Thanks for sharing. That’s sad. At least I’ll get to play it still once in a while. And I’m grateful that it got us the Miranda-class Antares variant in STO.
With Discovery ending and more information for from Prodigy and Lower Decks on the TNG-PIC era it seems like it would be reasonable to have a game that can run from First Contact (development of Warp Drive) to the 31st century or so in terms of possible tech trees and ship styles. Also, a wide range of possible outcomes of alliances and events...since you have 60 years of Star Trek to draw upon.
Yes but you end up the issue of sheer volume of content. There are certainly creative ways to do it, but if you're trying to make a game that spans 1,000 years of Trek with multiple playable empires... that's *ALOT* of assets that need to be created. The only way I could see it being reasonable is for Cryptic to develop this and utilize their Star Trek Online assets, which is unlikely. You could abstract the ships and stuff a bit, but that's kind of boring. The ships are such a big part of Star Trek, not really seeing them puts a damper on things. Hell I think this was a huge downside of Infinite... there weren't many ships, and due to being Stellaris based, I almost never actually saw them anyway... if anything, I saw dots on the screen zipping around and usually I didn't even bother with that. "Amount of possible content" really isn't an issue in the sense that there's not enough, it's the opposite... there's almost too much and would be a fairly monumental undertaking, especially in modern gaming. A way to do it, but that wouldn't sell, would be go kind of retro with it and make things sprite-based... you could spam out 1,000 years worth of things no problem at all. Do it pixel art-style and you can get a neat look, but nobody will do it because the license is going to be astronomically expensive and you won't get a return on it.
I enjoyed it. Still think the game should have started earlier in the timeline. A typical Stellaris game runs like 300-400 game years. If you start with Earth's development of the Warp Drive in 2063, you have currently a fairly solid timeline of stuff to ~2400. End Game can still be the Borg, but it would come much later in the game. Also a full galaxy map is fine since we have the Dominion and other powers in the Gamma and Delta Quadrants.
Sounds like either Paramount or the publisher were demanding it release at that particular time looking at developer comments on Discord now. They were fully aware they needed a ton more polish - they even knew about stuff like wrong weapon sounds etc. Just a quick cash grab - I had a ton of fun with it, but it'll basically be BotF2. Another badly managed Trek license.