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Interview with Star Trek Online's Design Director
eldavojohn writes "In a brief QJ article about STO, the Glen Dahlgren (Design Director of Star Trek Online) mentions a few details about STO:
Dahlgren insists that it's still too early to reveal the game's specifics and in-depth details, but tells that players will be able to choose whether to group in space or join a crewed ship. Gamers will also be able to fly more powerful ships and vessels and the captain will have some incredible abilities that players will surely look forward to. He also reveals that they are currently working on ensuring that new players will get the help they need when faced with unfamiliar terrain. There won't be auto-leveling of characters but they will provide tools to make off-line time valuable to the online experience.What makes this interesting is that there have been a lot of indicators that STO will be aiming to achieve 'high-end content' and not just combat content. It's becoming obvious that MMO's new to the scene need to offer consumers more than just combat content. Will STO be able to coax both the Sims Online and World of Warcraft crowds?"
It will almost certainly draw attention from players of http://www.eve-online.com/. From the reading I've done, PVP is going to be holodeck-only (thinkg Battlegrounds), and players will not be able to play as any faction other than the Federation. WoW (and EVE to a lesser extent) has done well in major part because of the tensions between alliance and horde players, and their ability to fight when they run into each other, without the need to queue up or to flag.
If the game is mundane and simplex enough to attract your average SIMs players its going to be too mundane for ST fans. The WOW would be fine but they already have their "communities" so why change? It's kind of funny that the biggest franchises in the movie world seem to create the biggest flops in online ones. Look at Matrix online (which sounded like pure mecca for geeks) or Star Wars galaxies. It just looks like some things are better left to the imagination.
If you play a borg does one of the other borgs make all the gameplay decisions for you?
Rah! Today is a good day to______
[ERROR - Connection err.. Timeout--]
Argh.
I doubt it will pull any appreciable numbers away from WoW.
For one thing, there's a large number of WoW gamers that aren't traditional geeks, and wouldn't be interested in something as "nerdy" as a Star Trek MMO (I know, I know, but they insist that WoW isn't geeky), and a great percentage that are dorks, but are fantasy dorks.
Then there's people like me, who just think that the design decisions they've made sound boring.
Shinma
Hopefully, the game will not be too restrictive as to what a player can do. People are going to want to play as Klingons and such, but people must also remember that Star Trek is not WOW. In WoW, Hoard and Alliance are mortal enemies that kill on site. In Star Trek, delicate relationships are kept. One side attacking the other could provoke a war between two sides. I guess it comes down to how the game creators deal with these more delicate natures.
Klingon Software is not released, it escapes, inflicting terrible damage onto the enemy as it does
Im fairly high on the trek geek scale. I use a klingon daqh-tagh knife to open letters with. But I doubt I'll play this. Why?
federation only.
They offer up excuses, but basically its so they can cash in with race-specific expansion packs.
I'd love to be a Jem hadar,Ferengi or a klinogn, but federation? yawnsville.
LucasArts have the right idea, their new lego game covers all 3 original movies in one game, plus its actuaklly fun.
I cant see trek online lasting long.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
You know what might be nice? Assinged shifts on the crewed vessels. So say, once a week from 4:30P - 5:30P you should log on for your "shift", or risk an insubordiantion on your record. Of course, with the time-intensive nature of MMORPG's it may not be a healthy feature, (few will want the 'graveyard' shifts) but none the less interesting. IMHO...
The problem that I see with Star Trek Online is that it may only attract fans of the series. A lot of people pick up WoW without caring at all about the environment or stories, just wanting a hack and slash game. Star Trek has always been about diplomacy and character interaction before fighting. Unless Star Trek can offer something amazing and new (the big thing is their crew system), it won't be able to expand its user base beyond fans of the series who are drawn to the game for the chance to explore (and maybe roleplay) in the Star Trek universe.
Star Wars' MMO had it easier because almost everyone is familiar with the movies, and it doesn't have such a "geek" stigma associated with it.
I always thought Star Trek would make a great MMO - why? When the ensign dies, he can respawn and nobody will question it, because nobody cares about poor little ensign Ricky.
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"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Oh so many moons ago, myself and my buddies were pretty heavily into FASA's Star Trek Starship Combat Simulator, a boardgame/wargame similar to Star Fleet Battles. (this is paper, dice, and lead figure stuff kids)
FASA also had a Star Trek RPG that tied into the wargame, so I picked it up to see what it was like. We tried playing it a few times, using mostly FASA's own modules.
For those used to D&D style hack'n'slash, it was a real adjustment adapting to the Star Trek universe. Combat encounters were invariably quick and *lethal* - a phaser (or similar weapon) set to kill - well, it KILLS. Zap, dead, done. Getting into firefights with the bad guys was a sure road to terminal casulties.
The FASA module designers were cognisant of this, and their modules tried very hard to provide a myriad of non-combat resoulutions to problems and puzzles. But that placed demands on players to do a lot more thinking, follow the story with much more attention to detail, and role-play very intensely.
In the end, it was just too much of a commitment to be successful, and we reverted back to pure starship combat.
While well done and well thought out, it just didn't support casual gameplay very well. Anybody can join in on a dungeon crawl at a moment's notice and with little preparation. Attempting to solve a murder mystery wrapped in a diplomatic puzzle takes a whole lot more work.
I'm curious to see how the game designers intend to handle this problem - and I sure hope it isn't via "5 shots to kill a tribble".
DG
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You have contracted Wesley Crusher.
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[Computer]
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This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Great, of all the things /. could be importing from digg, its blog spam.
How about a link to the original article?
crappy triceratops
i hope they mean it's still too early to talk gameplay because marketing doesn't want to let anything slip yet. it's been 2 years since they announced the game. if it's still too early because they don't have anything designwise firmly in place, this game won't see the light of day anytime soon.
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Back to the point of DS9 the trek universe would have been perfect for a MMO game due to the consistency of the series and the strong naval discipline. But as B&B savaged the franchise, incorporating more and more inconsistencies and weak characters the potential for a game dropped.
An old school pre-B&B game with a lot of exploration options, and some "cold war" level conflict would be excellent. A DS9 style game with lots of interaction in the alpha quadrant and conflict in the gamma quadrant would be great. DS9 also has the advantage of fielding runabouts that many players would be capable of flying without rising to the rank of captian.
Of course my ultimate trek game is still a multiple lan party online game. Each lan party is a ship, forming bridge and engineering etc. (Imagine a lan party with everybody sporting dual screens arranged in a bridge layout with a projector for the main screen.) The online component would manage interaction of separate ships. This would be perfect, in that most ship to ship interaction would be either communications between ships or renders of the ships and sensor data. For non-landing party stories this would be perfect.
Glen Dahlgren was Lead Designer on the sadly under-promoted and underrated FPS game Wheel Of Time (based on the series of the same name by Robert Jordan), which had defensive aspects to the Multiplayer game that are still unparalleled in the genre. He's a really nice guy and an excellent developer (IMNSHO). Only a fraction of his original vision for that game was realized, but it foretold many things that would later be integrated into MMO games. If I were an MMO player, I'd certainly be picking this up on his credentials alone.
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Michael Okuda was one of the design consultants on this game, and seemed to be pretty heavily into it. Now they've announced that he's also leading the production team on the new CGI versions of the original series. It seems like they are doing those in a fairly compressed timeframe, meaning that most of his time will probably be devoted to TOS rather than this game... and the game's quality, production schedule, or both will end up suffering.
TNG and voyager promoted the concept that you must stick to your ethics and morality, for that is ultimately the only way to win. Many of the episodes, and "First Contact" and "Inssurection" movies specifically delt with that issue. DS9, specifically such episodes of "In the Pale Moonlight", "Blaze of Glory", "Extreme Measures" and all the Section 31 episodes show another side of the issue, where sometimes it's necessary to defy those ethics and morals in order to preserve the environment in which you can practice them. Nothing in life is Black and White. You have to have a ethical foundation to stand on, or society will collapse into chaos, but it's probably unrealistic to expect that society as a whole will always exclusively stand by those same ideals.
I liked the darker themes presented by the later shows. We've been shown the best The Federation and Starfleet has to offer. We see how peachy the future is going to be. But there IS an underworld, and there are lots of shades of grey. There exist those who would sell out their entire race to obtain a little more power. This theme has been demonstrated over and over in the history of our world, and it proves to continue to exist in the future as well.
-Restil
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