Update: More than two weeks after it was removed, Star Control: Origins is back on Steam. It's not known what changed to enable the game's return, and Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said on Twitter that he's not able to discuss the matter publicly.

Star Control: Origins currently remains unavailable on GOG, however. I've reached out to Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche for comment, and will update if I receive a reply.

Original story:

The designers of 1990 MS-DOS game Star Control have issued a DMCA takedown notice against Star Control: Origins, Stardock's RPG reboot of the series. The game has been removed from Steam and Stardock expects it will be removed from GOG, too.

The Stardock team said anyone who has bought the game will be able to keep playing it, and that they hope it will return to Steam "soon". In the meantime, they may have to lay off staff to help cut costs, the team said in a Steam post.

It's the latest development in a long-running dispute over copyrights and trademarks between Stardock and the creators of Star Control and Star Control 2, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III. Stardock acquired rights to the franchise in 2013, and on the eve of the launch of Star Control: Origins beta in 2017, Ford and Reiche announced a "direct sequel" to the original game called Ghosts of the Precursors. Stardock filed a complaint over trademark infringement, which was followed by a countersuit by Reiche and Ford.

You can read Stardock's side of the story here, while Ford and Reich have chronicled the dispute on their website. Both sides have proposed various settlements, none of which have been agreed on.

Stardock has uploaded a copy of the DMCA notice, sent to both GOG and Valve, here. In its Steam post, it said that "rather than relying on the legal system to resolve this, [Ford and Reiche] have chosen to bypass it by issuing vague DMCA takedown notices to Steam and GOG".

Ford and Reiche have not yet put out a statement, but I've contacted them and will update this post when I hear back.

Update: The ruling rejecting Stardock's request for an injunction against further DMCA takedown filings from Reiche and Ford has been posted online, and it contains some pretty harsh language for Stardock. The ruling describes Stardock's objection to Reiche's claim to be the "creator" of Star Control as "frivolous," for instance, but says that Reiche's objection to Wardell's "expertise" on copyright has "obvious" merit. 

"Indeed, not only has [Stardock CEO Brad] Wardell failed to establish any such expertise, but his opinion as to whether the work in question is 'copyrightable' constitutes an improper legal conclusion," the ruling notes. "Such legal conclusions are without evidentiary value." 

The conclusion seem especially damning. "Plaintiff was aware of Defendants' copyright claim to Star Control 1 and 2 since the development of Origins commenced, however, and was aware of the contours of the present copyright dispute since at least December 2017. Thus, whatever monies Plaintiff invested in Origins was done with the knowledge that serious copyright disputes were like to arise or had arisen," it states. 

"In view of the foregoing, the harm Plaintiff complains of is indeed of its own making. Plaintiff had knowledge of Defendants’ copyright claims from the outset. Despite that knowledge, it developed potentially infringing material without resolution of the IP ownership issues, and then publicized the release of that material during the pendency of this action. It now claims that its investment in Origins and reputation are on the line. Given that Plaintiff largely created the foregoing predicament, the Court is disinclined to extricate Plaintiff from a peril of its own making." 

To be clear, the ruling is solely on Stardock's request for an injunction against further DMCA filings, and not the copyright dispute itself, which is ongoing. As a result of that dispute, Star Control: Origins is no longer available for purchase on Steam and GOG, but can still be had through Stardock's own website and is currently on sale for half-price. I've reached out to Stardock for comment and will update further if I receive a reply.  

The interstellar strategy-adventure Star Control: Origins is getting a four-part season pass called Earth Rising that will add "dozens of missions, new alien races, and a variety of ships" to the game. The expansion will leave the job of starship captain essentially unchanged—advance Earth's interests in the galactic community with a deft blend of diplomacy and violence—but the state of the galaxy itself sounds a whole lot more complicated. 

"In the first part, Aftermath, players discover that not every alien is happy about the prospect of an expanding human empire," publisher Stardock said. "There are unknown enemies lurking in the shadows seeking to undermine Earth's ambitions, while others begin to react to the recent successes of the Earth captain and his primitive ship." 

Earth Rising will provide new content for players who have finished the game's primary missions, but it also "expands the richness of the Star Control universe for first-time players," Stardock said.   

The Earth Rising season pass will sell for $20, and will go live on December 11 with Aftermath. The second part is scheduled to come out later this winter, followed by part 3 in the spring of 2019, and part 4 in the summer. 

Ian found some things to like in arcadey space RPG Star Control: Origins, particularly in the combat, but said its galaxy felt empty and forced you to grind. Perhaps the new world editor and mod support, added this week, will let creative players bring out the best in it while getting rid off the boring bits.

The world editor, which looks fairly intuitive, will let players add star systems, characters, ships and weapons, as well as tweak the rules of the game, such as the way gravity works. The "Adventure Studio" is where you'll write your own quests and stories. You'll be able to upload your creations in both to the Steam Workshop, where you can browse all the mods made so far.

To get the community started, developer Stardock has added two mods of its own: Bounty Hunter, which asks players to track down the galaxy's most wanted criminals, and The Galactic Zoo, a mod that tasks you with collecting specific animals on your travels. It has also released a modding guide full of tips, tricks and tutorials.

The new tools arrive for free in the Multiverse DLC. Stardock have also released an update, 1.1, that makes changes to the base game, rebalancing the economy by making late-game items more expensive—but also more useful. Aliens now have new weapons, and Stardock has tweaked the appearance of some leaders to make them look more formidable. 

You can read the full patch notes for 1.1 here.

"Rark! Halt your garbage vessel!" The captain of the hailing ship is an alien called a Drenkend who looks like one of those super-jacked kangaroos who has steroids for breakfast that has been surgically grafted on top of a Roomba. He's aggressive and aggressively stupid, and his species has been ordered to kill all humans on sight.

At the helm of humanity's first interstellar starship, I'm on a quest for friendly species who might help us in our fight with a galactic totalitarian. The Kangaroomba, on the other hand, just wants to start shit. Worse, every time I destroy one of these bozos, another one hails me and has the same conversation. It was pretty funny the first time. Now, not so much.

Moments after I destroy the Drenkend fleet, I receive an incoming hail: "Rark! Halt your garbage vessel!" It's yet another Drenkend, and I absolutely want to just die of boredom.

Galactic grind 

With an entire galaxy full of star systems and exoplanets to explore, it's frankly unbelievable how shallow everything in Star Control: Origins feels. All of the same pieces of the 1992 MS-DOS classic, Star Control II, are still here: funny dialog, diplomacy, planetary exploration, space battles. But they come off as hollow imitations lost in the endless void of the grind.

For example, one of the most important jobs of my ship, the UES Vindicator, is gathering raw materials to bring home to Earth. The Vindicator is humanity's only interstellar ship, and keeping it running or building a second ship is going to take up a lot of resources. Finding resources is easy: fly into orbit around a planet, launch a lander, and drive around the surface picking up floating blocks of iron, aluminum, gold, etc. There are a lot of different elements, but they all just go into the big Tank O' Crap I sell back at Earth, so I didn't care if I was picking up argon or oxygen. If I could have used the elements to craft upgrades for myself, that might be another matter, but the resources-and-trade system here just isn't that deep.

Every planet is more or less the same—some are sort of gray or brown and some have trees and lakes—and the floaty, bouncy physics handling of the lander craft is an absolute horror. I get stuck on every little ridge and hilltop, and there's no joy or challenge to driving around an empty planet to pick up Space Cash. Landing on planets involves a simple keep-within-the-lines mini game that only lasts for a few seconds and is equally joyless. Exploring planets did occasionally make my framerate stutter and my landing craft explode for no reason, which was at least good for a laugh.

I'd be more than happy to ignore resource-gathering entirely, but I quickly found that I couldn't. Aside from exploring samey planets, there's a whole galaxy full of species to talk to and  far-flung destinations to reach. I set out into the stars, looking to seek out new life and new civilizations. Maybe I could even build a federation! But journeys are also a terrible slog, a murderous trial by attrition. Every encounter with a pirate or enemy vessel chipped away at my ship, and it's impossible to repair or refit away from a space station. Winning fights wasn't good enough—I had to win them flawlessly, because every piece of damage would still be there for the next fight, and the next.

More than once, I pounded and fought my way to a destination system only to arrive in tatters and with no possible way to make it to the actual planet and the aliens I had been sent to talk to. The only way to fix this was to start the journey again but with more upgrades on my ship and friendly ships recruited for my fleet—and that meant I had to head back to the landing craft to farm some resources. God, what a shame.

The grind is so heavy that anything that doesn't feel like a grind feels out of place, as though the game is telling on itself a little bit. Holding the forward button to cross interstellar distances isn't fun, so just turn on the auto-pilot and the ship flies itself. The landing-on-a-planet mini game isn't fun, so a landing craft upgrade lets the lander fly itself. The combat can be really frustrating and repetitive, so an upgrade lets the ship fight battles itself. These options don't really make the grind any better, but with good planning and a little care, you can almost avoid playing the game entirely.

Alien clones

The real jewel of Star Control: Origins is the writing. There's snappy dialog everywhere, and each alien species is fantastically detailed and fleshed out as a distinct personality. The Tyvoom, for example, are sweaty worm nerds who are just desperate to have even one single friend. The Mu'Kay are adorable squids who exude joy and happiness (First contact with the Mu'Kay began, "Many playful splashes, unknown alien!"), but with a hard edge of self-delusional boredom. Any of these aliens and their jokes would fit in well with a Douglas Adams novel. They're that good.

At least, they're that good the first time. Again, the feeling of emptiness and shallowness seeped into my interactions with aliens. Everywhere I went, an alien would greet me identically, as if to say "Hello! Here are the seven jokes I can offer you." It wasn't long before I stopped hailing friendly ships to say hello, and I started ordering Fire At Will with enemy ships just to avoid having the same damn conversations again and again.

This is a real problem in a game that should theoretically be about diplomacy. I never got the feeling that I could offend an ally enough to turn them into an enemy or sweet-talk a pirate into letting me go without a fight. I was hoping for diplomacy tête-à-têtes like Picard, but what I got was like having an argument with the animatronics at Disney World.

The variety and depth of diplomatic options are, I think, where Star Control: Origins feels the absence of the original creators, Fred Ford and Paul Reiche, the strongest. It feels bizarre to say it, but that 1992 MS-DOS game was, first and foremost, a point-and-click adventure game where talking, wit, and character where the foundation of the entire project. Instead of talking and forging alliances, Origins pushes me to spend more of my time in repetitive grind-combat-grind cycles that don't have the same joy.

Red alert

There's one thing in Star Control: Origins that is worthy of unreserved praise, and it's the arcadey dogfighting of ship-to-ship combat. This is also where Origins lifted the most directly from the original—as a result, it's the most interesting and deeply varied thing Origins has to offer. When a battle starts, two ships are dropped into a space arena full of obstacles like electric storms, wormholes, asteroids, planetary gravity wells. Speed and momentum follow space rules: if you thrust forward, the only way to slow down is to turn around and thrust backward. Swinging around and around without time to fully cancel out velocity makes combat fast and chaotic, and there's a massive variety of ships and weapons to tangle with.

During my battles with the Drenkend (the robot kangaroos), different classes of ships used different weapons and tactics. The Zealot, a small, fast ship, would fly straight at me to use its single weapon: self-destruction. Carriers, on the other hand, launched wave after wave of boarding parties, small shuttles that would fly toward me and take a serious chunk out of my crew population if they made contact. Still other ships used more conventional lasers and sniped at me from a distance, and that's all within just one species.

Space combat is genuinely great, and the standalone Fleet Battles mode is the strongest recommendation for Origins entirely. Fleet Battles lets you build a fleet out of any number of alien ships and jump right into the action against local or online opponents. Free from the constraints of Story Mode's grind, losing a fight or winning by the thinnest of margins doesn't mean a trip back to the salt mines—just load up a new fleet and go again. Fleet Battles is a little hint of how much fun this game could have been, if only the rest of it had been rebooted with the same depth and attention to detail as the combat arena. 

I don't think that Stardock deliberately set out to make Origins a grind. A grind is just what happens when you build an entire galaxy and fill it with only three things to do. That's the real tragedy here: If this game wasn't a grind, it would just be empty space.

Star Control: Origins, Stardock's reboot of Accolade's famed deep-space strategy-RPG, is now available, so let's take a couple minutes out of our busy lives to kick back and watch the launch trailer. 

As the uniquely-qualified captain of Earth's one and only starship, players will set off to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and do their best not to piss them off too much—because humanity is wildly outclassed by pretty much everyone else out there. Ultimately, your job is to keep a lid on things until the folks back home can build a fleet that has a hope of standing up for itself. 

The trailer looks promising, and Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said in a recent "pre-mortem" that Star Control: Origins is "by far, the biggest game we've ever done."

"When you look at Sins of a Solar Empire, Galactic Civilizations, Offworld Trading Company, Ashes of the Singularity, Fallen Enchantress and even Elemental, they all have one thing in common: <$3 million budgets. When you're dealing with such budgets, you are focusing on maximum gameplay per every dollar spent. And it shows. There is a certain level of polish that is a luxury at such budgets," he wrote. 

But for Star Control: Origins, polish has been a priority. "This is a game that was, effectively, completed earlier this year and has been undergoing polish, enhancement, and iteration ever since," Wardell wrote. "You can't come in 'hot' in this market. It's too risky." 

I haven't played Star Control: Origins so I have no idea if it lives up to the hype, but I hope it does. The Star Control games, particularly Star Control 2, were a smart, sharp, and funny blend of genres, and after so many years away (Star Control 3 came out in 1996, and the original trilogy was removed from sale last year as a result of an ongoing legal dispute between Stardock and Star Control creators Fred Ford and Paul Reiche), it would be great to see it make a proper comeback. Star Control: Origins is available on Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store.