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This is a must read people!
In 2010 the long wait will be over when Cryptic releases its massive
multiplayer online game, Star Trek Online. In an exclusive interview
with TrekMovie, STO executive producer Craig Zinkievich talks about how
he will balance between hardcore and first time gamers, what you can do
besides blow things up, We also have three exclusive new screenshots.
INTERVIEW: Star Trek Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich
TrekMovie: Do you think of Star Trek Online as being more for
gamers, who may have an interest in Star Trek, or for Star Trek fans,
who may be interested in gaming.
Craig Zinkievich: I think there is stuff there for both. Both
audiences will have different measuring sticks and approach the game
with different expectations. We are Star Trek fans and we are gamers,
so we are making a game we are excited to play. Some of the time that
is a really really good impressive game mechanic, and some of the time
it is ‘I was just interacting with the Guardian of Forever, that is
awesome!’. So I think it depends on the player. I think both of those
audiences are going to find really cool stuff in here.
TrekMovie: In our polling, it appears a number of first time
gamers, and certainly first time ‘Massive Multiplayer Online’ players
are going to try this out. What are you going to do for them–to
accommodate these total newbies?
Craig Zinkievich: I think you look to your tutorial. You look
toward opening up content features and functionality to players as they
advance over time, so you don’t dump everybody in right with a full
functioning, with all the buttons and everything that is there right
off the bat. You kind of introduce them to the mechanics as time goes
on. I think that games in general, over the past four to five years,
have really learned this and rather than expecting that their player is
coming with preconceived knowledge, or expecting the player is coming
already having read the manual even, they’re taking the player and
right off the bat it is ‘let’s teach you from scratch what this game
is.’ I think that gaming in general has exploded market-wise into
people that aren’t gamers, so most everyone developing games is
thinking about how is the non-gamer going to approach this game. So for
us it is obvious what you said, there are people who don’t consider
themselves gamers, definitely not MMOers, trying out Star Trek Online.
And we need to make sure they can come in and the game is accessible
and they can be taught all of those things that the MMOer is going to
take for granted and skip through that part of the tutorial.
Some Gorn get blasted (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: There is a lot more to Star Trek, from TV and the
movies, than combat. But a lot of the stuff we see from you guys,
previews and images, that has a big focus on combat. What is there to
do in this game besides combat?
Craig Zinkievich: It is true. It is game, it is an MMO, there
is a great deal of combat within the game. That being said, we want to
make sure that there are outlets and other things to do that everything
you do in the game does not revolve around combat. There are social
areas where people can go and role-play and hang out and do what they
want to do. There is a harvest-crafting sort of game play so you can go
out and scan anomalies, collect data, and bring that stuff back to
Memory Alpha and help advance your character that way. There are some
other things that we haven’t talked about, but we will be, that are
from the non-combat side of things.
TrekMovie: Can you move your way up the ranks, from Lieutenant to Admiral, without ever engaging in combat or rarely engaging in combat?
Craig Zinkievich: You will have to engage your character in
combat to move your character up through Admiral. We want to make sure
there is non-combat gameplay in the game, but it is a core part of the
game, especially at launch. I suspect we will be adding a whole lot of
roles the universe as time goes on, as we expand. Hopefully we will
allow you to not be part of Starfleet, be a Ferengi trader and kind of
advance your character like that. But if you are going to be enlisted
in Starfleet in a time of war, you are going to end up doing combat.
TrekMovie: You will be able to chose a science background and
there will be ships that are more for scientific research, does that
mean ’science missions’ are more available to you than other players?
Craig Zinkievich: There will be some content differences
based on your ship and based on what your career is, but really what it
is, it really defines what role you end up playing in the game. If you
are a tactical officer, you are obviously going to go in guns blazing.
If you are a science officer, maybe you are playing more of a support
role and looking more towards the harvest sort of game play. It doesn’t
change the content you are experiencing, but it changes the way you
approach that content.
A Federation ship explores some Borg wreckage (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: Star Trek Online has two warring factions, The
Federation and the Klingon Empire. We did a poll on the site and it
showed that the vast majority were more interested in playing on the
Federation side. Plus it seems there are more Federation fleets forming
as well. Are you concerned there is going to be an imbalance in the
game?
Craig Zinkievich: No. Someone PMed me your poll, we did a
poll very early on after we announced the game, and our numbers were
right around the same numbers. So we have really tried to make sure
that the design supports that natural imbalance. So the Klingon
gameplay is going to be much different than what the Federation is
getting. It is going to be a lot more focused on the PvP [Player vs.
Player] and focused on the houses within the Klingon Empire than really
big story episodic exploration-focused that the Federation faction is
going to have.
TrekMovie: How will you be handling music in the game?
Craig Zinkievich: There is a lot of original music created by
Cryptic Studios in the game. Also, there is a lot of the music we are
also doing based on the themes from Star Trek music pieces that you
will recognize. So you got to have the Pon Farr theme and the Klingon
warbird theme and that kind of stuff you can expect.
TrekMovie: One of the biggest complaints with MMOs is the
notion of ‘grinding’, as in doing boring repetitive tasks over and over
in order to level up. You guys have talked about how you are going to
avoid that, can you give an example of how you have solved that problem?
Craig Zinkievich: The terminology of grinding means different
things to different people. In some games, grinding is what happens
when you no longer have any directed content — nobody is telling you to
do a specific mission and you just go out and kill guys to level up.
One of the things that we really bring to the table and want to make
sure that happens in the gameplay hours that take place in Star Trek
Online, is that there are always choices as to what you can do. There
is always episodic content, there is exploration stuff, there is always
some sort of PvP thing, some sort of large-scale fleet action you can
participate in. At any point that stuff in kind of in your face, like
‘hey do you want to do this, or do this’ and that we don’t just kind of
leave the player to their own devices. It is still up to you as to what
you chose to do, but at no point in time will you be ‘I don’t know what
to do.’ I think that is how we are getting around the grind.
TrekMovie: Regarding ship customization, what can and can’t you do to your ship?
Craig Zinkievich: Within a configuration, if you look at the
website and what has been updated recently, light cruiser would be a
configuration, also research science vessel, cruiser, those are all
different configurations of ships. What we want is for you to be able
to look at a player and his ship, and know what configuration he is
flying. So you can look at say an Olympic and a Sovereign, and those
are two totally different configurations of ships. So you can look at
an Olympic and say maybe the sphere can be different and the hull can
be different and swap out the nacelles, but you can still say that it
is an Olympic and not a Sovereign. So within a configuration you can
swap out the saucer, the stantions, the nacelles, the secondary hull,
plus you have sorts of different options, like the plating.
Ship combat in Star Trek Online (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: Is there currency in the game? Is it latinum?
Craig Zinkievich: There is currency. There is latinum for
inter-faction trading. Within the Federation there is ‘Starfleet merit’
that you gain and there are ‘energy credits’ that you use. They say
there is no form of currency in the Federation, but the farmer in
France can’t just say ‘look I feel like having a Sovereign ship.’ You
do end up having to earn reputation and put your time in to gain those
resources within Starfleet.
TrekMovie: Are there consequences in the game. Say for
example I am a Federation player and I violate the prime directive, or
a Klingon player acts cowardly or without honor. Is there a penalty?
Craig Zinkievich: There are some storylines in the game that
change based on the actions that you have, but there are no sweeping
rules like you described.
TrekMovie: OK, so let’s say I am on a Federation first contact mission, but I decide to kill everyone, can I do that? What is to stop me?
Craig Zinkievich: Currently we don’t have a choice that
drastic that you can take. Any first contact mission, what stops you is
that we don’t let you fire your weapons on the friendly guy. So you
can’t actually target that poor new species and wipe them out.
TrekMovie: You guys use the term ‘fleet actions’, which are
also called ‘raids’. Can you describe that, and can they be something
as big as something like the Battle of Wolf 359, where everyone is a
player character?
Craig Zinkievich: Yes. Fleet actions are the really really
large scale battles in the game. One of the fleet actions in the game
is Starbase 24 is being attacked by the Klingons. On the Federation
side this is a PvE [Player vs. Entity], where you go into this system
there are over a hundred Klingons attacking this system. You need to go
into it with your team, as well as a bunch of other teams, in order to
beat them back, get onto the starbase, get some data off that starbase
before it is over run or you end up winning the battle. And in PvP
there are these fleet action sized events where you get like forty
players on each side and you go at it. So in both PvE and PvP, there
are Wolf 359 sized battles.
TrekMovie: After the Star Trek movie came out, you
guys put up a graphic that explains the prime timeline, where your game
is set, and the alternative timeline, where the new movie is set. I
think most people get that. But next year when this game is on the
shelf at Best Buy, some people are bound to pick it up and think ‘hey
Star Trek, I loved that movie’. So will there be any alternate timeline
stuff in this game?
Craig Zinkievich: There will definitely alternate timeline
stuff in there. If not the Abrams universe stuff at launch, you can’t
make a Star Trek game without going back in time, without going to the
mirror universe, without going to these alternate realities. There are
definitely places in Star Trek Online, where you go to these places. We
don’t expect you to go back to the Abrams timeline at launch, but that
is an option to add after launch.
STO graphic shows the game’s setting in the prime timeline
(click to enlarge)
Star Trek Online comes out in 2010. Retailers are taking pre-orders
for March 2010 release, however Crytpic have not yet set an official
date or price.
In 2010 the long wait will be over when Cryptic releases its massive
multiplayer online game, Star Trek Online. In an exclusive interview
with TrekMovie, STO executive producer Craig Zinkievich talks about how
he will balance between hardcore and first time gamers, what you can do
besides blow things up, We also have three exclusive new screenshots.
INTERVIEW: Star Trek Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich
TrekMovie: Do you think of Star Trek Online as being more for
gamers, who may have an interest in Star Trek, or for Star Trek fans,
who may be interested in gaming.
Craig Zinkievich: I think there is stuff there for both. Both
audiences will have different measuring sticks and approach the game
with different expectations. We are Star Trek fans and we are gamers,
so we are making a game we are excited to play. Some of the time that
is a really really good impressive game mechanic, and some of the time
it is ‘I was just interacting with the Guardian of Forever, that is
awesome!’. So I think it depends on the player. I think both of those
audiences are going to find really cool stuff in here.
TrekMovie: In our polling, it appears a number of first time
gamers, and certainly first time ‘Massive Multiplayer Online’ players
are going to try this out. What are you going to do for them–to
accommodate these total newbies?
Craig Zinkievich: I think you look to your tutorial. You look
toward opening up content features and functionality to players as they
advance over time, so you don’t dump everybody in right with a full
functioning, with all the buttons and everything that is there right
off the bat. You kind of introduce them to the mechanics as time goes
on. I think that games in general, over the past four to five years,
have really learned this and rather than expecting that their player is
coming with preconceived knowledge, or expecting the player is coming
already having read the manual even, they’re taking the player and
right off the bat it is ‘let’s teach you from scratch what this game
is.’ I think that gaming in general has exploded market-wise into
people that aren’t gamers, so most everyone developing games is
thinking about how is the non-gamer going to approach this game. So for
us it is obvious what you said, there are people who don’t consider
themselves gamers, definitely not MMOers, trying out Star Trek Online.
And we need to make sure they can come in and the game is accessible
and they can be taught all of those things that the MMOer is going to
take for granted and skip through that part of the tutorial.
Some Gorn get blasted (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: There is a lot more to Star Trek, from TV and the
movies, than combat. But a lot of the stuff we see from you guys,
previews and images, that has a big focus on combat. What is there to
do in this game besides combat?
Craig Zinkievich: It is true. It is game, it is an MMO, there
is a great deal of combat within the game. That being said, we want to
make sure that there are outlets and other things to do that everything
you do in the game does not revolve around combat. There are social
areas where people can go and role-play and hang out and do what they
want to do. There is a harvest-crafting sort of game play so you can go
out and scan anomalies, collect data, and bring that stuff back to
Memory Alpha and help advance your character that way. There are some
other things that we haven’t talked about, but we will be, that are
from the non-combat side of things.
TrekMovie: Can you move your way up the ranks, from Lieutenant to Admiral, without ever engaging in combat or rarely engaging in combat?
Craig Zinkievich: You will have to engage your character in
combat to move your character up through Admiral. We want to make sure
there is non-combat gameplay in the game, but it is a core part of the
game, especially at launch. I suspect we will be adding a whole lot of
roles the universe as time goes on, as we expand. Hopefully we will
allow you to not be part of Starfleet, be a Ferengi trader and kind of
advance your character like that. But if you are going to be enlisted
in Starfleet in a time of war, you are going to end up doing combat.
TrekMovie: You will be able to chose a science background and
there will be ships that are more for scientific research, does that
mean ’science missions’ are more available to you than other players?
Craig Zinkievich: There will be some content differences
based on your ship and based on what your career is, but really what it
is, it really defines what role you end up playing in the game. If you
are a tactical officer, you are obviously going to go in guns blazing.
If you are a science officer, maybe you are playing more of a support
role and looking more towards the harvest sort of game play. It doesn’t
change the content you are experiencing, but it changes the way you
approach that content.
A Federation ship explores some Borg wreckage (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: Star Trek Online has two warring factions, The
Federation and the Klingon Empire. We did a poll on the site and it
showed that the vast majority were more interested in playing on the
Federation side. Plus it seems there are more Federation fleets forming
as well. Are you concerned there is going to be an imbalance in the
game?
Craig Zinkievich: No. Someone PMed me your poll, we did a
poll very early on after we announced the game, and our numbers were
right around the same numbers. So we have really tried to make sure
that the design supports that natural imbalance. So the Klingon
gameplay is going to be much different than what the Federation is
getting. It is going to be a lot more focused on the PvP [Player vs.
Player] and focused on the houses within the Klingon Empire than really
big story episodic exploration-focused that the Federation faction is
going to have.
TrekMovie: How will you be handling music in the game?
Craig Zinkievich: There is a lot of original music created by
Cryptic Studios in the game. Also, there is a lot of the music we are
also doing based on the themes from Star Trek music pieces that you
will recognize. So you got to have the Pon Farr theme and the Klingon
warbird theme and that kind of stuff you can expect.
TrekMovie: One of the biggest complaints with MMOs is the
notion of ‘grinding’, as in doing boring repetitive tasks over and over
in order to level up. You guys have talked about how you are going to
avoid that, can you give an example of how you have solved that problem?
Craig Zinkievich: The terminology of grinding means different
things to different people. In some games, grinding is what happens
when you no longer have any directed content — nobody is telling you to
do a specific mission and you just go out and kill guys to level up.
One of the things that we really bring to the table and want to make
sure that happens in the gameplay hours that take place in Star Trek
Online, is that there are always choices as to what you can do. There
is always episodic content, there is exploration stuff, there is always
some sort of PvP thing, some sort of large-scale fleet action you can
participate in. At any point that stuff in kind of in your face, like
‘hey do you want to do this, or do this’ and that we don’t just kind of
leave the player to their own devices. It is still up to you as to what
you chose to do, but at no point in time will you be ‘I don’t know what
to do.’ I think that is how we are getting around the grind.
TrekMovie: Regarding ship customization, what can and can’t you do to your ship?
Craig Zinkievich: Within a configuration, if you look at the
website and what has been updated recently, light cruiser would be a
configuration, also research science vessel, cruiser, those are all
different configurations of ships. What we want is for you to be able
to look at a player and his ship, and know what configuration he is
flying. So you can look at say an Olympic and a Sovereign, and those
are two totally different configurations of ships. So you can look at
an Olympic and say maybe the sphere can be different and the hull can
be different and swap out the nacelles, but you can still say that it
is an Olympic and not a Sovereign. So within a configuration you can
swap out the saucer, the stantions, the nacelles, the secondary hull,
plus you have sorts of different options, like the plating.
Ship combat in Star Trek Online (click to enlarge)
TrekMovie: Is there currency in the game? Is it latinum?
Craig Zinkievich: There is currency. There is latinum for
inter-faction trading. Within the Federation there is ‘Starfleet merit’
that you gain and there are ‘energy credits’ that you use. They say
there is no form of currency in the Federation, but the farmer in
France can’t just say ‘look I feel like having a Sovereign ship.’ You
do end up having to earn reputation and put your time in to gain those
resources within Starfleet.
TrekMovie: Are there consequences in the game. Say for
example I am a Federation player and I violate the prime directive, or
a Klingon player acts cowardly or without honor. Is there a penalty?
Craig Zinkievich: There are some storylines in the game that
change based on the actions that you have, but there are no sweeping
rules like you described.
TrekMovie: OK, so let’s say I am on a Federation first contact mission, but I decide to kill everyone, can I do that? What is to stop me?
Craig Zinkievich: Currently we don’t have a choice that
drastic that you can take. Any first contact mission, what stops you is
that we don’t let you fire your weapons on the friendly guy. So you
can’t actually target that poor new species and wipe them out.
TrekMovie: You guys use the term ‘fleet actions’, which are
also called ‘raids’. Can you describe that, and can they be something
as big as something like the Battle of Wolf 359, where everyone is a
player character?
Craig Zinkievich: Yes. Fleet actions are the really really
large scale battles in the game. One of the fleet actions in the game
is Starbase 24 is being attacked by the Klingons. On the Federation
side this is a PvE [Player vs. Entity], where you go into this system
there are over a hundred Klingons attacking this system. You need to go
into it with your team, as well as a bunch of other teams, in order to
beat them back, get onto the starbase, get some data off that starbase
before it is over run or you end up winning the battle. And in PvP
there are these fleet action sized events where you get like forty
players on each side and you go at it. So in both PvE and PvP, there
are Wolf 359 sized battles.
TrekMovie: After the Star Trek movie came out, you
guys put up a graphic that explains the prime timeline, where your game
is set, and the alternative timeline, where the new movie is set. I
think most people get that. But next year when this game is on the
shelf at Best Buy, some people are bound to pick it up and think ‘hey
Star Trek, I loved that movie’. So will there be any alternate timeline
stuff in this game?
Craig Zinkievich: There will definitely alternate timeline
stuff in there. If not the Abrams universe stuff at launch, you can’t
make a Star Trek game without going back in time, without going to the
mirror universe, without going to these alternate realities. There are
definitely places in Star Trek Online, where you go to these places. We
don’t expect you to go back to the Abrams timeline at launch, but that
is an option to add after launch.
STO graphic shows the game’s setting in the prime timeline
(click to enlarge)
Star Trek Online comes out in 2010. Retailers are taking pre-orders
for March 2010 release, however Crytpic have not yet set an official
date or price.
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