We really need a new Trek FPS game.

[137th Gebirg]

Years ago one of the devs from the game had a web site and on it they explained that not even 10% of the game was completed because of what he described as a revolving door in managmnet which impacted on the games developmant and brought it to a almost stop, plus not all the voice work was done, Kelly never did any, but the icing on the cake was when interplay went belly up, they only found out when they went to work one morning to find all the doors were locked, and the liquidators quickley came in and took everything, including all the computers that had all their unfinished games on, wiped them, and sold them on to pay off debts, so anything that was done with the game was gone because no one had any time to back anything up, all we ever got was 2 game expo demos and some scenes in the end.

I'd like this post if I wasn't so pissed off about the short-sightedness behind how this all went down. I get how creditors are lined up to get their due during a company's unfortunate demise, but holy shit! Didn't ANY of them see the value of what was stored on those machines at the time??

 

[Haggis and tatties]

^^^Yeap, even all these years later is still gets my shackles up, so much promised and yet they got nowhere near any of it, and then of course the whole Interplay going down the toilet and any work that was done is now long gone, which is a testimont to why managment at Inteplay at the time was such a mess as to have allowed to happen so quickly.

And just to rub it in......

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[The Rock]

Damn. Well I hope they at least turn it into a comic book or a novel! The plot of the game is pretty neat.

 

[jackoverfull]

Never seen those videos before. I dig the gravity shatner’s aged voice gives to that intro.

 

[Timby]

I've heard both that all the recordings were lost, and also that barely any were actually recorded in the first place, which matches up with other reports that the script was never actually finished. So I don't think the data needed to make a complete story was ever created in the first place.

Secret of Vulcan Fury went through at least three complete cast recording sessions (they had to do so many because the script getting mutated because the gameplay was completely broken). However, by the time of the third session, Maurice LaMarche had been brought in to dub for McCoy, as DeForest Kelley's health was failing to the point that he couldn't travel to the studio at that point. But multiple scripts were written for the game, and the game's scenarios, or at least some of them, were indeed mapped out and tested. The problem was that Interplay was relying on its own in-house engine that was doing some entirely radical things, graphics-wise, stuff that really hadn't been done before ... and, as Klingon Academy later proved, Interplay's in-house engines didn't always exactly work correctly.

It's entirely likely that the recordings still exist on a hard drive somewhere in California; Brian Fargo and Rebecca Heineman were both very big on archiving stuff before "oh, shit, we need to save everything" became A Thing in video gaming, although Fargo was ... not particularly good at it . Whether or not those recordings exist in a usable format, however, is another question entirely, particularly given how specialized audio recording equipment, hardware and software were at that time: It wasn't just a matter of putting on a headset and laying down all your dialogue in MP3 or WAV format back then and having a perfect digital master on a hard drive somewhere. It's entirely possible that the hardware needed to salvage those recordings would only exist in the hands of a few very specialized collectors anymore.

FC used the first Unreal engine, IIRC, and I remember reading that they had trouble with it.

First Contact didn't just use Unreal 1 (which was a broken piece of shit on its best day), it was Microprose's very first attempt at making a game on Unreal 1, so it was really probably doomed from inception. They did manage to hack Unreal 1 enough to turn Klingon Honor Guard into being ... well, I wouldn't ever call it good, but it was at least playable.

 

[NCC-73515]

I think KHG was pretty good - throwing a bat'leth across the room is always fun XD

 

[Timby]

I think KHG was pretty good - throwing a bat'leth across the room is always fun XD

If memory serves, the director of Klingon Honor Guard--Chris Clark, I think--was a high school friend of Tim Sweeney (of Epic), and ultimately appealed to Sweeney for his personal help to get Unreal 1 working properly in the game; this was after Microprose had already canceled First Contact due to having an absolute bitch of a time getting Unreal 1 to work.

Sweeney, who had personally coded a great deal of the engine, agreed, spending some of his own weekends and donating the time of quite a few other Epic programmers and artists to getting the game out the door, because Honor Guard was going to be the first released game to actually license the Unreal Engine, and Sweeney knew that if word got out that Unreal was a nightmare to actually mod and adapt, it could spell financial ruin for Epic (which had poured pretty much all of its liquid capital into the development of UE, with the hope of making the money back by licensing the shit out of it). And in fairness, there was some interesting stuff in Honor Guard. Again, I didn't like it, but it wasn't an abomination unto the Lord ... unlike some other Trek games of that era.

 

[Haggis and tatties]

I think KHG was pretty good - throwing a bat'leth across the room is always fun XD

I remember how colourful KHG looked on my very first 3DFX card and how the lighting was amazing, and the audio was also pretty good.

 

[donners22]

I'd prefer an RPG or 4X game, but at this point I'd take any decent Trek game.

 

[NCC-73515]

I remember how colourful KHG looked on my very first 3DFX card and how the lighting was amazing, and the audio was also pretty good.

The blood spilling out in circles in zero-g was awesome, and you could walk inside and on the hull of an entire K't'inga battlecruiser, and a BoP! I love exploring canon places beyond what we see on the screen, that's also what made Generations and EF so great!

 

[jackoverfull]

Yeah, going about Voyager and the enterprise-e was really a Trill (a nice spot of the game?).

 

[F. King Daniel]

I recently played and loved a VR game called Red Matter, and would love a Trek VR game with gameplay like that or the old Judgement Rites/25th Anniversary adventures. I'm sure they can squeeze in some shooty bits too, but throughout those EF games (as much as I enjoyed them) I couldn't help but think mowing down hundreds of baddies wasn't very "Trek"

 

[jackoverfull]

Me too, but was still fun. And of course the supposedly bad guys turned good guys were only stunned by pure luck!

 

[captainkirk]

I think Star Trek's core concept is part of the reason the games struggle. Shooters may be fun, but they don't quite suit Star Trek, and other games such as puzzles and RPGs are a harder sell.

 

[KennyB]

I just spent a few days playing Jedi: Fallen Order and Squadrons and Vader Immortal in VR and was thinking it's a shame we don't have anything like that. I'd love to be on a VR landing party, or exploring an abandoned ship with Star Fleet.......

 

[Bornin1980something]

I think Star Trek's core concept is part of the reason the games struggle. Shooters may be fun, but they don't quite suit Star Trek, and other games such as puzzles and RPGs are a harder sell.

All this is true, unless you are Michael Burnham.

 

[Timby]

or exploring an abandoned ship with Star Fleet.......

I mean, this is one of the reasons 25th Anniversary, Judgment Rites and to a lesser extent A Final Unity are so beloved, and that love isn't due to rose-colored glasses. I mean, the games could be difficult at times, but rarely did they write puzzles incredibly esoteric that they would make their contemporaries at LucasArts say, "Fucking Christ, son."

With the possible exception of the end of Judgment Rites and the last two levels of Final Unity. Admittedly, I was only 11 years old when that stuff dropped, but there is some shit in Final Unity so ridiculous that I refuse to believe anyone ever actually beat that game without the help of a walkthrough / strategy guide or being a masochist and savescumming like an absolute motherfucker.

 

[jackoverfull]

There is also that lovely set of levels on the Excelsior-class derelict ship in EFII, full with a “protect NPC that really likes to die” mission and even a super-Mario secret.

In case you missed it...

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[NCC-73515]

There was also a top-down-view Borg game, and something with a broken highway IIRC... on the holodeck perhaps?

 

[Rhodan]

I think Discovery and ESPECIALLY Picard would really fit to such mode, they are both providing atmosphere of tension-heavy Space Western.