Star Trek Online at Ten Ton Hammer

Ten Ton Hammer: Is it possible to lose a ship in combat? Or is there a threshold in terms of how much damage a ship can sustain before you’d lose it entirely?

Craig Zinkievich: I think that you’ll be able to blow up the other ship, but that doesn’t mean that your ship will be a total loss. We don’t want to get to the point where you spend hours and hours and hours refining and finally getting this ship, then having it blown out of the water so that you’d have to go through all of that again. So with ships I think that’s a place we’ve maybe broken reality a little to the point where you explode, it’s huge and really fantastic but then you go, “OK, let me go back and I’ll respawn. I lost that system, that system got totally destroyed and the durability on some of my weapons is hurt.” But you’re not going to go, “Oh my God I went AFK and I came back and my Galaxy craft was gone, gone, gone!” So yea, we don’t want that.

I mean, it adds something to a game – I remember times in EVE when I’d be teamed up with someone and they’d say, “Hey, do you like my new freighter?” And they’d accidently attack me and the police would come and destroy his 80 million credit freighter. I remember those times, so it adds something to games, but it’s not really an experience we want in STO.

STO will offer a high degree of symbiosis between ships, bridge officers and characters.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the bridge crew play a role in effecting repairs on your ship, or will you have to find specific places where you can dock and handle repairs from there?

Craig Zinkievich: There’s definitely docking stations where you’ll do repairs, but also – it’s not your bridge officers per se, although some of the bridge officers have skills to help you repair your ship and do hull repairs. But it’s your ships greater crew that does that, and kind of the makeup of that crew that helps you repair your ship outside of combat.

Ten Ton Hammer: Going back to the ship configurations a bit, you’d mentioned that there are a dozen different configurations; will there be somewhat of a direct or predetermined path players will take in terms of advancement from one ship class to the next? So for example, will players start out with a smaller ship and advance along a set path, or will there be points where a given player might decide to go in a different direction in terms of which ships they obtain?

Craig Zinkievich: There is a progression in terms of advancement for the ships, but there’s also a whole lot of choice across the board. There are different roles that the ships take, and also there’s lines where going from one class to the next class that opens up to you once you get skilled to open up that ship – how much that previous ship is effective depending on how you have it outfitted, there’s not a clean line where it’s like “OK, get out of that ship because it’s useless to you now.”

I’m not going to say that you can take the very first ship that you’ll have in the game and use that all the way until you’re an admiral, but you can actually pull it along much further after you’ve opened up other ships. So you can keep that ship much longer rather than there being any kind of clean line.

Ten Ton Hammer: So between the different ship configurations and the separate career paths, two different players can start out in roughly the same place, but ultimately end up in two very different places based on advancement choices?

Craig Zinkievich: Definitely. If they took the same career choice, that doesn’t mean that they’ll end up in the same ship by any stretch of the imagination. They could really end up anywhere with the ship, and because the career choices are so broad, they could end up playing to totally different games. What really makes up who that player is, what role they play in the game is a combination of their career choice, what skills they’ve chosen within that career choice, what ship they’re flying, the bridge officers that they have, the equipment that their ship have and that their bridge officers have. So there are a whole lot of customization elements and a lot of different routes that players can go based on what they choose for any of those things.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are the bridge officers another of the customization elements that players will acquire throughout various aspects of normal gameplay?

Craig Zinkievich: Definitely. You’ll pick up different members as you play, or you’ll run across unique alien races that have unique, cool skills that you can’t get any other way. And whether or not you take one of those guys and recruit him into Starfleet or whether you ask him to train one of your bridge officers in those skills is really up to you. I mean, you don’t want to start off with Spock and then have to cut Spock loose just because you found some phat loot. So you’ll be able to train up your bridge officers. Some people don’t care, but personally I do – the attachment to the bridge officers is a big part of the game.

But the skills that they learn, the bridge officers will level up those skills. You get points that you’ll spend to say, look with this guy I want this skill to be better. They rank up along with you, so you have to promote them throughout the game. So there’s a lot of advancement for your bridge officers as well as you.

Ten Ton Hammer: It definitely sounds as though there’s a lot of symbiosis between the ships, bridge officers and player characters.

Craig Zinkievich: Yep, it all comes together to really define what role you’re going to play based on all of those things.

Ten Ton Hammer: Well Craig, thanks for taking the time to talk with us!

Craig Zinkievich: No problem! Thank you very much; it’s been a whole lot of fun to do this!