Associated Press reveals new Star Trek Online details

by Griffin McElroy { Aug 10th 2008 at 1:30PM }

We're just hours away from Cryptic's world reveal of Star Trek Online during the Star Trek Experience event in Las Vegas, but those wishing to jump the phaser on all the hubbub would be wise to read a recent AP interview with Cryptic Chief Creative Officer Jack Emmert. In said interview, a number of intriguing details about the MMO are revealed -- chief among these include word that players will be able to choose an alien species to play as, or create their own, in an uncharacteristic show of disregard for Star Trek canon.

New players will then captain their own Starfleet or Klingon ship, the size and crew of which will grow as the player progresses. Players will also be able to leave their ships to explore planets in true Trek fashion. Don't expect to see many familiar, pointy-eared faces on your travels, however -- Emmert explained that the game takes place "a few generations" after the last Star Trek film. It seems your best bet of running into Shatner in an MMO is to continue searching World of Warcraft for a shaman with unusual vocalized pauses.

[Via 1UP]

Tags: cryptic-studios, jack-emmert, mmo, star-trek, star-trek-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Smoke_Dawg_187 @ Aug 10th 2008 1:48PM

Beem me up Warf

wildboar @ Aug 10th 2008 2:01PM

THERE ARE.. FOUR.. LIGHTS!!

UltimateQ @ Aug 10th 2008 6:52PM

You win.

ArcticFox @ Aug 10th 2008 2:26PM

Worf*

RabanastreRat @ Aug 10th 2008 2:38PM

Dibs on the Borg

jimmygotsmack @ Aug 10th 2008 2:44PM

Can you play as a Q?

I bet you Qs are what the admins are in game.

Mr Khan @ Aug 10th 2008 3:44PM

That would be a few kinds of epic

FSK405K @ Aug 10th 2008 2:44PM

Set disappointment phasers to lethal.

Corbo @ Aug 10th 2008 3:01PM

Presumably when creating a new alien species for your character, you get to decide on their height, their colour and the shape of their forehead.

The only canon-violating I can see going on is that I doubt Klingons would be willing to hand the keys to a Bird-of-Prey to anyone who wasn't a Klingon. I'm pretty sure they only let Kirk keep his because they knew they wouldn't be able to get the smell of whale out of it.

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 3:39PM

So now every single player is a captain of their own ship.

Star Trek Online started out with every person actually getting to play a character and serve a unique role in a community. And now that has been replaced with generic wish fullfillment. It'd be like if there was a Star Wars MMO, and then all of a sudden they changed things so that Jedi was a starting class. Oh wait...

Seriously, I have been anxiously awaiting STO ever since SWG went down the tubes. Now, not so much.

FSK405K @ Aug 10th 2008 4:09PM

Can I be a science officer on board some dude's ship? If not, no sale.

Halwende @ Aug 10th 2008 4:17PM

I agree with The Doctor, the more I hear about how they're doing this the less I'm looking forward to it...

Couldn't they do the LOTRO approach and have major plot quests featuring Picard / Janeway / DS9 etc? As a Trek fan that would suck me in - at the moment it just sounds like a generic sci-fi MMO with a license tacked on....

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 4:32PM

@FSK:
Originally, that was the plan. Now you have to be a captain. Everyone is a captain.

@Hal:
The LOTRO method, with the world instants and all that, would be perfect.

Snowblind @ Aug 10th 2008 5:24PM

How much fun would it have been to sit there and be the engineer, while the helmsman controls the actual ships and the tactical officer fires the weapon? What if one of your crew members gets lag or disconects? I really don't understand how people were expecting that to work, or how it would have been any fun in the slightest.

Yes, everyone is in the command possition now, but they also said there are still different fields you can specialise in.

Snowblind @ Aug 10th 2008 5:26PM

Everyone is captain of a ship, not necessarily captain of rank :)

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 5:40PM

How much fun is it to stand back and heal or buff people who are doing the actual fighting in other MMO's? Some people seem to enjoy those kind of positions.

Lag, or signing off early, etc, was I believe, originally going to be taken care of with NPC's of the same level taking the place of PC's. Your NPC self would grow in level with you.

How much fun does this sound?
"Lvl 1 Kira class lfg"

How are groups going to work at all? And specialization? A medical ship, a science ship, etc? If they're going that route, why not just simplify it to what Star Trek actually is composed of and have a crew of people?

Snowblind @ Aug 10th 2008 6:12PM

With healing classes, you're still taking part in a major way, and still free to move around, etc. Sitting at a console in engineering, and making sure a bar doesn't go too far to one side, doesn't really seem quite as exciting.

I'm sure if someone had a reasonable way these other positions could be implemented, then the guys at the Cryptic forums would listen..

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 6:34PM

Doesn't have to be sitting there watching a bar. Buffing the ship, buffing weapons, and on ground taking care of vehicles are all jobs the engineer could do.

Thing is, these things WERE being implemented, before it switched developers. The original plan wasn't perfect (they were going to do 2d space, which was insanely stupid) but it was better than EVE + Vulcans.

Snowblind @ Aug 10th 2008 7:16PM

Cryptic said they inherited everything from the previous developers which was.. nothing. They hadn't started making anything even resembling a game.

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 7:21PM

Huh. I thought I remembered screenshots of stuff like character creation. Maybe it all was concept art.

But even if they hadn't gotten far, they certainly were very vocal with their ideas. And, thus far, their ideas were better than Cryptics.

Could Star Trek Online still turn out to be an amazing MMO? Yes. Yes it could. To me, all signs are pointing towards No, and a No with no reason for it be No at that. Maybe I'm cynical. But I've had to experience a great MMO becoming a base, mediocre drop in the sea of would be WoW's once before, and stuff like this just irks me now because of it.

LaughingTarget @ Aug 10th 2008 8:36PM

SWG was crap before they made Jedis a playable class. SWG was crap from the beginning. If it went down the tubes, it didn't go far. Sorry, last thing I find fun is making 1,000 worthless mouse robots just to get enough skill to make something equally worthless on the way to do something fun.

SWG was still part of the old-school MMO design philosophy, and that made it crap from the get go.

Cryptic may be on to something. Sitting down in the engineering room staring at nothing but a screen with data would likely be very boring. This way, everyone can get in on the action. The tiny minority that thought wandering the corridors, being the guy who flies off to the side when the ship takes a hit would be fun may not be happy, but in the end, this'll likely be a much better decision.

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 8:51PM

@LaughingTarget

I thought the complexity of classes and skill based system was loads of fun when I played. But that's just my personal opinion.

Yeah, being random dude #3 is boring. Sitting at a counsole watching a bar is, as previously mentioned, boring, but, also as previously mentioned, engineer can be more exciting than that.

I think that the people who want to play a Star Trek online are the people who want an experience like Star Trek. A million tiny single person staffed ships running around is not Star Trek. Getting to be a member of a starship is. Who watches Star Trek and goes "I wish I could be that ship!" But people do think "That job is cool!"

Snaf00 @ Aug 10th 2008 10:19PM

I think sitting in engineering could be a fun job if they did it right. You could play a mini-game to keep the warp core from exploding...you would have to run around in engineering from one console to the next fixing things. you could go through the jefferies tubes to track down a problem with the shields or whatnot. that sounds like a lot of fun to me.

A lot more fun than the game Cryptic seems to be making.

LaughingTarget @ Aug 11th 2008 3:09PM

The problem is, that vision is not even feasible.

First, you'd need to have a near-prefect server population willing to take the various positions. I don't know much about Star Trek so I have no idea what kinds of jobs there are, but I do know if there is a significant imbalance of players that want to play engineer and not enough captains, you have a much smaller population of people having a good time and tons sitting around waiting for a crew to get together.

Plus, just how useful are specific positions? From what I've experience, there is little to no independence among members of the crew in official canon. The gunner doesn't pick and chose targets and fire whenever, the helmsman doesn't fly the ship where they want to. They all took orders from the captain. For this to work, we'd have a captain player sitting in a chair just talking the whole time, telling everyone else how to play the game.

Much like how SWG was a financial flop pre-Jedi and is now at least financially solvent, your vision would (temporarily) appeal to you but would ensure the game failed in short order.

Just like on a modern warship, everyone aboard is the captain's flunky. If you really want to be a gunner and decide the captain is a moron and fire off at a ship before given the order, would you have your player go through whatever Star Trek's equivalent of a court martial is?

Basically, the above videos are far truer to the source material than you imagine. Captain says go over there, ship goes over there, captain says shoot at that enemy, the ship shoots at the enemy. Of all the characters in any Star Trek movie or TV series, none of them had any say in the matters of what was going on with the exception of the ship's captain. All the Worfs and Datas and Spocks of the shows were still at the mercy of whoever was sitting in that chair in the middle of the bridge.

This way, you don't have to worry about the prospects of a server that is 40% captains (either class or skill-set, depending on if it was classless or not) when the optimal number is 15%, not many people are going to have a good time. The number of people having fun is directly limited by the smallest crew segment.

Your vision would quickly put the game out of business. Would you rather have 6 months of your idea of perfection or longer with something that isn't quite exactly what you wanted?

The Doctor @ Aug 11th 2008 10:16PM

If I'm going to play a licensed game, it needs to both be A. Fun and B. true to the license, otherwise the license should be dropped to better serve A.

MMO's are a social activity. Implementing good grouping is necessary. Implementing good soloing is nice, but a secondary concern.

In Star Trek there would be a few positions: Science, Medical, Engineering, Security, and Command. Science on ship would debuff enemies (identify weak points), and buff the medical and engineers on ship. Off ship, in addition to this debuff role, he'd serve as a scout, scanning the area for potential enemies/ points of interest.

Medical is self explanatory. The healing class. As is Security, the straight out combat class.

Engineering would, as previously explained, be the major buffer of both the ship itself, any and all equipment, and handle vehicles.

On board, any profession can take the helm or weapons. There would be universal skills that individuals could choose from regardless of profession to level up in, including skills that would aid in either of these positions.

Command would not be a starting option, but one you could choose once you'd risen high enough in rank. Command would have to be more boring than the other classes to play, both because of its function and because a much lower number of Command players would be needed compared to the other jobs. He would choose what quests the crew would embark on, and coordinate how they approached them. Giving orders would give a minor buff to whatever action it was he wanted performed. He'd also have whatever skills he had from before promotion, making individual captain's suited to different missions/ ships. If the Captain's a jerk, x amount of complaints remove him from his seat. And if someone disobeys the captain, no court martial, but he could be kicked out of the group, just like in other MMO's.

If people get bumped mid mission, an NPC of their character replaces them.

This game would be Star Trek, what you see in the series, online, drawing in people who like Star Trek. The game Cryptic is making is not going to be an experience similar to what Trek fans are fans of. It will draw in MMO fans who want a sci-fi MMO and not WoW. I don't know which would make more money. But I do know that a great, original, Sci-fi MMO would make more money than a Star Trek MMO that will not appeal to Star Trek fans.

Anam @ Nov 3rd 2008 9:04AM

I agree with the doctor completely, though I do think that if only the captain chooses where to go, that would turn some players off. If I make a Vulcan character and don't have the choice of going to Vulcan because some annoying captain would rather spend 99% of our time completing every last quest in Cardassia, that would be annoying.

But you could probably fix that by associating particular ships with particular areas. Like, say that the Excelsior is assigned to Bajor. Anyone who wants to take a job on the Excelsior is also limited to Bajor. If you want to go somewhere else, you need to get a job on another ship. And maybe guilds (or whatever you'd call them) could get independent ships to go where they please, like the Enterprise.

Anyway, point is there are ways to make it work well. Just because it might be tricky doesn't mean that developers should give up and just make a WoW clone with Star Trek models.