Warp
Drives are humming with anticipation all over the galaxy as style="font-style: italic;">Star Trek Online
continues to build towards engagement. With closed beta in full speed
ahead mode, more details continue to emerge from Cryptic Studios about
this highly anticipated title. This week we were fortunate enough to
sit down and discuss the abilities system with Steve Nix,
Combat System Designer and Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer.

How do abilities work in STO? Does your race play a factor in your
characters overall capabilities? Does STO finally succeed at breaking
the traditional MMOG pigeon-holing of class roles? The answers to all
these questions, and many more, await you in this look at the most
fundamental aspect of combat, player abilities.


Ten
Ton Hammer:

Can you explain a
brief overview of abilities and how they work?

Steve:
They have a variety of different modifiers that will affect the
player’s capabilities such as skills that you improve by
spending earned points.  These skills modify abilities which
are discreet clickable “powers” if you will.

Ten
Ton Hammer: 
How do
you gain these points? Is it through experience or as you level?

Steve: 
As you go through the game
completing missions and fighting off enemies you will earn points, as
well as gaining reputation with Starfleet which can be spent on
progressing your career as a Captain and earning a higher commission
for your starship as well as gaining more bridge officers for your crew
and so on.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
Is this a
progressive tree based system?

width="200">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/76080"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 320px; height: 180px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/76080/preview" />
STO
characters are more complex than traditional MMOGs

Steve:
You have a career choice. Our characters are a bit more complex than
the average MMOG in that you as a player are playing your own Captain
but then you are also responsible for your Bridge Officers as well as
your crew on your entire starship.  This means that any given
moment that you are playing, you are improving all those
assets.  You have a personal career choice as a Captain, which
can be Tactical, Engineer or Science. As you develop your character and
acquire bridge officers they will also be either Tactical officer,
Engineering officers and Science officers that you are developing.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
Do these career
paths affect both space and ground combat?

Steve:
Yes they do, on the ground your
personal career choice is more apparent since you are playing as the
individual. For instance if I am playing as a tactical officer I will
have certain abilities that I get just for being a Tactical Officer
that I can use on the ground. I also have my away team that is a
composition of my bridge officers that I use or other players to round
out the group, but my own discreet performance is largely affected by
my career choice. Now in space you are more representing you as the
captain on your ship and so your own abilities that you can use are
more focused on the bridge officers that you have assigned to duty
stations on your bridge as well as the ship class you are currently
captaining be it a tactical escort, a cruiser which is more of a
engineering ship or science vessels.  So in space now
it’s more of a composition of all your officers and what
abilities you have trained them in.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
When you send the
away team “away,” is any portion of that team AI
controlled?

Steve: 
When you beam down, if you
are in group with any other players, they will beam down with you as
part of the away team. You can have up to five people in your away
team, any slots that are not filled by a player will be taken up a by
an AI bridge officer, and that can come from your bridge officers or
any other player you are grouped withes officers.  When you
beam down by yourself you will choose four officers to beam down with
you, now this is very interesting because as your developing your
bridge officers you can specialize them if you will and you can have
certain ground officers you’ve trained and certain starship
bridge officers that you have trained up, or you can just balance each
one and have your own sort of Scotty and Spock and Bones that you take
each time.


Ten
Ton Hammer:
So are there
always five party members when you beam down, whether it is you and
four UI controlled characters or five players?

Steve:
That is correct, it’s true for all episodes, but there are
some instances where you beam down  as just the captain.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
How do the group
roles work - is it the traditional tank, healer, DPS or are you able to
move away from that?

width="200">
href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/76088"> style="border: 0px solid ; width: 320px; height: 180px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/76088/preview" />
STO
will help blur the roles of traditional MMOG archetypes

Steve:
The roles are a little more blurred for Star Trek, certainly everyone
is a capable DPS player, and you have to have that. Everyone has the
ability to access and equip their ground characters with various
weapons, there is not really weapon restrictions as to “oh
you’re a science officer so you have to use this,”
everyone has a wide variety of ground weapons and therefore everyone is
dealing out a good deal of DPS. Now depending on your career choice and
the abilities you get from that you
augment that in different ways. A
tactical officer does end up augmenting a lot of their capability with
more damage and variety of delivering damage. The engineer is more
about survival, I wouldn’t call him a tank, but
it’s more about survival. The engineer, depending on which
career branch you follow, that is a control, debuff and can potentially
offer heals if you follow the doctor branch.  In terms of
strict ok you’re the tank you’re going to grab all
the agro and then were going to burn it down in a kill order, were
trying to avoid that traditional model.  

Craig: 
What we have found is that
when people approach the game, they approach it looking for that, and
it exists somewhat. You can outfit your starship to play more of a tank
role or a support role and the same with your captain. Pretty soon, a
few hours into the game, they start blurring their characters a lot
more and they start doing a lot of different things with subclasses.
You can use that MMOG vocabulary to get your familiarity, but pretty
quickly people get a hang of it and try new things, like being an
engineer that increases DPS instead of a traditional support role.

Steve: 
We actually have something pretty interesting as well, were trying to
offer as much flexibility as possible so on the ground we have what
were calling a kit system, so when you equip a career specific kit,
each of these kits provides a certain set of abilities which provides a
different flavor. Science is a good example, so if I am a science
officer with a medical kit then now I have healing abilities and im
speccing more of a healer or medic role. If I have a science kit, now I
have a statis field which is a control or a tachyon harmonic which is a
cone shield/dps attack. Based on your kit, and those kits can swapped
outside of battle so you can change your spec on the fly, you can
really perform different roles for your group. 

Ten
Ton Hammer:
Are these kits
going to be tradable if you are short on a certain spec?



Steve: Absolutely, some are bind on equip with that sort of mechanic
you will find in other MMOGs, but   in general, yes,
you can trade the kits.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
Getting back into
the more specific abilities, can you give us some examples of them, and
are there any sort of super-human abilities in the game?

Steve:
We have species traits in regards to the super human aspect of the
question, and based on the species you chose you will have a couple of
mandatory traits and then a couple free choices to customize the
character a little bit. When acquiring bridge officers many times your
choice may come down to their inherent species traits, for example you
may want a Vulcan officer due to their logic ect.

Ten
Ton Hammer: 
To that
point, you are allowing characters to create their own species, so will
you be able to identify those traits you seek in the player created
species?

Steve: 
Yes we are allowing players to create their own species and part of
that creation process is being able to define those traits. 
Creating those officers and putting them into the world via trading
with other players or trading them into Starfleet will introduce those
species into the game world.

Ten
Ton Hammer:
So eventually you
will see computer controlled beings of that species in the game?

Steve:
Yes, we expect to see it mostly via players trading officers to each
other based on needs and that will allow the introduction of these
custom species.
Ten Ton Hammer: Was there anything else you would like to tell the fans
about abilities and career paths?

Steve
The major focus we are going for is not to be so rigid in character
careers, you have one, but you are constantly expanding on what your
captain can do. You as a player get to play your captain, your officers
and your ship so it’s a much more fulfilling role, so players
won’t have to create so many alts to explore new aspects of
game play but will be able to explore it on your main character.

Craig:
We expect that through swapping out your kits, weapons and bridge
officers you use that players will basically alt with one character by
using equipment instead. Instead of having to create a new character
you can simply look to try and acquire these items, or play this role
this week and skill this ability up and let players switch it up on the
fly.


Ten
Ton Hammer thanks Steve and Craig for taking time out of a busy day to
give us some insight on this exciting aspect of STO.


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Star Trek Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

Comments