A HardTalk Special

An interview with Rantz from QuickSilver

With the new series of Star Trek games due out at the end of this year we caught up with the second game that was announced for the console handhelds.  Star Trek: Tactical Assault has shades of the old Starfleet Command series and we asked rantz of QuickSilver some questions that the community has been asking about this new game.

 
1: The first question on everyone's mind is from the few screenshots we have already seen of the game itself. Will be game be based on the famous series of games that QuickSilver had a big part in during the Interplay years, namely Starfleet Command? Since the screenshots look remarkably like Starfleet Command 3.

Well there’s certainly some cross-over there. Some of the key folks on the Quicksilver team for ST:TA were involved in the design and creation of the first Starfleet Command, and since that project came about at Interplay in no small part by certain folks at QS holding Star Fleet Battles up and saying “We need to do a game of this”, there’s a certain amount of SFC that’s kind of ingrained in us at almost a cellular level, that we couldn’t extricate if we tried. (laughs)

That said, it became obvious very early in the design phase of the game that trying to replicate SFC, or the complexity of that kind of interface on a handheld would be a sure fire route to disaster.

The experience of playing a game on a handheld system doesn’t have to be a moronic, point and shoot one, as games like Final Fantasy Tactics, and Advance Wars have proven… but it is a very different set of input mechanisms and it’s also a different user experience.

When you are playing a game on the PC or even on a set top console, you are committing yourself to a block of time that is usually fairly significant. At least an hour or so, for the game experience. In the classic handheld games that had some depth, Advance Wars, the Sword of Mana, etc those games were structured so that you could have this overarching deep experience, that was parsed into sections that you could break at 10-15 minutes at a time, allowing you to play it on the bus, or in a waiting room. The new generation of consoles seems to have moved away from that and given you basically the ‘ok commit to 3 hours, or you’re playing tetris’ choice, which kinda sucks.

We also wanted to really give equal emphasis to the dramatic side of the scenarios as well, making each scenario feel more like the player was actually playing through the combat of an episode in the original series.

All of that gets balanced against the fact that this is first and foremost, a tactical ship combat game. It isn’t a twitch game, it isn’t a traditional console or handheld shooter… It all comes down to maneuvers… getting your weapon facings around towards the enemy as they reach their charged state, while keeping your strongest shields towards the enemy, while trying to get to their weakest shields. You still have emergency energy reserves to allocate, you have ship upgrades in the form of crew promotions based on your scenario performance. Different Ships still have different hardpoints and different weapon mounts and facings, as well as the numbers they can be tricked out with… It was interesting at E3. We had more than a few die hard SFC fans who were members of the press who were very skeptical when they picked it up and after 5-10 minutes were enjoying themselves and saying how much it ‘felt right’.

We know that the hardcore SFC fans will probably find issue with some of the choices, but the intention has been to bring as much of the feel over as we can without overloading the player, given the platform. It is not by accident that the game is called Tactical Assault. A lot of titles were floated around and a LOT of them were shot down because we did not want it to seem as if this was a handheld sequel, or port of either SFC or SFB. Inspiration? Oh hell yeah, lots of inspiration. Not so much SFC2 and 3, but the first one and SFB were definitely inspirations.


2: Any idea on what ships will be in the game?

In campaign mode, you play the Fed campaign, which upon completion, unlocks and begins the Klingon campaign. There are 5 Fed ships and 5 Klingon. In addition to the campaign mode, there’s ‘skirmish’ mode which is one-off sandbox-style play, where you can just say “I want these ships, this type of map, these win conditions, go” and slug it out. The ships available in skirmish depend on your progress in the campaign mode. If you’ve completed the campaign, you’ll have available to you over 20 ships including Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Gorn, and Orion.

3: The game itself is set in the Kirk and Spock movie era, what made you decide to stick with the The Original Series era?

Because everyone knows Kirk is the greatest Starfleet captain ever! (laughs) Honestly it was more a matter of going back to what worked for the game and wanting it to feel ‘right’. We wanted the era that to almost everyone equals the pinnacle of Star Trek ship combat… Wrath of Khan, and use that as an emotional touchstone. Also, it was seen as the logical starting point for a potential series.

4: The big question...gameplay. The handhelds, even though they are much more powerful than the older cousins from the late 90's are still basically handhelds and are restricted by the physical size of the unit. How has QuickSilver managed to keep the feel of a Star Trek game while shoehorning it in for the handhelds?

I think it helps by having a really solid design core going in, and knowing that every choice you make has to support that basic core. This has to feel like Star Trek from the ‘Kirk movie era’, and the ships have to move and fight like ships fight in the world of Star Trek. No little dogfighters flitting about, no twitch mechanics… and that there has to be a sense of that tension and drama in the battle… both in what is built in to the scenario, and in terms of how the player reacts and what their tactical choices are.

You have to give the player depth beyond just ‘pow pow pow’, next scenario, or it’s not Star Trek, whether you’re speaking to something like SFB or the film canon. ST has always mentioned things like rear shields, forward phasers, etc… it’s always had emergency power whether it’s the SFB/SFC implementation, or whether it’s the filmic expression of Kirk tersely telling Scotty that ‘I need more power, NOW Mr. Scott!’ You have to have those elements in there or really, it just isn’t a Star Trek ship combat game by anyone’s definition.

Hardware-wise, the systems have been able to handle these things without too much strain, and really we feel like we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what the platforms can do. The key design challenge, to us, was making sure that all of the commands and controls were very easily understandable and accessible to a new player and the introduction of new capabilities and skills, etc was a transparent learning curve, rather than a cliff that they’d smash into.

5: The gaming world has changed a lot since Quicksilver's days of working alongside Interplay on the original Star Trek: Starfleet Command. You have a lot of titles under your belt. Since the old days of SFC you have won the Peabody award for "Heritage - Civilization and the Jews" and have also released the acclaimed Full Spectrum Command in conjunction with the ICT (Institute of Creative Technologies). Coming back into the Star Trek fan base after having been away for the past half a decade, what does it feel like and what are the biggest changes you have seen?

Working on a Star Trek game again definitely feels like coming home for a lot of us here. When Bethesda first contacted us to see if we were interested in doing a ST game, it almost felt like someone was pulling our leg a bit, because it was one of those obvious questions “well, yeah of course, but is it going to happen?” Because at the time, almost 2 years ago, no one had any idea what was going to happen with the ST IP in regards to games.

We had actually made the decision as a company about 4 months prior to Bethesda’s call that we were going to begin doing the majority of our games work on new handheld systems, specifically in the Tactics and Strategy genres because, unlike the GBA where there were a lot of strategy and tactics games, there were any in development (at the time) on the DS or PSP. We had been talking with a couple of publishers about, ironically, doing a DS game based loosely on one of our biggest-selling classic PC strategy games, and then Tactical Assault came along and took off like wildfire.

From a fan standpoint, we feel a huge sense of personal obligation with this game. We are, first and foremost, Star Trek fans. These are the characters we grew up with and the show that made many of us pursue computer sciences and sci-fi in our professional careers. To get to work on a Star Trek game set in the classic film era, for the 40th anniversary and having one of the Original TV Series writers writing the script and dialogue for the game… it’s very hard sometimes to not go into ‘fanboy’ mode.

I was talking with Robert Myer Burnett (Director of the brilliant movie Free Enterprise which you should all see if you haven’t) about this, and saying about how even in those moments of fandom, you are acutely aware of the fact that so much bad Star Trek content has come out… so many bad TV episodes, so many bad books, so many bad games. And with the 40th Anniversary, the last thing we want is to fail to deliver a anything but a true Star Trek experience to the fans. You can’t help but feel that pressure every day… you really put yourself in the fan’s shoes every day with this, because, as a fan yourself, it means so much.

6: Back onto the handhelds, both the DS and the PSP are 2 very different handhelds. Has the dev team encountered any difficulties in making Tactical Assault the same style of game for both of the versions?

Each platform has its pros and cons. We really wanted to make sure there wasn’t a ‘red-headed stepchild’ version of the game… the ‘oh, and we’re also on platform X’, so that required us to make sure that a.) there was a solid core play mechanic that worked identically on both platforms, and that b.) it still allowed us to take advantage of the unique capabilities of each piece of hardware and make each one equally appealing for different reasons to where, ideally a person with both platforms would have a difficult time picking which version to play.

With both versions, the mapping of the D-pad and shoulder button controls is identical, so all the commands and orders you can give on one, you can give on the other. The scenarios, the number of ships, the scripts… all of that is identical across both platforms. So with each platform, we played to the unique strengths they respectively had. The comparison we’ve been using is that in presentation, the PSP is the “watching the 70mm version of Wrath of Khan” version… very cinematic. On the DS, it’s the “You are in Chekov or Sulu’s seat at the conn, using the actual touchscreens on the bridge of a starship. This goes as far as having the ‘running lights’ at the bottom part of the top screen, just like you saw on the bridge display screen in the original series.

In regards to the difficulties… there have been challenges, certainly… but in both cases the team got a grasp on the HW fast enough that we ended up pushing it far beyond what our original goals were, and in the PSP’s case, what Sony tells us is beyond what most PSP developer’s do. That kind of ties into the earlier question about development outside of games… we have a programming team that does some pretty insane work in the non-game sector. We (as a company) are kind of used to having to make things work within very tight tech constraints. Frankly that’s part of the fun of it  It’s really easy to just throw more and more at something and hope eventually it’ll look ok. But when you’ve got 18 k total? And it has to just visually sing… well, that’s the challenge of good games!

It was very satisfying at E3 for us to have demos start out with “well, which one would you buy?” and us telling the reviewer “I don’t honestly know, it’d be really hard to choose one of them” and having them go from thinking you are pulling a marketing line on them to playing the two versions themselves and then saying ‘yeah, I see what you mean, it is kind of a hard choice, isn’t it?’


7: We have already heard that Tactical Assault wont be using downloadable content on the PSP version. However, is there any plans for stand alone expansions? Maybe a series of games in the Tactical Assault range?

Ultimately the choice is up to Bethesda and how ST:TA performs in the market. I can say that the relationship with Bethesda is great. They have just been an amazing publisher to deal with, going way above and beyond in the best interest of the project. You can really tell that at all levels, they love ST and really feel that if you are going to do a ST game, then it has to be done right... I know that we don’t plan on going anywhere, and that as far as TA is concerned, we never saw this as a one-off. It’s easy to see from the history of games that Bethesda has published, and the fact that this is a multi-year exclusive deal, that they don’t consider TA or Legacy to be ‘one-offs’ either. The storyline of the game and well as how it is positioned in the timeline is very specifically set up to easily allow for future games in the Tactical Assault series if demand warrants it.

8: Gameplay...what will people expect when they first start playing the game. Will it be a strict series of missions or will the game be slightly open ended play?

In Campaign mode the player starts as a Federation commander, beginning his career in Starfleet. You’ll have your bridge crew that will be with you as you make this journey, through promotions and advancements. The Campaign definitely is set up so that the scenarios play in an episodic nature… like an episode of the original TV series. There is some branching to the story and the player can definitely influence the path the story takes and the tone of the subsequent chapters. Once the Player succefully completes the Fed campaign, the Klingon campaign begins. The storylines run chronologically one after the other, the events in the Fed, influencing the setup of the Klingon. There’s 30 scenarios in Campaign mode.

Aside from that, there’s ‘Skirmish’ mode, which is sandbox play, where you choose which ships you want to battle, what type of map, under what win conditions, etc. and can just play a quick pure ship combat game. Which ships you have access to is dependent on your campaign progress. As you make it through the campaign, different ships get unlocked and become available in skirmish.

The same kinds of setup conditions exist in multiplayer mode, which in this version is two person, ad-hoc mode local (no internet) head to head for both the PSP and the DS.

9: Has QuickSilver got any plans for future Star Trek games on the PC? Or is that still up in the air?

Our plans for Star Trek right now are solely focused on wrapping Tactical Assault and making sure that it is as solid and as enjoyable a game as is humanly possible. After that, then we’ll be looking at what the next projects are, and we’re platform agnostic, so if Bethesda wants us to work on a Wii version of a Star Trek game, we’d love to do that. If they see a PC game as being the next thing they want to do, then we certainly wouldn’t be adverse to that either. We’re really enjoying working with Bethesda, and we’re really enjoying working on Star Trek again, so whatever form it takes, we’ll be happy to take it on. (Unless it’s something like “ST: Blueprint Designer… that probably wouldn’t be as enjoyable…LOL)

10: Finally, as we give everyone who takes part in the HardTalk series...here's your chance to advertise this game to the Star Trek gaming populace who visits STG. Give us your top 5 reasons why owners of the DS and PSP will want to queue up to buy this game when it is released this year!

Oh man, now I have to be brief and to the point… I’m doomed…

With Star Trek:Tactical Assault we’re bringing a unique tactical combat experience to the handheld platform. It gives you the kind of depth and breadth of play you’d normally associate with a PC game while the scenario and level structure make it possible to play it ‘on the go’ when you only have a short period of time available. The structure of the 30 campaign scenarios are set up so that the player can have that kind of satisfying, experience, without sacrificing the integration into the larger whole, or feeling like the gameplay has been lobotomized.

The player’s sense of being in control of a Starship in the world of Star Trek is reinforced with unique user interfaces for the Federation, Klingon and Romulan. On the PSP that means the HUD, and on the DS, that means the touch screen controls are all done ‘race specific’ with the design elements and button and menu types associated with those races as seen in the movies. As a bonus, in the Klingon UI, there’s an option for having all of the text in English or in Klingon.

The story structure of the campaign and the scenarios are created so that the player feels like, as they are playing a scenario, they are actually actively participating in an episode of the original TV series. The tone and ‘voice’ of this rings true to the original series, since the writer for the game is one of the major writers for the original series, and even the more jaded members of the development team have been turned to gibbering fanboys at times playing through the scenarios and reading the dialogue. It’s been one of the true joys of working on this game.

The hardware on the PSP and the DS side is getting pushed pretty hard in terms of what it can do and the visual tricks we’re pulling out of it… to the point where we had one of the Sr. Producers at Sony tell us at E3 that there is only one other developer that is doing the kind of things we’re doing on the PSP, in terms of things like specular mapping and bump mapping on the PSP because we’ve gotten in there and just started hammering on the hardware and doing our own tools rather than just using the default stuff of 3rd party stuff. It’s funny because the screenshots that went up with the E3 articles were only 6 weeks old, but in terms of the visual look, there had been 4 major jumps in that period of time, so watch for new screenshots to be a pretty significantly different from what you’ve seen.

With Over 20 player-controllable ships, in addition to Starbases, freighters, a navigable Federation and Klingon bridge (on the PSP), a rich story-based 20 hour+ campaign mode and a quick sandbox-style skirmish mode, not to mention multiplayer mode…. There’s a lot of Star Trek to fit in your pocket!