Starfleet Command III Preview

For 14 years, the second generation of Star Trek TV shows--The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, and Voyager--have shown us interstellar adventures, personal conflicts, and grand battles in a galaxy rather different than the one Captain Kirk and the original Enterprise crew inhabited. Kirk and crew kept their adventures going with major movie releases, and while new movies--like Star Trek: Nemesis, which is due out this November--promise to do the same for Picard, Worf, and Data, they'll probably also live out a long career in games. So it's no surprise that Activision has picked up the Starfleet Command franchise and moved it into the Next Generation setting.

The scale is bigger, so starbases, Borg cubes, and planets look truly huge.

Starfleet Command has been the only series to try to re-create the feel of Star Trek space battles. The games' success reflected not only the appreciation of the show's fans for this sort of accuracy, but also the fact that the intricate tactical combat was really quite good. Star Trek ships are huge and powerful and serve multiple purposes, and that translates into battles between a relatively small number of ships with lots of maneuvering. In addition to primary weapons like phasers and torpedoes, the door is left open for tactics involving mines, shuttle craft, and away teams that beam over to wreak havoc inside enemy ships or even capture them. Starfleet Command III is the work of Taldren, the same team that produced the earlier games, so it's understandable that those games' best elements are intact, but there's more to the new game than the addition of the more powerful ships from The Next Generation and a deeper story-based campaign. Starfleet Command III will also feature the ability to customize ship configurations, officers who improve with experience, much more detailed graphics, and a streamlined interface.

The game is due out at the end of the year, around the time of Nemesis movie debut, and Taldren wrote the game's story with some crossover in mind. The single-player campaign will have more of an emphasis on story than the previous games. There are three campaigns, in which players sequentially belong to the Klingon, Romulan, and Federation sides. The campaigns are still fairly free-form, allowing you to move from sector to sector on a galaxy map, but now you'll always have a good idea of your objective at a given moment, whether it's one of the dozen or more story-based missions in each campaign, or a more general mission, like patrol or defend, that helps you gain prestige (the game's currency) and experience for your officers. The campaigns create an overarching story that takes place before Nemesis, and the developers have hinted that some events of the movie will be foreshadowed in the game, though not enough to give anything away. As the game starts, the Klingons and Federation have just finished constructing a major star base called Unity 1, and it's been placed near the neutral zone where its strong cloak detector will keep the conflicting sides honest. The star base is attacked by an alien race, and you naturally have a role in dealing with the consequences. In addition to the three playable sides, players will encounter the Borg, Cardassians, Ferrengi, and a couple of original races.

Play as the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans in a story-driven campaign set before the Nemesis motion picture.

The Starfleet Command games have a rather slower pace in combat, in keeping with the fact that players command huge capital-class starships, but there's often a lot going on at once. With the new game, the developers have worked to streamline the interface to make things more accessible for new players, simplifying the way ship data is displayed, adding a tactical mini map, and making AI-controlled ships in a task force more autonomous, rather than giving total control--and responsibility--of all ships to the player. Energy management is greatly simplified, so you only have to deal with the energy levels for primary weapons, heavy weapons, and shields. Subsystems and impulse engines now draw constant power, so it's no longer necessary to slow down just to recharge weapons and shields.