Cryptic Studios Releases New Star Trek Online Details, Trailer

Two days ago, an AP interview with Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert provided new details about Star Trek: Online, which was lost in developmental limbo for quite some time. Today, Cryptic released a game-play trailer and a forty-minute webcast discussing the game.

Comments

For the lazy..

[kunwon1]

Details from TFA:

• You start the game as captain of a small Klingon or Starfleet vessel
• You can create new races
• Big galaxy, lot's of space, away missions on planets
• Timeline is a few generations after Nemesis
• PVP space battles
• No release date yet
• More details will be unveiled on Sunday at a Trek convo in Vegas

Re:For the lazy..

[0100010001010011]

Details from TFA:

• Big galaxy, lot's of space, away missions on planets

How many red shirts do you get per ship?

Re:For the lazy..

[Adriax]

Instead of the standard HP or hit points, health will be gauged by RS, red shirts.

Marketing Pitch

[Stickerboy]

Yes, you, too can be the Anonymous Redshirt, for only $14.99 a month!

Re:Marketing Pitch

[BPPG]

No, you start as a Captain.

Does it really count if you're the red-shirted captain for the redshirt vessel?

Delivering a valuable cargo of freshly laundered red shirts?

Re:Marketing Pitch

[Buran]

I've never figured out why it seems that everyone in the Navy (Starfleet) is an ensign or higher in the Trek universe; Ensign is a commissioned officer rank, not an enlisted rank.

Yet, most of the stuff that happens on ships gets done by enlisteds, and even officers will listen to an NCO who knows their stuff.

So, you'd think the random guy would be a private, private first class, sergeant, etc.

But nope...

(and I say this as a long-time Trek fan: "huh!?")

Re:Marketing Pitch

[arth1]

"Chief" is short for chief petty officer, which IS a Navy rank.

In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
On smaller ships, he could often double as a boatswain, being directly in charge of the seamen. Later, the title was split into Chief Mate and Chief Engineer, with the Mate being an officer, and the Engineer not. Depending on nationality, the chief engineer might still de-facto outrank all officers except the captain, despite not being an officer.

Re:Marketing Pitch

[srmalloy]

In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.

It is different in civilian and military usage. In the Royal Navy, for example, the Captain was the commander of the ship, but until the development of a professional officer corps, the captain's primary skill was being able to fight his ship -- and originally was in direct command only of the Marine unit aboard the ship; the sailing master was the person who actually directed the sailing of the ship. The sailing master (shortened to master) was a warrant officer, along with the master's mates, and ate in the wardroom with the ship's officers, who were above him in the chain of command; the promotion of warrant officers was under the control of various boards and commissions, not captains, unlike the midshipmen and rates. The sailing master eventually became a commissioned office, becoming the navigation officer.

The only problem in Star Trek games

[FlyingSquidStudios]

is that you never make an entire planet feel ashamed right after first contact for not adhering to your superior future moral code. I mean that's basically the point of Star Trek.

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[MindlessAutomata]

Hmmm... Star Trek takes place in a future where mankind has embraced socialism and lives in a utopia....

Being contacted by smug socialists shaming you because you're not one? Yes, that's certainly new, certainly unheard of.

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[Moridineas]

Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved"

You may laugh, but that's exactly what many of the early Russian communists thought would happen.

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[node 3]

If you think about it, it shouldn't be surprising that the people who prefer Kirk see themselves as the center of the universe.

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[AstrumPreliator]

Ah yes, the original Star Trek. Where Captain Kirk would either
A) Beat up the antagonist
B) Have sex with the antagonist
or C) Do both A and B

It really went downhill after the original!

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[Anonymous Coward]

*ahem* Libertarian Socialist here.

Socialism is about distributing wealth equally

No, it's not. The bait-and-switch redefining of socialism was done by the Bolsheviks to seal their hold on power, and accepted by the western power elite for the same reason.
  Socialism is about people being in control of their own labor, by owning and controlling the means of production themselves.

  o If you have a set of tools and use that set yourself to make furniture which you sell, that's socialism.
  o If you hire someone else to make the furniture, and you take the money and give him back enough to live on, but not enough to buy his own tools, you have capitalism. *
  o If you have a set of tools and let your friends, neighbors, relatives, or whomever you trust borrow them to make furniture when you're not doing it, that's communism.
  o If you give your tools to the government so they can share them more fairly, that's state communism. It's also naive, since the government will quickly be occupied by people who are not going to share squat once they get their hands on everyone's stuff. (see: Soviet Russia, China, various other state "communist" nations.)

  Distributing wealth fairly (not necessarily equally) is a communist ideal.

Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved".

In Star Trek's defense, they seem to postulate that psychiatry will make advances towards reliable treatment of abnormal behavior in the future. Someone who feels compelled to own more than he can possibly use is treated as normal, even desirable in modern consumerist society, but I'd say he's got a borderline hoarding disorder. There's not a lot of difference between a guy who spends every waking hour trying to find ways to increase the numbers in his bank account and the old lady who has 40 cats, IMO. (I recall a psychiatrist about ten years ago who had worked with a number of Donald Trump Fortune-500 types, who said the most striking thing about them was that they had no "inner lives," that is, they didn't go for walks in the park or kick back listening to music for an afternoon like normal people. They were utterly driven. They'd get up in the morning and immediately start making phone calls, because that was all they did.)
  If a hypothetical future psychiatry treats and cures such individuals, then a society designed to minimize their negative impact via pricing signals and other market forces becomes unnecessary. (Not that I believe it will, but it's possible.)

  * You might wonder why it works out so that the employee doesn't figure out some way to get the money to go into business for himself. It's due to the design of the unfree market -- capitalism can only function under certain unnatural economic conditions. The first thing that's done in a third world country when the WTO and World Bank come in to "modernize" their economy is to have the government rig the market in such a way as to create those conditions. This involves robbing people of self-sufficiency and driving them into desperation so they will accept a bad deal as the "best alternative available," as the sweatshop apologists love to say. Kevin Carson has some detailed analysis of this stuff over at mutualist.blogspot.com which I highly recommend.

  - mantar

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[Joebert]

How about this one ?

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[Stooshie]

... another person is entitled to the proceeds of your labour ...

No, that's capitalism. The majority of people in a capitalist society work for someone else and their efforts go into making a profit for someone else.

Re:The only problem in Star Trek games

[AP31R0N]

It works because envy and greed and want are largely eliminated. The elimination of those wouldn't be communism or socialism. Such systems would be rendered obsolete. There would be little desire to (re)distribute something if everyone has it. People who want for little are generally easy going. People who have hope for something better are usually well behaved. Maybe you didn't watch enough of the show to learn how it worked.

Socialism is not about distributing wealth equally, even on paper. Please read up on what socialism IS before you talk about socialism. Germany, often described as socialist (though all countries are socialist to one degree or another {roads, public schools, cops}), does not try to make everyone equal. They just try to make sure that the disparity between the top and bottom isn't terrible. If you're sick in Germany, you go to the doctor. In the US, that's a privilege extended to those with (certain) jobs (not all jobs include benefits). Yet, it is still possible for someone through the sweat of their brow to become wealthy. Capitalism and socialism work beautifully together. But that's not what is going on in ST.

Communism, socialism, capitalism and so are moot when there's no point in being greedy, or there is less to "need". Why charge so much for medicine that certain people can't afford it, if there is no scarcity of medicine?

The social problems weren't described as evolution in the biological sense, they might have referred to it cultural evolution. The federation didn't have as many internal troubles as say, the Klingons. The federation didn't have as much external problems until something on the outside pushed in.

"But but but how did they get there?", you blubber, pretending to not understand. Time, pain and technology. Time and pain taught that version of Earth that the cause of much of their problems was want and greed. The former is mostly the result of the latter. Pain of wars and crime eventually taught them these lessons. Technology makes civilization possible. It also makes morality feasible. In an every man for themselves struggle to survive, moral decisions are a luxury. i can worry about whether is it right or wrong to kill you and take your land if i'm starving. Where people perceive that they have hope for something better, they are less likely to take stupid risks, or feel that it is ok to take from others.

The illusion of scarcity, or the sense that 'whoever dies with the most toys wins' drives most of the misery we see in the world. If i could get a Porsche from a replicator today, and get a Ferrari tomorrow, i would care far less about 'getting ahead'. i could put my time and effort into better things. Or do things and not worry about what it pays. It's the old "what would you do if you won the lottery?". i'd paint, write, travel, develop games, teach kids computers. i wouldn't be sitting in a cube farm working on TPS reports.

What would you do if someone came along and paid off your mortgage? Or your landlord said you could live rent free? Such an event would effectively double my income. i could take a lower paying job that would give me more satisfaction. Or i could spend that extra money to take art and language classes. i could buy lego sets and give them to kids so they could have fun and learn spacial and engineering skills.

If you find such a world hard to swallow, imagine how today's world would look to someone from 200 years ago. Marriages are for love? Blacks aren't farm equipment? Women leading nations? Widespread literacy? Conquest of weaker nations seen as bad? Some people of that time might see those as bad things, but i think their pretty groovy, and so would the people benefiting from those social evolutions.

This isn't going to go well ...

[Mike610544]

From what they haven't said about avoiding current MMO problems I picture it like this:

NPC: Bring me 17 Tribble Scrotums.
Player: Ok, here you go.
NPC: Kill the renegade Klingon warlord.
Player: Done.
... 49 levels later ...
NPC: Invade the Borg ship and destroy it's power source.
Player: Mission accomplished!
NPC: uhh ... now just keep doing that again and again for increasingly diminishing rewards ....
Player: but didn't I already ...
NPC: SILENCE! Invade the Borg ship and ...

Re:This isn't going to go well ...

[Adriax]

PC: 50 man borg cube raid fleet starting, need 37 more!

Fleet commander: %$#@!! Who aggroed the drone nest!?! That's Negative 50 BKP!!!

Re:Space combat + fps + rpg...

[jandrese]

If you want Star Wars there's no need to wait, just sign up for Star Wars Galaxies today. Warning: Gameplay may change suddenly.

Informative?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Except that the main site clearly states that the entire movie was created with the ingame engine.

Unless you have reason to believe they are lying the eye candy is part of the game.

Thanks for trolling, try again.

Start as captain?

[suso]

Isn't it going to be a little unrealistic to have a million starships going around? Besides, what do you have to work up to? Admiral, then the game gets REALLY boring. You just sit behind a desk.

I mean, with games like WoW, its more realistic to have hundreds of people all at the starting point of the game because they are just people and there are lots of people in the world.

But if everyone starts with their own starship and you have a lot of people playing, its going to end up looking like that TNG episode where Worf quantum leaps several times. "Sir I'm receiving 250,000 hails". (Sorry Wil, I couldn't resist quoting you)