From Star Trek Game Information
| Source: | LiveWire
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| Date: | Friday, 12th May 2006.
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| Description: | IGN/GameSpy's LiveWire interviews Dr Ian Lane Davis.
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| Download: | FilePlanet
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[edit] Overview
This is a very informative interview with Mad Doc CEO Dr. Ian Davis. Througout the interview, which is interspersed with some in-game footage, Dr. Davis is very friendly, and answers the questions well.
He explains a little about maneuvers, probably refering to pre-scripted macros that a ship can perform. He also goes into some depth about the ship customizing options, and other topics of interest. He is obviously excited to be making this game, which is a good sign for all Trek fans.
Take a look at this one if you want to see one of the men behind the game explaining some of its features.
[edit] Transcript
David Lawrence: The mad doctor is back - the mad scientist - yes. Ian Davis. Who reminded me that we met a couple years ago.
Sean Flinn: Yeah, he's been on the show before.
David Lawrence: How are you sir?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: I'm great, David, how are you?
David Lawrence: The question that we asked you just as we were going on the air was, "How's the show treating you?"
Dr Ian Lane Davis: The show is treating me great.
David Lawrence: You sound like you still have your voice.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: I do. It's been a good year where I've been reserved for just the really important interviews like you.
David Lawrence: Here we go, here we go. You don't have to butter us up, we're glad you're here.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Oh, good, I'm glad to be here.
David Lawrence: So yeah, I think they've hydrated the air somehow. They've added, you know, it's not as dry as it has been.
Sean Flinn: So we all stay velvet-throated.
David Lawrence: Hmmm-mmm.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: I had a big vanilla ice cream right before coming on.
David Lawrence: Ah, that's perfect. [Indecipherable] No gunk in your throat at all. We're talking about Star Trek Legacy for the XBox 360. You must feel like the guy who got handed the big old box of chocolates and can pick any one he wants.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Oh, absolutely. Star Trek Legacy is the Star Trek game that I've been wanting to make for a long time. So as you know, this is the third Star Trek game I've worked on but this is the first time we've really been able to say, from scratch, "Let's build a game that represents Star Trek fleet combat the way it is in the shows and the movies??, and not being told, "Do this genre of game and put Star Trek on it, but being told just do Star Trek.
David Lawrence: Yes holistically from Star Trek. And I mentioned that this is a franchise. We use the word franchise too often, but this is a storyline that has had things added to it, inserted at the beginning and shoved in the middle. And you know people have died and come back from death and Kirk has pretty much laid everything in the universe. This is a game that has so many different -- and so many fans have come in at different points along the timeline. Now you have the opportunity in one videogame to unify the entire timeline.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Yeah, there have been, I think seven hundred twenty six TV shows of Star Trek and ten movies and who knows how much fan fiction? This game is the first game that spans all of those time frames. We start from the Archer era with the Enterprise NXL1. We go up through the original series with Kirk's Enterprise to next gen and beyond. All of the ships from all of the four main races are there in this game.
David Lawrence: Do you have the Deep Space Nine Space Station as well?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Absolutely. It's in there. And you start with just one ship, like an NXL1 class ship, the Enterprise, or another one like that and you build up a fleet of four ships or so. And after every battle you can buy new ships or upgrade your existing ships. It's really, you know, every Star Trek fan's ultimate dream.
David Lawrence: Is there traunia?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Is there what?
David Lawrence: Traunia. Is there the Kirk light maneuver?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Oh! We've got all kinds of maneuvers. We've got the Picard maneuver, it's a little different from the Kirk maneuver.
David Lawrence: I'll bet. So, tell us, the game play obviously is battle, but tell us about how you start things out and where you go from there.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Yeah. Well, you start out with just one ship under your control, it's easy to jump down on the 360 controller, pick it up, start flying around. It's a very intuitive interface, because what we decided to do was, you're not the engineer, you're not the guy who's got fifty levers in front of you and fifty thousand blinking lights. You're the captain. You say, "Go full impulse, go half impulse, go fire phasers, fire photons." So everything you want to do as the captain you can do with the XBox 360 controller and you fly around. Everything's in real time, everything is done to Star Trek realism specs. I mean, we're really trying to make this the most perfect experience in reflecting Star Trek battles we've ever had. And when you have multiple ships, once you've gained a few ships in your fleet, you can just use the D-pad on your controller to hop from one ship to another. You know, if you give a ship a target it will go after it. You can come back later with another ship to bail it out and it becomes a very tactical game at that point, with the big ships being hard to maneuver but having a big punch when it comes to a Defiant class or something like that. You can just zip around all over the place.
David Lawrence: Very cool. We have a question to the chat.
Sean Flinn: sure, Dmax41 wants to know, Are the ships going to be customizable to suit the player's style at all?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Well, yeah, absolutely. One of the things that you do after every battle. Since you're not building ships in the middle of every battle, this is real Star Trek where you can build a sovereign class ship in 30 seconds. But between battles, you might purchase a new ship or the other thing you can do is say, "Well, you know, I really like using my Miranda class ship, which is the reliant from Star Trek 2, but I need my phasers to be more powerful." So you can upgrade your ship phasers or you could upgrade your hull or you could buy a special weapon to put on the ship, so there would be a variety of different weapons that you could add on to the ships to give it like a new sort of torpedo, a new sort of phaser, a tractor beam, all sorts of different things like that.
David Lawrence: Everything adds weight though doesn't it?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Everything adds weight and everything adds expense. You're constantly conflicted with the question of, "Do I go for the short term gain or the long term gain?" So let's say you've got your Constitution class, the USS Lawrence and you're flying around from a bunch of battles and you've got it all stoked up. It's really powerful. But then you see that they're coming out with a Galaxy class ship. And you're looking at it and your stoked-up Constitution could possibly outrun the brand new bare bones Galaxy, but are you going to keep pouring money into it or are you going to upgrade?
David Lawrence: Sure. That's the constant decision you make when you're buying cars.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: That's exactly how I was when I was looking at my 1987 RX7 Turbo and it was like, "Man, every year I'm spending $2000.00 on it, do I get the RX8?"
David Lawrence: One last question from the chat room.
Sean Flinn: Can you talk about multi-player really quick, is there going to be multi-player for this at all?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Oh, absolutely. You'll be able to play on XBox Live, the game is also for the PC so you'll be able to play that way and there's really nothing as fun as watching your friends duke it out as Federation and Klingon and then come in with a new one and assimilate their butts.
David Lawrence: That's nice. Very nice. September - is that as accurate as you're going to get?
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Yeah, it's timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Star Trek.
David Lawrence: Very, very cool. And we can't even ask who's in the game. We're not allowed. Sucks.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: I'm not allowed to say either.
David Lawrence: I understand.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: But it's cool.
David Lawrence: I bet it is.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: It's really cool.
David Lawrence: We'll take your word for it. Watch for it. It's coming from Bethesda software. It's this September. And the name of the game is Star Trek Legacy on the XBox 360. Thank you sir.
Dr Ian Lane Davis: Thanks.
[edit] Screen Captures
LiveWire
