Star trek legacy flop?

Kamakazie Sith · Post by **Kamakazie Sith** » 2006-12-09 12:42am

When everything is working how it "should" the game is very enjoyable. After a couple patches it should be an entertaining game. Will it be what everyone wants? No, and it'll be a far cry from that. However, Legacy has the potential to be fun.

One major complaint I have, and this isn't limited to just Legacy, but why is it that developers are so cheap on multiplayer options. Are these people so devoid of creativity that they can't think of some multiplayer options besides deathmatch, and a very limited Co-Op?(Basically, defend your starbase from wave after wave of enemies)

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-09 12:44am

Wow, that's the multi options from SFC1. They really haven't bothered to think up a new one?

Kamakazie Sith · Post by **Kamakazie Sith** » 2006-12-09 12:50am

Stark wrote:Wow, that's the multi options from SFC1. They really haven't bothered to think up a new one?

I think they considered adding some scenarios (Yesterday's Enterprise, Wrath of Khan, ETC) to multiplayer, but pulled it for some reason. I thought there was going to be a conquer multiplayer option where you landed troops on planets, and attempted to destroy starbases using one of the larger maps, which would have been perfect because some of those maps are huge

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-12-09 02:38am

"Fuck it guys, we can just let the modding community finish the game for us!

"

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-12-09 04:36am

Uraniun235 wrote:God damn, what is it with Star Trek games? Why is it so hard for anyone to release a complete, working Star Trek game?

That said, I'm glad I put this on my Christmas list so that I won't have to spend any money on it.

EF I-II were both stable and working out-of-the-box and if you can look beyond the fact that they're just mindless Quake mods with a Trek license, they are both very enjoyable.

And the best Trek game ever is still Academy on the SNES. A whole game made with about twenty polygons

Uraniun235 · Post by **Uraniun235** » 2006-12-09 04:42am

Bounty wrote:
Uraniun235 wrote:God damn, what is it with Star Trek games? Why is it so hard for anyone to release a complete, working Star Trek game?

That said, I'm glad I put this on my Christmas list so that I won't have to spend any money on it.
EF I-II were both stable and working out-of-the-box and if you can look beyond the fact that they're just mindless Quake mods with a Trek license, they are both very enjoyable.

Elite Force was godawful. "Hey let's have guys spawning... errr... beaming in piecemeal for a few minutes!" Rinse and repeat for half the game. Sneaking around the mishmash ship was fun, but there was too much of that game that was horribly boring. It was in desperate need of better map designers.

No okay but seriously throw starship combat into the mix and all of a sudden developers get retarded.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-12-09 07:08am

I'd say that 25th Anniversary Disc was the best. It let you be Kirk and tell some dumbass guy on a planet, "I have a starship capable of destroying your planet..." and I forget the rest. But it was a nice sentiment. I wish these silly civilizations would realize, from time to time, that you cannot simply make bizarre requests all day to the captain of an orbiting doomship like the TOS Enterprise was.

Now, if they gave me a game like that, where I actually had a kinda cool "solve the episode" mystery that involved spaceflight and beamings and whatnot, that could be pretty sweet. How hard would it really be? Give me the theme music for the intro, give me the standard block-font for the beginning of a mission with exteriors of th ship, and bam! It's like an actual episode.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-12-09 09:05am

Elite Force was godawful. "Hey let's have guys spawning... errr... beaming in piecemeal for a few minutes!" Rinse and repeat for half the game. Sneaking around the mishmash ship was fun, but there was too much of that game that was horribly boring. It was in desperate need of better map designers.

Hence the 'mindless Quake mod'. But if you didn't mind the spawning generic aliens, you still had a smooth, reasonably pretty, well-handling twitch FPS.

EFII is better in this respect because it throws in extra puzzles. Plus you don't have to stare at Neelix's face...

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-12-09 11:17am

I decided to... "test" this game out. The campaign crashes during the first mission every time (a semi-common problem, I noticed a good number of people on the message board with a variety of different nvidia gpus having the problem), and I do mean crash - blue screen and reboot crash.

After playing the skirmish mode I find the game very lacking. I ended with a 1 vs 1 skirmish; I in a top of the line Excelsior class, my enemy in some sort of D-class klingon battlecruiser. Long story short, he virtually destroyed my ship in a single salvo, I was turning into him when he opened fire, and was so stunned to see my ship near death that I forgot to fire my torpedoes into him, and hopefully do the same. It was a very short fight.

I played a few other fights, since there is no edit controls menu I have no way of knowing what buttons do what, so I don't know how to instantly order my allies to attack, or follow or whatever. So in large brawls I kinda have to hang back, wait for the AI to show up on sensors, go to the strategic map and order all the ships to attack and then take command of my favorite. Of course, the first ship to get in close with the enemy usually seems to explode in short order...

Now I don't really know what all the controls are, and I assume there must be some way of putting more power into say... shields, but until I figure that out, ships are entirely too fragile.

Oh and my suspisions about the movie era phasers was correct, ships like the maranda do indeed fire beams that look pulsed. I guess its kinda neat how they pick different targets along the hull, or sometimes sorta swipe across it, but it doesn't look very convincing. I know it isn't a huge deal, but... well it is to me.

I'm guessing you can reallocate power to shields and stuff, but I'll be damned if I know how (I know you can allocate priority, or something, to repairs, but thats all). Maybe a bit of modding can make the ships tougher (especially the shields, which seem to drop instantly), but between the campaign crashing at the romulan encounter on the first mission and the previous problems, I just can't see myself getting into this game.

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2006-12-09 01:59pm

I haven't gotten any crashes yet, but damn it the game is annoyingly choppy when you actually get into combat (though that may be because there's about ten enemy ships in addition to my four, all flying in close proximity, carving NDF-burns into each-other's hulls like there's no tomorrow, with a beautifully rendered nebula and a few planets nearby).

Anyways, "E" pulls up the energy-redistribution screen (a little weird circle thing in the bottom left corner), "R" pulls up the repair screen, "Q" toggles your warp drive, "G" brings up a command menu that includes "transport", "tractor", "scan" and "hail", and everything is listed in the manual. It's actually a remarkably compact interface that would work incredibly well for both the PC and the 360 were it not the case that the framerate drops to about 20 per second as soon as my fleet of doom-bringing awesomeness gangs up on some poor enemy ship.

Jade Falcon · Post by **Jade Falcon** » 2006-12-09 02:35pm

Another Trek game that wasn't bad for its time, if not spectacular was Klingon Honor Guard.

The console base Shattered Universe however was pretty poor, which is a shame as the concept behind it wasn't too bad.

Edward Yee · Post by **Edward Yee** » 2006-12-09 07:05pm

Matt Huang wrote:my fleet of doom-bringing awesomeness gangs up on some poor enemy ship.

Well, how just how much overmatch (and who) are we talking here?

Lancer · Post by **Lancer** » 2006-12-09 07:58pm

Playing in the campaign, and I've got a pair of cruisers, a battleship, and a destroyer, all merrily chewing through whatever they can find, from Romulan transport vessels to starbases.

Edit:
Make that a NX-class Cruiser and a trio of Yorktown class Battleships. I've upgraded my task force a tad since the last mission.

montypython · Post by **montypython** » 2006-12-09 09:02pm

A dedicated fanbased team could probably do better quality for Trek games than the game companies, by the looks of many a mod.

Sephirius · Post by **Sephirius** » 2006-12-10 04:46pm

Covenant wrote: Now, if they gave me a game like that, where I actually had a kinda cool "solve the episode" mystery that involved spaceflight and beamings and whatnot, that could be pretty sweet. How hard would it really be? Give me the theme music for the intro, give me the standard block-font for the beginning of a mission with exteriors of th ship, and bam! It's like an actual episode.

Try Star Trek TNG for the SNES
fucking hard as all hell, but great execution, imho. ship to ship combat isn't great, but still fun, the bridge actually has a working library, you can warp to any star system in the sector and visit individual planets, away missions are the bulk of the game, each character has different stats, etc. etc. it's pretty awesome.

Covenant · Post by **Covenant** » 2006-12-10 04:54pm

To be perfectly honest, I can't blame them for making shitty ST combat simulators, nearly all the combat we've ever seen a starship engage in has been incredibly boring. The best fights were the cloaking ones where it was some crapass Klingon Bird of Suck versus the Enterpise. You rarely saw any stand-up fights that didn't boil down to a lot of exploding bulkheads and someone firing phasers a lot. Unless you're going to make it more like a shooter--where you manually aim the guns and zip the ship around--you're hard pressed to replicate that.

You could do as they do and try to input headings and bearings, but c'mon, that'd be pretty brutal.

The Defiant changed things up with it's agility and fixed-forward pulse phasers that it could strafe with. If they made a combat game, I'd definately want to set it on a ship like that, or a Klingon/Romulan ship where the cloak gimmick can add strategic depth.

montypython · Post by **montypython** » 2006-12-10 06:24pm

Ship combat by its very nature is similar to naval warfare, good gunnery and patience are key attributes.

Edward Yee · Post by **Edward Yee** » 2006-12-11 11:24am

Matt Huang wrote:Playing in the campaign, and I've got a pair of cruisers, a battleship, and a destroyer, all merrily chewing through whatever they can find, from Romulan transport vessels to starbases.

Edit:
Make that a NX-class Cruiser and a trio of Yorktown class Battleships. I've upgraded my task force a tad since the last mission.

Just going at the enemy head-on, without focus fire, regardless of enemy numbers? I'm wondering if frame rate issues can be attributed to your graphics settings, hardware, the total number of objects on screen, or your quartet alone.

(Dunno how allied AI is in this game, so I don't know to what extent you can get away with "point to area, ships go and kill anything in the way without further intervention.")

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

My task force is now a quartet of Constellation-class Cruisers, and I'm fairly certain that the slowdown isn't because of my hardware and the amount of space junk I'm creating on the screen.

Even when the background is relatively clear, I get occasional bouts of slowdown, though the screen can literally be filled with dozens of glowing chunks of planetary fragments, phaser beams, and torpedos, and still run smoothly.

JME2 · Post by **JME2** » 2006-12-12 09:15am

Despite looking forward to this game, I've made up my mind based on SDN's usual reviews: I'll be sticking with Empire at War for my RTS fix, thank you very much...

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2006-12-12 02:30pm

OK, so I got this today hoping all the people saying this is crap were just misunderstanding the game. They are not.

From the confusing UI which doesn't give you any info and is excruciatingly difficult to use despite suffering from bad consolitis (or perhaps because of it), bad AI, bored voice acting (have only heard Bakula up until now and he sounds like he's got a hangover and wants to get it over with), confusing weapons hardpoints (why does the phasor lock show up sometimes when you can't fire and why don't the torpedoes have consistent arcs of fire?) and an overall lack of information (a diagram showing the arcs wouldn't kill you y'know, not to mention other ship details), controls that are suffering even worse consolitis then the rest of the ui (seriusly, has anyone seen a more useless implementation of a map in a game since, say, 1990?), cut features (ship upgrading for example), this game is an unmitigated disaster. What's bad is that all it lacking is a good final polish, but the kind you cannot do with patches.

Disappointing.

Do not spend money on this, if this wasn't star trek it would flop very badly, and it will hopefully still do to punish the developers for releasing such unfinished consolitis suffering crap.

Kamakazie Sith · Post by **Kamakazie Sith** » 2006-12-13 01:52am

I've been hearing rumors that Legacy was ported to the PC from the XBox 360, and that's why it's turned out so poorly.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-12-13 02:18am

Kamakazie Sith wrote:I've been hearing rumors that Legacy was ported to the PC from the XBox 360, and that's why it's turned out so poorly.

This is extremely obvious from the control system: it uses console-standard radial menus.