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New Star Trek MMOG Announced
jabagi writes "Perpetual Entertainment and Viacom decided to produce a Star Trek MMOG. Not many details yet, but beta will be available in 2006, and the game will be launched in 2007. Here is
the discussion on gamespy."
...is at startrek.com.
FAQ on the game
fifteen jugglers, five believers
If you're into text adventures, you should check some of many Star Trek based text online games (MUSH'es and MUSE's). They offer an amazing depth of roleplaying experience, often modelling even the smallest aspects of ST universe. Sadly, with the advent of graphical online games, they've fallen behind in popularity.
A classic game based on TOS (which had Nimoy, Shatner and Kelley visit for chat sessions on several occasions) can be found on space.tos.net. To play, simply telnet to tos.tos.net, port 1701. Several empires to chose from, with fleets, a space system, economy, diplomacy, culture (especially important with Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans), language, etc. All based on roleplaying and some coded systems.
Unfortunately, even waiting until they were in Alpha wouldn't prevent the proliferation of MMO game cancellation notices. Horizons, Dragon Empires, Uru (the multiplayer Myst game), and quite a few others have all been very late in development before they were canned.
Yeah, there is one which involves something other than killing more and more enemies in an endless loops. Plus, it's got a Linux client. It's called "A Tale in the Desert".
http://www.atitd.com/
I used to work for a company that did CGI. We heard by word of mouth that Paramount were looking for tenders for the CGI for a licensed Star Trek game, including a short demo movie. But the catch was, there would be no contract, and nothing could be done in writing.
When we eventually got someone on the phone (really, they wouldn't talk about this in email) and asked why, they reluctantly explained that it was because when Paramount's legal team gets a whiff of something like this going on, it becomes their job to kill it. They tend to refuse anything that gives even a suggestion that $NON_PARARMOUNT_EMPLOYEE is licensed to create Star Trek content. In practice, this makes anything but a full, final contract for the winning bidder simply impractical. The best that our contact could promise was that he would try and ensure that we weren't sued for putting in a tender.
And so we did the demo movie (quite nice, actually), and delivered it, by hand, in a face to face meeting that never happened. We didn't win the bid, but it certainly opened our eyes.
What's the relevance to this? It's that MMORPGs necessarily involve ordinary $NON_PARAMOUNT_EMPLOYEE people creating content. Paramount were killing this stuff while it was still in its infancy. Even if they do manage to license the whole kit and kaboodle, can you picture the tortous EULA and T&C's for a Star Trek MMORPG? Try and imagine the limitations that will be placed on players, and the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that will spring up. If you think Sony Online have poor customer relations, just wait until you meet a Paramount Intellectual Property Protectorate lawyer in game. The Borg are a pale shadow of these guys.
Sure, it could go differently, but years of history says otherwise. Best not to get your hopes up over this one.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.