Plymouth, MI. August 28, 2018 – Today Stardock Entertainment announced the extension of their technology and gaming partnership with AMD (NASDAQ: AMD). As part of the ongoing partnership, Stardock will optimize the upcoming Star Control: Origins for AMD technologies including AMD Ryzen™ processors and Radeon FreeSync™ 2 technology, as well as update the game post-launch with support for the Vulkan™ Graphics API.

This collaboration follows AMD’s previous work with Stardock to deliver the first ever game with DirectX® 12 benchmarking, Ashes of the Singularity.[1]

"Delivering the latest advanced technology to gamers by working with innovative partners has been and continues to be critical to AMD’s success,” said Ritche Corpus, Head of Worldwide Content at AMD. “Stardock has proven time and time again that pushing the gaming envelope is part of their DNA, and we’re thrilled to continue our relationship with Star Control: Origins, their biggest and best game yet.”

“Stardock has consistently led in game experiences designed to take advantage of multiple processing cores, and AMD has been key to those efforts across technology and marketing,” said Kevin Unangst, Vice President of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships for Stardock.  “AMD’s Ryzen™ and Radeon™ platforms deliver massive potential for the tech and gameplay experiences in our upcoming Star Control: Origins.”

Stardock and AMD are jointly marketing Star Control: Origins, including offering the upcoming sci-fi action adventure RPG in AMD’s Raise the Game GPU promotion: buyers of the AMD Radeon™ RX Vega, Radeon™ RX 580 or Radeon™ RX 570 graphics cards from qualifying retailers get Star Control: Origins - for free.

AMD is also debuting the first public showing of the full Star Control: Origins game in the AMD booth at PAX West in Seattle, WA in advance of the September 20 launch.

In Star Control: Origins, you explore the galaxy, investigate new worlds, contact new civilizations, and battle hostile aliens. You are the captain of Earth's brand new, state-of-the-art ship, The Vindicator. Your mission is to gather allies to fight an ancient alien menace that threatens to annihilate the human race.

Star Control: Origins releases September 20, 2018 and is available at a special pre-order price of $34.99 through Stardock, GOG, and Steam. For more information, visit www.starcontrol.com.

Star Control: Origins Media Assets:

Gamescom 2018 “By Any Means Necessary” Trailer: https://youtu.be/9E09Cgk_qZs

Screenshots: Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Screenshot 3 | Screenshot 4 | Screenshot 5

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Please contact press@stardock.com for all media inquiries.

About Stardock: Stardock is a developer and publisher of PC games and desktop software located in Plymouth, Michigan.  Its PC games include Sins of a Solar Empire, Offworld Trading Company, Galactic Civilizations and Ashes of the Singularity. www.stardock.com.

About AMD:  For more than 45 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies ― the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and the datacenter. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) website, blog, Facebook and Twitter pages.

[1] Source: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2015-ashes-of-the-singularity-dx12-benchmark-tested

One of the most difficult challenges we've had in developing a new Star Control game has been the delicate balance between the need to start fresh and the desire to satisfy hard-core fans of the classic DOS games.

Today we will look at our solution to that conundrum.

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"Captain, you must save humanity... by any means necessary."

Check out our trailer featuring all-new gameplay footage below!

Saving Earth - not to mention the rest of the galaxy - from a race of murderous aliens is no easy task. Your orders from Star Control are to save humanity - with no requirements about the choices involved. Will you make friends, or will you make enemies? Will you save other alien species during your travels, or will you obliterate them? Will you hug the Tywom, or will you shun them? ...No one will blame you for that choice.

The path is yours to take. Good luck, captain.

Star Control: Origins releases on September 20, 2018!

*Price valid during pre-order time only.

Most fans of our previous games know that we make a lot of strategy games. Strategy games are all about having as much data on-screen at one time as possible.

But Star Control isn't a strategy game, it's an action RPG.  It took us a very...very long time to nail down the user interface we wanted for Star Control: Origins, mostly due to having to quit trying to make a strategy game UI for an RPG. 

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Today, Stardock Entertainment announced that international star Adam Baldwin is joining the voice cast of the highly anticipated science-fiction adventure game, Star Control: Origins.

In Star Control: Origins, you explore the galaxy, investigate new worlds, contact new civilizations, and battle hostile aliens.. You are the captain of Earth's brand new, state-of-the-art ship, The Vindicator. Your mission is to gather allies to fight an ancient alien menace that threatens to annihilate the human race.

Adam will be portraying a rogue mercenary commander of the Menkmack who pursues the player on behalf of a mysterious client.

Said Adam: “Great stories matter, and I’m looking forward to being part of the story the Stardock team is telling with Star Control: Origins.”

“Adam has played so many unforgettable characters and earned millions of fans worldwide.  We’re thrilled to have an artist of his caliber join the talented team at Stardock to deliver our biggest and best game yet,” said Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock.

Star Control: Origins will release on September 20, 2018.  Users can pre-order the game now at a discounted price and receive instant access to the Fleet Battles beta.

Star Control: Origins is available at a special pre-order price of $34.99 through Stardock, GOG, and Steam. For more information, visit www.starcontrol.com.  

Star Control: Origins - E3 Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-EnCjcxsJE

Star Control: Origins - Beta Screenshots:
Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Screenshot 3 | Screenshot 4 | Screenshot 5

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Please contact press@stardock.com for all media inquiries.

About Stardock: Stardock is a developer and publisher of PC games and desktop software located in Plymouth, Michigan.  Its PC games include Sins of a Solar Empire, Offworld Trading Company, Galactic Civilizations and Ashes of the Singularity. www.stardock.com.

In one of our other dev journals, we showed the pipeline of how aliens came to be in Star Control: Origins.  The process started with the artists and the writers working in parallel.  The artists would sketch up lots and lots of alien shapes, and the writers would design the history and lore and roles of the aliens. From there, the process would begin to merge to ensure that the final alien visual expression matched up with the lore for them.

Today we're going to begin walking you through how the Star Control aliens that appear in Star Control: Origins were developed.

Do you have enough Jeff in your life?

We first have to separate the difference between a character and a species.  In the classic Star Control series, there was Fwiffo, the character and Spathi, the species.  For the most part, Star Control: Origins focuses on species but there are also a few characters and one of our favorites is Jeff.

Ironically, as far as I know, Jeff's species is not revealed in Star Control: Origins.  I won't spoil Jeff's personality but you can get an idea of what he looks like and how he evolved.

First, you have the inkblots:

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Not all ships are created equally.  This is particularly true for the ships of Star Control itself.  In the year 2088, the United Earth Advanced Space Vehicle Program (UEASV) had done its best given the politics involved.  But ultimately, what Star Control starts out with is a ship with very much the capabilities that a ship in 2088 would have, which is to say: it can... turtle around the solar system.

The first long-range ship program - the Vindicator program - was designed to allow the ship to be frequently updated with new modules.  Because the ship was designed to handle technology from different nations such as the United States, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, etc. the interfaces are remarkably flexible.

Ironically, this need for flexibility has also made the Vindicator class well suited for plugging into alien technology that arrives...

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Necessity is the mother of invention

Welcome to the second ship design contest! Last year we held our first contest for people with a talent for unorthodox and innovative ship design.

This time we have new prizes, an improved ship designer in Fleet Battles and just a little bit of alien oversight.

How To Enter

1. Read the contest details below.
2. Create your amazing ship design in Star Control: Origins – Fleet Battles BETA.
3. Upload it to the Steam Workshop.
4. Submit your entry to this thread with a link to the Steam workshop file.

Contest Details

Eligibility

This contest is open to all owners of Star Control: Origins.

These are two requirements for eligibility to participate:

• You must be a legal adult in your country of resident (i.e. 18+ in the United States).
• You must have a Stardock account (free).

Entries

• All entries must be submitted before 6 PM EDT, August 20^th, 2018.
• All entries must be original, (cannot be duplicate of any current ship).
• Any entry that appears to violate any copyright or other IP rights will be rejected by Stardock’s discretion.
• No vulgar or harassing submissions will be accepted.

Rights & Ownership

• The author of an entry agrees to grant Stardock a perpetual right to use, modify and redistribute the ship in any Stardock product of promotion as they see fit.

Ship Requirements

• Your ship must be an original design of your own making.
• It must be fully viable in multiplayer and single player.
• You must use the standard set of parts and modules in game. No custom XML modding.
• Only submit one ship design for consideration. Make it your best one!

Moderation

• Judges will be Stardock or/and community members that have not participated in the contest.

Prize

• 3 winners will be selected.
• These 3 winners will have their ships included in-game.
• Up to 10 runner-ups will be included in a community spotlight.

Judging

• Judges will be Stardock or/and community members that have not participated in the contest.
• Ships will be judged for three criteria; Look, Feel and Balance.

Rules Modifications

• Stardock reserves the right to modify these rules at its discretion.

Cancellation of Event

• This event must have at least 3 entries to be considered viable.

Law and Venue

This Contest shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of Michigan. To the maximum extent afforded under the law, the parties hereby agree upon, and submit to, the sole and exclusive jurisdiction and venue for all lawsuits arising from or related to this Agreement (or the performance of a party hereunder) of the Michigan Courts located in Oakland County, Michigan, and to the Federal Courts of the United States of America located in Wayne County, Michigan. This Contest is void where prohibited by law.

It's well known that RTS suffer from being less accessible than other genres, but I think the reasoning for why is oversimplified and under-analyzed. Most people attribute the accessibility woes of RTS to their steep learning curve, but that's only part of it. If the steep learning curve is such a hurdle, then why are MOBA's like Dota or League of Legends so immensely popular? I don't think you can argue that StarCraft or Company of Heroes have a steeper learning curve than Dota, which is as hardcore as you can get. A more accurate diagnostic might be that RTS have issues with player retention, it's difficult to get new players hooked on an RTS. Today I'll be exploring what it is that makes RTS suffer from player retention and mention examples from RTS that have attempted tackled these problems.

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For most people, Star Control: Origins will be the first Star Control game they've ever heard of.  But long ago, back in the DOS days, there was a trilogy of Star Control games.

The first Star Control game was essentially a Space Wars style game with a strategy layer. There wasn't really any "lore" with it.  The second one, my favorite, was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. This game was filled with an epic lore that dated back over a quarter million years. The third one, Star Control III: The Kesari Quadrant, took its own direction, which many fans have since come to not care for.

When we began working on Star Control: Origins we had the challenge of deciding what was and wasn't canon in the Star Control universe.  Ultimately, what we decided was to make Star Control a multiverse.  Thus, Star Control II took place in what we call the Ur-Quan universe.  Star Control III takes place in the Kessari universe, and Origins takes place in the Origins universe.

Early concept of the Xraki

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