Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Jeff – Excellent, that’s great to hear. That was one of the finest answers to that question I’ve ever heard. That’s kind of a game for us, you know, it’s the eternal battle between devs and audience you know? Everybody wants to know when a game’s coming out, but no dev wants to commit to a date.

Craig – Yea, I think that you can look at milestones, you can look at goals and stuff like that, but one of the major, big-huge turning points is when the dev team starts playing. And we do. We have weekly play tests where the entire team has to play – Art, OCR, CS, QA – everybody is playing the game. And when it’s hard to stop them to wrap up and get their feedback, when they look forward to it and everybody’s raising their hands afterwards and saying that it’s fun, that’s when I think we’ve turned the corner and that’s where we are now.

Jeff – Excellent.

Garrett, do we have some questions from the audience?

Garrett – We have a ton! So Craig, I’m gonna rapid-fire through these as best I can. Some people are asking some good in-depth questions, but the first one I’m looking at here is, “What is Star Trek Online gonna offer role-players? Is there gonna be social areas for players to kind of hang out in the game?”

Craig – There’s definitely going to be social areas for the players to hang out in the game. Space stations, DS9, social hubs where you’ll be able to go and hang out as you’re captain. Go down the promenade, see what’s going on, go to a ten forward and sort of hang out, do that sort of role play.

Outside of that I think you’re gonna find that our fleet system, which our word for guilds, also is going to offer a whole lot options for people to role play there. One of the really cool things about the Trek fans – they have fleets already out there. Trek fan groups called fleets, and they have their order, they have their ranks, they know how to progress through them, and giving them that space in the game where they can do that sort of thing I think is an overlooked part of role playing, but kind of a big part of it in Star Trek.

Garrett – Awesome, awesome. The other thing is, I know someone here has a good question about the trans-hubs in the game, or transwarp hubs I’m sorry. As far as a flight path type of system, is that what you’re gonna work with, or can you stop off somewhere and go explore? How are your transwarp hubs gonna be put in? I guess they’re already in, but just talk a little bit about that…

Craig – Our transwarp hubs are pretty much instant travel to basically the far side of the galaxy. Not the far side of the galaxy … basically long distance travel to make it instantaneous. It is not the only way to travel between systems. You will basically go out to our sector-level where you’re traveling at really high warp velocities, which is kind of an astrometrics view of the galaxy. But transwarp hubs are pretty much, “OK, I need to go way across the galaxy, I don’t want to spend, you know 30, 40 minutes traveling there – take me there.”

Garrett – Awesome, awesome. I’m just going through this as fast as I can, there’s a lot of good questions here… You talked a little bit about the fleet system, so I’m gonna avoid that, but one of the things we already talked about, you will be at E3 – I see that one went by.

One of the following ones is about Geordi’s visor – will you be able to wear things like that in the game? Maybe talk a little bit about equipment.

Craig – I mean, if you’ve seen any of Cryptic Studios’ character creation and costume editing system, it continually blows me away what the artists are able to do. Our lead character artist, Matt Higginson, came up to me today and was like, “Look, I found out how to make normal maps go backwards now!” And I was like, “Wow, that’s great, that’s awesome. Now we can get more pieces in.”

*laughter*

And he is, him and his entire team are just throwing, constantly throwing pieces in. I’m sure Geordi’s visor is going to show up, I’m sure it’s going to be customizable. It’s amazing what the team here can do.

Garrett – Awesome, awesome. One of the other ones here I’m looking is, this is interesting, “Will the space environments have interactive celestial bodies? Will they have a sun, photosphere, cause damage to shields etc.? Black holes? That kind of thing.”

Craig – There’s definitely nebulas that cause different effects on your ship as you fly through them. We’re working on trying to make it so that you either avoid, or you soak the damage if you need to. Or then nebulas that can give you benefits.

We’re iterating right now on asteroids, and whether or not they should cause damage when you run into them. It’s the type of thing that you always flip the coin between – it’s not a flip, it’s really a decision you have to make between realism and fun. If you constantly run into things that cause damage and you’re doing it by accident, that’s not fun.  *laughs*

So there are interactive stellar objects in the universe in the game right now, it’s just whether or not it goes full on simulator, I’m doubting that.