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

Ten Ton Hammer: Okay.  And how does loot work, when you're with a group?  Split evenly, round robin?

Craig: We end up doing kind of loot sharing whenever a drop happens.  There's round robin and chancing based on the level discrepancies between players.  The loot basically drops for a certain person within the group.  And they can deal with trading or not trading, but we kind of round robin it so that it's kind of a fair loot drop. So... I'm not going to be able to steal your loot.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is that something that the group leader will be able to choose? You know, whether it's round robin or percentage chance to loot, or something like that?

Craig:  Yeah--hopefully, by launch, we'll have the standard loot-sharing choices that other MMOs have, but right now, it's round robin. 

Ten Ton Hammer: I wanted to ask you about supporting peripherals.  Champions Online makes great use of an XBox controller.  A lot of games that have a flying element to them have support for head-tracking peripherals and other gadgets.  Have you decided on what kind of peripherals the games going to support yet?

Communication and coordination will play an important role in STO combat, but specific peripheral and addon support remains a question mark.

Craig: We haven't announced any deals or any official support yet.  But, yeah, we're definitely looking in the X360 controller, because a lot of people have those and they work really well.  As well as, I mean, joysticks and other controllers like that, but I don't have any announcements right now. We'll try to get as many in as possible before we have to ship, and then keep adding them in afterwards as the community asks for support.

Ten Ton Hammer:  What about voice chat?  Do you suspect players will use voice chat much more in combat than text chat?

Craig: Yeah, I think that people will use voice chat a lot more readily in combat than text chat, but we don't plan on having any integrate voice at launch.  Whenever we talked to the community about it or whenever we discuss it with MMO players  in general, most people have--you know, they have their favorite, they have their Ventrilo server for their guild, or they already have their voice chat that they have and that they enjoy and they plan on using for whatever MMO they're going to be in.  So... it's something we don't plan on putting in for launch.

Ten Ton Hammer:  What's your stance on user-interface add-ons? Are you going to be open to that, do you think?  Or, is that something that's yet to be determined?

Craig: It is yet to be determined.  The engine that we use to do our U.I. is a proprietary engine internally that's actually really powerful, and really cool scripting-wise. But, whether or not, we'll be able to kind of expose that and get that out to the public by launch is something that we're not quite sure about right now.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Okay. And, along with that, will you allow players to macro certain maneuvers? Do you think you might allow, keyboard shortcuts or macros or things like that?

Craig:  You can pretty much bind anything within the game command-wise to a key that you want it to be on.   We do have limited macro support, and we're going to kind of have to make sure that the macro support that we expose doesn't actually remove the fun from the game.  That you can't actually macro away the game part of it.  So, that's something we're evaluating right now.

Our thanks to Craig Zinkievich for taking the time (and braving the flu) at Cryptic Studios to speak with Ten Ton Hammer last week!