Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Jeff – That’s phenomenal.

One question I know that’s gonna come up later – with the game taking place 30 years after Nemesis, where the major antagonist was the Borg, will we be seeing the Borg in the game? Will they be playable at all? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Craig – I think that you’re probably not going to play Borg – you’re definitely not going to play Borg at launch.

*laughter*

But I don’t think it would be Star Trek if the Borg weren’t there. That’s just one of the things you’re gonna have to see.

Jeff – Excellent. I’m gonna turn it over to Reuben, who has some questions to ask about exploration.

Craig – Cool.

Reuben – OK. Yea, so the first thing I was wondering is, what type of achievement system might you have for the explorer types out there? Like I know in the City Of… games you had the badges and everything – a way to show other players things you’ve achieved as far as exploration-type things go. Do you have anything planned along those lines?

Craig – Definitely. I think that you really want to… Even for people that just want to go out and explore, there has to be a, not a checklist, but some sort of achievement to it. Accolades, medals that kind of count what you’ve explored, seen, what you’ve discovered and track what you’ve brought back to the Federation. So there’s definitely going to be all sorts of medals and accolades that you can achieve by exploration.

Reuben – Awesome.

Then kind of following along that same vein, when you do open up any kind of achievement-type things with exploration, will that open up anything faction-wide, or is that gonna be more of like a personal event when you make discoveries?

Craig – We think right now the majority of the medals and accolades that you get through exploration will be personal. The things that you open up will either be personal, or you’ll be able to share them with your friends, like the location of this really cool planet that you found.

The majority of the faction-wide rewards that you’ll be able to open up will really be located within the indirect PvP content that we have planned.

Reuben – Alright, that makes sense. That’s pretty much all I had – I know we wanted to get to some user questions…

Craig – Oh yea…

Reuben - … so I’ll keep it short.

Jeff – Just to keep things moving here I’ll go ahead and ask the first question, which is always the first question. How are you doing with development, are you on track, do you have any kind of timeline yet for beta and release?

Craig – Yes, of course I have a timeline…

Jeff – That you’re not sharing …

*laughter*

Craig - … I’m not gonna tell you it.

*more laughter*

I’ll get in trouble! Actually, if you had asked me three months ago if we were on track, I’d probably have lied then and said yes, but it wouldn’t have been true. I think that a few months ago it was a little rocky, there were a few things that we were still trying to figure out that were core to the game, and iterating on.

But really, over the last month and a half, since about mid- December the team has really, really come together, really started to roll. And really, we’re just starting to churn out content now that is just... every single time we play it, it’s like, “That’s it. That’s what we want.” Every new skill that we put in, every new ship we put in, every episode that gets added in is just feeling right. So I really think the team has started to roll right now, and definitely, definitely on track for all our internal goals.