Pouring explosives on the STO fire…
The folks on various Star Trek fansites are not pleased with my previous post, and I can’t say I’m surprised. :)
Sorry guys. Here’s the bad news:
- MMO’s are incredibly hard to make, much harder than you think. Perpetual didn’t spend thousands of man-months and fail because they’re total retards. It’s really really hard to make an MMO.
- Star Trek is extra super hard. I know nobody believes these things, and I’m okay with taking the heat for that, but it’s true.
- The developers should stay away from the fan sites early on because you guys are not fans of the upcoming Star Trek MMO. You are fans of the Star Trek MMO you each see in your heads. In 18 months, when there’s a game to actually be a fan of, then you can add to the discussion meaningfully. In the meantime, you’re just trying to inject random features into an already impossibly-complex game.
- You also are just not a good representative sample of Star Trek fans. There’s no good way to say that, and I know how insulting it sounds, but… your voice does not represent Star Trek fandom.
- Perpetual did do a fair amount of research. Real research, not internet polls. And remember how they suddenly went extra-casual? Did you suppose they suddenly lost their minds? No. Research. There’s a whole lot more Star Trek fans who are older and can only play for 20-30 minutes at a time, or who aren’t gamers and can’t deal with realistic space physics or the tedium of exploring space for 6 hours on a manned crew.
- Research shows that it would be financial suicide to make a fast-paced action game, or a realistic space game, as a AAA Star Trek MMO. There’s not a big enough fan base to support it.
- You don’t believe that last statement to be true, and that is why the devs need to ignore you for a while!
- Interacting with the fan base comes at a price. Feeding the fan PR “beast” takes a lot of time and effort, and ultimately slows down development. I think STO started building its fanbase up about a year too early, and it hurt our productivity and strained the fans. I don’t want to see that same mistake made again.
Guys, I don’t really want to play a WoW-esque Star Trek MMO either. I want to play a game where I’m Picard-esque (I even look kinda like him… well, I’m bald anyway!) and I talk my way out of problems, and I have adventures every hour on the hour. But the game I want to play costs about $600 million to make. It’s like WoW plus EVE Online plus a few dozen adventure games worth of really deep and clever content.
It’s not going to happen.
I will settle for an MMO where I can do Starfleet-esque things, where I can explore brave new worlds, and where I can see the cool places I’ve always wanted to explore. I will settle for a WoW clone with Star Trek theming. I will buy it, and if it’s decent I might even stick with it while they get the next chunk of the game done as an expansion, and then the next, and then the next.
And here’s the thing: so will you. If you’re a big enough Star Trek and MMO fan that you’ve been following this game from way back when, I already know that you will settle for this approach, because I can completely empathize. You sure won’t like it, but it’ll work.
In the mean time, the devs will be able to pick up some of the WoW player crowd, and some of the casual gamer crowd too. There’s lots of latent Star Trek fans in their 40s who would love to play occasionally, maybe a few hours a week. But it’s got to be really accessible for them to be able to play.
A few other misunderstandings I wanted to correct:
- They should absolutely listen to their core audience. It’s just that the few thousand folks on Star Trek fan sites are not a big enough core audience to be worth spending this much money on.
- I love Star Trek, and it gets really old to hear “has he even seen such-and-such?” Of course I’ve seen it. Hell, I bet I can out-Trek-trivia most of you! That’s a challenge, and I’d love to have a trivia duel if we meet up at a con or something. But the thing is, I realize that I’m in the incredibly tiny minority of people who know, say, how many symbionts are released per year from Trill.
- If I had infinite money, I would make a very different game. But I don’t, and neither does Cryptic.




I love Star Trek. I worked as the systems designer on Star Trek Online during its early preproduction period, and I was (and am) excited about the design we had come up with for the game. But that said, it seems that
Cameron Sorden on Random Battle asked a very good question recently in his post