The news has broken that P2 Entertainment, the successor company to the ill-fated and ill-managed Perpetual, has been removed as the development studio in charge of Star Trek Online. The amusing spin in P2’s response aside, this is all kinds of good news for anyone hopeful about STO. We know that another Bay Area studio has been given the rights to Star Trek Online, and the current rumor says that this is Cryptic - which would be great news for them if the other rumor about Marvel Universe Online being dead in the water are true.
Now, Darren over at Common Sense Gamer has reservations on the grounds that Star Trek computer games almost always suck… which is generally true, although I’ve played one or two that were decent. I think the reason for that, though, is that design teams have typically tried to put a Star Trek veneer over very traditional gameplay, whether that be turn-based strategy or whatever, when the source material itself doesn’t lend itself particularly well to that kind of gameplay. And traditional MMO gameplay as established by EverQuest and reinforced by World of Warcraft would feel to me to be about as far from Star Trek as you could get. Neither is the cutthroat play of EVE reflective of the broad idealism of Trek. So at first glance we have a property with a large target audience who’d probably get deeply into such a thing, but play conventions that don’t lend themselves well to that property. Perpetual looks to have been ignoring this and working on something that’d play a lot like WoW in space, only crappy. That does not mean that there can never be a great Trek computer game, or a great Trek MMO… and I would suggest that the sort of paradigm-tweaking that Cryptic did in developing City of Heroes might make them an ideal candidate to develop a strong STO that borrows appropriate elements from traditional gameplay while replacing others that won’t fit the property.
For starters, take traditional servers and sharding. Convention says that each shard is a parallel instance of the game universe, but nothing says this has to be the case. What if each shard is actually a ship, intended to accommodate, say, a few hundred players, rather than the thousands that make up the typical WoW or EQ2 server. Each ship would have an ongoing sequence of missions that progress as it continues its five-year mission. You jump in-game and the USS Tiberius is at Angosia III, and the Captain sends down teams of volunteers to free political prisoners, via diplomatic means or otherwise. The next day, the ship is en route to some other place, and there are some shipboard things to do… maybe a mutant virus picked up on a previous planet, or a demagogue among the crew stirring up a well-intentioned mutiny.
Here’s the cool part: different ships could have different types of missions; some would be diplomatic vessels visiting important planets, others would be warships assigned to patrol the Romulan Neutral Zone, while still others could be on scientific missions or whatever. You could still mix the missions up (as would be appropriate given the source material,) but each type of ship would have its own distinct overriding theme. And by spending some kind of in-game prestige or, when you get promoted, you could transfer between ships, opening up new possibilities. When the five-year (or whatever) mission ends, you’d get automatically assigned to a new ship. This would provide the sense that you have in EVE that everybody is playing in the same universe, without the technological burden that EVE suffers from sometimes when too many players congregate in a single area.
Character advancement would be skill based, and sort of level-less. Instead, you’d have rank, starting at cadet and working all the way up, eventually, to Fleet Admiral. This would make promotion a very big deal, though you’d need to add some kind of additional system so that players feel rewarded in day-to-day play. Higher ranks would open up new quests and close off others (the First Officer is not going to be asked to clear Tribbles out of the cargo hold.) Character specialization (sciences, medical, engineering, etc.) would do the same. If you make Admiral, you could even get transferred to Star Fleet Command, where there would be different types of missions (political, strategic planning, etc.) available… some of which might have an effect on some or all of the ships.
The format for missions would be varied as well. You could certainly have traditional stationary questgivers, but qualified individuals would also get offered specialized missions through the ship’s comm system. (If you want to be on the away team, meet in 2 minutes in transporter room two.) Completing quests might also get you contacts, which could offer you specialized gear and new missions. And some missions should offer opportunities to participate in ship-to-ship combat, a la Star Wars Galaxies.
What would be really neat (and I’m not sure how feasible this is,) is if the ship’s captain could himself be a PC, who could assign missions to people on-board (i. e. in-game,) and maybe even design those missions using some kind of mission editor. This would mean that achieving Captain’s rank would be a very big deal, equivalent to being a Black Temple-equipped 70 in WoW… but maybe that’s as it should be; ideally, most characters should probably fall in the range of Lieutenant through Lieutenant Commander anyway.
Just ideas. But it shows that making a Star Trek Online that’s not only good, but groundbreaking, is entirely possible… and you could make it feel like Star Trek as the same time.
