Star Control II is a collection of different interrelated minigame mechanics. You have spacewar-style combat, planet exploration resource collection, interactive storytelling with the communications with other races, resource and time management, ship and fleet customization, and exploration of the universe.
But some planets could require a side-scrolling platformer, instead of the top-down lander. Or you could put together a jRPG-style party and explore a settlement on a planet. You could play a Scumm-style adventure game on an abandoned space station. In addition to spacewar, you could have a bullet hell shooter for traversing an asteroid field. You could do economy management and trading, purchasing self-sealing stem bolts on Cardassia Prime and trading them for seal furs on Caladan. You could level up your crew to make them better at piloting ships in your fleet or participating in away missions. And of course we need procedural generation for the sake of replayability.
Halcyon 6 could be this, but ended up having far too many grinding fights.
For me, the main appeal of SC2 and first Mass Effect game was a sense of a huge undiscovered galaxy where the wonders are. The joy of finding your first rainbow world was immense.
Starcom: Nexus temporarily scratched this particular itch for me. There is no economy in the game, but there is ship building, researching, collecting resources, interacting with ships and planets, discovering stuff, space battles and a mystery that takes 10-15 hours to unravel. It's a top-down 2D game with free movement. The gameplay is balanced and fun, and the game doesn't always give you quest markers to chase, so you are expected to be observant.
How do you feel about Stardock's Star Control reboot? For me, it felt like a big tech demo, but not fully fleshed out.
Btw, Mass Effect was very inspired by Star Control with its use of minigames for mineral collection. I really want a game that's more of a 50/50 mix between Mass Effect and Star Control.
My disdain for Origins is just about Brad Wardell's treatment of Fred and Paul and his complete disregard for which rights he purchased versus which he didn't. And that really hurt because I liked Stardock so much - I remember reading something about how he built the original Galactic Civilizations and each ship was its own window due to how he misunderstood the system, and I really admired the pragmatism and get-things-done attitude. And then he was a massive jerk to these other people I think are cool.
The game itself was lovely. The writing was good. The art was good. The combat was fine. The lander and everything adjacent to it was frustrating; not only did it bounce around like a caffeine-addled pigeon, the things you'd do with the resources were not satisfying. The game was short, but it was supposed to be a platform upon which other people would build using a campaign editor, and then the entire community hated Stardock and nobody wanted to create more content.
Interesting, I always thought of Mass Effect as a spiritual successor to Sentinel Worlds 1: Future Magic. Never played Star Control though, may need to check it out.
Both Star Control II and Mass Effect create this sense of alien-ness, where you feel like you're really trying to deal with alien races using human concepts and, unless you can break out of that mold, you won't succeed. In SC2 this is quite literal, since the game runs on a clock of sorts, and it's possible to get into an unwinnable state.
The best part of SC2 is that it is impossible to know ahead of time if your encounters will result in making loyal allies or barbaric enemies. The only way forward is to keep exploring the galaxy.
If you like that feeling, you might enjoy the old game Vangers. It's not quite ‘take these completely foreign things and do barely understandable tasks with them’, but the mood is definitely there.
‘Space Rangers’ does a bit of what you describe, though not much. In fact, I learned about SC2 much later after playing SR, and realized that SR borrowed a lot from SC2. But perhaps SR can satisfy some of the itch for a new game in the genre(s), for those who haven't seen it yet.
Star Control is a spiritual successor to Starflight - the star system exploration screen is virtually identical between Star Control II and Starflight.
Totally aware! Huge fan of both. However I think I in general prefer the overall vibe and lore or Starflight to SC2 myself. Both series are great though.
I'm not up-to-date with the ongoing state of the UQM2 effort, other than awareness of the subreddit and the streams. They communicate mostly via video and I prefer text, so I haven't kept up since the kerfuffle with Stardock.
I did only play Ur-Quan Masters, though, and in like 2006, at that. I wasn't aware of the original until UQM.
Star Control II is a collection of different interrelated minigame mechanics. You have spacewar-style combat, planet exploration resource collection, interactive storytelling with the communications with other races, resource and time management, ship and fleet customization, and exploration of the universe.
But some planets could require a side-scrolling platformer, instead of the top-down lander. Or you could put together a jRPG-style party and explore a settlement on a planet. You could play a Scumm-style adventure game on an abandoned space station. In addition to spacewar, you could have a bullet hell shooter for traversing an asteroid field. You could do economy management and trading, purchasing self-sealing stem bolts on Cardassia Prime and trading them for seal furs on Caladan. You could level up your crew to make them better at piloting ships in your fleet or participating in away missions. And of course we need procedural generation for the sake of replayability.