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StarFleet Command 3, anygame like this out there?
joojoo1975
Member UncommonPosts: 275
I've come in here from time to time looking for this but to no avail
Looking for a game like SFC3. I liked the fact that you could target specific areas of ships as well as take damage to your ship which affected game play.
I grow bored of just the "shields/armor" blast blast. where you take damage but your ships flies and handles Just fine. I want the aspect of having to maneuver/manage your ship as well as do damage controls.
here are the games that you do Not need to recommend:
Eve - played it and it's not what I am looking for
Earth and Beyond emulator - watched YouTube vids and it seems like it's just pew pew, no degradation of ships controls etc
FTL- own it already and kind of bore of it, it does have a lot of what I look for(hence why I bought it) but it's simplistic though fun
all the X series - Very fun franchise, but it's still just a shields/armor pew pew(I don't own the newest one though)
STO - lets not go there, I did a post about that one months ago, so unless they totally revamped it and now its a lot like SFC3.
Freelancer - own it and played the discovery mod, just basic pew pew, though Really fun pew pew
Star Citizen - it's not out yet? but I will check it out when there is beta or Free To Play model
Darkspace - tried it, and its not what I am looking for(as far as I can tell from the hour or two fiddling around with it.
well that's about it, lemme know what you all think.
To Protect The Helpless From The Heartless
Comments
Well, you can try the Space Empires series. They are old, but they do provide the level of detail that you want. I really enjoyed working with the developers on these games.
You can also try something like Space Run, which is more of a space tower defense.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
The community was a huge factor. They fixed, ran, and organized servers. We're just flat out fun even the bad apples. Watertiger pretty much pissed on everyone's wheaties at some point. Not saying I liked the guy just saying he made a good villain. On the other side of the coin you had stuff like that one guy who made a gif of watertiger shitting all over the place on the bridge of a starship. Him and WT were always going at it. The community was fucking hilarious and fun. Lot of work went into those servers and mods. A company could copy everything exactly as SFC3 did it. It still wouldn't be the same. The community was a huge factor that helped make SFC2 and SFC3 just as much as anything else.
My thoughts on it at least.
To Protect The Helpless From The Heartless
Elite Dangerous is about as close as your going to get till star citizen.
Hate to kinda sorta necro, but ran across this (somewhat) recent post on a late night reminiscing about days past, and when I saw it was not only about SFC3 but had the name WaterTiger I had to read and comment; would of went through hell or high water just to see the forum discussion. Hulluck you're quiet right on both fronts. Number one, WaterTiger pissed in everyone's Cheerios every day. That man just loved to think he was the ringleader of everything, even while Victor hosted the "main" forums, a large group of the community as a whole worked on the Unity Mod, and an old Taldren employee (Dave) helped out the community a lot. I believe he was the one behind the 'unofficial' patch that fixed quite a lot and things like the Makeitso=1 removing the need to have the disc in the drive. But WaterTiger was the mastermind, or so he loved to think. Hence why the man got into fights with every single person he ever talked to, and why he was eventually run off. Last time I saw him it was the release of WoW and Wade (WaterTiger) was running with his tail tucked between his legs as fast as he could into World of Warcraft. Last time I saw the man he walked out of the Trek community as a whole and was on Argent Dawn playing a Mage.
But as for the OP, the community is really what made SFC3 what it was (for better or for worse). And as for what OP is looking for, that's going to be something hard to replicate in any modern game. A game's lifespan isn't even long enough these days to even form those sort of tight knit communities anymore, and the games and the environment itself isn't conducive to it. They're either large singleplayer sandbox games like Assassin's Creed, Dragon Age, etc., or large MMOs that are so large outside of a forum, they don't form any sort of community outside of clan memberships. SFC3 was lightning in a bottle. It wasn't just the gameplay that made it a fun game, but the time at which the game came out. It was a weird mix of perfect timing for Trek fans, PC gaming as a whole, the age of the internet itself, and the fact that around that time space sims games like SFC3, Freelancer and many, many others were at their peak and already heading toward the genre's crash. The Activision/Viacom lawsuit didn't help matters much either. Everything just happened to come together to form what all of us old SFC3 veterans remember: A mostly tight knit community of trekkies that revolved around SFC3 and BC, to a lesser extent Elite Force, and to a much lesser extent Armada. Excluding some of the fleets that mainly used Gamespy for single PvP matches and never came into the Dynaverse servers to play or ever make any sort of attempt at communication with the larger community as a whole like RSC and a few other lesser fleets, that is.
So yeah, you're going to be very hard pressed to find a game that even gets close to resembling what SFC3 was. You've got what was the lesser side of the game - single PvP matches via Gamespy TCP/IP; and the larger "main" game, long-term play over servers centered around a dynamic conquest map. Multiple races/factions of both players and NPCs fighting for control of territory through PvE and PvP to flip tiles and eliminate every other race's space bordering on what we'd today in gaming refer to as some amalgamation of MMO, RTS, RPG, and even Roguelike, as you lost your ship and had to start over from the starter ship when you were killed with just your credits you banked. A lot of that fun was also something we made ourselves, not something the game specifically provided, like making impromptu alliances late at night then turning on each other a few hours later. Not only was the basis of the online gameplay rather unique at the time, but so was the combat. A weird mix of a "tactical" RTS with slight simulator-esque options, ship customization, and open-matched PvP battles all centered on a server with a single 2D tile map based almost entirely on player involvement. The playerbase of that game is what kept it on life support for so long, but its demise was pretty much sealed. The unofficial beta patch, the Unity Mod trying to add content into the game to keep people around, the lawsuit, the playerbase being split between Gamespy and Dynaverse, and the final nail in the coffin coming with the release of what was to be basically the largest videogame ever coming only a couple years into SFC3's time, and a number of other things. Those types of games just really don't exist anymore, and if you find one let every old Trek boomer know because we'd prolly roll our wheelchairs over in droves.
For what is currently available in the Sci-Fi genre that has its roots based in that older generation of space-sims and that allows you to make your own fun, Elite: Dangerous is one that comes to mind. Most other games are single-player only, are games you've already mentioned, or so far outside the scope of anything close to being SFC3ish or even remotely related to Trek or even scifi in general. The general basis of games has just changed so much that something along the lines of a spiritual successor, or even a game halfway resembling it's style of play just doesn't exist, even looking away from AAA games and at indie developers. I wish it did, because I'd love to have something like we had back in the days of SFC3, BC, and Elite Force to play, and that same type of community to be a part of. Honestly the more I think on it, it's more than just wanting another Starfleet Command type game, it's us looking back on that time of the early days of the internet and online gaming as well as our lives over a decade ago that we'd like to travel back to.
TL;DR
SFC3 reminiscing aside, the only thing I can say is hold out and wait, or try Elite Dangerous. I've become a big fan of that game and enjoy it immensely. There really isn't much out there that's going to come close to SFC3, especially since you pretty much eliminated a lot of titles both current and old that don't fit you. However, the Sci-Fi Space-Sim genre is starting to make a big comeback after its crash many years ago, and games like Elite: Dangerous are already here, Star Citizen, No Man's Sky, are in the works, EVE Online is taking a forray into drastically expanding and changing it's core gameplay with additional games/DLC/game change (whatever you want to call it) like Valkyrie and changing the game from a point and click to controlling ships in a more space-sim way with WASD keys. Maybe someday something will come out that will catch your eye, but as for something to fill the void a game like SFC3 left, there's honestly nothing.
*had to edit this years later, realized I put Treyarch instead of Taldren. /facepalm