Galactic empires

Stellaris has long had a history of rich and deep total conversion mods, fan-made overhauls that let players take one of the most successful space strategy games of recent history and turn it into everything from Warhammer to Star Wars. Trek mods are no stranger to it either, but now they have new competition: an official Trek spin on 4X gaming from Paradox themselves.Playing Raffi Throughout Star Trek: PicardPreviously revealed at Summer Games Fest last weekend in a non-gameplay trailer, today, celebrating the fabled…

One of the best things about Star Wars can, on occasion, also be one of the worst things. It’s the canon. The fact that all Star Wars stories released these days are happening in the same universe. So whatever happens in one story could, and should, impact the others. ‘I Started a Yoda Fan Club’This can be incredibly cool, leading to fun, emotional payoffs, but it can also create all kinds of questions. Not exactly “plot holes,” but questions. Questions like, “If there are dozens of Jedi still alive in the universe around…

Screenshot: LucasfilmBut is anything ever really gone in Star Wars? It’s telling that the Darksaber was simply grievously damaged rather than completely destroyed—and even when the galaxy far, far away has seemingly gone out of its way to show a legendary weapon like a lightsaber being lost, it can still find its way into the hands of a new hero. While it seems like The Mandalorian and Star Wars at large are currently ready to move on from the rebuilding of Mandalore as a focal storyline, there are potential seeds in…

Image: ParamountPicard ends with the Titan re-christened as the new Enterprise-G, meaning the F, briefly seen on-screen before disaster struck in the penultimate episode—and the Enterprise of Star Trek Online, where its design originated—has either itself been re-christened, or it got hit way harder in the Borg attack than we’d assumed.We saw Admiral Shelby killed in action when the Borg assimilation spread through the fleet, but nothing about the Enterprise-F going down. A year’s passed since the Titan was re-christened…

Image: Lucasfilm/EAOrchestrated by the Emperor’s counsel and Fleet Admiral Gallius Rax, the first Shadow Council was, as the name implied, meant to manage the Imperial Remnant’s counteroffensive against the New Republic from the shadows, with only Sloane, now a Grand Admiral, as its public figurehead. But although not as short-lived as the IFC, the first Shadow Council was doomed from the beginning, intentionally.Rax, operating on direct orders from Palpatine posthumously released as part of Operation Cinder—Palpatine’s…

This week’s episode of The Mandalorian was all about setting the stage, and the stakes, for an explosive end to a very mixed season three. But it also looked to Star Wars’ future with the presence of a face very familiar to fans of the old Expanded Universe.Spoilers of the Week: July 1stThe opening of “The Spies” sees a returned Moff Gideon, freed from New Republic custody, address his fellow Imperial Remnant commanders as part of the Shadow Council, the mishmash of Imperial officers, warlords, and spymasters that tries…

Image: Respawn/EA/LucasfilmThis weekend is Star Wars Celebration 2023, and even Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is getting a little bit of love. Respawn’s sequel to its 2019 breakout releases at the end of the month, and while it doesn’t have a panel to itself, the game got a new trailer during the annual event.Spoilers of the Week Feb.11thJedi Survivor picks up five years after the end of Fallen Order (and not long after the recent Battle Scars novel from Sam Maggs), with an older Cal Kestis on the run and still fighting the…

Screenshot: LucasfilmHundreds of years later, it is this fractured society that gives way to a new cultural divide among the Mandalorians. Horrified by the cataclysm that ended their eons of war against the Jedi, a sociopolitical group formed under the banner of the New Mandalorians, a faction that advocated for a rejection of Mandalore’s martial history and the warrior-clan structure in favor of a pacifist, isolationist parliamentary democracy.Civil war broke out between the New Mandalorians and the Martial…

Image: Perfect WorldIn Star Trek Online’s now non-canonical timeline of the 25th century, the Enterprise-F is launched in the year 2409, under the command of the Andorian Starfleet officer Va’Kel Shon. Shon’s former ship, the Defiant-class Belfast, was destroyed during a mission against rogue Jem’hadar forces transported into the near future by Sisko and the Gamma Quadrant wormhole aliens known in Bajoran religious beliefs as the Prophets during the events of the Deep Space Nine episode “Sacrifice of Angels.” One of the…

Image: Respawn/EA/LucasfilmDuring the late 2010s, when it seemed like Star Wars video games would become more notable for their controversies rather than the games themselves, Respawn Entertainment released Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. That game resonated with audiences that it both let EA create more Star Wars games (and other studios take a stab at the property), and guaranteed a sequel in the form of Jedi Survivor.Ahead of its gameplay trailer at the Game Awards earlier in the week, actor Cameron Monaghan (who plays…