Star Trek: Armada Interview

GamePro takes you behind the scenes of Star Trek: Armada, the upcoming real-time strategy game set in the Star Trek Universe, with new information, new screenshots, and an interview with Lead Designer, Eric Gewirtz.

What could be better than a game that's one part Starcraft and two parts Star Trek? We'll find out this spring, when gamers and Trekkies finally get their hands on Activision's Star Trek: Armada, a real-time strategy game set in the Star Trek: Next Generation time period.

GamePro recently caught up with Armada's Lead Designer, Eric Gewirtz, for a one-on-one chat about the direction Armada is heading. GamePro also scored some new screenshots of Armada for all you Trekkies out there to chew on.

Interview:
GamePro: What was the biggest challenge in creating a Star Trek RTS?

Eric Gewirtz: The biggest challenge design-wise was blending all the aspects of a traditional real-time strategy game, while still maintaining the tone and feel of Star Trek.

GP: Star Trek strategy games are usually turn-based, how will gameplay hold up in real-time?

EG: Most of the basic gameplay, like large scale space battles between fleets of starships, will work really well. But some of the features of the real-time genre and some of the details about the Star Trek Universe needed to be tweaked to gel together.

GP: Can you give us an example?

EG: Yes, the Borg are really powerful in the Star Trek universe, but in order to make multi-player fair, we had to give the other races ways to defeat the sheer power of the Borg Collective. We did this by adding a variety of unique special weapons on all the ships of the fleets, giving each vessel a tactical advantage in certain situations.

GP: Ah, the Borg! How do the Borg, and other races, fit into Armada's storyline?

EG: The ideas on racial interaction we knew we wanted to hit on were: The Enterprise fighting against the Borg, a Klingon Civil War, Romulan secret deals, the Borg invading Earth, and time travel. We love time travel. The details were filled in from there. We already had Patrick Stewart on board with the project and we thought a confrontation between Locutus and Picard would be really cool, so we worked it into the story. Deep Space 9 ended with some major changes to the Klingon Empire, so incorporating those into the plot seemed natural. The rest almost filled itself in.

GP: Were there any complications incorporating each specific story idea?

EG: No, the initial concept and story arch for Armada was not complex. We just came up with a bunch of ideas we would've liked to seen implemented in the Star Trek Universe, and then tried to incorporate them into the gameplay of an RTS.

Telling the story in the game became complicated later on in the process. This was in large part due to the constant switching of perspective. The story starts out from the Federation point of view, then switches to the Klingon, Romulan, Borg, and back again to the Federation for the end. Once we worked out the transitions from perspective to perspective, the storyline really came together.

GP: How will each race differ in regards to gameplay?

We spent a lot of time trying to make sure the four races had a unique feel when playing them. The Federation are more defensive, the Klingons have strong offensive strength, the Romulans have cloaking and weapons designed for sneak attacks, and the Borg are focused around assimilating their enemy and taking over enemy ships. Since you get to play all four races in the single player campaign, the gamer can get comfortable with how each of the races plays before testing their skills against real opponents on-line.

GP: How important is Armada's multiplayer in the grand design scheme?

EG: Most of the team are hardcore multiplayer gamers, so making sure Armada was fun, cool and balanced online was really important to us.

GP: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Good luck with Armada.

EG: Thank you.

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