ST Legacy -- ouch.

kephren · Post by **kephren** » 2006-12-11 10:40pm

My first impression is -- graphics are beautiful but the game itself is deadly boring.

Essentially, you use counterintuitive keyboard controls to make a starship fly like a biplane and keep hitting the mouse keys until a meter (representing the enemy ship) turns completely red. That's the combat system. I'd rank it considerably less interesting than Pacman or Pong.

There's no strategy to weapon selection. Every time you touch the mouse it meaninglessly changes the camera angle, which has no connection whatsoever to your ability to fight. So your point of view is always jumping around, for no good reason. You could just keep your hand off the mouse, but then you can't fire. I imagine that some customization of the controls might have fixed this, but the fact that they'd make such a crappy set of default controls argues poorly for the game design.

While you're fighting, the "aliens" keep making stupid remarks like "The Praetor wants you dead" -- as if that's supposed to add some drama to an essentially pointless exercise. If you manage to get close to the enemy and get the enemy in your forward sights, you get a better hit. That's an excellent strategy for a Sopwith Camel, but completely archaic for a starship. Moreover, as the ships get bigger, they get slower and duller. Great design concept, guys.

If I were to net it out, I'd say that Legacy takes the dumbest part of Bridge Commander (the mind-bendingly dull combat system) and combined with the dumbest part of Starfleet Command (the limited "combat area" concept) and rolled it together with a dumbed-down version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. It really doesn't get much worse than this. Seriously.

In short, as a game, Legacy is a real dog. The graphics are gorgeous, though, so it will probably be, like Bridge Commander, primarily useful as a machinima engine.

Batman · Post by **Batman** » 2006-12-11 10:45pm

Don't we have a C&G forum for stuff like that?

Stofsk · Post by **Stofsk** » 2006-12-11 11:01pm

Batman wrote:Don't we have a C&G forum for stuff like that?

That's some good moderating there Bats. Why don't you move it to C&G?

Who cares anyway? There or here, it's a star trek topic.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-11 11:36pm

The ships (and the relative balance of them) are really wierd. It's got wierd one-shot stuff like Norway, but not Sabres. It's got SFB-style Akulas, but calls them 'Apollos', and the new Akula is the single fugliest ship I've ever seen passed off as 'Federation'.

The TOS-Movie era battleship is a quad-nacelle Connie, instead of the awesome huge-saucered, rollbarred SFC one (or the absurd-yet-funny catamaran-hulled, rollbarred, superlasered one). There's a 'refit' of it that kitbashes it with Exclesior parts. The Lakota-refit is counted as TOS era, for some reason.

Oh, and the NX-01 is better than a ship that looks almost exactly the same but has more torps - the deeply lame 'Coto'. I also second IB's criticism of the very, very poor 'pulse phaser' effect used on refit Connies: it's made worse because the fucking ENT-era Yorktown battleship (with gull wings, on an early Fed ship... uh huh) has a Defiant-style machinegun thing on the back, which spams out individual pulses.

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2006-12-12 12:31am

And here we are.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-12 03:49am

Shouldn't this be merged with the other ST Legacy thread? here...

need4spd · Post by **need4spd** » 2006-12-12 05:00am

i've tried 3 times playing this game now. I am bored after the second compaign mission. And what's with me beating the computer on expert on skirmishes the first time i play the game?

Yes the controls bite

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2006-12-12 10:23am

Does the game add crap new ships and races just because it can?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-12 10:54am

Laughably, there are only Fed, Borg, Klingons, and Romulans. But OH YES they've invented piles of new ships.

Of course, they didn't use any non-canon ships from anything else. What's with that? Can't they settle on an EU fleet for other races? Back in the SFC/KA days, you at least had a consistent spread of classes ... these days, it's all random bullshit. Like the Klingon ship that's a TOS Romulan warbird upside down with a neck/head added to the front. The Fedder 'Akula', which is so stunningly crap I'm motivated to grab a screenshot.

EDIT - Bear in mind the 'Akula' from SFB and almost every TOS-era game is the 'over and under' nacelle design, post-refit with a Miranda torpedo thing on the lower pylon. This is... well... it's some kind of turreted phaser crazy shit with scalloped nacelles.

It's from somewhere called the 'Mastercom Data Center', apparently, so they're using SFB ships, kitbashes, MDC stuff, all in one big disordered mess.

The Grim Squeaker · Post by **The Grim Squeaker** » 2006-12-12 12:12pm

Holy fuck Stark

that looks like a damn pistol with a sight and a disc stuck on the end

.

And yet again ST proves that no matter how mediocre a SW game may be (Empire at war, especially the ground combat) theres always a ST game thats flat out terrible

KrauserKrauser · Post by **KrauserKrauser** » 2006-12-12 12:26pm

The stupid! It burns!

Good thing I avoid ST games out of principle.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-12-12 12:35pm

And yet again ST proves that no matter how mediocre a SW game may be (Empire at war, especially the ground combat) theres always a ST game thats flat out terrible

Yoda Stories

KrauserKrauser · Post by **KrauserKrauser** » 2006-12-12 12:59pm

Was a fun game, I don't know what game you played.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-12-12 01:00pm

GBC version or PC? Because the former was a mess.

And let's not even mention Flight of the Falcon...point is, 303's comment doesn't hold water.

FedRebel · Post by **FedRebel** » 2006-12-12 01:24pm

Stark wrote:Laughably, there are only Fed, Borg, Klingons, and Romulans. But OH YES they've invented piles of new ships.

So this is basically SFC3 2.0, with a stripped down version of the "Generations at War" mod preinstalled

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-12-12 02:33pm

Stark wrote:Of course, they didn't use any non-canon ships from anything else. What's with that? Can't they settle on an EU fleet for other races? Back in the SFC/KA days, you at least had a consistent spread of classes ... these days, it's all random bullshit.

That's because back then all the TOS/movie-era games were Interplay products, so they could reuse their own work. (which, except for the perennially pooched look of the Excelsior class, was pretty decent IMO)

But yeah, that Akula just looks like sloppy, lazy shit to me.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-12 05:49pm

FedRebel wrote:So this is basically SFC3 2.0, with a stripped down version of the "Generations at War" mod preinstalled

Most damningly, the multi is 'kill everyone' or 'kill starbase' like SFC1. The single is ONLY the lameass linked-missions story or skirmish. There's no freeform, no ship tweaking, just ENT episodes or 'kill everyone' skirmishes.

Uranium235 wrote:That's because back then all the TOS/movie-era games were Interplay products, so they could reuse their own work. (which, except for the perennially pooched look of the Excelsior class, was pretty decent IMO)

If all they did was rip stuff out of the SFB board game, why stop? Why go for the laughable ships in Legacy, with the Romulan 'Raptor', the 'top half of a Deridex' and the Klingon ships having K'Vorts, D-7s, AND Stabbers in the same time period? Sigh. Some of the SFB ships were deeply lame, but at least they sat together as a design lineage.

Uranium235 wrote:But yeah, that Akula just looks like sloppy, lazy shit to me.

It's apparently a TOS-era ship, between 'Miranda without rollbar' and 'Miranda'. Just looking at those scalloped nacelles, the retarded dorsal turret thing, and the huge cutouts on the saucer and thinking of TWOK makes me laugh. The fact that they just ripped it from 'Mastercom Data Centre' or wherever just makes it worse: they didn't invent it, they looked at it and thought 'hell yes this is going in our game'.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2006-12-12 07:49pm

I did see a SFC era ship in screen shots. It was the War Destroyer from the Federation.

What sucks is that they left out canon Trek ships and used non-canon ones instead. What the fuck? Thats like Jump to Light Speed making a Tie-Defender clone but not actually using the Defender.

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-12-12 09:12pm

Stark wrote:
Uranium235 wrote:That's because back then all the TOS/movie-era games were Interplay products, so they could reuse their own work. (which, except for the perennially pooched look of the Excelsior class, was pretty decent IMO)
If all they did was rip stuff out of the SFB board game, why stop? Why go for the laughable ships in Legacy, with the Romulan 'Raptor', the 'top half of a Deridex' and the Klingon ships having K'Vorts, D-7s, AND Stabbers in the same time period? Sigh. Some of the SFB ships were deeply lame, but at least they sat together as a design lineage.

Interplay didn't just rip stuff out of SFB; as I recall, SFB actually used the old Franz Joseph designs out of the 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual to flesh out the Federation fleet, whereas the Interplay-designed "destroyer" and "dreadnought" are much different animals.

Legacy isn't made by Interplay, so that's probably why we don't see a wholesale re-use of the Interplay-era ships, although I wish they had given how screwed-up their ripoff of the Interplay Fed battleship looks.

montypython · Post by **montypython** » 2006-12-13 10:50pm

I'm hoping that someone will eventually mod this game into something good.

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2006-12-14 01:27am

The problem is we have some fundamental problems with the game AI. The game physics. The game controls. The complete lack of a save system.

Modders can make the ships more realistic in capability, but with the other problems it won't matter at all.

FedRebel · Post by **FedRebel** » 2006-12-14 01:44am

Alyeska wrote: The complete lack of a save system.

http://legacy.filefront.com/file/Saving ... bled;73513

Alyeska · Post by **Alyeska** » 2006-12-14 01:50am

Is that an official patch from the makers of the game?

Ritterin Sophia · Post by **Ritterin Sophia** » 2006-12-14 03:04am

Alyeska wrote:I did see a SFC era ship in screen shots. It was the War Destroyer from the Federation.

What sucks is that they left out canon Trek ships and used non-canon ones instead. What the fuck? Thats like Jump to Light Speed making a Tie-Defender clone but not actually using the Defender.

I wish JtLS had TIE Defenders, instead of having to rely on a gunner for maximum efficiency, at least this game doesn't have that kind of BS.

FedRebel · Post by **FedRebel** » 2006-12-14 10:52am

Alyeska wrote:Is that an official patch from the makers of the game?

Nope, modders to the rescue