Hi,
I read a few negative press reviews and I cannot agree with them. So I want to let you know what I like about that game to make sure you don’t change that and also want to give you constructive criticism to improve.
I love the character of Jara Rydec, but every time I hear her name I think of Sara or Alec Ryder from Mass Effect Andromeda. I don’t know if that was intended, but it fits well, as they are in equal situations to save the day. No traces of “Uncanny Valley” here, so that is a plus.
You managed to make the character’s faces look realistic enough to be believable, but still kept the distinct artistic look to aways be remembered that this is a game, not a movie. I love that. I also like how the texture resolution is in balance with the vertex resolution.
The environments, both in ships, as well as on planets, take me back to the original TNG TV sets, which were basically painted styrofoam and plywood, and this look in combination with the film grain makes it really feel tangible and shows the labour of love that went into it.
Unlike what I read in some press review articles, Carter Diaz does not appear as an afterthought, but is perfectly cast and the amount of different activities you can do besides just dialog are great. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.
I love the science and engineering “minigames” as much as the command decisions and diplomatic dialog. It provides a good variety of gameplay.
As I am not so much a combat focused player and usually mess up pretty badly, I also like the option to “Replay in Story Mode”, but I miss the option “Story Mode” in the main menu. I would rather be able to watch combat scenes like a short cinematic and proceed after the resolution, which should always be the ideal outcome to advance the story without unneccessary losses.
The controls for the minigames are a bit clunky, but I think that is because there are no control setup options to change keybindings as well as mouse sensitivity and contextually independent Y-axis inversion for controllers, which are actually standard nowadays and a MUST HAVE.
Overall I love the story and its facettes and how decisions you make with Jara affect Carters story and also the whole crew. The whole game appears to me like a very good interactive Star Trek movie. The cuts between A and B plot are perfectly fine for me and bring back the way of storytelling of TNG episodes.
The Tkon are a great adversary, and the bioforming reminds me a bit about the assimilation of the Borg, and their war hero appeared to me a bit like Khan Noonien Sing, so I think you managed to get the best from “Star Trek - First Contact” as well as “Star Trek - The Wrath of Khan”.
In order to explore different story branches, I would like to have an option to jump to a specific chapter already unlocked and re-play from there, like in various other Telltale games, or to encourage me even more to explore different story branches, I would like to see narrative paths mapped like a branching tree, as in “Detroit - Become Human”.
However, with roughly 10 hours of playtime, and not so much obvious replayablility, due to the lack of exploration gameplay (neither character exploration, nor environmental exploration AKA Open World), I really hope this game is just a pilot episode and a platform for many more episodes of this kind to come going forward.
I truely believe that A.I. tools are not replacing programmers and artists, but can be leveraged not only for code writing, but also to support storywriting and character development as well as more tedious tasks like resolving performance capture kinematics, and are ultimately instrumental, even inevitable to shorten release cycles as well as increase quality, while keeping the environment non-toxic and reduce the stress of developers.
Remember, even in the Star Trek TNG series, Picard, Riker, Geordie, Data, and others, everyone of them used A.I. (the computer of the Enterprise) to create artistic content on the holodeck. This is no longer Science Fiction and we live in an awesome time so see it starting now!
So in my opinion a viable approach would be to expand existing maps (especially ship and starbase interiors and exteriors) for the player to walk around and explore freely, as well as give NPCs more personality, so you can explore those characters backgrounds and motivs and develop deeper relationships.
As soon as you announce, that this will be an ongoing series with quarterly episodes, I’m like “shut up and take my money”. This is better than anything Star Trek I have seen for almost 30 years now. Even the Star Trek game in the Kelvin Timeline from 2013 didn’t provide that feeling and I don’t want to wait another 10 years for the next Star Trek game. In my mind, the potential replayability of a game should be able to bridge a large portion of the wait time until the next episode or game is released.
So the ultimate goal should be EITHER to have a much longer potential playtime, which I think can be achieved through an “Off-Duty Mode” featuring an open ship and/or spacedock map, more crewmembers to interact with, deeper dialog branches, explorable relationships, etc. OR more frequent releases of, compared to the release cycle, short episodes like this one, OR adding a handful of new crewmembers every now and then with systemic needs and opinions and schedules, which you can interact with and learn to know better.
I know the studio is just building up, but I would like to see you thrive and ramp up to that pace. I am used to Kickstarters and Patreons and if it helps to get there, I am fully down for a subscription, even during the development.
I would be happy if you consider this feedback and maybe let me know what you think.
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