This announcement came out of left field. I really didn’t expect Cryptic to announce this for another few weeks. One the plus side, I think knowing that the free-to-play launch won’t be until January 17th of 2012 will help assuage some of the forum drama that’s been rampant lately with people worrying that Cryptic and Perfect World were going to try and launch in December.

The more interesting bit from the announcement is this quote from Stephen D’Angelo, Executive Producer on STO and Chief Technical Officer:

We’ve always wanted the game to be free-to-play, in fact we tried to make it free-to-play at the original launch, but our publisher (Atari) didn’t want us doing that so we didn’t do that.

I don’t completely believe that since STO was their second game for Atari and I never heard anyone at Cryptic say Champions was always intended as a F2P game. Then again, with the way sector space is laid out in blocks, maybe there is something to that. Certainly going with a combination of subscription and in-game store shows a muddling of both models.

Star Trek Online announces F2P Launch Date
Tagged on:             

8 thoughts on “Star Trek Online announces F2P Launch Date

  • November 9, 2011 at 11:28 am
    Permalink

    Good luck, Perfect World/Cryptic/STO. I sort of distanced myself from the game since I heard the F2P announcement. I unsubbed figuring they have a lot of stuff on their plate and nothing huge will get developed in the coming months, and it was a good call. Plus, the drama exploded again, so gonna wait until that dies down too before I head back to (f2p) STO.

    • November 9, 2011 at 7:38 pm
      Permalink

      Oh the drama. It’s reached some new highs.

  • November 9, 2011 at 6:55 pm
    Permalink

    I think the timing makes sense. Launching too close to SWTOR would be pretty suicidal. January is also traditionally a pretty slow gaming release month.

    • November 9, 2011 at 7:38 pm
      Permalink

      The cool thing about the date I saw in the forums: 17th of January is 1701, which is Enterprise’s registry number.

  • Pingback:Yet more surprises from Cryptic | Blue Kae

  • November 9, 2011 at 7:29 pm
    Permalink

    That sounds cool. Glad to hear that Cryptic is getting out in front of it.

    • November 9, 2011 at 7:42 pm
      Permalink

      It’s hard to tell sometimes, since it feels like their decisions can be a case of “two steps forward, one step back,” but it seems like they are.

  • November 14, 2011 at 8:55 pm
    Permalink

    Sweet, I will be there for sure!

Comments are closed.