Fleet Report: First Post

I am going to try to start a regular set of posts regarding the future of Star Trek Online and what I personally see as going on.  I want to start off by making sure everyone who reads this knows I have no special "insider" information.  Everything I say here is speculation or gleaned from publicly available information (which I will do my best to properly document and reference).

Head on past the jump to get into the meat and potatoes...

Right now, there is a terrible uproar and overall feeling of discontent and downright hatered on the official STO forums.  So, for my articles, I'm going to go ahead and use Subnova's blog as my soapbox.  There is a lot of confusion regarding the massive sweeping changes being made to STO.  I think a lot of this is coming from a rather significant shift going on within the development team itself.  Dan Stahl left to go play with Zynga, and this left Stephen D'Angelo as a temporary Executive Producer for the project.[link]

This then started a series of Dev Blogs talking about the basic ideas they have been pushing to the Tribble Public Free to Play Test Shard.  As of last week, these blog posts stopped.  Also, announced on Twitter was that Zero (former QA Lead) was promoted to the title of Producer and that Fark was promoted to QA Lead.  I suspect that D'Angelo is no longer the temporary EP of the project and some additional shifting is going on this week.

Today, Geko posted a very nice and detailed bit of information regarding a recent change to the C-Store on Tribble which makes pet perk items into character-unlocked items.  Essentially, they want items like pets and small perk items like tribbles, and even special bridge officers to be giftable items.  This requires they remove the exploitable account-unlocks and shift everything to single-use character unlocks.

Later on, Geko posted one of the most valuable bits of information to date regarding Tribble itself.  The Tribble shard is a direct build.  There is no internal QA evaluation of what gets pushed to Tribble.  Cryptic has done something truly brave and has made the players directly involved with the QA evaluation process by giving us raw builds with speculative tests and experiments included.  What this means is that many of the changes we see are extremely experimental and subject to extensive changes or outright deletion.  This is probably one detail that could have been communicated far better when Tribble was brought online, however hindsight is 20/20.  Needless to say, there was a lot going on at the Cryptic studio at the time.

Right now, I see Cryptic taking a game that was originally being thrown together under an obscene deadline (they had 2 years to ship or lose the license).  Too many corners were cut to make the deadline... and an unfinished game was shipped.  Then, the team, under Atari, had major budget cuts and limitations placed on them.  They tried fixing things the best they could.  The transition of Champions Online to Free to Play was pretty obvious as the future of STO as well at the time.  It is simply a direction the entire industry is headed.  Unfortunately, Atari had long since lost interest in good games and just needed a quick bailout.  So along comes Perfect World and now Cryptic has a real budget and is rebuilding a development team.

Now, something to keep in mind is that Star Trek is governed by CBS.  Everything, and I mean everything has to get the stamp of approval from CBS before anything else can happen with it.  From sketch to deployment, CBS has their eyes on everything.  I can only imagine what sort of bottleneck this can produce.

So here we are, a growing team, new blood who are mostly die-hard Trek fans but unfamiliar with the game engine or in-house development tools... all trying as hard as they can to catch up.  The current team, being shuffled around as other members leave the project or company to continue their own personal dreams/families.  The team is pushing their work directly to the Public QA Shard of Tribble, listening to our feedback and doing their best to communicate what they want to do with the game, within the standard restrictions of not telling their competitors everything they are planning before they finish it.  It may feel like lack of communication to us, but it's normal business practice for this industry.  So far, the STO development team has been the most open and communicative group I have ever seen in the15 years I've been involved with the gaming community.

Stormshade is more than just the "community guy".  He has a lot of responsibilities and doesn't have all the answers.  So, for now, for as long as I can, I will put my assimilation skills to work and try to communicate what I see to whoever is willing to read it.

Cryptic wants STO to succeed.  Their very livelihoods depend on it.