Star Control Founders: SPRING 2019
StarControl Forums
Greetings!
Spring is here and there's a lot to talk about. Let's talk about NDA stuff.
Earth Rising
Part 2 of Earth Rising will be coming out early next month (May 9 is the current date but it might get moved up to May 2 depending on QA testing).
Part 3, The Syndicate, is well into development now and we expect that out this Summer.
Part 4, Earth Rises, we anticipate hitting early Fall and will conclude the Star Control: Origins saga and set us up for...
Heretics!
Star Control: Heretic. This will be the sequel to Star Control: Origins and will take place around 20 years into the future, well after Earth's empire has built up some and you are no longer having to worry about personally gathering minerals. I won't go into spoilers but the space battles will be much bigger (true fleets) and planetary exploration will focus around landing parties on already colonized worlds.
Lifetime Founders of Star Control will get Star Control: Heretic and its DLCs for free of course. We don't have an ETA on this game yet since, sadly, the lawsuit with Paul and Fred has made it difficult to do anything with Star Control right now. For instance, even this very post is subject to discovery (which means we have to give access to everything we do to Paul and Fred's various lawyers which adds an extra layer of time and expense). The current plan is to begin work on it as soon as Earth Rises is completed OR when the lawsuit is over (whichever comes later).
Legal nonsense
Not much new on the lawsuit. For those of you not familiar with this stuff, there are a few milestones during the course of litigation that goes something like this:
- Lawsuit is filed.
- Discovery Begins.
- Depositions are taken.
- Discovery ends.
- Summary Judgement
- Pre-Trial stuff
- Trial
- Appeals
Even though this has been going on for over a year, we are actually only in #3. So unless the parties settle, this is likely to go on for awhile.
The problem for us is that right now, it appears Paul and Fred believe they own the idea of Star Control. That is, the gameplay -- a game where the player travels through hyperspace to various star systems to meet aliens and have adventures. We really still aren't sure on what grounds they have to claim to own part of our game. But obviously, we're not going to spend more of our time and budget working on something that someone else is going to try to swoop in and claim rights to.
My personal opinion is that if Paul and Fred want to go make a new game, they're free to do that. They just can't call it Star Control or claim it's related to Star Control (and by definition, can't call it Ghosts of the Precursors as they've already gotten a lot of mileage out of claiming that it's the "true" sequel to Star Control). If they wanted to benefit from the association with Star Control they had that opportunity on multiple occasions in the past but passed on it.
I don't really care about them using alien names from the classic games provided that Paul and Fred stop trying to imply that Star Control: Origins isn't part of the Star Control franchise. It most certainly is. They also, obviously, have to stop trying to interfere with our work. They make their game, we make our game. You can't own ideas. You can't own "precursors" or "hyperspace" or whatever.
Console and "Definitive" editions
Once Earth Rising is done, we do plan to create console versions of the game. That will, again, have to wait until the lawsuit is over since, again, Paul and Fred seem to sue everyone who tries to sell the game (GOG and Valve). So obviously, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are not going to sell something that results in them getting potentially getting sued.
Lore Lore Lore
While there's quite a bit of new lore in Part 2 of ER, Part 3 really dives into it and should, we hope, make even a full replay of the game possible.
There's a lot to the Star Control multiverse and the Origins universe in particular and we are still very excited to share it with you!
