While Cryptic did have a high-level departure, they’ve also added a new designer, named Jesse Heinig, to the STO team.
Not a name I recognized, but based on some Googling and forum diving, he was a designer involved with the original Fallout games and worked on the Trek RPG for two years. Sounds like an excellent addition to the team.
So this little bit of news just came across my Twitter feed: Bill Roper is leaving Cryptic (or the Champions version). It was only a few weeks ago that Craig Zinkievich resigned as well. Does this mean bad things for Cryptic?
Of course there’s a lot of speculation about an exodus of people from Cryptic, and what it might mean for the company’s future. So far, I think all of the personnel changes have been very positive. I’ve been much happier with Champions since Shannon took over, and while I was happy with Zinc’s tenure at STO, I’ve been even more impressed with Stahl.
Like anything that happens within a private company, we’ll probably never know for sure. Personally, I’m much less concerned by this than I was by Zinc’s departure. First, Roper left his position as Executive Producer of Champions back in March and Shannon Posniewski has (for whatever reason) done a much improved job. Second, Bill has been a lightning rod for bad press since he started as Cryptic. A lot of that is fallout from the failure of Flagship Studios, but the launch day nerf and Vibora Bay announcement also contributed a lot of bad PR. So, while his departure may impact whatever Cryptic has in development, I don’t see it having any impact on their released games. Deserved or not, Roper’s name comes with a lot of baggage attached, and it can only help Cryptic not to have to deal with that anymore.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, Star Trek Online Season 2 was released yesterday. Tipa has a good overview of the update, and there’s a lot of detail in the release notes, so I don’t want to rehash it too much.
Two of the big highlights: skill cap (level) increase and diplomacy.
The skill cap was increased allowing for new ranks of Rear Admiral Upper Half (yeah I know but it’s canon) and Vice Admiral. In WoW-terms that’s a level increase from 45 to 51. There’s also new high level content to match, but I haven’t done any of it yet.
The big feature I’ve been excited about is the addition of the Federation Diplomatic Corps. Cryptic has added a diplomatic rank system to the game. There are seven new non-combat missions to Memory Alpha, Vulcan, Bajor, and Starbase 39 that are quite good (and include some branching). Unfortunately I haven’t gotten a chance to do any First Contact missions on the live server (Holodeck) since that requires the Attache diplomatic rank, which I haven’t earned yet. I have played a few of those on Tribble though and they were interesting, although I’ve enjoyed the investigations on Bajor and K7 (one of the missions that starts on Memory Alpha) more.
I also spent a lot of time scanning anomalies, which is not something new for me, but now that there’s a signal matching mini-game, those missions are a bit more interactive.
I’m planning a few non-spoiler, in character, write-ups of those episodes. Hopefully the first one will go up on Friday.
As Anjin noted recently, Cryptic has been very quiet about Champions Online since the Serpent Lantern update last month. I don’t mean that I was expecting another update, but just that it would’ve been nice to have an idea of where the dev’s were focusing for the next major patch to the game.
Thankfully Poz has released a State of the Game that outlines the planned Summer Update for August 17th and a sneak peak at the next adventure pack, The Demonflame.
Summer Update
Like the recent melee powers update that took place, Cryptic is also working on a revamp of the pet systems. This includes a more explicit way of controlling pets, an increase in the damage they do, and a new mechanic for keeping them powered.
I’ve not played with the pet powers at all, but I’ve heard that there are also problems with the pathing and having to resummon all pets when one dies. Hopefully these changes will help with those problems as well.
The Demonflame
Scheduled for the end of September, The Demonflame focuses on DEMON similarly to how The Serpent Lantern focused on Viper. We’ll be going to the Qliphotic realm and battling a new monster group. Check out the screenshots on the site.
Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.
Auditorium and Fractal are at the top of the list of the list of games that I should have bought but haven’t yet. Honestly, I’m not sure why I hadn’t bought them before now. Their normal price was decent and the demos were excellent. It’s moot now, because I snapped them up today after seeing Tesh (thanks Tesh!) mention that they are both 50% off.
Both games are very fun and unique experiences which I can’t recommend enough. At least go check out the demos, which you can play online at Auditorium and Fractal.
Only issue I have is that you can’t buy both at once, you have to make two separate purchases. From the comments on their sale blog post it’s a technical issue that is being worked on.
The Steam Perils of Summer sale is over. Based on what I’ve seen, I’m somewhere in the middle on money spent at $70. For only $10 more than getting a single console game, I now own:
I’ve been torn about whether or not to get Borderlands since it first launched. As a co-op focused game, I couldn’t decide if I’d end up playing more with Xbox friends or PC friends, plus there’s always GamerScore to think about. At $11 (+$12 for all the DLC), it was just too good of a deal to pass up. Plus, I saw a lot of my Steam friends getting it as well, so I figure there’ll be lots of people to play with.
I already own the original Witcher on DVD, but I bought the Enhance Edition anyway. This was purely out of laziness, now I don’t have to mess with patching the game when I reinstall it find the disc.
SupCom 2 and King’s Bounty are games I’d thought about getting at one point or another. I didn’t have a PC that would run SupCom2 well enough when it came out, and then when I had a PC that would run it, it was too old for me to buy at full price. King’s Bounty was one I wanted to buy when it launched but didn’t because of some DRM or retail issue, I can’t remember at this point.
Of all my purchases, Dawn of Discovery – Venice, was the only game I’d planned to buy soon. I really like Dawn of Discovery for city building, but I was waiting on getting the expansion until I’d finished a few more of my console games.
The rest of my purchases were all impulse buys: Audiosurf, Beat Hazard, Galcon Fusion, and the Introversion games. I’d demoed Audiosurf and Galcon before and liked them, but I’ve been out of a casual gaming mood for a long time now. Still at under $5 for each, they were worth adding to my library for whenever I was in the mood for a quick play session.
I haven’t played all of my purchases yet, but I did want to mention how surprised and thrilled I am with Beat Hazard. I picked this game up because it sounded fun and was only $2.50, but I didn’t expect to play it a bunch. It’s a shooter similar to Geometry Wars, but it uses your music collection to drive the gameplay. Oddly enough, it fills the same gaming niche for me that Rockband 2 does. Rockband is a game I play only once a month or so, but when I do, I play for a couple of hours. It’s a chance to listen to music that I like while also gaming. Beat Hazard is pretty much the same thing, only it’s an Asteroids-like shooter  instead of a rhythm game. Unlike Rockband, Beat Hazard is quick to pickup and play for five minutes at a time, and I think it’ll become a part of my regular gaming-life.
I got a little shock today from Twitter. Craig Zinkievich, the Executive Producer and a seven year veteran of Cryptic Studio, is leaving. In the full announcement, Craig basically says he’s taking the summer off to spend time with his family; although, he is planning to continue playing the game (I look forward to him posting gripes at the devs).
I was completely caught off-guard by Zinc leaving, and initially very concerned at what his departure might hint about the game’s future. Unlike with Roper’s management of Champions, overall I’ve been very happy with Zinc’s tenure as EP. Still, that initial fear reaction was just  my normal reaction to change. After reading the announcement twice and heading over to the forum thread, I was much less concerned.
Daniel Stahl, formerly a Producer on the game, is taking over for Craig and has brand new Twitter account, Cryptic_dStahl, if you’re interested in following him. Daniel is very active on the forums and well respected by the community, at least for now. MMO forum communities being what they are, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.
If you want an idea of what kind of person is taking over management of the game, just read Stahl’s awesome response in the forum thread about Zinc leaving. There’s also a good follow up by Zinc to some of the comments in the thread, and an additional post by Daniel to address some of the conspiracy theorists. My cynical side suggests that all of this is exactly what Cryptic would post, but given the number of dev posts I’ve seen by Cryptic staff I don’t think that’s true.
Of course how this will actually affect the game is any one’s guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.
There are some aerial billboards in the Renaissance Center in Millennium City. I’m not sure if it’s new, but this one caught my eye.
Scratch Crackdown 2 off yesterday’s list.
I spent an hour with the demo and did not have fun. It may have just been a bad demo, the game may actually be just as great as the first one, but I’m not planning to order it until I see what some other gamer-friends think of it.
The demo really felt like they gave you a beginning of the game character and dropped you into the middle of the game.
I may be switching to console mode again for a few days. Why?
There’s lots to do on the Xbox 360.
Then again, poor Cimmerian Brynulf has been trapped in Tortage for weeks longer than he should have been, and he’s only one quest away from escaping.
Bullet points provided courtesy of Anjin, Inc.