Over the course of the years we spent working on Premiere Remastered, the project grew more and more involved as we dug into the cards more and more. If you read the article about not changing the name of the Enterprise, you'll know one of the reasons we didn't change the name was because of how many other cards we'd need to touch. We started calling these "knock-on effects" - changes we would need to make outside of Premiere Remastered due to changes we made inside of Premiere Remastered.
It became obvious fairly quickly that we wouldn't be able to address all of the knock-on changes along side the release of Premiere Remastered. We started to separate the types of changes into groups, and make sure we had plans and standards for how we were going to address them. Let's go over the different categories of known-on effects and what our plans are:
Must Fixes
There were a handful of changes we made that would straight-up break other cards. As an example, we discovered that the name of the system on Pegasus Search was misspelled: it should be Devolin System Asteroid Belt, not Devlin System. We changed this on the mission, but as a consequence the card These Are the Voyages would have no legal place to be played. We needed to fix that card to keep it working (and on the 24th, you'll see that we did.) As the name implies, a "Must Fix" was a top-priority and we made sure all of them are ready to go with the release of Premiere Remastered.
Fix These Eventually
All the rest of our categories of knock-on effects are things that we'll eventually fix, but don't have the same urgency as the must fixes. For example, we spent a good amount of effort changing all of the hyphens in card titles to colons; Incoming Message: Klingon instead of Incoming Message - Klingon. But anyone that downloads one of the Incoming Message cards in Premiere Remastered would now have the wrong card name. Vixis, from The Motion Pictures, calls out "Incoming Message - Federation." Fortunately for these issues, the rules already has us covered with the long-standing equivalence between a hyphen and a colon. We'll fix that eventually (and delete the equivalence rule), but it works perfectly as it should for now.)
Another category of changes are those that are needed to make sure cards are ultimately consistent. You'll notice that the text on the Premiere Remastered version of Female's Love Interest isn't exactly the same as appears on the combo version, Female's Love Interest & Garbage Scow. We actually spent a ton of time on the "combo issue," and it turns out to be an extremely complex set of variables to make the combo cards match the new wording on the original dilemmas. We believe it can be solved, and will be, but it's going to take time. Thanks to the hard work of our Rules Team, we realized it would be okay if the version of Alien Parasites in Premiere Remastered was slightly different from the one printed on the combo dilemma in Enhanced Premiere. Weird? Yes. But acceptable. Honestly, "Weird, but acceptable" should probably have been this project's motto.
Finally, we have the correction-level changes. Most of the equipment and all the treaties, outposts, and espionage cards have been updated to new templating. There are some (very) minor functional changes, but no practical ones - nothing that will matter in most games of First Edition. The new wording on Espionage: Klingon on Federation works the same as the old wording on Espionage: Bajoran on Cardassian - they just don't match. These are changes we will ultimately get around to making, they just aren't something we could pile on top of the existing work. You'll see all future cards of these natures use the updated text, but we won't be rushing to put out the rest. If we do a revisit of DS9, that would be a great time to update the Bajoran, Cardassian, and Dominion treaties, outposts, etc. We'll get there - eventually.
A running theme of all of our Premiere Remastered content has been the recognition of how much work has gone into this project. It's no secret that our entire staff is exhausted, and that some of the above work is being defered to give everyone a break. We hope that you will allow us this respite, and that you will be able to find patience as we work through this backlog of changes. It will happen - just not today. And probably not tomorrow. But it will.
An Important Acknowledgement
We want to acknowledge that many of you are concerned about the game having multiple versions of cards with different game text. Not specifically the situations referenced above, but having different game text on a Premiere card versus the Premiere Remastered version versus any alternate-image promos. We are listening to your feedback and will be making adjustments, both procedurally and with our technology, to address them. We don't want anyone to be confused about what version of a card is current, and we never want someone to print the wrong version by accident. A theme of this article is patience - in fact, it's in the title. It's a big ask, but please be patient with us while we adjust things and process your feedback. Clarity is a top priority, so expect more updates on this topic soon.
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