Video Games

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.

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.