Stardock CEO talks Star Control: Origins’ player crafting and upcoming beta

Star Control is back—or at least it will be imminently. Next month, Stardock Entertainment will begin a beta test of Star Control: Origins, a space-exploration adventure game that the company's CEO, Brad Wardell, hopes will be a true successor to fan favorite Star Control II. The beta will include a ship-creator tool and playable super melee, 1v1 PvP mode. The beta coincides with the 25th anniversary of Star Control II.

Originally, Star Control: Origins was slated for release at this time, but it has been pushed back to next year. Stardock CEO Brad Wardell says the game has been delayed in part because its development team decided to implement robust, in-game creation tools that will allow players to create ships, planets, structures, stories, and more—Minecraft-style—then share them on the Steam Workshop.

I spoke at length with Wardell about the game, his personal history with Star Control, these newly revealed features, and more. And we have new art, new screenshots, and a video showing the game's current state of development.

Who’s involved and who’s not

But first, let's get a few things out of the way. The franchise's two original creators—Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III—are not part of the team, though they have been consulted. Also, Star Control: Origins' story does not take place after that of Star Control 3—or after Star Control II, for that matter, since fans don't consider III canon sans the franchise creators' involvement. Rather, it takes place in an alternate universe that split off from the main universe long before the events of the any of the previous games. Many series fans will find both of these facts disappointing.

Stardock bought the rights to Star Control in an Atari fire sale back in 2013. Ford and Reiche's company is now part of Activision, where they've led development of the wildly successful Skylanders franchise. Wardell says he's been talking with the creators frequently, and he's clearly a fan of their work. But they've just recently announced they're embarking on making a spiritual successor and direct sequel to Star Control II called Ghosts of the Precursors, which Wardell was very quick and excited to plug in my conversation with him. It was because the creators wanted to make that game that Wardell and his team decided to avoid making a direct sequel.

Ford and Reiche are pursuing Ghosts of the Precursors as a passion project on their own time, so it will probably be a while yet before we see that game. But Star Control: Origins is coming next year, so let's dive in.

Another game, another universe

Space exploration and simulation games are seeing a resurgence. You've got Elite: Dangerous, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky, Mass Effect: Andromeda, and so many more. Some are callbacks to franchises of old, and some aren't, but it's getting a little crowded in here. In some cases, franchises that are being rebooted haven't been around since before some current players were born. The current generation could be forgiven for forgetting what made Star Control II special, even though Star Control fans know they're completely different.

First off, it was not purely an exploration game, though it did have that aspect. It was just as much an adventure game, and an RPG. And even that doesn't encapsulate it. From what I've seen and heard about Star Control: Origins, it's cut from exactly the same cloth as Star Control II. It doesn't dabble in 4X strategy like Star Control 3 did. In fact, Wardell said that Stardock borrowed absolutely nothing from that forsaken sequel, in terms of either story or gameplay.

Wardell was quick to distinguish between Star Control: Origins and Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky. "Every Star Control adventure has a story, and you the player and your ship are the character that you’re building through that story," he said. "I think one of the challenges that No Man’s Sky and other games can run into is that the player is basically left to their own devices to find meaning in why they’re exploring." When prodded for a closest relative, he named Sid Meier's Pirates!—but that might not be helpful for some, as it's also a classic from a bygone era.

In Origins, you customize your ship, travel between star systems, land on planets looking for resouces, blow enemy ships up, perform diplomacy in dialogue with weird and hilarious aliens, make your way through a story with lots of side activities. It also features a PvP mode called Super Melee, in which you build your fleet and ship like you'd build a deck in Hearthstone, and duel with other players in ranked play.

Generating a universe that’s actually fun and interesting

"We rely on the procedural generation to do 90 percent of the universe creation, and then the last 10 percent is we have tools to craft and design our own planets," said Wardell.

Like other space exploration games, procedurally generated content is a part of design. But I asked him if Star Control: Origins will have the same problem that something like No Man's Sky does—a massive universe that feels cold and mostly the same, with only occasional outliers.

"One of the problems with these games is that they [have] the same pacing all the way through and you can’t just take a break and do something different," he opined.

With diplomacy, creation, exploration, combat, and a heavy dose of the hilarious and quirky writing the series is known for delivered with full voice acting, he hopes Origins can escape that trap.

The skeleton of the universe is procedurally generated, but the actual gameplay content is not. No aspect of the story is random. Think of it a bit like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in that sense—in that game, the landscape and trees were random, but the buildings and characters were carefully arranged for fun gameplay, as were the dungeons.

Take it one level beyond that, though. The things you’re placing in that procedurally generated area are what we’d call tiles, like a building or a cave or a dungeon. We’re making in-game crafting features so people can actually create their own buildings, crash-sites, or areas of interest and share them with each other. And other people can use them to create their own custom planets.

There's also the question of modernizing this nearly three-decades-old franchise while retaining its original spirit. Stardock is trying to strike that balance, but we won't know if that was accomplished until the final product ships. Modern players might find Star Control II's hard time limit frustrating, for example. “There’s no game clock here,” he clarified. He admitted this might be a controversial change from Star Control II; the enemy won’t wipe everything out if you take too long. The story and the gameplay dynamics revolve around you, but the systems and the universe don’t.

At the same time, though, some modern design conventions wouldn't be in the spirit of the original, so Wardell says the team is avoiding them. “We are not giving players breadcrumbs,” he said. In other words, there won’t be arrows on the map telling you exactly where to go at all times, except in the earliest, introductory missions. However, there is a journal called a captain’s log where you can track what characters have told you. When we spoke about the breadcrumbs present in other modern games, he was passionately opposed: “It completely takes me out of the game and kills all the immersion, because I can just basically put my brain on autopilot.”

The story and writing-driven approach might differentiate Origins, but there are still a lot more space games out there than there were a few years back. Wardell had a theory as to why: "I can tell you exactly what’s going on," he said. "It’s 64-bit. That’s what makes all this possible. We couldn’t have even conceived of doing something like this on a 32-bit—in two gigabytes? It just couldn’t be done and have it be visually competitive. Before you had to make that choice—do you want to be pretty, or do you want to be big? Now you can do both."

Something like Star Control actually requires multiple views—you have the alien scene, you have the lander scene when you’re on a planet, you have of course the solar system scene, you have the super melee battle scene—lots and lots of different scenes. Those are things that… when we moved from DOS, when we moved from sprites to 3D, that became really expensive—when I say expensive, memory expensive to do. So 64-bit is why it’s all happening.