earth to refuel.[5] The team decided to replace planet landing with a colony management system,[16] an allusion to the strategy elements from the first Star Control game.[4] The colony feature was designed to provide a convenient place for players to refuel, as well as a logical location to recruit crew and ships.[5] MacDonald explained, "we wanted a big universe to explore, but we wanted to make it easier to actually get places."[2]

The team were fans of the original 2D art of the Star Control II aliens, and were hesitant to utilize 3D graphics that were too mathematical or robotic.[11] However, they were also concerned that the 2D graphics created in the early 1990s were already obsolete.[18] Finding a third way forward, they designed the characters by filming live animatronic puppets,[11] designed to take advantage of the storage potential of CD-ROM.[18] MacDonald wanted the new game "to bring the visuals and multimedia elements as far forward as we could".[2] Working with special effects company State of the Art,[5] they developed their character concepts into animatronic puppets.[15] The registration points on the robotic puppets were integrated with software that could control their movements.[18] While a few aliens would be rendered in CGI, most of them were constructed in person,[4] filmed against a blue screen, and then composited with background footage of hand-crafted miniature film sets.[2] The team eventually finished 24 alien characters and animations (12 new, and 12 returning), which required extensive personnel to engineer, program, film, and convert to digital video.[11] Their design goal was to reveal the mood of the characters through dynamic animations,[18] though the final game seemed to repeat the same animations in most situations.[2]

The developers also added an isometric pseudo-3D view option to the combat screen.[16][18] This created aiming challenges that required more dynamic camera-movement.[15] They also rendered more ship angles than previous games, in order to support more granular aiming and steering.[4] This array of camera angles and lighting effects proved to be a challenge, but ultimately ran smoothly on a 486.[11]

The voice acting became more professionalized compared to Star Control II,[4] which were previously performed by personal friends of Reiche and Ford.[19][20] Audio producer Kathleen Bober auditioned talent from other games, as well as soap operas and documentaries, until they arrived at performances that felt accurate to the alien characters.[11] They directed the actors to convey the feel of the characters based on inflection and tone, rather than accents or distortions.[5] The result was a unique voice and lingual pattern for each alien,[2] with over 11 hours of audio created from 18 voice actors.[5] The designers also chose a MIDI soundtrack instead of the previous sample-based module format, in order to make it easier to port to consoles (which ultimately never happened).[5][4]

Although the game had been scheduled to be released in the Fall of 1995, the game was finally published a year later, due to the complexities of all the interactions between the different aliens.[5] Much later, in 2011, the game would be re-released for modern computers through GOG.com.[1]

Reception

Sales

Star Control 3 was considered a commercial success.[21] It debuted on PC Data's computer game sales charts at #11 in September 1996,[22] and climbed to tenth place the following month.[23] The game exited PC Data's top 20 in November.[24] In its initial two months, Star Control 3 surpassed 100,000 units in sales.[21]

Critical success

Reception
Aggregate score
AggregatorScore
Metacritic89/100
Review scores
PublicationScore
CGM [9]
CGW [25]
GameSpot9/10[8]
Next Generation (PC)[3]
(Mac)[26]
PC Gamer (US)90% [2]
PC GamesA-[27]
RPGfan86% [10]
MacHome Journal[28]
Macworld[29]

At the time its release in 1996, critics gave Star Control 3 positive reviews, despite inevitable comparisons to the highly acclaimed Star Control II. According to Metacritic, Star Control 3 has a score of 89% based on the reviews of 5 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[30]

Writing for PC Gamer, Michael Wolf places the game in context of the series, "where Star Control 1 contained mostly strategic elements, as well as action-oriented melee between ships, Star Control II focused mainly on telling a story, while retaining the ship-to-ship combat. Star Control 3, on the other hand, attempts to incorporate all three aspects of strategy, story, and action, with mixed results." PC Gamer awarded the game an "Editor's Choice" with a 90% rating, stating that the game "has some pretty big shoes to fill, and it does so beautifully".[2] Tim Soete of GameSpot gave the game a 9/10, proclaiming it "one of the best titles to come out this year", and calling it "a vast oddity, integrating real-time strategy and action elements with the exploratory playability of an adventure title into one game".[8] Computer Games Magazine gave the game 4.5 stars, explaining that the "plot is deep, the characters are brought to life effectively," and that "this is one of the best games of the year. It might even be the best adventure game of the year."[9] PC Games gave the game an A-, explaining that "Star Control II was a funnier, more colorful game, but Star Control 3 supplies a superior gaming engine, excellent online help (including a tracking system for hints), a sophisticated strategy-based colony system, fine Super VGA artwork, and far better game balance."[27] Giving the game four stars, Next Generation states that "although the strategy elements and uninspiring footage of the aliens aren’t as exciting as fans of the series might have hoped for, the story and variety more than make up for it.".[3] That year, Star Control 3 was nominated for a 1996 Spotlight Award at the Computer Game Developers Conference, for "Best Script, Story or Interactive Writing".[31][32]

Two years later, the Macintosh version received more mixed reviews. Macworld's Michael Gowan wrote that Star Control 3 "lacks a modern game feel, with stale character interaction and clumsy fighting modes."[29] Next Generation called it "obsolete" and rated it lower than its PC version, explaining that "although there are worse space conquest/simulation games out on the game market, not one of those is on the Macintosh."[26] That said, the game still received 4 out of 5 stars in MacHome Journal.[28]

Legacy

Ultimately, Star Control 3 is not remembered as fondly as its predecessor. Despite earning critical praise on release, the fanbase never warmed up to it.[4] When IGN compiled their 2003 list of greatest games, they celebrated Star Control II while noting that Star Control III "paled in comparison".[33] Upon its re-release in 2011, GOG.com made the contrast that "it got excellent reviews though some of the hardcore Star Control fans weren't entirely thrilled by the innovations".[34] Critical Hit describes Star Control 3 as "an able demonstration of computer graphics technology of the time," but "it went a little backwards in its integration of the series alien races, and poor combat modes. Developed without any input from designers Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III from Toys for Bob, most fans don’t consider it part of the series canon."[35]

Game developer and historian Neal Tringham suggests that Star Control 3 "attempted unsuccessfully to reproduce the formula established in the second game",[16] along with Rusel DeMaria who notes that the game "was not done by the original team and was not considered nearly up to the standard of its predecessor."[36] According to Kotaku, "no one's really nailed a successor to Star Control II and an official addition to the series was killed off by the lacklustre Star Control III."[37]

Initially, series creators Ford and Reiche had promoted Star Control 3 as a "visually rich" and "captivating sequel".[38] But years later, Reiche would comment that the change in character design "didn't have the same charm as the hand painted ones".[36] Kurt Kalata describes the efforts of Legend Entertainment, that it's "obvious the designers of Star Control III had great reverence for the older games, it still can’t help but feel like fan fiction. That feeling, that everything is slightly off, is what harms Star Control 3 the most."[4]

References

  1. Staff (September 15, 2011). "New Release: Star Control 3". GOG.com.
  2. Michael Wolf (December 1996). "Reviews - Star Control 3". PC Gamer. Archived from the original on December 1996.
  3. Jeff Lundrigan (January 1997). "Star Struck". Next Generation. No. 25. Imagine Media. p. 186.
  4. Kurt Kalata (September 11, 2018). "Star Control 3". Hardcore Gaming 101.
  5. Eric Jensen (February 27, 1997). "Interview With George MacDonald, Accolade Software". Online Gaming Review. Archived from the original on February 27, 1997.
  6. Kurt Kalata (September 11, 2018). "Star Control – Hardcore Gaming 101". Retrieved June 3, 2020.
  7. Allen Edwards, George MacDonald, W.D. Robinson (August 13, 1996). "Star Control 3 Manual". Accolade.CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. Soete, Tim (October 3, 1996). "Star Control 3 Review". GameSpot. Retrieved January 7, 2018.
  9. Eric Jensen (October 2, 1996). "Star Control 3 - Review". Computer Games Magazine. Archived from the original on May 30, 2003.
  10. Andrew DeMario (September 17, 2000). "RPGFan Reviews - Star Control 3". www.rpgfan.com. Retrieved June 3, 2020.
  11. Daniel Greenberg (October 2, 1996). Star Control 3: The Official Strategy Guide (PDF). Prima Games. pp. 201–213.
  12. Matt Barton (April 19, 2016). Honoring the Code: Conversations with Great Game Designers. CRC Press. p. 214. ISBN 978-1-4665-6754-2.
  13. Pelit (March 21, 2006). "Star Control - Kontrollin aikakirjat". Pelit.
  14. Alice O'Connor (February 23, 2018). "Star Control lead devs fire back at Stardock lawsuit". Rock Paper Shotgun.
  15. T. Liam McDonald (December 1995). "Star Control 3 - Preview". PC Gamer. pp. 166–175.
  16. Neal Roger Tringham (September 10, 2014). Science Fiction Video Games. CRC Press. pp. 428–. ISBN 978-1-4822-0388-2.
  17. Legend Entertainment (August 31, 1996). Star Control 3 (PC). Accolade.
  18. Steve Bauman (December 1995). "Star Control III Preview". Strategy Plus. p. 67.
  19. Greg Kasavin (June 27, 2003). "Greatest Games of All Time - Star Control II (Interview Feature)". GameSpot. Archived from the original on March 5, 2005.
  20. Rob Dubbin (Interviewer) (June 5, 2015). Classic Game Postmortem: Star Control. Game Developer Conference.
  21. Staff (November 1996). "Accolade Rebounds". PC Gamer US. Archived from the original on October 12, 1997.
  22. GamerX (October 29, 1996). "September's top 30 games". CNET Gamecenter. Archived from the original on February 5, 1997.
  23. GamerX (November 27, 1996). "October's top 30 games". CNET Gamecenter. Archived from the original on February 5, 1997.
  24. GamerX (January 10, 1997). "November's 30 best-sellers". CNET Gamecenter. Archived from the original on February 5, 1997.
  25. Elliott Chin (December 1996). "Can You Say Daktaklakpak - Star Control 3 Review". Computer Gaming World.
  26. Staff (August 1998). "Finals". Next Generation. No. 44. Imagine Media. p. 102.
  27. Barry Brenesal (May 25, 1997). "Star Control 3". PC Games. Archived from the original on May 25, 1997.
  28. Alan Stafford (August 1998). "Star Control 3". MacHome Journal. Archived from the original on February 23, 2002.
  29. Michael Gowan (February 1999). "Name Your Game; From Goofy to Gory, Macworld Reviews 48 Ways to Play". Macworld. Archived from the original on August 10, 2001.
  30. Metacritic. "Star Control 3 reviews". CBS Interactive. Archived from the original on December 4, 2016. Retrieved May 3, 2019.
  31. Staff (April 15, 1997). "And the Nominees Are..." Next Generation. Archived from the original on June 5, 1997.
  32. Press Release (April 28, 1997). "Spotlight Awards Winners Announced for Best Computer Games of 1996". Santa Clara, California: Game Developers Conference. Archived from the original on July 3, 2011.
  33. IGN Staff (2003). "IGN's Top 100 Games (2003)". IGN. Archived from the original on November 23, 2005. Retrieved 2019-05-03.
  34. GOG Staff (September 14, 2011). "Star Control III". GOG.com.
  35. Geoffrey Tim (October 10, 2017). "25 years later, Star Control II's creators are making a direct sequel". CriticalHit.net.
  36. Rusel DeMaria (December 7, 2018). High Score! Expanded: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games 3rd Edition. CRC Press. ISBN 978-0-429-77139-2.
  37. Logan Booker (January 12, 2013). "Relive The Glory Of Star Control II In Delicious High Definition With Ur-Quan Masters HD". Kotaku.
  38. Accolade (May 1996). "Star Control 3 Promotion". PC Gamer. p. 12.
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