Skeeter man, I like you... but man... you read the Bethesda forums way too much.

If you want Bridge Commander, play Bridge Commander. Legacy isn't the sequal, spirtually or otherwise. In addition, Legacy has a whole slew of other things to worry about, which accounts for your better frame rate on BC.

I expect some patches to take care of a few major things like customizeable keyboard bindings and selectable enemy fleets. Those are the two most glaring issues with the game, and they should be easily patchable considering that the program will likely have variable containers that store that data anyways. Otherwise, it's a great game with only minor bugs. The biggest one I've seen is the torpedo doing circles around my target thing. Considering a single equation takes care of the vector physics for that aspect, that too should be patchable.

The graphics themselves are superior to just about anything out there. The lighting effects are realistic and reactive, not just a bright spot on a really good texture. Combined, they make for stunning graphics as evident in the screenshots.

The AI is actually pretty good. It takes a bit of time to learn how to utilize it properly. If you're expecting the ships to fly themselves and figure out what to do all on their own, then what's the point of playing the game? A problem related to this is the keyboard mappings which, as I said, hope to see a patch for real soon. If you can ignore the forty billion negitive posts on the Bethesda forums, you'll wind up finding some very informative things from people who have stuck with the game and discovered some really neat things that you can do with the game.

You need to play Legacy for more than an hour in order to arrive at a realistic conclusion. Plus, you can always mod it. In fact, that's been something I've been told quite a lot when it comes to BotF2 game decisions on these forums.

Chris: if you have a 360, I would probably hold out for the 360 version unless you plan on moddifying it. Mods will be nearly impossible on the 360, but the controls were designed with the 360 in mind. It's pretty obvious they were, and will likely remain that way until Maddoc releases a patch that allows people to customize their keybindings. At this point though, I'm expecting such a patch so but that's just my personal expectations and not really based on any factual announcements.

I have played it for about 5 -6 hrs today, few skirmish which i find a bit boring to be honest. And the single player. Which isnt too bad and i do like a good story. Im on to breakpoint or whatever its called mission. Tryed it with a nx and the ship from previous mission but died when there were too many romulans about and i ran out of torps. Plus the bastards killed the shipyard for where to repair.

About gfx have you seen x3 reunion. And them great relections on all the ships and cool lighting?

I played that mission, you really need to buy another ship. I bought a Yorktown (battleship) and it made it MUCH easier. It's also around this mission that I finally learned how to exert better control over the AI without switching ships every 2 seconds.

The third mission I did with just those three ships as well. It wasn't too bad - a lot of repairing hull damage :p Federation Fleet WTB energy shields, PST!

X3: Reunion is pretty impressive, but it's not that much better. People put too much stock in the chrome metal effects. That engine has its own problems, it's not XBOX 360 compatible, and I doubt Maddoc would have been able to license it anyway.

x3 reunion has nice metalic reflections so erm you can see other ships refletions on ur capital ships hull for example or stations.

X3 reunion was built to be xbox compatible, not 360 tho i believe. Xbox release got canned tho. Good engine capable of high poly ships, most ships has 25000 polys or more. Stations probably alot more.

Like I said, everyone is obsessed with the metal effects, which really wouldn't make much of a difference in a Star Trek game where all the hulls are non-reflective alloys.

I aint obsessed with em, not bothered about em personally just thought id mention the ability to have reflective hulls. To be honest i wouldnt actually mind seeing a connie with a reflective (ever so slight) hull to see how it looked.

Azh, no I haven't got a 360 yet, hoping to buy one soon though. I just don't really have the money to keep upgrading my PC to keep inline with the latest games. At least on 360 with a HDTV your guaranteed a great looking game.

Thought everyone is going for the wii since its launch.

I would probably go for 360 version but alas no money for console nevermind the expensive 360 prices for games.

Just did that mission az. I think i transported troops to the shipyard too earlier cos i couldnt dock with it to make repairs when needed.

For any people in the UK who would like a perfectly legit and legal copy of the game now visit

http://www.direct2drive.com/2032/produc ... y-Download

Basically you pay $39.95 (£20.43) and download the game.

Just a image of romulan phaser burns across ent nx underside and the nx in a pretty bad way after a battle with 2 romulans in skirmish. Just as she was during xindi conflict lol.

Using 1600 res and as u can see 14fps. Actually the fps made the battle more trek like lol and slower pace.

Alrighty then, i have followed this thread for a bit. Interesting. I will not own this game, Cannot afford it. I looked the graphics over. Zoomed them in. Got to say the borg ship in Skeets "other game" were better designed, so much more detail. Compared the two. Over all The graphics seem to be better on the Legacy. But I'm no modeler. Looked at the Rom damage on your ship. Wow, impressive damage. I would like to see some of the other ships. i.e. Roms Cardis, Klingons, ect. For overall detail, I like what the legacy shows in these screenshots. Too bad I cannot afford to download the game. Might be fun to give it a run.


*Seperate Question Skeet* Hmmm you know you have a HUGE hole in your ship? Why Oh why did you keep fighting with it? That much damage, would send any ship limping away smoking, coughing, and spitting bodies into the colds of space. LOL

**Vivid Imagination on my part**

ahhhhh! I weep with that FPS, and only get them with one game on my system, Star Wars Galaxies (and only in cities).

That damage was relatively disappointing as well. The phaser burns on the hull looked like it was a simple brush effect in photoshop, and the holes in the hull were jagged. Phasers arent jagged...

--

and the models on the other page looked quite low poly. Nice textures, and lighting though. Its the gameplay that counts - some of my games I run on the absolute minimum cause i prefer speed over graphics.

The mind is my graphics card.

Even worse for me Skeet, on lowest settings 4fps!!!!! Unable to play it at all, but most people reckon that the 360 version is a heck of a lot different and if you've seen the videos of it being played then I'm sure you'll agree.

I have seen the vids and pics of 360 version and there is NO difference. I have no idea why ppl say there is when i can see no diff. Models, textures, lighting, enviroments. Identical they all are.

Btw some notes about legacy for pc.

-------

Mod1
Save in campaignes anywhere and able to load back where you were. (i think)

http://startrek.bethsoft.com/forums/ind ... topic=3803

Mod 2
8 players multiplayer and skirmish.

http://startrek.bethsoft.com/forums/ind ... topic=3871

Map maker:
http://startrek.bethsoft.com/forums/ind ... topic=3355

-------

Incase you fancy this stuff.

Skeet, most people hate PC Legacy because of the crappy controls and therefore gameplay! At max settings and good 40fps+ it looks brilliant + on the forums there's a thread to make it look even better by adjusting the config files. From what I see, the graphics are mint mate

Once you get past the cumbersome controls, this game kicks ass. I'm starting to have a lot of fun with it, and it looks pretty nice at 1920x1200 with the settings maxed out. Unfortunately, I have to stop playing now and cram for my prob/stats exam.

Even tho multiplayer is fu**ed up. Anyone fancy attempting it with a khan battle or somit, somene be khan and someone be kirk?

This describes Legacy pretty much spot on. The controls suck. But once you get over it, it's pretty good. Cloaking is a pain to do (no Kirk-era is complete without your take-over-a-Klingon-ship mode).

By the way, Skeet: in order to dock with shipyards, hold F down and click on dock. I'm sure you're already doing this, but if you release the F-key, then you are overriding the dock order with a movement order (which is lame, WTB new control scheme with ingame customization, PST).

If you keep F held down until you've started the docking process, you can release it.

Another problem I'm running into (I think it's a problem) is that sometimes the hero ship in the campaign isn't 100% accurate. For example, I had Kirk captianing the NX for a couple missions until it got swapped with the Enterprise A. I just finished the TOS era and entered the very first mission with that involves Picard. Picard claims that the current Captain dies in some sort of explosion and he's taking command. He then sends out a hail saying the ship he's on is the USS Stargazer while zoomed in on the Enterpise-A.

At this point, though, I don't mind that he's still on the Enterprise-A. As long as it changes correctly to the Enterprise-D and, when appropriate, the Enterprise-E, I'll be ok. I think the Connie Refit offers better defense than the Stargazer grants (I'd have to double-check to confirm), plus I purchased an Ambassador class to upgrade one of my original Connie ships, and that pretty much offers all the offense I need, heh.

My first impression is -- graphics are beautiful but the game itself is deadly boring.

Essentially, you use counterintuitive keyboard controls to make a starship fly like a biplane and keep hitting the mouse keys until a meter (representing the enemy ship) turns completely red. That's the combat system. I'd rank it considerably less interesting than Pacman or Pong.

There's no strategy to weapon selection. Every time you touch the mouse it meaninglessly changes the camera angle, which has no connection whatsoever to your ability to fight. So your point of view is always jumping around, for no good reason. You could just keep your hand off the mouse, but then you can't fire. I imagine that some customization of the controls might have fixed this, but the fact that they'd make such a crappy set of default controls argues poorly for the game design.

While you're fighting, the "aliens" keep making stupid remarks like "The Praetor wants you dead" -- as if that's supposed to add some drama to an essentially pointless exercise. If you manage to get close to the enemy and get the enemy in your forward sights, you get a better hit. That's an excellent strategy for a Sopwith Camel, but completely archaic for a starship. Moreover, as the ships get bigger, they get slower and duller. Great design concept, guys.

If I were to net it out, I'd say that Legacy takes the dumbest part of Bridge Commander (the mind-bendingly dull combat system) and combined with the dumbest part of Starfleet Command (the limited "combat area" concept) and rolled it together with a dumbed-down version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. It really doesn't get much worse than this. Seriously.

In short, as a game, Legacy is a real dog. The graphics are gorgeous, though, so it will probably be, like Bridge Commander, primarily useful as a machinima engine.

I'm so PISSED! I bought the game (even had it on preorder) and had to wait a couple days to play it....

This game totally sucks. Point blank.

Sure the graphics are awesome, but the lack of easy to use controls for PC instantly doom the game. I played for maybe 15 minutes thinking it would get easier once I was used to everything, but I found myself getting more and more frustrated by the second. I caught myself a couple times before I punched the monitor out of frustration.

The NUMBER 1 problem I have with this game.... The camera is all over the place. This aspect of the game could have been better worked out and look just as good.

Anyone wanna pick up a copy on discount just for the sake of having it, PM me and we'll discuss a price.

Don't buy this game for the full retail price!!

You do know that you can fire phasers with the ctrl key and torpedos with the alt key, right?

The game is hardly that bad. And I'm not sure how large ships canNOT be more sluggish. They're not fighters, but several megaton pieces of metal. And there are some actual choices in combat. If you're not finding any actual strategy, then I believe you haven't really given the game a fair shake. After a few missions in single player, you're shunting energy every which way, not to mention that you can't just willynilly fire torpedos all over the place. While phasers are essentially unlimitedly abundant, torpedos are not and you typically have access to 30something of them, depending on your ship. Torpedos have drastically reduced effect against sheilds, but are far superior when the shields are down. The strength of your weapons lock makes perfect sense, both as a gameplay decision and as far as Trek canon goes. Ever see weapons miss in Star Trek? I have. If you've got a better system though, I'd definitely be interested to hear it.

I think it is pretty unanimous that the controls suck. Though they are reconfigureable through a little modification and I would HIGHLY expect a patch from Maddoc and Bethesda that will make it customizable through the UI and perhaps even offer a better default configuration. The controls as they stand simply scream XBox, and it's likely that they simply ran out of time to optimize the controls for the PC. Good thing PC's are so easy to patch, eh? It's a perfectly logical decision both from a business and development standpoint.

I try to use the mouse as little as possible, but there are situations where the mouse is useful. The controls still suck, but I'm not ready to burn the game over it, especially since they can be changed; I'm just too lazy to do it and I've gotten used to the controls as they are. And that's really my only problem with the game, controls... and perhaps the restriction in verticle movement (I'm not sure why you can't loop, that seems counterintutive to what I know about 3-d programming.)

To each their own, I guess. I'm not sure what everyone was expecting, but I question how realistic everyone's expectations were. Mine were met and a couple of easy patches will make this game quite solid.

Ship movement is a lot easier to control with a good joystick. I recommend the Logitech Freedom 2.4 Cordless Joystick. Unfortunately, the joystick button controls are worthless. None of them fire any weapons, not even the trigger. I can't believe they made a game without control remapping (and didn't even bother to update the control table in the manual).

What about the standard XBOX 360 controller which is compatible with a PC. It has to be the wired version and the software for it is available here.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/906347

Ok, I just started playing this, and I have to agree with Azh. The game has it's downfalls, but they're not hard to tune out/get over. The W, S, A, D controls are pretty bad, but I've got the same joystick as you mstrobel so I'll try that out and see what I think. Is there no way to remap controls to the joystick out of the game, like in the configuration files?

BTW graphics I've found are good, but not as good as I was hoping. The lighting and AA is good, but the texturing is pretty bad, and I don't think it's doing Ansiotropic filtering either. It looks more Trilinear that that.


And what the heck happened to the Twisted Evil emoticon? It's not in the list anymore, it just says "Twisted Evil"

Moving is fine for me im used to wasd and using the mouse. Feels like bridge commander which is good. Just subsystems and stuff i dont like about controls.

I like those controls for an FPS, but not for a space sim. I didn't actually use them in BC myself, I just gave the order to move and it happened. Remember you were supposed to be the captain, not the helmsman . But every one plays games differently, it wouldn't be much fun without that diversity.

If someone with an unmodded game could zip up the Legacy 'odf' folder and e-mail it to me, I would be most appreciative. mike.strobel AT gmail DOT com.

hehehe... you killed your install didnt you? Just reinstall to a different HD (or directory), or extract the file(s) from the .CAB on the dvd.

I didn't kill anything, but I made some changes without backing up the original files, and I have no idea what the original values were.