I caught a bit of news this evening from a tweet by Altexist. Perfect World just released the transcript of their Q2 2011 earnings call that had several interesting tidbits regarding Cryptic but there’s one quote in particular that’s got the STO forums jumping:
And also Star Trek Online, after the acquisition, in fact Cryptic is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online. This is going to be launched by the end of this year as well.
Unfortunately that’s all the detail we have just now, as Cryptic itself isn’t ready to make any announcements according to Dan Stahl (from forum post):
I can neither confirm nor deny anything (until given approval to).
Update: Except Dan did post again later in the same thread with this:
There are certainly a lot of questions you may have about this news. The team is working on an FAQ and side by side comparison details that will spell out very clearly what this means for Lifetime and Subscription members. Until then, please stay tuned as we confirm all the details.
The goal has been to leave subscriptions alone and ensure that you enjoy all the same benefits you have today (if not more). There will be more details on this soon.
Based on Dan’s comment, I assume we’ll see something official fairly soon.
I don’t think anyone’s surprised by the announcement, I’m certainly not. I’ve assumed that Champions successful shift to F2P meant STO would follow. I originally figured six months would be the “wait and see” time before Cryptic decided of the Champions experiment was a success. I’m sure the delay has been because of the Atari to Perfect World transition.
I do feel bad for the STO team that PW leaked the news in an earnings call, I’m sure there’s some scrambling going on in Los Gatos this evening.
Despite my best intentions, I didn’t log into Rift until Thursday evening. It turned out to be excellent timing though since I noticed a guildie was standing next to me when my Mage, Kae, appeared in Meridian. One with a familiar name. A quick check of the guild roster confirmed it was my good friend MMO GamerChick. What are the odds that the first time I log into Rift in weeks that I’m standing next to someone I know.
Any-who, GC and I chatted a bit and she ran me through the cake quest before heading off to bed. I spent the rest of the hour I played restoring my PvE Stormcaller/Elementalist/Dominator role back together. My other two roles (Healer and PvP) were reset as well, but I didn’t bother with them. I want to research Chloromancers before I rebuild my healing role, and I was never really happy with my PvP role so I don’t mind just starting from scratch.
I also checked in on my alts. My Warrior and Rogue were fine but my Cleric was reset as well. Fortunately a reset at level 18 is much easier to deal with than it is at 50 and i quickly had my Shaman/Inquisitor/Warden back up to speed.
So now that my characters are playable it’s time to see the world. With the XP boosts available until the end of the month, I don’t want to spend too much time with Kae, but he’s my main and I want to make sure that any limited time titles or pets that I get, I get for him.
So this weekend I hope to revisit my favorite places in Telara with Kae before exercising my alts and getting some levels on each of them. All three are around 18. I find it easier to switch between classes if I’m always in the same general area. Between rested XP and the half-iversay event bonuses maybe I can get them all up to 28?
Feel free to leave me any suggestions for things to see and do.
I found out via Project Aon that Atlantyca, an Italian entertainment company, is developing a Lone Wolf game. Unfortunately that’s about all the detail I have about it besides the fact that it’s intended to release in 2013. I wasn’t sure what to think of it but the interview (see below) with Joe Dever make me hopeful it’ll be good.
When I was on my break, I saved a link to the SWTOR forums posted on Twitter by Zelibeli. The post talks about the distribution of player guilds that have been pre-registered and shows that there are more guilds/players on the Empire side than the Republic. That alone is interesting since in most MMOs the “good” guys usually end up with more players, although I think that has more to do with which side tends to have the uglier character models.
Even more interesting was the distribution of players by faction and sever type.
Type Empire Republic Total
PvE 17327 18262 35589
PvP 31556 15093 46649
RP 4819 8049 12868
Totals 53702 41404 95106
There’s very little difference in strength between the factions for PvE rules, but Empire players dominate PvP and Republic players out number Empire 2-to-1 in RP.
I was very impressed with the speed and quality with which Trion updated Rift for the first several months after it launched. World events, new types of rifts, and even a cosmetic system were all added much faster than I expected or hoped. Now that I’m contemplating logging in after a couple of months off, I’m starting to see the negative side of Trion’s incredible productivity.
In the past, when LotRO was newer and development on the game was more active, I could take six months off and still get back up to speed quickly on the changes. After only two months in Rift, I feel like I’m treading in some deep water. There’s new dungeons, tons of class changes, and my roles have all been reset.
I guess it is possible to have too much of a good thing, but it beats the alternative.
It seems appropriate that my last post before taking time off was about a lack of excitement. I hadn’t actually intended to take a break but I’m glad I did. I’d hit a dead spot gaming-wise and myself having nothing to say. Not to mention, I had my family summer vacation (took the wife and little Kae to Michigan, it was amazingly fun).
Even though I took my netbook with me and had some small Steam games loaded on it as well as Minecraft and a copy of my current single player world, but I didn’t end up playing anything. I also didn’t miss playing MMOs while I was gone. Which surprised me.
Instead I was mostly unplugged for the week, and read a lot.Although you can’t tell from the massive pile my backlog of books makes. I swear it grows even faster than my backlog of games.
So now that I’m back, what’s going on?
There’s a demo is out for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine and it looks amazing. I played a bit last night and had an absolute ball taking a chainsword to hordes of orcs. If the rest of the game plays the same it will be a ton of fun.
A surprise MMO came of of Gamescom this year: Wildstar. The videos I’ve seen look great and the features I’ve read about sound promising. The studio, Carbine, has a good pedigree and some experiences people, but the publisher is NCSoft and that gives me pause. NCSoft is infamous for killing games quickly and having security issues. Granted they’ve given a lot of support to ArenaNet and I haven’t heard much lately about account hacks, so maybe they’ve learned from prior mistakes. I also agree with MMOGC and would almost prefer to see the IP done as a feature-length movie instead of a game. Either way, I’m keeping my eye on it.
Stargrace made a very excellent point about games being a way for people to entertain themselves. I’ve actually worked on a post similar to hers talking about how lazy some players seem to be. There seems to be a growing expectation that a gamer should be able to sit back and almost be forced to have fun, kind of like watching TV, instead of having to invest some effort in the experience.
Big news at STO… the Perfect World acquisition is finally completed. The game had been in an odd limbo state since the release of Season 4. Because of the acquisition, Dan Stahl and the other developers had been much quieter than usual and the game had kind of stalled out content-wise with the Foundry being offline because of bugs. The floodgates have opened though. Dan posted a very interesting response to one community member talking up PW’s confidence and interest in STO, and Cryptic seems to be following up by posting a lot of job openings. Add in the fact that the Foundry is finally back to 100%, and I think the rest of the year should be pretty smooth sailing.
I’m likely forgetting some things but those are the major events I wanted to catch up on.
I pre-ordered the standard edition of SWTOR from Amazon. I wanted the digital version but it’s only available from Origin.com and I’ve already talked about how I feel about that. I’ve also applied to the Multiplaying group’s guild, Delusions of Grandeur. It feels odd to me to be applying to a guild for a game that I can’t even play yet but apparently it gives the guild some kind of benefits so I went ahead and pitched in.
All in all, that is the most attention I’ve given to TOR in months. Now that there’s a release date, of sorts, I feel like I should be excited. I feel like I should be impatiently waiting for the December. But I’m not, I’m much more excited for the upcoming Arkham City. It’s odd because Star Wars was my first scifi love. I was incredibly excited for SWG when it came out. It took me weeks after watching the Phantom Menace to admit to myself that i didn’t like it.
Maybe it’s prequelitis? I gave up on them after watching Attack of the Clones. I’ve never seen Episode 3 and can’t even tell you what the movie title is, or care to Google it. I did watch some of the animated Clone Wars series and enjoyed it but a lot of the magic was lost. Fumoggin midichlorians.
Maybe it’s trust? I was a huge fan of KotOR but never played the sequel after reading about all of the bugs and half finished story, so I should be ecstatic that BioWare is doing a real sequel. Maybe if TOR were a single-player game I would be, but it’s not and I’m not convinced either BioWare or EA are up to the challenge of managing an MMO after seeing how poorly DragonAge’s patching and community were managed.
Maybe I’ve gotten too good at countering the hype?
In the end it doesn’t really matter. I’ve pre-ordered, I’ll be playing at launch, and I have friends that are excited enough for ten of me.
Starfleet Academy was up on Tribble yesterday and is now live on Holodeck. Just warp to Earth and then you can beam down to San Francisco.
The map is gorgeous. There’s tailor, exchange, and mail services on the map right now. According to Dan Stahl (here) there are plans to use the map for a ground Fleet Action and as a starting zone for neighborhood missions. Eventually it will also be the starting point for the new tutorial.
Part of the fun when I was on Tribble last night was the party happening on the roof of Building Two. There’s a glitch where if you log out while standing on top of the plaque over looking San Francisco, then when you log back in you’re on the other side of the fence and can literally get behind the scenes. It takes a little running, but it’s possible to get around the edge of the map and up onto the roofs of the building.
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.
