Cryptic Finally Announces Star Trek MMO
Cryptic Studios yesterday announced that the developer has bought the rights to develop and publish PC and Console versions of a Star Trek MMO from CBS.
The change of publisher is good news for fans at this stage. Having waited so long for an ST MMO, messages on the official forums are mostly from excited fans who are relieved Star Trek Online seems to be finally kicking off. Several years ago, in 2004, Perpetual and Viacom announced that the two had secured the necessary license to develop the Star Trek MMO. The press release came at a time when the Star Trek MMO, still in the early stages of production, was years away and this, along with a number of other issues, meant the game received a lot of bad press.
Early this year Perpetual announced that the license and developing had been handed over to another company, (Cryptic). However the Cryptic page points to some changes made in gameplay. Previously, Perpetual had a sort of team playing idea going on where you didn’t control the whole ship, but played one specific role with other players making up the rest of the crew. According to the StarTrekOnline website, the Cryptic version will see each player become captain of his or her own customised ship as a Federation Captain or a Klingon Warrior. Captains must then recruit and train their crew for “exploration and combat”.
“Command your vessel in thrilling space battles, or beam down to planets with your away team for face-to-face confrontations.”
We’re not sure how well this is going to work out. The idea of everyone commanding their own vessel would mean an awful lot of “face-to-face confrontations”. Deep Space just got very crowded.
Cryptic will unveil the first Star Trek Online gameplay footage as well as more details at the annual Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas on Sunday, August 10, so hopefully things will be a little clear If you’re not lucky enough (ahem) to be attending the convention there will be a live podcast of the event accessible from startrekonline.com.
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Qu'vatlh guy'cha b'aka!
Those giant fungi will soon be stained with the blood of my enemies!
As you read this, I am sharpening my Bat'leth.
Quapla!
I'll expect the worst but hope for the best.
Sounds better than trying to get a crew to work together. At least you won't have to deal with some jerk taunting people with communications, going to warp during battle, or attacking friendlies for the heck of it. Plus how would you convince someone to stand around in the transporter room for hours on end or sit around in engineering waiting for something to go wrong.
However this still seems to limiting you need to be able to be more than either Federation or Klingon. How about Romulan, Cardassian, Dominion etc... Will you have the option to pawn people as the Borg or as Q?
Potentially, it could be the best MMO ever.
It just needs to be totally open-ended, where anything is possible. It also needs for players to be able to really be individual, and have an effect on the real world. A world-builder and submission system for player designed systems, ships, planets, to take the heat off developers. Maybe I just want to be a smuggler who makes a clone army to attack Starfleet? Or design weapons for the Daystrum Institute? A highly complex player crafting, patenting, and economic infrastructure to let people do their own thing. And pirates.
Lastly, no leveling. Skills only, and only for things that make sense like technical stuff. Real FPS combat, skill based. if people dont like it, stay on earth or a starbase. If you die, your toon is stuck in the hospital for a while, and you can play a different toon for a while. Trust me, a truly open system would take the 1337 gamers and grinders and kiddies and make them an asset instead of an annoyance. Especially with longer ship-to-ship combat and system wide distress calls. Emergency medical long-range transports and property insurance would smooth things over, and if the insurance companies got sick of it then they can hire more system defense or NPC/PC to prevent attacks both in space and on planet.
Open-Ended, and player generated (only if it's dev approved), could be a lot of fun.