Blue Kae

Cryptic and CBS unveiled the new Odyssey-class Enterprise-F design today on StarTrek.com in a blog post written by STO Executive Producer, Dan Stahl. I still like the design, but I have mixed feelings about how the reveal was done.

I like seeing the ship textured as I finally have an idea of the scale of the ship and it does indeed seem massive. I also like that the ship’s class name references journeys and exploration over combat.

I don’t like the angle chosen for the initial screenshot. It makes the ship look whale-like by over-emphasizing the secondary hull and dish and marginalizing the dual necks. Were this the only image I’d seen of the new ship I wouldn’t event realize how different the overall design if from the Sovereign. Besides the bad angle, the image itself is not very large and I’ve found no links to higher resolution images, or to additional images from other angles.

My guess as to why they did the photo this way is that they want to keep the ship still partially under wraps until it’s revealed in-game for the first time. That’s understandable but it doesn’t give a good first impression. Fortunately we still have this image.

I missed posting about the second Dev Diary regarding the new Enterprise, as it came out during my Android obsessive period a few weeks ago. It’s worth reading though if you have any interest in Trek starship design. Part three is out now though and features a beautiful in-game model draft of the ship. She’s going to be a cruiser, as expected, and a Vice Admiral level ship. I now have quite a bit of motivation to get my Engineer Nal working hard for promotion (he’s only Lieutenant Commander now).

Star Trek Online is coming down for maintenance tomorrow morning:

We will be bringing down Holodeck on 7.7.2011 from 6:30 AM to 9:00 AM PDT (2330 – 0200 UTC) in order to perform maintenance and apply the Season 4 patch. We will provide an update once the maintenance has been completed.

Patch notes for Season 4 are significant. There’s a few surprises on there too (my comments in blue):

• Whenever you join a team or fleet, you will automatically be added to a voice chat channel. I didn’t realize we’d be able to use voice for fleet chatting, I just assumed it was for teams like in LotRO.
• All existing characters will get a free respec token due to the significant changes to ground combat. I still have some saved from ranking up, but one more won’t hurt.
  
• An auto loot option has been added to the options screen. This will be nice to have, I always seem to fly to far from loot and have to make a second pass to get it after the battle.
  
• A ship selector has been added to all ship/shuttle transporter rooms. Players can now swap ships without having to fly to a starbase. This will be nice to have. No more having to go back to a starbase to switch to a shuttle for doing sampling missions.
  

There’s a lot more in Season 4 and I highly recommend checking out the section on ground combat changes so you understand what the new keybindings are. Even if you don’t intend to use shooter mode, you’ll want to know how to toggle it off if you accidentally engage it (press B).

I’ve actually been holding off on doing anything with my two alts since I saw the ground combat upgrades on Tribble, and I’ve been itching lately to get back to them. Hopefully I get a chance to check in with them tomorrow.

I just saw the news via PC Gamer that City of Heroes is going free-to-play. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m sure that NCSoft and Paragon Studios have been looking for ways to renew interest in the game and saw Champions Online’s renewed success. I’m just glad that NCSoft didn’t shutdown the game as they’ve never been shy about that before, although admittedly for much younger games.

Free or not, I’m not planning on going to go back to the game. Just like with Age of Conan, the subscription isn’t what keeps me from playing. It’s time.

Unlike Conan though, I do like the Paragon City setting and lore. I played back when a comic came in the mail every month and I enjoyed the two books that were released. But the lore doesn’t offset the aging character models and combat system. I prefer the combat pacing and mechanics better in Champions Online, as well as the open power system and newer graphics. The only reasons I’ve gone back to CoH in recent months have been for nostalgia during free reactivation weekends.

The F2P plan itself is a pretty standard hybrid subscription model with an in-game store, VIP members getting point stipends monthly, and separate tiers for free players, those who’ve spent some money in the store and subscribers. The most interesting feature is that they are creating a VIP only server and giving VIPs one free transfer a month.

Hopefully the new model works just as well for Paragon Studios and NCSoft as it has for Cryptic and Turbine.

The first Season 4 build is up on Tribble (see the patch notes here and here). There are a lot of improvements, but the biggest one is the new ground combat update.

My expectations for ground combat have gone through a complete cycle from apathy to excitement. At first, I didn’t really care that it was being revamped. I’ve preferred space combat since the very first time I played the game and always treated ground combat as just a delay before getting back to my ship. As I started to get an idea of what Cryptic was doing from listening to interviews, reading the forums, and seeing sneak peaks on Twitter, I started to get more and more excited. The duty roster is still the main feature I’m looking forward to in Season 4, but ground combat has become a close second.

So I’ve spent a couple of hours playing on Tribble tonight, and I have to say that ground combat is a lot of fun now. Switching from RPG mode to FPS mode is smooth and easy to do. Opening my crew screen automatically switches to RPG mode so I can use my mouse to switch equipment around, I can tell this is a beta feature though since opening the map doesn’t do the same. The FPS aiming takes a little bit to adjust to, and it’s a little weird that your beam doesn’t hit exactly where you point since really what the aiming is doing is selecting a target not actually pinpointing where you’re firing. But it is a vast improvement over the current system.

Combat is much much faster and more exciting. Changes to shield and health stats as well as weapons, mean that battles are over in one or two minutes instead of five or ten. There’s also much less of the goofy backpedaling to deal with melee enemies.

The guns are also much more interesting and varied. In taking my main to Vice Admiral 1, I only ever used two weapons: a stun pistol and a sniper rifle. The only variation was what beam type I used. The new weapons are really fun though and I forsee a lot of swapping between the different rilfes, pistols, and assault weapons.

The only downside is, I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate ground combat on the live server anymore.

Besides the big combat update, there’s also a neat new animated loading screen as well as a really cool new interface for ship requisition (not the C-store).

I took a few Fraps videos while playing tonight, I should have some up tomorrow to share for anyone who doesn’t have an active sub right now or doesn’t like to mess with the test server.

Want to see me talk about MMOs? I’m on Episode 49 of This Week in MMO on Gamebreaker.tv.

If you haven’t heard of it before, the Gamebreaker network is hosted by Gary Gannon (one of the founders of GAX Online) and TWIMMO is their weekly MMO news show.

While I’ve done guest spots on a couple of podcasts, they were all audio only. Doing a video show was new, exciting, and a bit scary for me. There’s a big difference between being able to talk and not worry about people seeing your reactions or fidgets, than being on camera. Plus this was the first time I’d done a show with a live chat room.

I ended up having a really good time. It’s always surprising to me how fast an hour goes when recording a show.

I’ve watched this trailer more than a dozen times today and I’m still not sick of it yet.

Ironically, I haven’t actually finished Arkham Asylum yet even though I keep planning to. Maybe this’ll provide the missing incentive?

When Catwoman was originally announced I didn’t really care. She’s an interesting side character but Batman is always the main attraction of Gotham City. The gameplay footage in this trailer looks amazing though, it almost seems like she could carry the whole game. Almost.

Catchy song too.

Champions

I was totally surprised to see  Issue 1 of the first Comic Series announced on Twitter today. The initial series is called Aftershock and issue one is Dead Air. UNTIL’s Camp Lantern in North Africa is not responding to communications and scouts dispatched to investigate have not returned.

The new series is scalable so any heroes level 11 or higher can experience the new content. There are supposed to be five more weekly issues in this series.

Despite how quickly the first issue snuck up on me, I’m very excited to get in and check it out. I started playing through the second Adventure Pack Demonflame this last weekend (more on that when I finish it) and it’s not quite the experience I was hoping for. From everything I’ve read, the Comic Series are intended to be more like the excellent Featured Episodes in STO, if they turn out to be even half as good then I’ll be spending a lot more time in Champions on a regular basis again.

Star Trek

The first Dev Diary about designing the Enterprise-F is up. Most of the controversy that surrounded the winning design has subsided now based on the dev diary forum thread (or I’m just no frequenting the right parts of the forum). The current clay model is interesting. I like how close the saucer and engineering hull are to one another and the dual neck looks much more substantial now that it did in the initial sketches. My only nit to pick is the saucer is a bit too pointy.

On my way into work this morning I glimpsed a couple of Tweets about Cryptic getting bought but didn’t see by who. So once I got to work I found this article on Gamasutra and thought, “Oh. Ok…. Who’s Perfect World?” I’m not a fan of the eastern-style MMOs and I long ago stopped paying any attention to that aspect of the genre. So I had to do some catching up to get an idea of whether or not I should be worried or elated.

Two interesting items on the money-side of the story. Atari bought Cryptic for $28 million (plus sales-incentives) in 2008, and Perfect World is paying $50.3 million. Perfect World is coming off of a good first quarter compared to the prior year, as payoff for investing in long-term projects. If that’s truly representative of PW’s attitude towards business then Cryptic’s in much better hands.

Besides their fiscal history, I didn’t realize that Cryptic isn’t the first development studio that PW has purchased. They bought Runic Games in May last year, but has stayed mostly hands off since then.

There’s still some important details unknown about the deal though. Does Atari still has publishing writes for NWN? I assume they do. If that’s correct, is Cryptic still developing that game? I’m guessing that Atari has passed the risk on to Cryptic and PW and is charging a licensing fee. This gives them a piece of the revenue with little further investment.

Since PW is primarily in the F2P end of the MMO market, what happens to STO? For that matter does Champions stay a hybrid model or does it go full cash shop? I’ll give even odds on STO going F2P but if it does it’ll go hybrid like Champions did. I think that’s a ways out though, I get the impression that Cryptic wants to see how regular weekly content releases affect their subscription numbers. I don’t see either game going full F2P like their eastern-market counterparts. There are very few games, Runes of Magic is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, that do well in the western market as full cash shop. Perfect World seems (in my limited research) to be a bit smarter than that.

One other thing I’m unclear on is what the actual corporate structure is. There’s Perfect World and there’s Perfect World Entertainment. PWE seems to be their western-market facing corporation, and I assume that PWE would be handling management of Cryptic. But the press release announcing the acquisition was on PW’s site.

In the end, it’s much much too early to panic. For the short-term, this is good. It removes uncertainty about the fate of the development teams and their games. For the long-term we’ll have to wait and see, but I’m optimistic based on what I’ve read so far.

Some good news and some bad news today, let’s start with the bad news first.

Up for Sale

Interesting news day for Cryptic, Champions, and STO today. Apparently Atari has decided to get out of the development business and is putting Cryptic Studios up for sale. I have to admit I’m surprised, but I really shouldn’t have been. There’s been a lot of movement towards social and mobile games, so it’s not too surprising that Atari’s headed that direction.

Naturally Twitter, game blogs, and STO’s forums have been buzzing with the news. I was pleasantly surprised by the mostly positive reaction on the STO forums. There were two dev responses I wanted to highlight:

Wishstone - The headline is chosen a little unfortunate by the colleagues at Gamasutra and makes it sound like we’re a kicked puppy standing in the rain. That’s not the case. 

Right now I have no further details other than what has been mentioned elsewhere. Support for Champions Online and Star Trek Online will be continuing as normal, our staff is working hard on their projects (and the folks from the Champions team deserve an extra cheer for their new stuff by the way) and there are no planned changes to the way any of our games and projects will operate.

So Stormy is here, I am here, Dan and the gang are here, your GMs and QA staff are working hard. It sounds way more dramatic than it actually is.

Dstahl -btw… several of STO’s new devs are starting in June – so that is one reason they haven’t responded yet.

Now of course the dev team is always going to put a brave face on things, so we’ll have to wait and see how the situation pans out. Personally, I’m not sad to see Cryptic and Atari part ways but I’m even less happy about the thought of EA or Activision acquiring the studio. There’s been some chatter on the forums about CBS, and I guess if Warner can get into the publishing business then so can they. There are lots of open questions about the situation though. Cryptic owns the Champions IP and CBS owns Trek, but I’m not clear on what Atari acquired when they bought Cryptic or who CBS actually granted their IP license to. Plus there’s the who question of Atari Points vs. Cryptic Points for the C-store currency. Interesting times indeed.

Regardless, I hope that Cryptic’s future gets resolved quickly and leaves the company in a stronger position to continue improving their games.

Update – Sente over at A ding world has some good background on the fiscal aspects of the situation.

Ground Combat

Aside from all of the corporate drama, there’s a new thread related to ground combat prompted by comments made by Al Rivera (Captain Geko on the forums) in the latest Stoked podcast (it’s an excellent interview by the way, you should watch it). Salami_Inferno jumped in on the thread and offered to answer any questions (have I mentioned recently how much I love the STO team’s communication?) and yielded some interesting tidbits:

• The optional aim mode will probably be something you want to turn off if healing, otherwise you’ll have to aim first to determine who gets affected by your Medical Tricorder. post link
• Pressing ‘Z’ will swap weapons and ‘X’ will switch aiming mode (from shooter to RPG and back). post link
• All weapons have a zoom, no head shots (maybe later, just didn’t work with their current code). There’s no cover system like Gears or Mass Effect 2, but they’ve made line of sight more significant. post link