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Coverage
Intro by Steve
Lieb, for links to the articles, please scroll to bottom.
I'm not even sure how it happened. One day about a year ago, I'm pleasantly minding my own business, happily reviewing games and I get a little cd mailer from Interplay. "Interplay?" I thought, "What did they send me now?"
Little to know that, like a crack dealer with their "first one's free" come-on, I had no idea what I was getting into.
Inside the mailer was a silvery CD-R, with the words "SFC Alpha for preview only" scrawled on in magic marker. I of course tossed it on the pile for later perusal, after I was done with that current game of West Front.
But it kept glimmering at me, I couldn't ignore it. I'd heard faint rumors of some company called 14 Degrees East doing some sort of Star Trek game, and basically expected, like most people, that it would be another totally sucky Star Trek adaptation, doomed to the bargain bin within a week.
But I thought "what the heck" and tossed it in the drive. It was truly an alpha - no installer, took a little tweaking to get it to run, but when it did, I was agog. 3D-Accelerated shipmodels and a really good-looking setting were neat but as I played around with the controls I started to realize - this wasn't Star Trek, this was Star Fleet Battles!
Yes, I had found it. I had found a computer adaptation of SFB that I had been waiting for since 1982! Certainly, there had been attempts - and a pretty good one that I think is called SFBOnline - but this was a real, professional, 100% honest-to-goodness port of SFB. Of course, I barraged the poor folks at Interplay (I think that's where Heather probably figured out I was a serious pest) with questions, comments and general hoo-ha until they gave me access to the beta forum to give me someplace to vent my angst and quit bugging them.
I was in heaven. Here were people working very conscientiously to produce a faithful - as in "screw what the marketers tell us, we're making it GOOD" - port of one of the greatest boardgames ever. It was the most interactive, fan-oriented game development team I've ever witnessed. They not only were present on the beta boards, but could be relied on at absurd hours to chime in with a rigorous defense of why they did something the way they did, or (equally frequently) to develop a suggestion to the point of inclusion in the game.
The rest is, as they say, history. If you check out our preview, highlight in the GenCon article, and our subsequent review (in which we gave it an enthusiastic Editors' Choice award), SFC was a smash success. Erik Bethke and Chris Taylor led a team of extremely talented people that shocked the gaming world and single-handedly resurrected the moribund Star Trek computer gaming franchise.
When the game came out, fans literally ripped it off the shelves, emptying stores of their allotments in only days and necessitating hurried reissues that still didn't keep pace with demand until the end of October.
Do you get the sense it was a pretty good game?
It was. But I'm not going to say it was perfect - there were a number of nasty bugs in the initial release that were probably avoidable. The multiplayer could have been better done, and cheating was so prevalent that Mplayer was forced to open two rooms for the game, one for people with hacked config's and one that overwrote your configs with the game-standard-vanilla ones to enter, ensuring everyone a fair game. Similarly, it must be understood that while I'm sure they were optimistic, they were still subject to the laws of business: no sugar daddy's going to pour money on you until you come out with the game. Limited resources forced some decisions that of course were lambasted by fans - the exclusion of the Kzinti (one of the core races in SFB) and other races, fighters only for the Hydrans, etc, etc (fans are happy only about as frequently as game reviewers).
Of course, when you have a game this good AND this successful (the two aren't necessarily linked - cf. Deer Hunter 3D) everyone is expecting a sequel hard on the heels of the first. But the silence was deafening. The community had some tantalizing comments from the SFC team, but nothing definitive.
That is, until now. It seems that SFC was such a success, the team spun itself off under the able aegis of Erik Bethke to form Taldren ("The art and science of gaming.").
Taldren's mandate, of course, is to produce SFC2. The unspoken mandate that they have followed is, of course, to make it completely kick ass. Having the complete success of SFC(1) under their belts, Taldren is working on Starfleet Command II: Empires at War.
Basically, the plan seems to be "1. Take great game ; 2. Make even better". This is not hyperbole. OK, maybe a little hyperbole. But I can't help get excited at the thought of SFC with a bundle of new features, including the much-missed Kzin (be still my beating heart! They will however be called the Mirak as a nimble dodge to the whole icky "just who the heck owns the rights to the Niven characters, in the Roddenberry unvierse, currently owned by Paramount, but included in ADB's original game, with permission probably from Lou Zocchi 25 years ago?" question!), as well as the damned ISC. You'll understand when you play against them.
Think about it - more than 250 new ships? Twenty new models, now with dynamic lighting, flexible damage textures, and so on, and so on? Take a moment and jump over to the FAQ they put out at
E3.
I'm even more excited that we at Strategy-Gaming Online are fortunate enough to be hosting the major information conduit into Taldren for the masses of impatient SFC2 fans-in-waiting.
Today we are able to post only the first installment of our intensive, exclusive SFC2 coverage:
Take a good long look at the 5 newest screenshots out of Taldren - of course it's interesting to see the Mirak and ISC ships of course, but I'm more impressed with the lighting - notice the illuminated cities on the dark side of the planet. This attention to detail is the hallmark of a team that knows exactly what it wants to do.
Need more information? Jump on over to our interview, in which Josh "Jinxx" Morris, Senior Designer for SFC2 gives us more than a few minutes of his precious time and answers a number of questions about some specific highlights of SFC2. (Please, feel free to send your further questions to me, and I will assemble them and after a while drop them on Josh's head once again….)
Still hungry? Well, we've got you covered. Interplay and Taldren have very graciously allowed SGO to host a
daily "designer's diary" giving us all an inside look at what's going on with the development of the most anticipated game of 2000.
In addition, every two weeks will be include massive update. Josh, all I can say is F PIC BEL, A BUR S F PIC, and "never trust the English".
Development Diary
Interview
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