Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Jeff – No doubt. We know also, that there’s just an absolute ton of lore, and I’m really anxious to get to the audience questions because one thing that the… It’s almost kind of like a tailgate party atmosphere in here. Even two hours before this Vooncast began. These guys know their Star Trek.

Can you talk a little bit about what you’ve done with the team to kind of indoctrinate them into the Star Trek Universe?

Craig – Well, we’ve done a number of things. It’s cool. When we got the license, rumor leaked out to the dev team before hand, and I was blown away by the number of people who came into my office, went into Jack’s office and was like, “Look, look, I gotta work on this game! Do we have this game? Are we doing this game? Look, here’s a picture of me at a Star Trek con when I was 10 with a standee of William Riker!”

*laughter*

People just coming out of the woodwork who were real, real big Trek fans. I was talking to you a little bit earlier about this. It’s the type of thing where I was, you know... yea, I love Star Trek! I watched Next Gen., DS9, Voyager – that’s really where I got into it. I thought I was a fan, but just like with City of Heroes and comic books I thought I was a fan of comic books before hand. As soon as I got online with this, started meeting the fans, interacting with the community, even the other members on the team it’s like “wow, there’s so much work to be done.” I don’t know anything compared…

*laughter*

So as a team, we pretty much went out, I mean we bought all the DVDs, we bought all the movies, just traded those back and forth. I mean, every week we all get together for lunch, sit down, watch an episode. You know, pick things out, make sure that some of the team members who haven’t really been indoctrinated get so they see some of the sets that we’re trying to build, some of the environments that we’re trying to reproduce, and really just try to force it upon people as much as possible.

But it really doesn’t take much until even artists who’ve never seen an episode before, which was kind of surprising for me, really start to get into it and wonder what we’re gonna watch next week.

Jeff – No doubt. When you move from the TV to the MMO, when we talk to people who have developed these licenses, they talk about the limitations that were there in TV episodes and movies just aren’t there in the computer world. When you’re making a video game, you have just a wide open canvas. Has it been a struggle to kind of rein in, prevent from scope creep and that kind of thing?

Craig – I don’t think so. I mean, part of what Star Trek is - its many different things, but the environments I think they always wanted them to be fantastic, always wanted them to be over the top, always wanted them to be bigger than life. It’s not scope problems, it’s really “Wow, we can do these things now”. CBS and the license, they’re really excited about the things that we can see. They’re really excited about kind of pushing some of the creatures that you’re going to see. It’s like “Well the Gorn looked like the Gorn ‘cause we could just afford a rubber mask that episode”.  Kind of really push them a little bit further.

And so it’s difficult to rein back a little bit, make sure that the team stays true to the feeling and the appearance of the IP. But at the same time, I don’t think the universe limits us in any way.

Jeff – I see.

We saw the race creator that you did a demo of at New York Comic-Con. If you guys haven’t gotten a chance to take a look at that video it’s up on Ten Ton Hammer and a couple other places, well worth a watch.

When players are putting together their race, are there any plans to… Star Trek has a number of, you might call them non-humanoid races or less humanoid races, maybe more reptilian kinds of races. I guess the most obvious example is Q which is, you know, he’s kind of energy. Are there plans to implement these kinds of races in the game, either playable or probably as non-playable?

Craig – We’re looking into… we expect at launch that most of the races that you’ll create will be bipedal. That doesn’t limit us from doing tails or strange legs or stuff like that but don’t really expect to get that Horta right at day one. But we are looking into doing holographic, if not your character, your bridge crew, your bridge officers which is another sort of customizable race in the game; making them holographic, making them into changelings. We’re looking at being able to do that, but we don’t have a definitive list right now.