This is basically Civ III in space. It is what it is, I got many more hours of enjoyment out of this than I would have spending the same $30 at an arcade or even a restaurant.
I enjoyed the game (it actually turned me on to Stellaris which I hadn't played before). It wasn't "bad" just wasn't what it needed to be to capture the audience they were after. They needed to bring in Star Trek fans to a grand strategy title, for that they needed good Trek lore, story, etc. They weren't going to drag a lot of Stellaris players into the title, they already had a bigger game with the same mechanics and a mod if they wanted Star Trek, unless you just blew them away with story and new mechanics. They did neither.
There was so much they could have done. I had a lot of hope, especially with Paradox's usual thing of following up with DLC, but for some reason that didn't happen. I'm always keeping an eye out to see if the reason hits the news, but I doubt anyone is chasing Nimble Giant dev down the street to get their comments on STI development being halted.
My favorite was Starfleet Academy. Had cameo's by a number of original series actors, a decent story, and was generally a fun game just to screw around in even if you didn't go down the story path. Had the 6 CD-ROM set because there was so much video :P
@@GearandGaming StarFleet Academy and Klingon Academy some of the best games maybe with the Star Trek StarFleet Command 1 and 2 (3 was a bit worse). Those years are very good years, with also the X-wing and TIE Fighter and several Wing Commander and lot more...
@@GearandGaming In my case, I have the original edition, then I bought the DVD edition and finally I got the Steam edition. The Steam one works at 1080p, but obviously distorting. The DVD one (which is fantastic for the quality of the video) worked for me in 3D mode until Windows 11, I don't know if it's because of windows 11 or if it can be because of the graphics I took to test that it was an intel Arc A-750 but in either of the two forms in 3D or normal system, keeps the resolution at 640... The graphics card is supposed to scale itself as much as possible in older games while maintaining the aspect ratio in the image... but unfortunately I haven't managed to do it yet. :(
It was a weird one. The map was so tiny, with the Romulan's, Federation, Cardassia and the Klingons all packed together, and no-one else. No effort to make it true to the Alpha/Beta Quadrants, and Gamma and Delta just missing. The ship combat was just copy/paste Stellaris, the fleets just mash together and orbit firing laser beams, with zero effort given to any of the species weapon types even matching or making sense. Even the ship line progression screamed "we don't understand Star Trek" when you can build intrepid class ships even before galaxy or even the constitution class. Did they not even bother to hire a single person that actually likes Star Trek? The entire game was littered with these GLARING inaccuracies. Such a disappointment.
I agree. They needed to get the Star Trek side right and they failed on almost every point. I'll admit the ship models looked nice and the set piece art was pretty. Sound track was good as well. But once you get into the lore of Trek the story, characters, and tech progression fell apart.
To be honest though, there are better Stellaris/Star Trek mods and then there is the Star Trek Armada 3 and Ages of the Federation mods for Sins of a Solar Empire. Granted, they may not be as immersive as a Stellaris-based game, but still.
I agree. With that kind of competition you would have thought they would have been more aggressive in producing a unique compelling story. Can't put out meh when good options exist.
I wish I could figure it out. Paradox has written alternate history timelines for like every country on every continent in WWII in HOI4, but for some reason put out the most vanilla Trek story of all time. My best guess is they tried to do it cheap and were just hoping Trekkies would carry it. Its a very playable game and its pretty, but there ain't much there there.
According to a documentary those parasites bug things were supposed to be the Borg. But then the writers strike happened and they were taken off the series, in that bug form.
Another commenter above said that they were brought back in Star Trek: Online, so I guess my Paramount conspiracy theory is wrong. But I thought a massive invasion of infiltrating bugs is almost custom made for the end game invasion crisis in this game. The Borg are just overused. And if you have a game where you can go almost anywhere, why go back to the same old same old for your main antagonist? Low effort like a lot of this game unfortunately.
Yeah, I briefly mentioned the layoffs in my post release timeline. A number of Paradox titles have been cut recently. Been a lot of cost cutting in the whole industry as money has tightened up. This title caught me by surprise simply because it reused the Stellaris engine and had such a ready made pile of content. Wasn't a ton of development that needed to happen.
"Au contraire, mon ami, " Es un juego COMPLETO. Con 20 años de retraso pero muy fiel a la saga Star Trek y sin bugs . Podeis dar todos las gracias. Venga vamos, dad las gracias No os oigo
Shocked to see Star Trek Infinite stopping all development in such a short span of time. I had planned to try it out when they developed it more but I guess I am going to just stick to New Civilizations for Stellaris.
I don't know what happened there. I figured with Paradox behind the thing we would get a ton of DLC, it's kinda what they do... But instead they just walked away. Maybe something went south with Nimble Giant or Paramount that made them want to abandon it. Haven't see anything in any articles though. So I just assume they expected a better reception from the Trek community and when they didn't get it they just said forget it.
Now it will be up to the modders to save a star trek game... and this can be a great block of clay. Cause like many have said. I miss botf.. i got it to run on a 486dx4 with 48mb of memory.. beyond turn 50 it took 10 mins or so per turn. But this game could do everything great. With a giant map, and minor races where they should be(atleast for the founding members of the federation and important minors).
The problem with STI (may she rest in peace) is that there was not enough compelling gameplay from the start. A sandbox with just sand is a pretty shitty sandbox, you need buckets and rakes and little plastic shovels as well. The storytelling was also lazy, so the two pillars of a good game were missing from the start. The art team completely carried what little there was of this "game" and it really seems like the rest of the developers just called in sick all the time because they had almost nothing to show for it.
Yeah. I think they went too Stellaris and not enough HOI4. In HOI you get told a story and your decisions affect which way it goes. Stellaris is more of random event... You decide and based on that you get a buff or debuff... then you continue until the next random event. That's good for that kind of game, but if you have something like Star Trek, you need more story. I was hoping for more, but the more I think it appears this was just an attempt to make a "Star Trek" game as cheaply as possible and pray the Trekkies show up with their wallets.
It's simple. Game Companies these days don't invest in what is called a QA department. I never tried Star Trek Infinite. Wasn't my type of game. Nimble Giant lacked the vision? Cryptic Studios lacked the respect. But that is a topic for another video.
Bought on first day, the patch kind solved most bugs (on my part), but, what really really annoyed me was the small details... Dumb things that would spend minutes to solve, human with life expectancy totally wrong, If Picard dies of age because the borg mission is out of range, quit, the story will stop totally... only 6-7 classes of ships and again wrong names... It is like someone that developed this didn't watch or read the content of the series... BOTF was so nice. I hoped that they could solve that and expand with DLCs, but, meh... Perhaps I had high hypes because of Star Trek Armada 3, FleetOps, and other wonderful MODS that came during the years... Really disappointing...
I do want to explore the mods that some made with this game. Also want to check out the trek mod for Stellaris. I love my grand strategy games and was really hoping this game would deliver and with Paradox in charge I had a lot of hope. Unfortunately it seems my faith was misplaced
This game was real disappointing. Got it when it came out and played it for about 14 hours. I guess ive had worse uses of money, but compared to my expectations i was very disappointed.
I'm with you. I've had a good time and got used to Paradox titles being... Expansive and detailed. So I just kinda assumed the same was going to be true for this game. Then it wasn't and I hoped for DLC, cause again its Paradox, and was disappointed. Lacking depth and disappointment pretty much sum up this game. And I wanted to like it so much.
Among the worst things, without a doubt, the least Star Trek soundtrack in the entire history of Star Trek video games. Insanely bland, generic, and disconnected from Star Trek. And I've been playing Star Trek games for decades. The game could have had a great future, we just had to work on it more seriously. The mistakes, in addition to the soundtrack, were a mistaken selection of the game time frame, a bland and pathetically small number of ship hull models, introduced in an even more erroneous sequence. Dozens of bugs, some of which have surely not been fixed. The game had enormous potential, but Paradox is sometimes unable to follow through with a project and improve it. And of course a tree of technological development that seemed to give you technology more than 100 years before what should be used, that develops very slowly at the beginning and then you end up with of technologies that not even in the 31st century developed in just over a month... (I honestly doubt that most of the developers really knew anything about Star Trek, because otherwise, I can't understand so many poorly done approaches. But let's remember that Paradox let Battletech die, which was hundreds of times better made, firmer and with a huge chance of having released DLC for years and years. So it's easy to assume that with this one that we're going to recognize, they stuck too many legs in too many holes and weren't going to bother to really correct it. Honestly, at this rate, I'm going to stop buying Paradox games and then the tears will come.
I can't disagree with you. Trek has such a deep well of content, but it has to be respected. Like the ships and tech, if you are going to market to the Trek community you have to get those right. But if you do... there is almost an unlimited number of things for you to use, and Star Trek fans will eat it up with a spoon.
@@GearandGaming The community can put a number of things to improve, I really think that the developers have had the opportunity to be able to read all those that I point out and more... many more... But there have been no solutions from the company. oh they put on the 3D model of the most useless ship in the game, the USS Cerritos, when they had much more serious things to fix. If the game frame started in 2151 and ended in 2550, it would be a thousand times more correct than the framework they have put on the game...And even most of the initial technologies would feel much more in place. But it's not the users who have to do the work that should have been done either at the beginning of Paradox, or that should have been corrected... Honestly, it tells me very little about Paradox and the approach they had planned for the game. And the soundtrack is a crime. Absolutely generic and inconsequential for Star Trek. Every game, even those that sounded in midi, had more elaborate soundtracks reminiscent of Star Trek. Imagine that I ended up putting on CDs of the various movie and video game soundtracks so I wouldn't have to listen to that bland and unfortunate (from Star Trek's point of view) music. Yes, modders can do wonders trying to fix the endless broken ones, but let's face it, the company charged us a good amount of money, for a game that would be worth even early access. Every time I played, I found dozens (if not hundreds) of dialog boxes with non-existent dialogs and that you had to know which option you chose because of the modifiers that occurred. And I still think that it could have had incredible potential because there were missions that linked to TNG, but it could have been much better, increasing the number of missions and characters by adding those from other previous eras. But for one reason or another, Paradox flushed it down the toilet. And it was Paradox's obligation to at least have corrected the game sufficiently. Again, the Battletech thing has happened again, except that this one was infinitely more polished than the STI. That and that in the case of Battletech, they were committed by the kickstarter to release the DLC they released. If anything else Paradox won't make DLC's come out, the problem is that when they get the wire crossed, they abandon games with EA's ease to let them die, before taking enough trouble to fix it. And just as I stopped buying EA games in the past, I'm sorry to say that Paradox is on the same path.
This is basically Civ III in space. It is what it is, I got many more hours of enjoyment out of this than I would have spending the same $30 at an arcade or even a restaurant.
I enjoyed the game (it actually turned me on to Stellaris which I hadn't played before). It wasn't "bad" just wasn't what it needed to be to capture the audience they were after. They needed to bring in Star Trek fans to a grand strategy title, for that they needed good Trek lore, story, etc. They weren't going to drag a lot of Stellaris players into the title, they already had a bigger game with the same mechanics and a mod if they wanted Star Trek, unless you just blew them away with story and new mechanics.
They did neither.
I was hoping this would be like a new version of Birth of the Federation once more DLC were released.
There was so much they could have done. I had a lot of hope, especially with Paradox's usual thing of following up with DLC, but for some reason that didn't happen. I'm always keeping an eye out to see if the reason hits the news, but I doubt anyone is chasing Nimble Giant dev down the street to get their comments on STI development being halted.
I'd honestly pay $499 for a BOTF2 or even a remaster.
Those parasites are called the bluegills and they are in STO
Well there goes my conspiracy theory that Paramount denies they exist.
Star Trek had a great game called Armada. That is top ST game. ST is usually a hit and missed franchise. It's a shame so much potential.
My favorite was Starfleet Academy. Had cameo's by a number of original series actors, a decent story, and was generally a fun game just to screw around in even if you didn't go down the story path. Had the 6 CD-ROM set because there was so much video :P
@@GearandGaming StarFleet Academy and Klingon Academy some of the best games maybe with the Star Trek StarFleet Command 1 and 2 (3 was a bit worse). Those years are very good years, with also the X-wing and TIE Fighter and several Wing Commander and lot more...
@@Timberjac I lover Starfleet Academy. Actually picked it up on steam, but can't figure out (yet) how to get the resolution to work right.
@@GearandGaming In my case, I have the original edition, then I bought the DVD edition and finally I got the Steam edition. The Steam one works at 1080p, but obviously distorting. The DVD one (which is fantastic for the quality of the video) worked for me in 3D mode until Windows 11, I don't know if it's because of windows 11 or if it can be because of the graphics I took to test that it was an intel Arc A-750 but in either of the two forms in 3D or normal system, keeps the resolution at 640... The graphics card is supposed to scale itself as much as possible in older games while maintaining the aspect ratio in the image... but unfortunately I haven't managed to do it yet. :(
It was a weird one. The map was so tiny, with the Romulan's, Federation, Cardassia and the Klingons all packed together, and no-one else. No effort to make it true to the Alpha/Beta Quadrants, and Gamma and Delta just missing. The ship combat was just copy/paste Stellaris, the fleets just mash together and orbit firing laser beams, with zero effort given to any of the species weapon types even matching or making sense. Even the ship line progression screamed "we don't understand Star Trek" when you can build intrepid class ships even before galaxy or even the constitution class. Did they not even bother to hire a single person that actually likes Star Trek? The entire game was littered with these GLARING inaccuracies. Such a disappointment.
I agree. They needed to get the Star Trek side right and they failed on almost every point. I'll admit the ship models looked nice and the set piece art was pretty. Sound track was good as well. But once you get into the lore of Trek the story, characters, and tech progression fell apart.
To be honest though, there are better Stellaris/Star Trek mods and then there is the Star Trek Armada 3 and Ages of the Federation mods for Sins of a Solar Empire.
Granted, they may not be as immersive as a Stellaris-based game, but still.
I agree. With that kind of competition you would have thought they would have been more aggressive in producing a unique compelling story. Can't put out meh when good options exist.
@@GearandGaming Especially not game-copies with reskins...
there are already huge stellaris ST mods and this looked more like another mod
Yep with all the good options out there this really needed to be something special, not just what turned out to be essentially a Stellaris reskin.
heres an Idea give us the Gorn. I mean how many TOS species were 1 shots some of those were pretty cool and if they brought back would be amazing
Exactly. So many options in Star Trek lore. Borg are just over used.
Damn i did not even buy the game yet what a shame it have so much potential they giving up too soon
I wish I could figure it out. Paradox has written alternate history timelines for like every country on every continent in WWII in HOI4, but for some reason put out the most vanilla Trek story of all time.
My best guess is they tried to do it cheap and were just hoping Trekkies would carry it. Its a very playable game and its pretty, but there ain't much there there.
According to a documentary those parasites bug things were supposed to be the Borg. But then the writers strike happened and they were taken off the series, in that bug form.
Another commenter above said that they were brought back in Star Trek: Online, so I guess my Paramount conspiracy theory is wrong. But I thought a massive invasion of infiltrating bugs is almost custom made for the end game invasion crisis in this game. The Borg are just overused. And if you have a game where you can go almost anywhere, why go back to the same old same old for your main antagonist? Low effort like a lot of this game unfortunately.
Isn't Nimble Giant under the Embracer umbrella. Considering the massive layoffs and cancelations Embracer has done, that could explain what happened 🤔
Yeah, I briefly mentioned the layoffs in my post release timeline.
A number of Paradox titles have been cut recently. Been a lot of cost cutting in the whole industry as money has tightened up. This title caught me by surprise simply because it reused the Stellaris engine and had such a ready made pile of content. Wasn't a ton of development that needed to happen.
"Au contraire, mon ami, " Es un juego COMPLETO. Con 20 años de retraso pero muy fiel a la saga Star Trek y sin bugs . Podeis dar todos las gracias. Venga vamos, dad las gracias No os oigo
Shocked to see Star Trek Infinite stopping all development in such a short span of time. I had planned to try it out when they developed it more but I guess I am going to just stick to New Civilizations for Stellaris.
I don't know what happened there. I figured with Paradox behind the thing we would get a ton of DLC, it's kinda what they do...
But instead they just walked away. Maybe something went south with Nimble Giant or Paramount that made them want to abandon it. Haven't see anything in any articles though. So I just assume they expected a better reception from the Trek community and when they didn't get it they just said forget it.
Now it will be up to the modders to save a star trek game... and this can be a great block of clay. Cause like many have said. I miss botf.. i got it to run on a 486dx4 with 48mb of memory.. beyond turn 50 it took 10 mins or so per turn. But this game could do everything great. With a giant map, and minor races where they should be(atleast for the founding members of the federation and important minors).
I agree. It needed a ton more depth than it got and it needed to do the lire right which it singularly failed on.
The problem with STI (may she rest in peace) is that there was not enough compelling gameplay from the start. A sandbox with just sand is a pretty shitty sandbox, you need buckets and rakes and little plastic shovels as well. The storytelling was also lazy, so the two pillars of a good game were missing from the start. The art team completely carried what little there was of this "game" and it really seems like the rest of the developers just called in sick all the time because they had almost nothing to show for it.
Yeah. I think they went too Stellaris and not enough HOI4. In HOI you get told a story and your decisions affect which way it goes. Stellaris is more of random event... You decide and based on that you get a buff or debuff... then you continue until the next random event. That's good for that kind of game, but if you have something like Star Trek, you need more story. I was hoping for more, but the more I think it appears this was just an attempt to make a "Star Trek" game as cheaply as possible and pray the Trekkies show up with their wallets.
I just want another Star Trek Conquest.
I just want another good Star Trek game. I shouldn't have to go back 30 years to get one.
🤯
It's simple. Game Companies these days don't invest in what is called a QA department. I never tried Star Trek Infinite. Wasn't my type of game. Nimble Giant lacked the vision? Cryptic Studios lacked the respect. But that is a topic for another video.
Damn shame.
Yeah. Missed opportunity.
Honestly I would much rather have another Resurgance game. Perhaps set in Lower Decks form.
Sad that season 5 is going to be the last for Lower Decks. Probably my favorite "New Trek" series.
Bought on first day, the patch kind solved most bugs (on my part), but, what really really annoyed me was the small details... Dumb things that would spend minutes to solve, human with life expectancy totally wrong, If Picard dies of age because the borg mission is out of range, quit, the story will stop totally... only 6-7 classes of ships and again wrong names... It is like someone that developed this didn't watch or read the content of the series... BOTF was so nice. I hoped that they could solve that and expand with DLCs, but, meh... Perhaps I had high hypes because of Star Trek Armada 3, FleetOps, and other wonderful MODS that came during the years... Really disappointing...
I do want to explore the mods that some made with this game. Also want to check out the trek mod for Stellaris. I love my grand strategy games and was really hoping this game would deliver and with Paradox in charge I had a lot of hope. Unfortunately it seems my faith was misplaced
This game was real disappointing. Got it when it came out and played it for about 14 hours. I guess ive had worse uses of money, but compared to my expectations i was very disappointed.
I'm with you. I've had a good time and got used to Paradox titles being... Expansive and detailed. So I just kinda assumed the same was going to be true for this game. Then it wasn't and I hoped for DLC, cause again its Paradox, and was disappointed.
Lacking depth and disappointment pretty much sum up this game. And I wanted to like it so much.
Among the worst things, without a doubt, the least Star Trek soundtrack in the entire history of Star Trek video games. Insanely bland, generic, and disconnected from Star Trek. And I've been playing Star Trek games for decades.
The game could have had a great future, we just had to work on it more seriously. The mistakes, in addition to the soundtrack, were a mistaken selection of the game time frame, a bland and pathetically small number of ship hull models, introduced in an even more erroneous sequence. Dozens of bugs, some of which have surely not been fixed. The game had enormous potential, but Paradox is sometimes unable to follow through with a project and improve it. And of course a tree of technological development that seemed to give you technology more than 100 years before what should be used, that develops very slowly at the beginning and then you end up with of technologies that not even in the 31st century developed in just over a month... (I honestly doubt that most of the developers really knew anything about Star Trek, because otherwise, I can't understand so many poorly done approaches.
But let's remember that Paradox let Battletech die, which was hundreds of times better made, firmer and with a huge chance of having released DLC for years and years. So it's easy to assume that with this one that we're going to recognize, they stuck too many legs in too many holes and weren't going to bother to really correct it.
Honestly, at this rate, I'm going to stop buying Paradox games and then the tears will come.
I can't disagree with you. Trek has such a deep well of content, but it has to be respected. Like the ships and tech, if you are going to market to the Trek community you have to get those right. But if you do... there is almost an unlimited number of things for you to use, and Star Trek fans will eat it up with a spoon.
@@GearandGaming The community can put a number of things to improve, I really think that the developers have had the opportunity to be able to read all those that I point out and more... many more... But there have been no solutions from the company. oh they put on the 3D model of the most useless ship in the game, the USS Cerritos, when they had much more serious things to fix. If the game frame started in 2151 and ended in 2550, it would be a thousand times more correct than the framework they have put on the game...And even most of the initial technologies would feel much more in place. But it's not the users who have to do the work that should have been done either at the beginning of Paradox, or that should have been corrected... Honestly, it tells me very little about Paradox and the approach they had planned for the game.
And the soundtrack is a crime. Absolutely generic and inconsequential for Star Trek. Every game, even those that sounded in midi, had more elaborate soundtracks reminiscent of Star Trek. Imagine that I ended up putting on CDs of the various movie and video game soundtracks so I wouldn't have to listen to that bland and unfortunate (from Star Trek's point of view) music.
Yes, modders can do wonders trying to fix the endless broken ones, but let's face it, the company charged us a good amount of money, for a game that would be worth even early access. Every time I played, I found dozens (if not hundreds) of dialog boxes with non-existent dialogs and that you had to know which option you chose because of the modifiers that occurred.
And I still think that it could have had incredible potential because there were missions that linked to TNG, but it could have been much better, increasing the number of missions and characters by adding those from other previous eras. But for one reason or another, Paradox flushed it down the toilet. And it was Paradox's obligation to at least have corrected the game sufficiently.
Again, the Battletech thing has happened again, except that this one was infinitely more polished than the STI.
That and that in the case of Battletech, they were committed by the kickstarter to release the DLC they released.
If anything else Paradox won't make DLC's come out, the problem is that when they get the wire crossed, they abandon games with EA's ease to let them die, before taking enough trouble to fix it.
And just as I stopped buying EA games in the past, I'm sorry to say that Paradox is on the same path.