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FEATURES

Gen Con 1999:

Would you like to play?

By Steve Lieb

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Friends . . . Romans . . . lend me your ears...

The second and smaller part of the con is the extensive list of events, seminars, and speeches that are addressed primarily at the gaming public. Not nearly as obvious as the gaming itself, these can be of extraordinary value to any gamer/designer willing to make the time to find and attend them. Game industry luminaries of all makes and models from all parts of the industry make time in their schedules to offer nuggets of wisdom, advice, and opinion on the business of games.

Similarly, Game Companies often schedule such events as a way to get their "company line" out to the public. Of course, rumor is usually racing far ahead of corporate PR so these are frequently a chance for the company to "correct" the rumors, and are interesting (or alternately, amusing) in that respect.

The final part of the convention, and certainly not least, is the exhibition hall. More than 300 vendors pack their butts into corporate wear and hawk their latest and greatest products to the teeming public. Obviously given the focus of the con, the majority of these are RPG- or Trading Card related. But a large number of the wiser computer companies see the value in participating in a customer-based event like Gen Con and are also present. From the huge industry players like Microsoft and Sierra showing off their newest titles, to the small one-man codeshops that are pitching their latest wargame utility, a computer-focused attendee like myself has a lot to go over.

Finally, the report!

Upon arrival I made a beeline for the Interplay booth, to harangue Chris Taylor for not bringing my review copy with him (note to Chris: I'd just have taken it back to my room and missed the rest of the con, so probably better you didn't bring it!). Starfleet Command, for those of you not paying attention, has just gone gold and is on its way out the door. In another example of the startling ability of this team to make the RIGHT decisions, they were shipping first to the dedicated fans who made pre-orders. That's right, they shipped first to their dedicated (slavering) fans, and second to the retail outlets. Amazing that something so clearly THE RIGHT THING is missed by so many companies.

Anyway, Chris was busily demo'ing the retail version to a crowd of impressed onlookers. He actually was running it off the silver original disk itself (the copy they use to make the master gold disk)! In any case, the game looked spectacular. The graphics, which were good looking in the demo, have been cleaned up substantially and made to look even better. Chris quickly whipped up a scenario with a number of races battling in a deathmatch and showed that the ship model scale issues have been completely solved. He didn't even really mean to show it off, but the battle showed something else very clearly: the AI has been significantly improved. He was flying the Feds, and since he was busy showing off camera features, models, etc, his ships naturally separated. The Klingons pounced, their two ships working in tandem to reduce his smaller ship to wreckage while it was alone. That's pretty cool.

Fighters in the retail version look great - they are no longer the suicide shuttles of the demo. Interestingly, due to bandwidth issues fighters from a given ship are treated as a single entity (a squadron) and the model actually shows a wing of fighters. As I can't recall offhand an instance in SFB where I split a small fighter group - remember, carriers are not yet in SFC, so the fighter groups are typically less than 6 ships anyway - this may turn out to be a clever solution to a thorny problem. There were a lot of questions posed about the pre-order disk and it seems that this is not widely regarded with the scorn that such products have met in the past. The public seems genuinely interested in getting the new scenarios and especially the scenario editing API's. I had a brief chat with Chris, but he was so busy showing the game off to interested fans that we didn't really go into much more detail. Needless to say there was a crowd in front of Interplay's booth the entire convention.

Click here to read about Age of Kings and Bruce Shelley!