Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Any MMO bearing the Cryptic Studios name is bound to have a staggering amount of customization options available to players. But what happens when you take that core concept and extend it far beyond the cosmetic and fully into the realm of functional mechanics?  Thanks to a robust alien creation tool, upcoming Star Trek Online could very well raise the bar in terms of cosmetic options, but character customization doesn’t end there, not by a long shot. Ten Ton Hammer recently sat down with executive producer Craig Zinkievich to discuss ship customization, learning some interesting details about the impact of bridge officers along the way.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Will ship customization in STO be as extensive as what we’ve seen with character customization, or is it a separate type of system that players will build on over time rather than work through up front as with the race creation tools?

Craig Zinkievich, executive producer for Star Trek Online.

Craig Zinkievich – Executive Producer, Star Trek Online: It’s not the same level of customization as the alien creator is. As a kind of general overview, there are over a dozen different classifications or configurations are what we call them, of ships within the game. So you have your basic Miranda type, your Akira configuration, your Galaxy configuration. The customization within these configurations – it’s actually pretty awesome what the ship guys have been able to do – the different nacelles, the pylons which are the things the nacelles attach to, the different bridges, the saucers to the actual materials that you put on it such as the windows you choose or the color detail around the ship.

But the goal within a configuration is to make sure that there’s a great amount of customizability so that the player can feel like they’ve made what their ship looks like, but so that another player looking at somebody’s ship can say, “I know what configuration that is, I know what ship that is, I know how powerful that guy is.” So generally you’ll know what role that ship is playing whether or not it’s more of a support role, or whether it’s more of a DPS role you can kind of tell that by looking at somebody’s ship.

Now, based on all of the other aspects of the ship that aren’t cosmetic; what weapons you’ve slotted, what systems you have on board, how your deflector dish is configured, what bridge officers you have on your bridge – that really, really narrows down what role you’re going to end up playing, what powers you end up having and really what sort of subclass you have.

So there’s the cosmetic customization which is really cool, and then there’s the functional customization that, within a configuration of a ship, you can really bend and specify how you end up using that ship.

Ten Ton Hammer: So you’d still walk away with a ship that’s highly personalized, but at the same time another player wouldn’t be completely clueless as to what configuration it is if they square off with you in combat.

Craig Zinkievich: Exactly.

Ten Ton Hammer: In terms of how players gain access to ship customization options, is that something you’ll gain over time through general gameplay? Could you explain a bit how that end of customization works?

Craig Zinkievich: On the cosmetic side vs. the functional side; one of the cool things about the way Star Trek Online is being put together is that the items, the weapons, the panels that you put into your ship, what sort of systems you have online – those also allow the player a lot of customization within the career that they’ve picked, or the configuration of their ship. We want to make sure that the things that are long term choices like the player’s career or what ship they’ll be in for a while – there’s a lot of ability for the players themselves to choose how that’s going to act.

With the major careers in the game being Engineering, Science and Tactical, you could say, “Oh man, there’s only 3 classes in the game, how boring is that?” But we’ve purposefully made them really, really wide in how they function. So within those classes, or within your career choices there’s so much that you can explore. The player can say, “Look, I’m really going to try to learn these skills or really try to push myself in this direction and maybe it’ll work or maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t I’ll just go learn these skills now and play this today.”

So on the ship side to go back to your original question, when you customize the functionality of your ship – all of the items, the weapons, the systems, how you slot your warp core – all of the functional things, you can look at that as kind of normal loot within a game. Those are the things you can get from Starfleet, or that you can find from that really cool advanced alien race that you did a favor for and they give you that really special warp core. All of those things open up throughout the game.

On the cosmetic side, there are some things that we are putting throughout the game. So say you did this big task or fleet action, you’ll get this special thing for your ship. But Cryptic really likes to allow as much cosmetic customization to the player, to give that away for free as much as possible. People really, really enjoy that. The majority of the cosmetic customization is kind of open to the player when they get that configuration of ship.