I brushed up against this subject a couple days ago, but I’d like to revisit it — will the first major MMORPG of 2010 be leaving spacedock as the proud Enterprise of Star Trek’s 1-4, or the clunktacular Enterprise of Star Trek 5? My thoughts, such as they are:
- How Cryptic handled Champions launch was less-than-spectacular, and the state of Champions at launch, while playable and fun, was buggy, thin with content, and surprisingly unfriendly for people wanting to experiment with character builds. In short, Champions didn’t make me hate Cryptic or fear them entirely, but it’s turned me leery toward their methods and philosophies regarding MMOs and launches.
- Many people have accused Cryptic of mining Champions for funds and forwarding them on to Star Trek Online, the “real” MMO that has a greater potential of making them money. It’s cynical and sounds, well, conspiracy-laced enough to be accepted as true, but I don’t think it’s quite that sinister. I think that they desperately want to become a Big Studio, and that path is through multiple game launches and cross-promotion. Hard to do that with just one game.
- So my general feeling is that STO is being rushed out the door. If beta started not too long ago, are they so comfortable with the current state of the game and the feedback from testers to put a firm launch date on the product, three months out? What if the testers are like, whoa buddy! This is seriously flawed, you need to put a LOT more work into it — will they listen or just go ahead and release anyway?
- Part of me really, really likes the idea of jumping into a scifi MMO that has both spaceship combat and ground combat, but notice the key word here — combat. Star Trek as a genre might have action and fighting, but at its core, it’s not a combat-oriented show, the way Battlestar Galactica was. Everything I see on this game, from their timeline videos (which are nothing but explosions in space) to hands-on impressions, is all combat and nothing but. Cryptic has vaguely stated that there are other things to do in the game besides wiping out entire civilizations, but it’s clear to me that they’re trying to shoehorn Star Trek into the typical MMO paradigm of fight, more fight, and big fight.
- Although I never cared about the Klingon side of things, it really left a sour taste in one’s mouth when Cryptic was, from the start, promoting this as a two-faction game, and only recently said that every faction other than Starfleet would be a PvP dealie, with virtually no PvE content or depth to it. That’s weak, and smacks of content getting cut at a late hour.
- Finally, I’m still not seeing a great marketing push for this. Even with the Star Trek movie last year, the Trek franchise has been waning over the past decade and a half, and solely relying on Trekkers who play MMOs to bulk up their subscriber numbers might prove problematic. They need to market this game to the non-Trek crowd as well (perhaps why it’s being promoted with combat so up front and central), to do a lot of cross-promotion with Trek sites and establishments and actors and what have you. Why hasn’t this really happened yet? Why does it feel like this is more of a spin-off that the rest of the Trek franchise is just going to ignore, more or less?
Maybe that’s all a bit prematurely grumpy, as the proof might well be in the Ferengi pudding. Which is disgusting pudding, by the way. Maybe they are far more ready for this than they were for Champions. Maybe it will be a stellar hit right out of the gate. Maybe Trekkers will rally around this in unforseen numbers.
Perhaps the most telling sign for me, personally, is that I am supposed to get a spot in the closed beta due to a Champions promotion, have not received word yet about it — and I’m really not sweating it. The more I read about this game, with the same regurgitated promotional lines, the less enthusiasm I can muster.
Yeah, they’re inviting the champions subscribers a bit later in the closed beta due to the massive number of us there are.
Hokay…
The being rushed out the door… I don’t really know which way I should lean on that one. The beta does seem to be incredibly short, but on the other hand they’ve said its based on the Champions Engine, that one they theoretically have working properly.
Marketing. While there’s that little outfit code with the third season Blu Ray version of the original series, with the game in Feb and the movie out on Monday you’d think there’d have been something more done. Run a sweepstake for beta invites with the movie release. God knows Paramount keeps an eye on everything they give the license to.
Combat. Yeah… if they wanted a shooty blasty sci fi for MMOization they should have gone BSG or Babylon 5. Star Trek has always been more about finding the ideal solution rather than just setting phasers to kill. Sure it has to be done from time to time but the best Captains always try to find a way around the fight. I havent seen any articles on a “drink tea and talk your way out of it” feature.
Klingons. Worrying. They jumped 25 years into the future to get away from the canon ties, as alot can happen in that time and they’ve put the Klingons right back to idiotic beligerent force. Given that you’ll have to unlock them if you want to pvp, how many grindfleets will we see just so the PvPers can then run around disrupting (heh) people?
That and the whole PvP/RP fight is, to my knowledge, still going in CO where the two seem to have immense trouble co-existing.
As for Trekkies…. I followed this game pretty heavily on the StarTrek.com boards when Perpetual had it. Say what you like about them, but they certainly seemed to interact more with the trekkies and the communities. Cryptic, to me personally, appears to be just putting STO out there and expecting glory and adulation.
Personally I’m still worried about it and likely will complain again soon
It does seem strange that they are pusing the combat part so much since Star Trek was always about problem solving and peacful solutions.
Instead we probably will see Picard on a phaser rampage because he has a quest to kill 10 tribbles…. .
Ardua comment got me thinking, I would love to see a Babylon 5 MMO! It is much more combat orientated with several factions Earth, Centari, Narn, Mimbari and you could decide to side with the rangers/alliance or shadows/Vorlons. The more I think on it the more I see how this could be a great MMO in a similar was to DAOC – multiple races and three main factions!
Throw in Eve style combat/exploration and various world to explore and do quests. Would be awesome!
I’m worried for all the same reasons as you and Ardua. My biggest fear is that they will turn STO into nonstop violence and that is not what i wanted when i first heard about STO. I really hope that there is a lot of “Earl Grey, Hot!” and not so much “Fire Photon Torpedoes!”
I can’t speak on the rest of the bullet points, I’m not well informed on STO, but as far as the first one…
I learned long ago to approach and treat each game separately, regardless of its relations to other games. When Ion Storm (of all houses, Ion Storm…) released Deus Ex: IW it turned out to be the equivalent of your computer vomiting on you. Everybody was scared about what it would mean for the upcoming Thief 3. Same company, parallel development, same engine even.
But it was a different team, and that turned out to be the difference. Thief 3 was (is) a fantastic game in its own right.
I’m not saying this works all the time, but I think it’s healthy to approach things on their own values.
@ Julian – Good point!
The short, fixed beta reminds me a lot of Vanguard. In that case, we now know that they kept the open beta short because they were out of money and had to release the game in whatever shape it was in.
How much do you want to bet that Cryptic is in the same position?
I’m with you on this one. I think the recession is affecting games companies and Cryptic are being rushed to door, as you put it, with the release of STO. We can only hope it won’t be in too bad of a state.
I think it’s perfectly acceptable to be worried about STO. It may be a different set of developers working on the game, but it’s still Cryptic and it’s using some of the same technology that is in CO.
I can’t help but feel that STO will be released with paper thin content like CO was.
[...] Syp wrote about cryptic I think that they desperately want to become a Big Studio, and that path is through [...]
To counter Julians point. Jack Emmert moved from Champions, handing off to Bill Roper, to take over Star Trek.
Ask a City of Heroes fan their thoughts on that
“Star Trek as a genre might have action and fighting, but at its core, it’s not a combat-oriented show, the way Battlestar Galactica was.”
Uhm… Were you watching the same franchises I was? Galactica was certainly NOT a combat-oriented show, and the entirety of the last three seasons of DS9 were nothing but one big war. I’ll grant that Trek as a whole was not combat-focused, but it certainly didn’t have any less shootiness than BSG.
I’m willing to be patient and see what comes out of STO, but I’ve never had truly high hopes for the game. Doing justice to the settings was never going to be easy, and with Cryptic recently showing that they could barely do justice to their specialty genre, I think we’re looking at another SWG.
I was part of the Perpetual team that was working on STO. I wound up leaving before the company went under, but I can tell you this: I know they’ve claimed they started from the ground up on this project, and I honestly don’t know if the purchase included all the code we had completed, but I can say, without a doubt, they’ve used our finished art assets.
If they wound up working from our material and reworked it/used it as a starting point, they could have finished quite a bit in such a relatively short amount of time. I know they’ve showed our concept art and our ship designs, so if they didn’t use our assets directly, they certainly gave them a much-needed head start (and for that, I’m glad–smartest thing they could do).
We also struggled with the same issue of “too much combat” and “living up to expectations”. While I can’t comment as to what the solution to that may or may not be, I can say that creating another EVE Online (non-combat missions, courier running, etc) isn’t going to help the genre. I’m curious as to how Cryptic will focus on this issue.
I, personally, have come to believe (after wading through hundreds of emails, message boards, threats and otherwise ridiculous statements), that this franchise is one of the worst to develop in to an MMO. There are too many expectations and people get down right mean when they feel that their franchise isn’t going in the direction THEY want it to go.
I have hope for Cryptic’s version of STO and I think they’ve made a lot of good choices. Having walked a mile in their shoes, I’m completely excited to see their work, and wholly empathetic to their plight
What I find surprising is no one is talking about a space MMO that is better (to me at least) and that is Jumpgate Evolution.
I played the original Jumpgate a decade ago and recently revisited it to get a refresher. NetDevil knows what they are doing, they are not new to this and they are fine tuning their game and taking time with it.
Beta has not yet begun but they have plenty of interested people and their beta list is ever growing. They have pushed the game back twice now I believe all for the sake of polish and balance. They want this game to ship as a success and never quit. That is their goal, not dollars.
Check their game out and you won’t be disappointed!
I think the underlying question is simply, what numbers are they trying to reach?
WoW is in it’s own class, anyone trying to compete has a planet to conquer, not a mountain.
Lineage, Lineage 2, Runescape, FFXI are all 500K-1million base, but arguably targeted to the Asian audience.
At best, they are looking for 100K active and they have to pull these folks away from other MMOs, because let’s face it, the rate of subscription increases is directly related to the increases in WoW.
Are there 50K people willing to shell out for any Star Trek game? The title alone will keep people on it, just like SWG.
There’s a point where you go, if I spend another 1 million am I going to ever see that money again? I believe strongly that Cryptic is at that point (see their comments on voice acting) and they are “happy” with the quality reaching the client base they are projecting.
That being said, I wish them the best of luck but with all the points listed so far no one is expecting them to sustain incredible numbers.
And who can sustain them? The MMO genre isn’t like any other genre out there. It’s difficult to justify more than one MMO at any given moment. Single player games can exist in the same market relatively easily. With MMOs, especially subscription based ones, it gets harder to exist in the same market.
The reason STO and other MMOs need to be compared with WoW is because that’s where the bulk of the player base has to be pulled from. STO and other MMOs are unlikely to ever expand gaming to a point to actually grow the MMO market in any foreseeable future.
Cryptic likely knows this full well. No one ever invests money if they know it’s going to fall flat. We have to consider this very real fact. Cryptic has investors, it has people, all of them rely on the success of STO to keep food on their tables. This means they’re putting in the best effort they can. Does it mean they’re aiming for multi million level subscribers? They can hope, but it’s more likely that Cryptic will be just as happy with 150,000 players. They may be able to pry that many away from other MMOs, at least long enough to justify all the time and money spent on the development cycle.
Cryptic likely knew enough to tailor the game around the resources and talents available to Cryptic. We’ll have to consider the quality of the final product around those factors and decide if we are still willing to put hopes into the title.
So here’s an interesting question, given the discussion of expected subscriber numbers:
Why are the expectations so much lower for a Star Trek MMO than they are/were for either Star Wars MMO? Given the craptacular Star Wars prequels and the relative success of the recent Abrams movie, Trek’s franchise should seem to be both bigger in general and more popular recently. But Galaxies is generally considered a failure by anyone other than its diehard fans despite 400K or so subs at its peak, and the expectations for TOR are so unbelievably high I fully expect that it’s going to be next year’s WAR.
Yep people here are throwing around 150-200K numbers like it’s what people expect. Why is that?
Expectations I think, are are based on the history of each franchise in terms of video games, and the developer track record.
Remember that Warcraft was an AAA *game* franchise, that was turned into MMO by a developer with an AAA deveopment track record, making WoW by far the most popular MMO so far. Of course this was with the franchise being the deveoper’s own.
The same thing happened with Ultima back in the day. Wholly owned game franchise again.
So both STO and ToR start out with the clear disadvantage of their franchises not being owned by their developers and not being strictly gaming franchises. You can pick either LoTRO or SWG as your ‘most succesful MMO developed with an outside license’. That SWG is on the shortlist, despite being an infamous disaster, is a bit telling.
In terms of computer gaming, despite SWG, I think the Star Wars franchise is a lot stronger than Star Trek. Along with the usual crud and disasters of licensed games, we have at least three lines that were good in their time and arguably even classsics, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight line, and KoToR. And the MMO is based off of KoToR. I assume everyone is hoping that this will outweigh Star Wars being an outside license.
For Star Trek I can’t think of anything equivalent to those games.
If anyone has a track record as developer with similar success in their niche, and reputation for quality, as Blizzard it’s Bioware (however EA certainly doesn’t have this track record, so Bioware’s ongoing absorption is not a plus for success). That the track record is non-MMO looks to be an advantage given history, the potential for bringing over your single player gamer audience to your MMO might be part of the secret sauce. That a lot of Bioware’s track record is with games that were based off of licenses (D&D, Star Wars) is something even Blizzard didn’t have (but didn’t need).
Cryptic has a track record of just two games, both of them MMOs with no single player audience to bring over. City of Heroes hit ’solid second rank’ at launch and stayed there, which is pretty good going, but Champions doesn’t seem to have done as well launchwise and is looking rather sickly.
So yeah, you could argue Star Trek is the hotter franchise in general across all media give the latest film, but even accounting for SWG, Star Wars looks much stronger in gaming. Similarly, Bioware, coming directly off of Dragon Age, with Mass Effect 2 in the pipelline, also is looking much stronger than Cryptic coming off of Champions.
At the moment Cryptic’s best case scenario is that they reprise Turbine, with STO becoming their LotRO, and Champions being a DDO that can be salvaged some time down the road, rather than an Asheron’s Call 2. I’m thinking about 50/50 between something like this and doooooooom.
On the other hand Bioware’s best case is that they emulate Blizzard and ToR becomes a runaway hit like WoW. Incredibly unlikely, but not completely outside the realms of possibility. It ending up as a WAR like Buhallin suggests, overhyped with big launch numbers, then cratering, has much higher odds. ‘Solid second rank’ is probably more likely than either I think.
Of course it’s all just wild mass guessing.
Welcome to the club brother.
We got jackets.
http://arewenewatthis.wordpress.com/2009/11/11/darth-kirk-or-jean-luc-kenobi/
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