Star Control 3
Description official descriptions
Since the events in Star Control 2 the Ur-Quan have been pacified and the captain who bravely destroyed the Sa-Matra has had a horrible vision of the future. Suddenly without warning, all Hyperspace travel in the universe has stopped. Top scientists have pinpointed the cause of this disturbance somewhere in unexplored space in an area known as the Kessari Quadrant. Hastily assembling a fleet of ships as and an untested Precusor star drive... a loose alliance of alien races known as The League of Sentient Races sends a task force to the Kessari Quadrant. You are its commander.
Star Control 3 features a new 3D star map, new alien races to discover, new worlds to explore and colonize, new artifacts to research and a new isometric Hyper Melee battle system for inter-starship battles.
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Credits (DOS version)
115 People (110 developers, 5 thanks) · View all
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Reviews
Critics
Average score: 68% (based on 23 ratings)
Players
Average score: 2.6 out of 5 (based on 55 ratings with 14 reviews)
Not a bad game, if you judge it on it's own merits.
The Good
The storyline isnt bad at all, and some of the dialogues are quite amusing - even if they are a little to long winded in places. As long as you don't compare it to SC2 (as others seem to do) then you'll probably enjoy the game.
The Bad
The colony managment parts seem to have been an after thought (I played the game right through barely having to manage the colonies at all.)
The Bottom Line
Keep your expectations low and you'll be ok
DOS · by Marrsy (57) · 2001
The Good
I've played SC2 several times and still needed 3 attempts to finish this one. Each race has its own agenda, power, behaviour and motives, which do not relate to one another (for instance, the Doogs have the best ships in the game, but are quite and passive), alliances are made and lost unexpectedly and distributive thinking is required, as well as paper use, because the hint system is bad.
There are many traps in the endless dialogues and one mistake can end the game.The key is to adapt your behaviour for each race and not make moral judgements.
The colonization process is tedious, but rewarding for your space travel. Also, you have to remove precious crew from your ships in order to colonize (30-50 people is decent for any new colony, having 10000+ resources) but the population in your old worlds will increase very slowly, which makes ship building a fast way to get people, even if you'll never use them in combat.
Fancy ship designs are not the best, but each one is unique and probably useful to destroy another. So far I'm using just Utwig, Doog, Ur-Quan,Chmmr(less) and Claircontlar ships in encounters.
The story manages to get real and keep your attention for hours (even if it's scripted). The times waiting for event X to happen can be used in exploration and colonisation.
The Bad
The search system is simply terrible. Each time you need to get to star X you have to carefully look for it in the unexplored and explored ones, because only the colonisation sites appear as valid targets for search. And if you cannot find it, let a second to rotate the galaxy and search again manually. That's simply painful.
The dialogues are very, very, very long and repeated each time you encounter the same race, even if the events who triggered it are long gone. That is making this game an interesting training option for these diplomatic talks :) For instance, each time you encounter Daktaklakpak and not want to kill them (so that you appear as good in the eyes of the League) you have to pass through 12-13 dialogues and have to remember the correct answer each time. But after a while you'll be responding instantly, without bothering about what the other said.
The combat is annoying, boring and very long, interrupted just by an occasional crash into that little tiny planet, then you're trying to get away from the grav pull and find yourself crashing again into that unrealistic space anomaly.
The Bottom Line
If you're deeply involved in politics, your girlfriend left you, or you're trying to convince yourself to give life another chance, this game is a must, but try to win it without watching the walkthrough. Carefully write on a sheet of paper every aspect worth mentioning, because it requires more time and attention than the previous version, which I loved.
DOS · by lucian (36) · 2005
Much better than everyone wants to make you believe
The Good
In the first place this is an adventure game. The game has a superb story and you are a key player in it. The story starts out rather simple and gets more exciting with every new race and artifact you discover.
The alien races are very well made. Apart from the races you already know from Star Control 2, there are a dozen new ones, each with their own particular voice and music. The dialogs are very well written, the voice recordings are well done an the races are highly interesting.
If you played Star Control 2 (SC2), the game will tie up lots and lots of loose ends from that game. I don't know if everything that is being revealed was already decided upon in SC2 but it all ties in very well with the original story.
When you are stuck with the story, you have some sort of on board computer on your starship that will give you clues. Sometimes so many things are happening in the story that you just forget something you are meant to do and then this feature comes in handy.
The Bad
The strategy part of the game isn't anything challenging and you cannot really fail at it. Do not play this as a strategy game - you will find it very boring.
The ending is absolutely disappointing. After such an epic story, you get a short video sequence and some spoken text as you see the credits scrolling down. SC2 did much better in this regards.
There seems to be an occasion of bad event scripting in the game. I'm not sure if you can actually get stuck with the story but it can become very tiresome at one point if you didn't do something in the early game. Unfortunately this will make you want to start the game over.
The Bottom Line
The target audience for this game undoubtedly was the people that played SC2 before and it is not recommended playing it without having done so. While it is possible, lacking all the background story information from SC2 will make the game much less comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the fans of SC2 received this game very badly. The fact that it wasn't from the original creators generated a lot of bias against it even before it was released. Since it was somewhat different from SC2, most of those people saw their prejudices confirmed and didn't really give it a chance.
To me, SC2 was one of the biggest games of its time and still is today. SC3 isn't as good as it if you compare it directly, but it's very different and stays very true to the original story setting. It's less strategy and more story telling. At this it succeeds and even surpasses SC2 in my opinion.
If you found the resource collecting in SC2 tiresome at some point (I sure did) and preferred interacting with other races and being a diplomat, you will love this game.
DOS · by vulture (15) · 2008
Trivia
1001 Video Games
Star Control 3 appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.
Novel
A novel titled Star Control: Interbellum was published by Prima and written by author W. T. Quick. The book supposedly contains story and events that takes place between Star Control 2 and Star Control 3... however the popular opinion is that the author has never played or was ever given the plot to either game. Also the player character of both games is given a name for the novel, "Commander Omega".
Screenshot capturing technique
This game will dump a screenshot to a .PCX file if you hit PRTSC during gameplay.
Star Control III
Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III owned the character rights to the various alien races, Accolade owned the Star Control copyright. When the original creators declined to make the new sequel, Accolade gave them an ultimatum; sell the character rights or part three would be made with entirely new characters, no continuity involved whatsoever. The creators decided to make some final money off of their creations. A side note to this is that none of the original artists involved with Star Control II were even approached to work on Star Control III.
Information also contributed by Aaron Grier, Vance, and WildKard
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The Pages of Now and Forever
This site could perhaps be called the heart of the Star Control fan movement on the 'net.
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Trixter.
Windows added by Picard. Macintosh added by Terok Nor.
Additional contributors: RmM, Shoddyan, PoliticallyCorrupt, Plok, FatherJack.
Game added May 21, 1999. Last modified March 18, 2024.