Cryptic pumped some great content into style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek Online
with their Season Two update. To get some more information on Season
Two, Ten Ton Hammer talked to Executive Producer Daniel Stahl. After
plying him with a great deal of Romulan ale, he agreed to talk without
any prompting by the agonizer.

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Ten
Ton Hammer: With the introduction of some ship interiors in Season Two,
can ship-based missions be far behind? I’d love to see a
“Day of the Dove” type of mission on board my ship.



Daniel
Stahl: Now that players have
more of their ship interiors to explore, we naturally want to start
looking at different types of missions that could take place on your
ship. The first mission type we have a strong desire to see is the
ability to perform boarding actions against enemy players, or have
enemy groups attempt to board your vessel. From there we can start to
consider more scripted mission logic similar to a “Day of the
Dove” episode. The trick is that players can select between
several interior layouts and in order to make a mission take place, we
need to place the actors and script their movements differently for
each layout.

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TTH:
What has been the player response to the new diplomacy missions?



Daniel
Stahl: We’ve
received a lot of positive feedback to the few diplomatic non-combat
missions we created for the launch of Season Two. Standoff and
Quarantine stand out as two examples that players really enjoy and that
we want to use as a basis for making future diplomatic missions. We
have additional missions like these in the works that will be making
their appearance in our upcoming weekly series. In addition to those
missions we also introduced a way to make First Contact with species as
well as rank up in the diplomatic corps by completing non-combat
missions while exploring.



TTH:
Can you more fully describe the diplomatic
‘newspaper’ missions you can receive doing
diplomacy missions?



Daniel
Stahl: For Starfleet players
that are looking to perform more non-combat missions while exploring,
we introduced an Ambassador that will direct you to missions in various
Star Clusters where the objective does not involve combat. Completing
these missions for him, will earn you experience towards ranking up in
the Diplomatic Corps. These directed missions can be taken frequently
and our design goal was to offer players who aren’t fans of
combat a way to focus on missions without it.



TTH:
Season Two has added some needed wardrobe choices to the Klingons. Will
the other non-Federation races, particularly the Gorn, get to start
wearing clothes other than Klingon hand-me-downs in the near future?



Daniel
Stahl: The Gorn are getting
both a facelift as well as the same upgraded costume treatment that the
Klingon’s received in Season Two. The biggest change will be
the introduction new facial features that will allow for greater
lizard-like variety for our Gorn players. These changes will be coming
out around Season 3, if not before.



TTH:
With the introduction of the Dabo mini-game in Season Two, is Cryptic
looking at creating online tournaments to boost social interaction or
hoping that the players themselves will do so?



Daniel
Stahl: We’ve
received a lot of great feedback on Dabo and what it has done to
improve socializing in places like Quark’s bar. In a
strangely fun style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek
way, it almost makes sense that Quark put that Dabo table there and we
are glad players are enjoying it. While we are not currently working on
a tournament structure for Dabo (we’d like to see that for
PVP before anything else), we have been working on various other
mini-games that are more multiplayer in nature – such as 5
card draw poker (similar to what the officers would play on style="font-style: italic;">The Next Generation).
We generally believe that adding more mini-games can provide a nice
variety to socializing.

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TTH:
Player response to the Fek'ihri story arc in Season Two has been
extremely positive. What prompted you to bring them into style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">STO style="font-weight: bold;"> as foes?



Daniel
Stahl: Two things led to the
decision to use the Fek’ihri. We wanted to have a unique
enemy faction for the Klingon Episodes and we wanted those enemies to
allow the Klingons to whip out their Bat’leths and show their
prowess in Melee combat. By going back to the Klingon’s
ancient enemies, we found both these options in the Fek’ihri.
When we then combined that concept with the location of Grethor and the
guardian Fek’lhr, we were very happy with how the enemy group
turned out. We look forward to writing more episodes involving the
Fek’ihri.



TTH:
The level cap was raised from 45 to 51 in Season Two. Will there be a
level cap increase in every Season or was this just the right place at
the right time for the level increase?



Daniel
Stahl: While we
don’t anticipate a new level cap for every season, we felt
that players were left in a state from launch where they were at a
half-rank and unable to purchase some of the skills they wanted to
flesh out their Captains. That is one reason we worked to raise the
level cap in Season 2 and in so doing establish the design for a future
rank structure up to 61.



TTH:
You’ve announced with Season Two that there will be weekly
new episodes starting in August where players from both factions can
aid the Deferi from a new adversary. Who is this adversary? Is it a
brand new race or some old favorite making their return to style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">STO style="font-weight: bold;">?



Daniel
Stahl: We plan to introduce a
specific enemy faction from style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek
with each series. In Series one starting in August, the enemy is going
to be the Breen, who were last seen as allies to the Dominion. They
have started harassing the Deferi and appear to be looking for
something specific near their sectors of space. It will be up to the
players to aid the Deferi and determine what they are after.