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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wofano Wotanto" data-source="post: 9623684" data-attributes="member: 7044704">Universe was faulted by both contemporary critics and fans for its combat systems - both personal and ship battles - being too slow and complicated for an RPG.  Rightly so IMO, and despite being better received and much better remembered, I've always felt Dragonquest suffered almost as badly when it came to personal combat slowing down the game to a snail's pace.  Didn't get much better as a wargame unto itself either, Arena of Blood was a bore to play.  For a game designed as a Traveller killer, Universe largely failed at the task right out of the gate.Hard to really say where Universe might have gone in the long run, but SPI was gone less than two years after its release and TSR had zero interest in continuing with the game when Star Frontiers was already doing fine.  Pretty muchonly sold it until they ran out of the 2nd edition stock they'd gotten from looting SPI's corpse.  Dragonquest met a similar fate.  The one major expansion for the game was a long article in Ares adding the first alien species to the game, a well thought-out set of natural shapeshifters who weren't just Thing expies and had an interesting and pretty cohesive culture.  Not quite up there with the best of the Traveller alien modules but close, and definitely showed promise.  There was also a smaller adventure in Ares, although I wasn't as impressed by that.</blockquote>