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Good Interview
Rifle123
Member UncommonPosts: 38
http://outpostgamez.com/news/1118/star-trek-online-interview/
OPG asked some good questions and most of the answers were:
" ..that's something we would like to do a little further down the road. We have to fix the game first..."
Comments
my favourite line is:
" Traveling between systems is important parts of making the game feel big"
"nothing actually matters, we're just slightly evolved monkeys clinging to a dying piece of rock hurtling through space waiting for our eventual death." - Frankie Boyle, Mock The Week
What's with every website on the internet using the smallest font possible? Most people have larger screens nowadays, we don't use 640x480 anymore, so why do they insist on treating the internet like we're all using monitors built 10 years ago? My eyes are now bleeding.
Anyway, this whole artivle reads as either "we're maybe planning on doing it in the future" or "we don't have the technology to do that yet." When your game engine is so limited that you can't do most the stuff you want to do with it, it's time to get a new engine. I'm beginning to think that the CO engine was simply a piece of crap from the get-go. Also, a lot of the answers seem to show that they didn't really care about the IP when they made the game (we already knew this.) It's as if they're just now realizing "oh shit! The players of our game want it to feel like Star Trek! Who'd have thought that? Quick! Add some Star Trek like stuff!"
To boil that interview down .....
What are you doing or adding to this bare bones of a joke that you are passing off as Star Trek?
Most of what people want we won't build because it would take too much time and what we can add today we will wait and add in a future update, maybe. In the end, no one will care by the time we figure it all out.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
The game is an epic fail and their management of it shows it off even more...
Brilliant article, thanks for posting it. The fact that it didn't even occur to them to put any of OPG's suggestions in the launched game tells me they didn't speak to any gamers or took any notice of feedback in Beta.
Thats because the players in Beta actually played the game. Their new council has made it clear that the only advice and suggestions they want to hear are from those who have never touched it.
Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-pope.
hold control and zoom in with the mousewheel, sheesh.
whats with people not knowing the basic features of operating systems these days?!
"The players of our game want it to feel like Star Trek! Who'd have thought that? Quick! Add some Star Trek like stuff!
lol
they pandered to the wrong group
WOW has a huge budget- trying to start an mmo to match or emulate that is stupid
the series had a few things-
captains in love with thier ship
exploration and wierd sci fi stories
members of the crew as a huge part of the storyline
so......they have it that you switch ships all the time
......you get not to be a captain- but an Admiral! (you know- like kirk did not want)
.....the wieird original stories are ..."debris on planet- no life, click 4 glowing things and leave
the kicker is they could have made a better game- with less stuff- and using less money
hey, Cryptic! View Screen and voice - (again on every incarnation of the show) - and sandbox
are you stupid?
Remonds me of $OE. Cryptic is more concerned for the players they don't have than the players they do have.
i remember one reviewer's take on the game (he liked it- so he was kinda an exception)
but he wrote a line or two at the end, which was somewhat prophetic.
something like- i fear that star trek people will be put off because it is not like the shows and movies- and mmo'rs will be
put off because it is not content heavy or a populated enough mmo-
Interesting how whoever was answering the questions neglected to identify themselves. Cryptic continues to squander what could have been a lucrative undertaking for them. The sad truth is that they are so busy massaging the egos of their Lifers and tacking on new content for those who raced to max level, they simply don't have time and resources left over to fix and fill out the core elements of the game. The STO development team is the lousiest MMO company I've ever seen when it comes to prioritizing. They don't seem to have a shred of common sense.
"Soloists and those who prefer small groups should never have to feel like they''re the ones getting the proverbial table scraps, as it were." - Scott Hartsman, Senior Producer, Everquest II
"People love groups. Its a fallacy that people want to play solo all the time." - Scott Hartsman, Executive Producer, Rift
The redemption will come when these guys start losing their jobs since their 2nd MMO has now become a complete joke in the MMO inudstry.
Ooo I love kicking a game company when its already down...
Serves them right! *kick* kick* kick**
But yea, responses in these kind of interviews now are generic across the mmo industry... I'd imagine there is a guide floating through all the companys now on what and what not to say.
"We would *love* to do that... but its not planned"... *sigh*
When will they learn?
Why do they always have these things on these small gamming sites. I meen they only have like 5 votes going to that page. and you have to log in to vote with no activey.
Why not do an intervew at MMORP ...considering we the bigest gaming community...
ANyway these guys are "DIRECTION LESS" ...someone give them a GPS ...so they can find there way home! ...also i would like to know who the Dev's are on this Game by name.
So that if one of there names are on any other tittle i might be intested in ...i will give it a pass!
Which is why they don't do it.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
When WE do - and stop buying their garbage.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
'Our job as post-release devs is to offer empty promises to hold as many subs as possible. Content costs money. Fixes cost money. Lies cost nothing.'
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
Scroll wheel broken, but I use CTRL+. But still, I shouldn't have to. I think it's pure bad design. I hate the fact that websites take up maybe a quarter of my screen's space. This goes for this site too, I've had to endlessly CTRL+ it to death.
Yep, they tried to build the game for the "average MMO gamer" or even "the casual gamer who never played an MMO before," but then they discovered that the only people willing to play their craptastic game was die hard Star Trek fans (which turned out to be the people they did not build the game for.) So now egg and their faces are in allignment and they have to rush to try to add Star Trek features after launch (like functional bridges) because it turns out this is exactly what their playerbase wants.
It was said by me and others over and over again while STO was in development: why are they making a Star Trek MMO? Because Star Trek is fun for a lot of people. These people want to play an MMO in the Star Trek universe. Cryptic spoke as if "Star Trek" and "fun" were mutually exclusive ideas and in order to add fun to the game, they had to remove Star Trek from it.
This is all despite the fact that the average Trek convention gets around 20 times more attendees than BlizzCon. They could have made the perfect Star Trek MMO that pandered directly to Star Trek fans and it would have gotten very good subscription numbers (well, until the subscribers figured out that Cryptic was nickel and diming them with the C-Store.)
They pretty much said it flat out - given a choice between being true to the IP and being fun, we chose fun. That shows a high contempt for the source material. Yet, they claimed to be Trek fans. Yeah - like devs are always fans of the IP they are working on AT THE TIME.
As you said - a faithful Trek MMO would have been a very popular game. Even if no non-Trek fans ever played it. The catch is that it would have taken a serious effort WRT to time and money to make it. Not Cryptic's style.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
Wow... I think the only thing asked about that was actually on the horizon was a functioning bridge. Everything else was, "not in the immediate future(aka in the next year)" or "probably never".
Pretty unfortunate.
LOL! Yeah, I caught that too. The bit about "seeing your friends flying" was a bit silly too, since you're actually seeing a blip on what's supposed to be a map; a blip that's rendered to look like a ship.
Haha, the games really are quite separate you know? Both games were developed at the same time, CO was started from scratch in early 2007, and STO around the same time. No previous engine assets were carried over from City of Heroes or Marvel Universe, that is what "started from scratch" means.
So, it's time to find a new scapegoat for why STO sucks, CO has very little to do with it. Also, the engine is quite technically impressive for how responsive it is, but that doesn't show up in STO because that game is so slow.
Cryptic is trying a Customer Development approach to MMO creation.