The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

Okay, Im not expecting anything GOOD, but I want to just know it, without having to suffer through the game.

I remember buying it just on the name and throwing it out soon after. Theres a great detailed wiki on SCII's story, but I cant find anything on SCIII's story for the life of me.

Little help?

I've barely played SCIII but somebody just told me the basic premise the other day. I don't remember why, but for some reason the new alliance decides to fly off to either another section of the galaxy that's really far away or another galaxy altogether. It's a very long jump using new 'tech and the allies end up scattered all over the place. Your goal is to get everybody back together again, find out what happened to the precursors and find out how to deal with an upcoming visit from an extremely ancient race that's billions of years old that pops in every few 100,000 years or so to suck the sentience out of all existing sentient life.

The big secret *spoiler alert* is that the precursors achieved sentience shortly after just such a visit and consequently had the time to develop space travel and realize that something really bad has been  happening to all sentient life in the universe at regular intervals. When the next time came they effectively put their own sentience on hold with the hopes that the next round of sentient critters can free them so they can warn everybody and find a solution to the problem. The race is too powerful to be defeated so all the races basically get together and slightly sap their own sentience, putting it into a pool to  content these nasty critters so everybody has time to develop their strength over the next few hundred thousand years or so in order to finally deal with these guys. That's the, "heard it from a buddy recently" version.

Pages of Now and Forever (http://starcontrol.classicgaming.gamespy.com/sc3/) to the rescue. It's a bit broken now, but all the information (should be) there.

It's even worse than that: the ending mentions that it was done so that they could "live in peace" with the Eternal1's.  Yay!  Everyone wins! (except the poor doogs who couldn't afford to lose the little sentience they added to the pool)   ;)

The truth is SC3 is not a bad Sci-fi story, especally for the premise of a video game.

The problem is it was a lousy StarControl story. It failed to address some of the fan-favorate threads left dangling at the end of SC2, and seemed to be trying to distance itself from SC2 in every way. That was because that's exactly what it was trying to do.

However, as I said eons ago, I thank SC3 for being so much less than SC2 was. If not I would have never learned about Fred Ford and Paul Reiche III and come to worship them the way they deserve.

All hail the Gods of Groombridge!

PONAF doesn't really give the plot line.

Pherdnut gave a pretty accurate description of the game, but here's a bit more detailed (*Immense spoiler alert*)

Shortly after destroying the Sa-Matra, hyperspace stops working, and because you had a vision right after the sa-matra explodes, wherein all sentient life is killed, you want to help everyone. Luckily, you're back on unzervalt, and for some reason, you now have infinite resources here (remember, no-one can travel because hyperspace isn't working), and you build an even better ship than before, and this one happens to have a new technology, a "Warp Bubble Transport" ... Woot!

You gather up some of the allies you already had (and some you were fighting against) and travel to the galactic core, where you saw this vision happening.

On the way, your warp bubble throws your allies around all over the place.

During the game, you have to deal with some of the following:

Find all races
Meet the enemies
Turn all enemies except 2 over to your side
Never give in to public pressure
Make friends (But not allies) with all native species
Find out what "really" happened to the precursors
Please the big bad aliens
"Bifurcation" of the Chmmr
Sentience of Mycon Deep Children
Joining of genetically flawed races

And so on and so on ;)

The following SC2 races appear:
Supox (Dies before you meet them)
Chmmr
Human
Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah (Not your allies, show up after you've colonized a few Ur-Quan planets)
Mycon (Allies)
Orz
Pkunk
Spathi
Syreen
Ur-Quan Kzer-Za (Allies)
Utwig
VUX (Allies - Yes ... they really are your allies ... sort of )
Arilou (Randomly show up and gives you advice - don't count on having loads of their ships)

The following are native races:
Exquivan (Enigmatic carebears)
Harika & Yorn (One race, originally allies with Crux, vicious and plagued)
Doog (Originally allies with Crux, very stupid)
Lk (Quasi-space sages)
Owa (Protectors of the rainbow worlds)
Precursors (sort-of)
Vyro-Ingo (Mean-tempered and with dual personalities to boot!)
Xchagger (Microscopic allies)

the following are "Crux" races (baddies, plus the 2 above):
Clairconctlar (Taalo anyone? *LoL*)
Daktaklakpak (A precursor leftover)
K'tang (Stupid Grunts)
Ploxis (Evil mastermind(s))

Short summation of plot:

You go to the galactic core
You rally your allies
You gather a lot of fuel and ships
you find a lot of precursor artifacts
you kick some crux @$$
star systems disappear
you learn of the eternal1's
The spathi go renegade (And are actually usefull now)
you subvert the crux
You upgrade the doog ships and that's everything you need in this game - ever
You restore the chmmr
you unleash the mycon sentience
you fix the ultron ... again ...
you reject the ploxis
the pkunk go insane
you pass the exquivan tests
you gather anti-matter from the rainbow worlds
you join the genetically flawed races
you find out that the precursors sap their own intelligence (You've been eating precursors since you were a baby)
you revive a precursor, who basically tells you that you're screwed
you defeat the ploxis
you defeat the orz
you defeat the eternal1 heralds
you gather sentience from all the races
you feed the eternal1's / you're killed by the eternal1's

*The End*

left out some minor plots that don't have a great influence and / or you don't need to do ;)

think I got most of it ... unlike a lot of people, I enjoy the game. It's not at all up to the SC2 standard, and most of the lines in the game are a rip-off of SC2, but as guesst said, it's actually a good plot by itself, but the answers are unsatisfactory and nowhere near what everyone wanted from this game, hence all the hate towards it

Man, not one person replied with "You, as heroic Janitor Roger Wilco, must save the Game Designers from the evil forces of ScumSoft".  ;-)

My three-sentence summary for Star Control 3 is "Save the Galaxy from having Cthulhu eat it.  But do it without hurting anybody.  Including Cthulhu."

Best three sentence summary ever  :D

Yeah Starcon3 was wazzy. Some of the races looked good though.

D'oh! I knew there was something fishy with that title, I just couldn't put my finger on it.