Blue Kae

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.

Back in January Cryptic remastered the Stranded in Space mission, which is the first mission new players do once they get out of the tutorial. Gozer went back to one of the first missions the team made for the game and updated it using all of the new tools that they’d developed since it was initially created. The result was very impressive. Ever since, players have been looking forward to more remastered episodes and Cryptic released two more last Friday: Diplomatic Orders and Doomsday Device. The new missions are just as impressive as what was done to the Azura rescue mission. I ran through all three over the weekend.

The Azura replay was offering a personal communications code that allows a player to summon the S.S. Azura II which provides mail and bank access from wherever you happen to be. That was really the only reason I ran through it again, since I’ve already played the remastered mission a few times.

Diplomatic Orders offers a cool data recorder to replay all of Spock’s Sector Block introductions, but I would’ve played it regardless to see how the mission had been updated. Ambassador Sokketh is no longer haunting Earth Spacedock but is now on Vulcan. Vulcan itself has seen some investment by Starfleet and now has a station in orbit.

Sokketh now has an issue with transporter technology, so there’s a fun section where you fly down to the surface in a shuttle. The Shuttle interior is very well done, as is the flight over the Vulcan temple complex. I do have a complaint about mixing franchises though since Starfleet has somehow managed to incorporate Tardis technology into their shuttlecraft.

Once Sokketh is aboard, the rest of the mission plays out mostly the same only with some tweaks to the dialog and a cinematic when the Ambassador’s true identity is revealed.

Doomsday Device was my favorite of the three episodes. The story is substantially changed from the original, and it really reminds me of a DS9-style episode. You start out by disabling the I.K.S. Targ and then boarding and securing the ship. I really enjoyed not actually having to blow the ship up, and I’d love to see more of that done in future missions/remasters.

MMO Gamerchick didn’t enjoy securing the Targ as much as I did since you beam over without your usual Away Team, but I actually preferred it that way. When you materialize on the Targ there is already a firefight taking place between your crew and the Targ’s crew, so I felt like a Captain beaming in to personally monitor an existing situation. If I’d come in with my regular team, it would’ve been okay but this way made if feel like more of a major operation since my full crew was involved (ignoring of course that they didn’t have names and their uniforms were different).

There’s some interesting gameplay and story in securing the ship and making repairs, not to mention getting a holoemitter disguise to make my character look like a Klingon. I really liked that I had a diplomatic choice once I beamed down to the planet and could avoid combat for the most part.

The final fight had some great story as well as some great new tech in it. The tech part is integrating character scenes into the same maps as ship scenes. This doesn’t sound like much, but it allow for some really cool story telling. Being in a space map and watching the Doomsday Device fire on a moon and then cutting to the bridge of the Targ was very seemless and as close to watching a television episode as they’ve come yet.

It’s not perfect yet. Throughout the mission, you’re talking with Lt. VanZyl whose supposed to be a member of your crew. But her uniform is off and usually in a mission you interact with your bridge officers. Still, she’s voiced well in the cinematic scene so it’s well worth it.

If you haven’t checked out the remastered episodes, I highly recommend them, especially if you’ve been through the Featured Episode series and are looking for more of the same quality-level.

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.

The Jupiter uniforms are part of the 500-day Veteran Rewards and also due on the C-store around June 2nd. When I first say them mentioned for the Veteran Rewards, I had no idea what a Jupiter-style uniform was. Apparently I wasn’t alone in that, since Matt Highison, who  is the character artist working on them, posted on the forums recently (he’s also go more picture links there) to explain that Jupiter is the name for the new series of uniforms. The old uniforms in the tailor have always been labeled as A and B, and they are being renamed to Antares and Sierra.

I think the uniforms look really good. Bryn will be getting a wardrobe update once they become available.

I started this thread to suggest a game change on the STO boards which I’m going to duplicate here:

One of the reasons I play STO is to put myself in the Trek-universe. While I accept a lot of the compromises Cryptic had to make to design a fun Star Trek game, there’s one that’s always bugged me: non-captain ranks. Starting out as an Ensign and getting command of a ship has always seemed quite a stretch regardless of how badly the wars with the Klingons, Borg, and Undine may be going. Of course the game does need to have some form of progression, some Trek-like way to advance. So why not make all players Captains and change the Rank/Grade system to refer Security Clearances instead?

When you start out with a new character, you could go through a promotion ceremony and get assigned your first command: a Miranda-class ship. Then you pick one (or more) bridge officers and start through the normal tutorial events with slight alterations.

In the game proper you would still collect skill points and merits, only instead of increasing in Grade from 1-10 on your way to the next Rank, your Captain would increase their Security Clearance starting at Alpha-1 through 10 and then Beta-1 (which would allow for tier 2 ships), and so on. After all, Starfleet can’t give command of their most advanced ships to just any command officer. Only the most trusted Captains would have access to high-level technology. This would make a VA-1, which is basically level 51, a Captain with Epsilon-1 Security Clearance.

The SC system would be functionally the same as the existing Rank system, but the new terminology allows for quite a bit more expansion through the remaining letters of the Greek alphabet, plus it’s less jarring from a lore standpoint.

The Admiral ranks could be re-purposed for a secondary system for Fleets (as in guilds) or fleets (as in handling multiple ships), similar to how the Ambassador ranks are used for the diplomacy system.

While there’s no major mechanics changes, this would still be a sizable change to all of the mission dialogs and UI, but it would be a huge boon to immersion and also give Cryptic more room at the top-end of the game to expand further without getting into more Admiralty ranks.

If you like the idea, or you have suggestions to improve it, then go over to the forums and leave a reply.

I love this quest title.

When accolades were activated back in Season 1.2, I had a one minute and forty second flood of Accolade notices the first time I logged in. One of the things I’ve heard about Duty Officers is that some will be earned Accolade awards. I wonder, am I going to be buried under an avalanche of transfer requests when Season 4 goes live?

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.