I mean good ones. Unless there are some and I just have never heard of them?
:inquisitive:
Star Trek, in all its incarnations, has always focused around an ensemble rather than an individual hero. The whole “Chosen Hero and his small band of loyal followers tramp about the land doing quests” format just doesn’t work in the setting.
An away team?
Reported.
Yeah, the Star Trek formula of Captain Plus A Few Main Crewman almost exactly fits every game Bioware has done. Isn’t Mass Effect pretty much exactly that, just with with a different setting?
I guess the straightforward answer is that George Lucas has [del]beaten a dead horse[/del] aggressively franchised Star Wars to a degree that Roddenberry’s successors have not.
Uhm, Wikipedia lists over 50 ST games spanning 40 years. There’s been plenty of flogging, they are just a lot crappier at it than Lucas, apparently.
It wasn’t until about 2000 and the release of Armada and Voyager: Elite Force that there were a number of good PC games in a row. I rather like Birth of the Federation, but that game has a horrible memory leak.
There will be. They tried to make an engaging and interesting MMORPG and failed, as did the Star Wars franchise–a few times. It’s difficult to implement a Star Trek game as an MMORPG and please the fans. So they probably tried to be different than the other 18,965 MMORPGs currently on the market, not just re-release WoW with a Star Trek title, and the fans didn’t like different. That’s my theory. Remember, their attempt at making a Star Trek title in this genre is relatively new. Star Wars has had a few attempts before they managed a successful game.
Since the OP said “…games like Knights of the Old Republic…” I presume she meant MMORPGs only, and there’s only been one attempt at that AFAIK.
I assumed she meant single player RPGs, like the original two KOTORs.
Perhaps. I see now that the current Star Wars MMORPG is merely titled “The Old Republic,” not “Knights of the Old Republic.” Very subtle there.
I assumed that she meant what she wrote. My comment was for the one right above mine, with something like 40 games released. My point was that common wisdom was for years that all Star Trek computer games of any type are terrible and the first one I remember getting really good reviews was Elite Force.
God, hell no. I hate MMORPGs and feel like they are taking away from excellent single player games. Old Republic should have been KOTOR III, damnit, not some nancy-pancy social butterfly game.
Sorry, is my ire showing? I’m sure MMORPGs are great, just great. :rolleyes: 
Anyway, I am quite disappointed - I don’t need a James Kirk or Sulu game. But I would love to have an excellent game set in the ST universe.
The confusion (all mine, admittedly) was clarified just above.
I’m personally looking forward to the new Star Trek game set to come out next year. It’s going to be based off of the new franchise and will allow co-op play (one player as Kirk, one as Spock).
That sounds like fun. What’s the name of it? If it gets good reviews, perhaps my SO and I can play together (like Borderlands).
There’s definite potential.
In the hands of a decent dev and hopefully based in the universe, but not about a crew that existed as part of the cannon, I think it could pretty awesome.
My guess is if they tried it again, unless someone with brains and knowledge of the game market took hold of the reins, they’d do it wrong.
It would be a Halo clone with smaller production values and “better with kinect”, and be utter garbage.
I’d like something fairly dark with an interesting story, as well as some action/adventure parts.
I think a modern take on point and click adventure (Like Tell Tale’s Walking Dead) Could work. Maybe something even truly indie-like and a bit different for the Star Trek universe with maybe an isolation theme like Stasis or Reset.
I’ve also always liked the idea of being the security officer aboard a station like Deep Space 9. Uncovering cardassian plots, spoiling Romulan assasinations, exploring nearby worlds to search for clues, etc. Toss in some third person action combat when appropriate and it could play a lot like Deus Ex meets Mass Effect.
I suspect this is pretty much the answer. Lucas was a technological visionary who created a quality videogame company, Lucas Arts, way back in 1982. It is known for many great games, including those like Grim Fandango, with no connection to Star Wars. So it's not surprising that it's created some great Star Wars games as well. With Star Trek I suspect it is a matter of TV studios with no real knowledge of gaming just trying to make a quick buck.
I would say the stricter control over canon causes part of it. Lucasfilm may be accused of “flogging” its property, but it doesn’t try to, say, nail down all kinds of canon. Paramount does, because they don’t want anything ruining their baby. This partly led to the death of Star Trek with the one-two punch of Voyager and Enterprise. only partly redeemed by the newer film reboot.
This makes it a lot more difficult to fit in new stories. You can’t easily go back to some point in Star Trek’s history or future (as Star Wars games are wont to do, and in fact often do very well). For one, it’s complex and not that interesting, whereas Star Wars has, well, dazzling and uimmense conflicts which shaped the fabric of the universe. There’s also the issue that Star Trek has a heap of shitty , but vague background ideas which can cause you a lot of trouble with plots. Although he’s thankfully no longer involved (being dead), Gene Roddenberry kneecapped many of the most interesting plot ideas and actively fought against what would become the very best parts of Trek. That legacy still makes it difficult to make the kind of epic plots which come naturally to Star Wars.
But the last bit is perhaps the most key. let’s say you make a big, grand Star trek RPG. What are you going to make it about? Note that even Mass Effect revolved around a relatively free band, with limtied interference and the ability to deploy a shit-ton of firepower. You can’t really do that in a game that heavily features the Federation, for instance. Well, you could, but how could you make drama when people aren’t supposed to be aggressive, or interfere in alien cultures, and when your problems are all intended to be solvable by advancing technology?
Basically, you have to cut the Trek out of Trek to do it. I’m not saying anyone could do it, but there’s no good reason they’d try. Star Wars was ripe for an RPG: when people played KotOR, they understood the kind of themes and experience they’d be getting, precisely because it was the kind of adventures they saw in movies, and then comics and even books. That sold the game for them. Star Trek doesn’t feature that kind of adventure, so you’d have to do more work in actively selling it. So why bother? Your own franchise has none of that baggage. Or you could pick another franchise and exploit that instead. Additionally, you’d have to crete even more of the setting than with Star Wars: right from the start, there was an entire rich universe of oddball background characters who quickly developed their own stories and identities. These basically don’t exist in Star Trek, because pretty much every non-main-cast member is a once-off and not very interesting footnote.
To do it at all would be very difficult indeed. To do it right would be even harder. Ultimately, a lot of this comes dfown to the fat that it’s really a television show, not a movie. Television shows usually don’t feature the same kinds of grand adventures movies do, because the latter are better suited to a 90-120 minute tale rather than one 45-minute show a series which must always leave things pretty much the same between episodes.