Blue Kae

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

Daniel Stahl’s released the May Engineering Report and it’s got some really really exciting information in it. Season 4, especially Ground Combat 2.0, has been on the horizon for so long, that it felt like it was never going to make it into the game. Now suddenly it feels like it’s almost here. Stahl has announced a tentative, let me repeat that tentative, date of July 7th for Season 4′s release, with features starting to show up on the test server in early June.

Stahl also gives a short summary of what the new ground combat is like by saying that it is going to be faster. There’s a new optional over-the-shoulder aim reticle mode which eliminates tab targeting and leads to some cool new mechanics:

It also means being able to drag weapon fire across an area an hit multiple targets, or dumb throw grenades in a general area.

Weapon stats, ranges, firing modes, reload times, sound effects, and visual FX had all been updated. Mobs HP scaling has been adjusted when changing mission difficulty, this is something I’m very interested in since I like space combat on the advanced difficulty but ground combat at that level is very tedious.

I’m starting to get excited again now that it feels like we’re more than halfway through the lull between Featured Episode Series 3 and the Season 4 update.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Heretic’s latest forum thread on the Duty Roster and there’s been some more good information posted besides the work-in-progress interface.

First, the STO team isn’t happy that duty officer names can’t be customized either, but it’s a technical limitation. I’m sure this is primarily a database issue. Because a character in STO is more than just a single individual, it’s always had more restrictions on the number of characters you could have without paying for additional slots in order to offset the higher storage costs.

The species traits I commented on yesterday will combine with a duty officer’s assignment to affect mission outcomes. Heretic give the example of “Aggressive” duty officers having a better chance of succeeding in military category assignments. Also in that same post, Heretic confirms that duty and bridge officers are completely separate resources (at least for now), so you can’t take surplus bridge officer candidates and convert them to duty officers.

Duty officers can’t be promoted and their rank contributes to the effectiveness of their passive abilities as well as the chance of success on away missions. Promotion is technically possible but not on the schedule currently. Civilian duty officers cannot be place in the active roster list, they are solely for mission assignments. Heretic give examples of: traders, advisors, and holodeck characters (which sounds very neat).

Clarification that the duty officer system is a precursor to the department head system, where you’ll be able to select a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Science Officer, etc. from among you existing bridge officers.

Cryptic developer Heretic posted a sneak peek of the work-in-progress Duty Officer interface today on the forums today.

Obviously the interface could still change quite a bit before Season 4 launches, but it does give you an idea of how Duty Officers fit into the game mechanics. There are limited positions to fill within each department, and each officer assigned adds certain passive bonuses. The traits, shown as icons in the list and detailed on the personnel file, are new to me. I wonder if those are intended as flavor text or possible have something to do with what kinds of missions you can send them on.

Season 4 looks like it’ll be amazing, since not only will I have another subsystem to play with in the game, but there’s a (much needed) revamp to ground combat, and some really cool new environments coming based on images Dan Stahl has been tweeting.

Today was an oddly busy news day for a Friday.

Champions Online

I’ve been wondering for weeks now if Poz was still running the Champions Team over at Cryptic. He hadn’t posted on the forums in weeks and the level of communication from the team had really deteriorated. So, I wasn’t surprised by this announcement that Poz hitting the pause button. The thing that’s odd about the news is it’s half written like Poz is on vacation and half like he’s left the company. Rob Overmeyer is taking over, which is also not a surprise since he did the excellent follow-up Ask Cryptic for April.

Besides the (possibly temporary) change in management, Cryptic also posted a new Costumes and Concepts page. The Champions team is going to use this page to give players a peak at upcoming costume designs and get feedback. I really like this idea and hope they keep it up to date. Costumes are a major part of the superhero genre, and the more Cryptic can add to the game the better. Plus. it opens more lines of communication between the development team and the players, and I’m all for increased communication.

Star Trek Online

The other half of Cryptic’s been busy too.

The Breen Featured Episode rerun is underway and offers players who missed out the first time a chance to get the Breen Bridge Officer. The team’s also added a new equipment set, so player’s who’ve already been through the FE have some incentive to go back. I really like the idea of reruns while we’re waiting on Season 4 to come out, of course I’d like new FE’s better but this will help pass the time a bit.

Besides the reruns, Cryptic released a massive Ask Cryptic for May. Fifty good questions and nice detailed answers by Executive Producer Dan Stahl. Here’s some of the highlights, although you should still go read it yourself:

• Some big new Borg-related coming, including a revamp similar to what the Romulans got.
• Rare particle traces are getting their own icons. I know this sounds minor, but when I return to Spacedock and I have a row of rare traces in my inventory, it is so slow to hover over each to figure out which one stacks where.
• Season 5 will focus on End Game and Fleets.
• Featured Episode series 4 doesn’t have a release date yet. Stahl is talking like they want to make sure they’re setup for a consistent FE schedule with two weeks between each before series 4 comes out.
• Despite the possible delay in FE4, Dan said, “The next”content release may not be a feature episode, but something bigger.” So maybe we’ll may see some type of expansion similar to the Season 2: Ancient Enemies?

One other thing I wanted to mention. It feels like the team has a big content change coming related to the Borg. Stahl mentioned that they were getting a graphical and mechanic overall like the Romulans got in FE3. He also mentioned that the Undine would be back but not before the Borg “make their move” which he hinted could happen before FE4. Lastly, Stahl answered a question about the Gorn Rebellion by mentioning it depends on whether or not their homeworld get’s assimilated.

I also feel like I should mention that Cryptic announced the winning design for the Enterprise-F. Apparently there was some voting done by the community a while back and the fan-favorite isn’t even on the Runners Up list. This of course has resulted in a fifty (when I wrote this) page thread full of nerd rage, trolling, and pleas for sanity. I don’t recommend reading them, except to check out Stahl’s follow up posts here, here, and here. Personally, I like the winning design more than the one some of the community is upset about.

Rift

Finally, I wanted to highlight a post on the forums by Producer Scott Hartsman regarding character names on RP servers. I generally don’t look at the Rift forums outside of the dev tracker, so I’m not informed at all on the “excitement” Scott’s referring to. I’m inferring from his post though, that there’s been some kind of drama over character names. Which doesn’t surprise me much. Were the server not marked as RP in the launcher, I’d have no idea based on the high number of immersion jarring character names I see running around. I try to keep an open mind about it, but I’m pleased to see Trion talking about clarifying what the naming policy is on RP servers. I’ll be even more pleased (and a little shocked) if they’re enforced.

So I was reading through my RSS feeds yesterday and caught this bit from Destructoid which reported that Mass Effect 3 was delayed until Q1 2012. I wasn’t happy about it but I figured if Bioware needs more time to make a quality game, then I’d just have to show some patience. Then I ran across this Gamasutra article which went into some more detail behind the delay.

“This franchise is a personal favorite of mine,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello of the BioWare-developed conclusion to the epic sci-fi trilogy.

“One of the things the team up at Edmonton has done is…essentially adjust some of the gameplay mechanics and some of the features, which you’ll see at E3, that can…essentially address a far larger market opportunity [than Mass Effect 1 or2].”

According to EA’s Frank Gibeau, the now-delayed game’s E3 presence will reveal “some feature innovation and some new ways to play.”

Nothing about that sounds good to me. It sounds like EA is getting a bit more hands-on with the franchise and I don’t expect that to turn out well. Hopefully, I’m blowing this out of proportion. If so, I’ll be very happy about being wrong.

Today is Star Wars Day (think about the date).

Regardless of my love for the Mass Effect universe, Star Trek, or the ‘Verse of Firefly, Star Wars will always have a special place in my heart. Watching Star Wars on television in the early 80′s is the earliest memory I have of experiencing science-fiction in any medium.

Despite all of the stuff that’s happened with the franchise over the years, and by that I mean I’ve purged from my memory anything that happened in theaters after 1983, to me it’s the original 1977 movie poster that is the iconic symbol for the series.

May the Force be with you, and go check out some of the fun with wordplay on Twitter today.

I complained earlier about the poor level of communication on the part of Cryptic’s Champions team, especially as compared the the level of communication that the Star Trek team maintains. There was apparently enough community feedback that they did an Ask Cryptic, Part 2. This one is much better.

First, the post is explicit that the questions are being answered by Producer Rob Overmeyer, so that whole vague anonymous feeling from the original post is gone. Second, the answers are informative and detailed without losing the humor from the original post. Not to mention there’s just more of them.

Besides the second Ask Cryptic, there’s also a State of the Game for April. Also done by Rob, it does has some crossover with the Ask Cryptic, enough so that Rob is planning to start doing alternating months for the posts.

I’m feeling lukewarm about the upcoming Resistance Adventure Pack. I had issues with Serpent Lantern and I haven’t even attempted Demon Flame. My hope when Adventure Packs were originally announced was that they were nice multi-mission story arcs, but they ended up being mini-dungeons complete with boss fights. It just occurred to my that STO’s Featured Episodes were actually what I’d had in mind for AP’s.

The two things I’m really looking forward to are the Golden Age and Pulp Comics costume sets. Even though they’re C-store items, I’ve got enough Atari Points from my stipend to get at least one for free.

Besides more costume options, I am curious about the Hideouts coming in July although I can’t imagine getting a lot of use out of it once the initial novelty wears off. I’m also interested in seeing what the team does with their AP replacement, Comic Series. It sounds much more like the FE’s that they were inspired by, and even though a lot of challenge focused players probably won’t like it, I hope they drop the boss fights. I’m just interested in experiencing more stories, not snapping my keyboard in half in frustration.

Cryptic’s been starting to address some of the grinding missions in the Foundry by un-publishing some and in some cases revoking some players’ Foundry access, see Wishtone’s post for an excellent summary. I like that they’re policing the published missions, and I originally though revoking player access is a bit heavy handed until I saw Wishstone’s post which implies that only players who were republishing removed missions were affected. She doesn’t say, but I assume that it’s a temporary measure until fixes are applied to Tribble and Holodeck.

Speaking of which the first patches to remove the exploitive mechanics that are now on Tribble:

Ship explosions will now only effect a maximum of 5 targets.

Apparently some of the missions that allowed players to level quickly relied on spawning a ton of ships on top of you and then blowing up as a result of the warp core breach from your own ship dieing.  Someone further down in the thread asks if this is related to Foundry exploit missions and Salami_Inferno, the associate producer, confirms that it is.

I’m very please to see them addressing these issues. I hope that some of the suggestions regarding adding categories and tags to missions to help with searching will get implemented quickly as well.