Staff – June 18, 2019 at 2:06 PM
What makes for a good video game sequel? When we pick up the latest entry in an established series, we may expect a refinement of the series’ core mechanics, a continuation of its overarching storyline, or maybe more of the same, only with better graphics.
For the Starpoint Gemini series, though, it’s best to dash all of those expectations. Little Green Men Gaming uses every installment to push the game’s boundaries by synthesizing the core experience with new genres. The Starpoint Gemini DNA is present in all of them — they’re all space sims set in the same narrative universe — but they’re also all incredibly different from one another.
The first Starpoint Gemini was an RPG with tactical combat with 3D assets set on a 2D plane, while Starpoint Gemini 2 introduced the same premise to a full 3D environment. Starpoint Gemini Warlords broadened the core game’s scope even more, this time by implementing a layer of 4X strategy. Starpoint Gemini 3 sees Little Green Men Gaming diving once again into what was previously uncharted territory for the studio: a character-driven, narrative RPG.
The feature that perhaps most sets Starpoint Gemini 3 apart from its predecessors is its storyline. The way this particular narrative was developed is consistent with the studio’s own experimental approach to making games, as well as their willingness to take risks to produce new things.
LGM owe Starpoint Gemini 3’s story to a writer named Darko Macan. “That guy is — and I hope he won't get offended if he reads this — 100% loony,” LGM Co-Founder Mario Mihovokic said.
It all started when Mihokovic and other members of the LGM team were standing outside a convention hall in Zagreb, having coffee. They’d been participating in a gaming convention inside and were taking a break. Macan, who had been attending a book fair hosted in an adjacent hall, struck up a conversation with them.
“He said, ‘It's very loud in your pavilion,’” Mihokovic recalled. “And we said, ‘Yeah, it's also loud in your pavilion.’"
After introducing themselves to each other, one of LGM’s programmers realized that he was a big fan of Macan, whose oeuvre includes Star Wars comic books and other works of sci-fi and fantasy. On a whim, LGM’s programmer mentioned that LGM was working on a space sim and that they needed a story. Though the team had never worked with a professional writer before, they liked Macan and decided to extend the offer to him.
Since Macan had never written a story for a video game before, the team found that they needed to find a way to gracefully sculpt his ideas into an episodic format that would be compatible with Starpoint Gemini 3’s mission-based structure. Ultimately, they ended up with a storyline that everyone felt good about.
The game revolves around a hardened adventurer named Jonathan Bold. “It's a space saga with very, very ordinary problems set in very surreal circumstances,” Mihokovic said. It’s more personal and full of heart than the grander narratives featured in the previous Starpoint Gemini games. For instance, instead of granting Bold a pivotal position in the major events of Starpoint Gemini’s universe right from the start, Bold has much more humble motivations, like building a career or mediating his relationship with his ex-wife.
Everything about the gameplay, in fact, has been focused through a more intimate perspective. This means getting up close and personal to the individual planets that make up Starpoint Gemini’s universe and interacting with their inhabitants. This shift in scale is massive for a series whose prior entry mostly concerned the big picture, ordering fleets of starships between various systems of planets. “Planets were like scenery or points of interest that had some purposes for missions or training,” LGM Co-Founder Mario Mihokovic said. “It was the same with the stations and fleets.”
Though Starpoint Gemini 3 will still contain the same ship battles and RPG skill development featured in previous Starpoint Gemini games, this time quest-givers can be found on the surfaces of individual planets, space stations on various planets, or you can encounter them while in deep space. While Starpoint Gemini 3 still has robust ship customization, your ship itself is of a much smaller size than the fleets you might’ve commandeered in previous Starpoint Geminis. The teeny capital ships that acted as your chess pieces in Starpoint Geminis of old take up miles and miles of space in Starpoint Gemini 3.
Mihokovic explained that Warlords simply wasn’t designed to support the same degree of detail that Starpoint Gemini 3 will. “In that environment, at least for our team, it was absolutely impossible to populate all of that to an insane degree while also giving players the ability to interact with all the details,” Mihokovic said.
Starpoint Gemini 3 will be completely different. “Nothing is going to be just scenery,” Mihokovic said. “You’re going to be able to go to meet aliens face-to-face, talk to them and see how they feel.” For the first time ever, Little Green Men is adding fully-formed and detailed environments to Starpoint Gemini, full of characters to meet and with whom to form relationships.
Ultimately, Mihokovic said that both Macan and the LGM team found their collaborative relationship fruitful, challenging both sides to extend past their comfort zone and take risks. “He said, at the end, writing for the game was the hardest thing he’d ever done,” Mihokovic said. “Nobody had ever asked him to do something like that. But I think he liked it.”
In fact, the process went so well that LGM decided to continue pursuing a collaborative relationship with Macan. “He's actually working with us on a second project as well,” Mihokovic said.
This eagerness to experiment with new methods and collaborators is what got the Starpoint Gemini series to where it is today. Mihokovic knows that Starpoint Gemini 3 is a big leap for the series, but he trusts that both old and new players alike will appreciate the new direction the studio has adopted for the series. “I can only say to all of our previous fans: I'm positive you're going to love this,” he said. “Yes, it's going to be different. But guys, give it a chance, you're going to love it. I'm sure of it.”
Starpoint Gemini 3 will be released for PC later this year.
