It appears that Perpetual’s version of Star Trek Online has been cancelled.
I had an interesting conversation at work about this today. Rather than try to overanalyze or punditize it, I’ll just quote it verbatim!
Me: “Did you hear about Star Trek Online?”
D: “Big shock there… that’s an impossible license. THE impossible license.”
Me (meekly): “I think I could write a decent Star Trek MMO…”
D: “OF COURSE YOU DO! EVERYONE does! That’s the Trek curse! EVERYONE thinks they can write the ONE Star Trek game that will boldly work where no Star Trek game has worked before!”
Me: “(You didn’t actually say that exactly, but I’m just filling in your lines with cool catch phrases.)”
D: “As long as they are GOOD catch phrases. But my point is that every designer thinks they can make a Star Trek game because they all watched Star Trek as a kid and think they *know* the license. But everyone has different expectations of the license…”
M: “Does it pass the wife test? Because my wife will watch Star Wars, but she won’t watch Star Trek.”
Me: “But see, my wife loves Star Trek, but she is bored by Star Wars. She thinks it has too many explosions.”
D: “See? Everyone has their own expectations.”
There have been a few good Star Trek games. Some of them even playable online.
There have been some Star Trek games that were good simply by being “Star Trek In Name Only” – basically ignoring the license and making, say, a fun shoot-em-up.
There have been some Star Trek games that should have been good, but, well, had some issues.
And then… oh god. The bad games. They are all so very, very, very bad.
Now, I have no idea where Perpetual’s version of Star Trek Online would have fallen, but I can say that this:
As a die hard Trekker of 30 years standing, the Diku-mud standard screenshot of a Rogue fighting a murloc – I mean a Security officer fighting a Gorn made me weep silent tears.
Which just means that everyone’s perfect Trek game is different. Much like, well, other licenses.
#1 by Apache on January 14th, 2008
Lowest bidders developing AAA games for the win
#2 by sanyaweathers on January 14th, 2008
Shit, you have to pick WHICH flavor of Trek first.
A TNG fan is just not going to love anything in the Delta quadrant. An Original Recipe fan needs to see a combat move involving both hands together thumping someone on the back. Are the Klingons allies or enemies?
My expectations for a Trek game have to be set in terms of the colors and the time period before I even dare to dream.
#3 by hellfire on January 14th, 2008
Your co-workers are right. This game could never be “good”. I’m as guilty as the next guy for wanting to see it go, but there’s just no way.
In fact I think Trek has it worse off than Star Wars does as far as the license goes. With the EU there are a TON of places where you can tell good stories and have great adventures that are completely Star Warsy, but don’t tread on any sacred cows. SOE completely failed to do that, but there’s hope for KotOR-online, right?
Star Trek is good because of the stories that are told, the universe and all those toys are just vehicles to tell the story. Star Wars is exactly the opposite – those toys, the settings, the vehicles and EVERYTHING are all part of the story and the atmosphere. It wouldn’t be the same without those pieces.
Even if they set the game in the middle of the Dominion War there’s just not enough. You need breathing room!
#4 by J. on January 14th, 2008
oh perpetual
why must you pretend to be a real company
#5 by guttertalk on January 14th, 2008
You missed the recent badness.
#6 by Georgia on January 14th, 2008
I’m impressed that there’s actually a screenshot of a working game though. I mean, I thought it was just in preproduction with no real code available for it yet. Regardless, I do agree that it would be hard to nail down a solid MMO based on Star Trek. Like Sanya said, it all depends on the “flavor” the studio decides to go with. I liked Voyager, but I don’t think a lot of other people did.
#7 by Div Devlin on January 14th, 2008
Was P2 not being sued by someone?
So, this means they lost the lawsuit and they lost the liscense?
I thought it had something to do with the other game they were making on the Romans, could not account for the funding and ceased development, leaving their investors with empty pockets.
I’m a bit out of the loop.
#8 by Aler on January 14th, 2008
I have yet to see a game (any game) which captures the Star Trek flavor.
Watch a bunch of Star Trek episodes, at random. Any series, any season. Count how many space battles you see. Or conquering planets. Yet this is what every Star Trek game consists of.
What all the Trek series had in common were space adventures. Go somewhere new, find something weird, get in trouble, get out of trouble, off to the next adventure.
Nazi planet? Roman gods? Giant space crystals? Giant space amoeba? Planet eaters? Space pirates? Nomadic space travelers? Primitive societies under observation? Lizard men? Green skinned women? Robots? All of these things are awesome.
I want to play a game where I fly a ship through the universe and have space adventures. Surely it would be possible to make this game. Why doesn’t this happen? Why is every space game so boring?
#9 by Brian 'Psychochild' Green on January 14th, 2008
I think Aler just demonstrated why STO would be a bust: yes, all those things are cool, but they’re not repeatable. In other words, the first time you, uh, “engage” with a green-skinned woman it’s pretty cool. The second time? Well, okay. Fifth time? *yawn* And, no, the woman being orange-skinned doesn’t make it a whole new encounter. This is the “content problem” in a new skin. (lol)
Further, these types of encounters require a LOT more content than the current staple of our games, fantasy combat. Most of the time in Star Trek the crew was facing impossible situations and had to figure a clever way out. Yeah, sometimes it was by spamming the “technobabble” special button, but that’s what made the show interesting. Doing the same thing in a game isn’t quite so interesting. (But, it’d be funny to see a game where the most overpowered special ability was “reverse the tachyon flow!”)
In the end, we see the same thing that has come up before: the elements that make for a good story (movie, TV series, etc) aren’t the same things that make a good (online) game. Sometimes you can get it right, but you really need to be able to focus on elements that work well in both media. IMNSHO, I think Star Wars has more of this than Star Trek. We’ll see if KotORO proves me correct.
#10 by Aler on January 14th, 2008
Brian makes a good point. For an MMO to work, players have to be ‘free agents’, doing good (or evil) for their own purposes.
Star Trek doesn’t work like that – Star Fleet (or the Klingon equivalent, or the Romulans, or the Cardassians, or…) are all structured military organizations in which captains are accountable through a chain of command. This doesn’t make sense in an MMO format, and any attempt to shoehorn it into the common structure will just make for an awkward fit. As far as I could tell, ‘guilds’ in the Star Trek MMO would be crews of a ship, which makes sense, but wouldn’t be any fun. Everyone wants to be captain, but who wants to be the barber?
Even though the results are decidedly mixed, Star Wars is a universe in which the MMO free agent format works.
I still think that a Star Trek single player game can be both fun and honest to the franchise.
#11 by Redchuck on January 14th, 2008
There have been Trek games since Netrek?
Who knew.
#12 by Tuebit on January 14th, 2008
I don’t think the world needs another standard MMO. We’ve already got the one MMO to rule them all.
What we really need is just 1 high quality MMO “engine” that we can all play. All the other studios can just license IP and develop skins.
Just imagine. In my STO skin, I’m a vulcan shooting a klingon with a laser and in your LOTRO skin, you’re a troll getting shot at by an elf with a bow.
#13 by Jester on January 14th, 2008
So Lum, what are your thoughts on STO’s new Captain then? Is Jack Emmert up to the task?
#14 by Scott Jennings on January 14th, 2008
I hadn’t seen where the identity of STO’s new developer had been announced, and wouldn’t comment on the ability or lack of ability of any particular developer in any event. As this blog entry itself states, the license is cursed! CUUURSED!
#15 by Apache on January 14th, 2008
Cryptic Studios is trying to get it
#16 by Mist on January 15th, 2008
The license is cursed for more than just MMOs. All but a handful of Voyager episodes were awful. Enterprise was almost as bad, saved by a handful of somewhat-almost-likeable characters. DS9 was good, but only because it deviated heavily from the Trek formula. Three out of the last four movies were terrible.
Far be it from me to bash Trek. Trek done right makes amazing TV and solid movies. Even bad Trek I will watch JUST because its Trek. In order for Trek to be done right, you need incredible writing, and no MMO yet has had writing even improaching good, let alone incredible. Also, I’m gonna go out on a limb, but I think the Trek franchise in general is at this point is in a major slump that could possibly take all new writers to get it out of, and they would need to take it in an entirely new direction. It’d have to be true to the original vision but it would need to go in some kind of direction that would make it relevant to today, and, who knows, this new direction MIGHT be workable in an MMO.
So, if I was a studio looking to get this license, I’d get your creative team and your writers working on some really creative new direction to Trek that would fit in an interactive online game.
#17 by Jeff Freeman on January 15th, 2008
And that is why you could not make a decent Star Trek MMO, even if you could write something that everyone agrees would be brilliant (except those who don’t, but let’s suppose none of them matter).
No one is going to trust that license to a treatment unlike all other MMO’s (by which I mean WoW), and Wow-trek wouldn’t be decent (exceptions being in some designs that go fairly weird in other ways).
Personally, I’d find it pretty challenging to deal with even if somehow I were trusted to make it unlike WoW.
Not impossible, but it’d involve more effort than I like to exert…
Especially with the way that TNG established the Federation as being the biggest kid on the block (and the only kid with a sweet ride, whose girl is the most popular cheerleader in school, is captain of the football team, with the tough choice of going to college on an academic scholarship or a football scholarship), even if all his close friends are much less fortunate and constantly in need of his kind intervention…
The original series just sent some dudes off five-years that-a-way to find new enemies, when the Federation had two serious threats that it knew of already.
Enterprise more or less did the same, but sent hillbillies instead of cowboys, in a new-fangled machine they didn’t know nothin’ about and had no business ridin’ in no how.
DS9 was still entirely the Federation of TNG, but now and always in a very special episode with the Fed’s very most misfortunate friend of them all.
And finally, Voyager, not anywhere near anything of importance to humanity, no longer singing along with Star Trek’s song about humanity, but it’s own dirty little ditty about a captain losing her entire ship in the very first episode, and not even recovering from the disaster in Part II, next week, as every other captain had before her, in their very worst situations.
This was to show that women could be as good as Man Captains, and even made a special point of how she stopped to ask for directions right away, as if to suggest that in some ways a woman might even be better.
I feel like I “get” Star Trek so well that it ought to be easy for me to work with, but no… maybe the problem is I understand it too well.
I’d beg for it to be Star Trek Rebooted The Movie Online, really.
Maybe TOS in a universe with its own future ahead… Would the cold-war parallel resonate with today’s youth?
#18 by The N00b on January 15th, 2008
Eh, I’d like to see some heavy Eve-Online influences in any ST:Whatevergeneration game…but then I only played the beta for it =\
#19 by Freakazoid on January 15th, 2008
I liked the interior shots of the galaxy class starship. I also liked how complicated they wanted to make engineering. I would’ve given it a shot, diku or not, but it was obvious they were talking more than they could deliver.
#20 by Dren on January 15th, 2008
There is a way to make the game and it would be good. I refuse to think it can’t be done.
Yes, everyone wants to be the captain. Ok, run with that. Everyone is a captain. However, every captain starts off with a modest assignment, right? You can’t just jump into the captain’s seat of an “Enterprise.” There are lots of other uses for captains all the way down to cargo freighter or mining vessels with a crew of….2.
Money? No such thing. Everything is influence and ranking. Use influence as a way of getting better crews (the top people in their fields,) and dibs on the best/newest equipment. Ranking is used as a way to update to new positions, which means bigger/cooler ships with more crew/responsibilities. Both ranking and influence are built up by doing your job right and satisfying Starfleet.
Giving up is too easy. Somebody do it right…please.
#21 by VPellen on January 15th, 2008
I think the real question here is:
What the heck is an Elephant doing on an alien planet?
#22 by Njal on January 15th, 2008
What Dren said … and make phasers one hit kills that way you don’t have to discourage pvp, everyone would hate it anyhow.
#23 by Zach Moniker on January 15th, 2008
Like everyone before me, I think the chances of a good Star Trek MMO are slim to none. I don’t remember Captain Picard grinding for his epic uniform. And really, what is there to customize? Does everyone own a ship?
#24 by chabuhi on January 15th, 2008
Didn’t Perpetual cancel “Gods & Heroes” in order to commit all resources to STO? Are they going to re-light G&H? Anyone know?
#25 by culannmac on January 15th, 2008
I love Trek, but I had serious reservations about this game. To make a Star Trek game work you would need to make a next generation game, one that would put RPG back into the MMO.
The model of all current MMOs is the Skinner Box; whack a monster get a treat, whack a bigger monster get a bigger treat. That would be a horrible model for Star Trek. Star Trek as others have said is story driven, bringing 12 Romulan scout ears to Lt. Commander Worf for a +3 phaser would just not cut it.
The game would have to be dynamic, purposeful, and complex. A game which isn’t loot driven but instead goal driven with an emphasis on RP. The problem with Role Playing is that it is acting; most of us aren’t actors, so we don’t know how to do it or don’t do it very.
So software and hardware tools would have be incorporated in to the game that would encourage if not out right force role playing (i.e., you would choose a group of assigned names, so no player chosen names like “Captain Fatass McGrabber).
Other tools needed would be:
Advanced AI that realistically interacts with PCs
Voice Chat tools that lip-syncs and sounds like your character
Dynamic worlds that players can interact and change
Purposeful PvP that has beginnings and endings. ( Most MMO PvP is like the ST episode “Day of the Dove”)
Realistic weapons (Phasers that incapacitate on one hit) and tools.
A game like this would require software and technology that doesn’t exist at the moment. A game such as this would be terribly expensive and would have a very steep learning curve. I don’t know if a game like this is possible. I would play any MMO like this; however I’m not sure if most other people will.
#26 by Derek Smart on January 15th, 2008
The only feasible way that any MMO based on the ST license would work, is if it were
(a) based on the Next Gen or Voyager
(b) it entailed self-contained instanced stories which are refreshed periodically
Since the very nature of MMO games is to
(a) do combat
(b) amass stats/wealth
That sort of notion is completely lost on any IP based on Star Trek which is not primarily about combat, but rather about exploration and adventure.
So, the question is, how do you make a fun MMO that is based on exploration and adventure, while keeping the sucke…I mean gamers, paying for it month after month? Now *that* is the hundred pound gorilla in the room.
As I posted in my dev blog, I already predicted that this would fail, right from speaking with them back in 2004.
http://www.3000ad.com/forum/index.php?s=&showtopic=46000002&view=findpost&p=158097
My guess is that whoever gets this license and having no experience with the Star Trek mythos let alone space games in general, is just going to be burning through someone else’s money because it can and ultimately will fail.
NCsoft just last week canned their space game MMO as well. Not to mention the fact that they already had experienced space game developers (NetDevil) under their wing during the failed (and canned) Auto Assault. They’re now working on Jumpgate Evolution. Developing and marketing space games is bad enough as it is, let alone trying to develop and market an MMO based on such a difficult genre to sell.
#27 by Roc on January 15th, 2008
Trek’s doable.
It wouldn’t be everyone’s vision of Star Trek, but Star Trek, episode to episode doesn’t fit everyone’s vision of Star Trek. Who cares? (WoW doesn’t even fit everyone’s vision of WoW, ponder that) Trek is a series of good sci-fi stories told in a familiar universe, with more focus on problem solving than laser blasts (not that they’re devoid of action). Like X-Files, it’s at its best when telling episodic tales.
So… pick an episode of Trek. Make it a series of quests with less focus on hit point attrition and more focus on multiple resolution options based on player capability/demeanor. So ’save the colony’ loses ‘kill 10′ and gains an arc that lets players choose: murder the marauding foozles or bribe the leader or destroy their secret weapon or reason with them or sleep with the blue chick (that always seems to help), etc.
Does it matter that Ensign Bob would have to help Gamma Prime after Lt Fred already did it? No. Of course not. Players are past that kind of disconnect. They’re willing to meet games half-way. Everyone loves the Defias storyline regardless.
Would it have the content problem? Of course. All MUDs do. You’d need lots of people writing and designing quests. Is it the end of the world? No. Some people would burn through the content in a few /played days. Many more wouldn’t. And with a Trek license, you’re not targeting the WoW/EQ raid crowd. (At least you shouldn’t be.) Your core players will move much more slowly. They wont’ be driven by the ‘leet gear’ of people up the chain. They’re driven by their desire for more stories. (Which is why you reward them with access to more stories, not by giving them ‘leet gear’ and telling them to redo what they just did ten more times.)
As I see it, it’d wind up more or less like DDO. Instead of sections of a hub city unlocked as you progress, you’re doing different tours on different ships, earning rank rather than levels (rank as a minor reward to signify ‘been there, done that’). ‘Dungeons’ are replaced with instanced story settings. Maybe it’s an away mission, maybe it’s a holodeck/bar/engineering deck setting – go crazy. Crib from the catalogue like mad.
If you need a raid-ish end-game, have a set of ‘group only’ storylines unlocked when people top out their rank. Swap ‘guild’ with ‘crew’ and give guilds their own ship. ‘Raids’ get swapped out with ‘bigger’ story arcs.
Just make sure you drop the holy trinity, drop grinding, drop hit point attrition and focus on stories that match the tone and feel of at least one Trek episode.
#28 by Mr_PeaCH on January 15th, 2008
In “my” Star Trek MMO…
Everyone who hasn’t capped their level and who doesn’t possess the highest tier of elite or epic gear has for their avatar the guy or gal in ‘the red shirt’.
But then I’m old skool like that.
#29 by Dan on January 15th, 2008
Isn’t Assassin’s Creed basically a Star Trek game? It’s HoloDeck adventures!
In all seriousness, a serialized HoloDeck adventures star trek game would be a brilliant idea.
#30 by Damion S on January 15th, 2008
My wife thinks the only way to do Trek right is to abstract out all the activities, a la Puzzle Pirates.
So far, I haven’t heard an idea I think would work better.
#31 by Mist on January 15th, 2008
I’m shocked that no one else has addressed the downward direction of Trek in general, even outside of video games.
#32 by ubvman on January 16th, 2008
You can just about wrap ANY MMOG game (ANY genre) and call it a Star Trek Holo-deck adventure.
The Holo-deck was the lamiest of the lamest lazy writer cop-out in Star Trek universe. The umpteenth time a holo-deck character or scenario went awry and actually threatened the existence of the Enterprise – you’d think the Federation would shut them down. And this was with the crew of the Enterprise – On the USS Random_Bozo, the holo-crew took over and blew it up…
Anyways, the Holo-deck as presented in the ST universe ran 100% counter to human nature. It would be 24/7 porn with super-models (both sexes); NOT dickering bloody fake Leonardo DaVincis.
PS – Gaming relevance:
ST online games not doomed. Just create a good game and wrap one carefully selected isolated corner of the ST universe with it (select flavor: OS, DS9, etc.). If all else fails – go for the Holo-deck cop-out!
#33 by tannenburg on January 16th, 2008
KHAAAAAAAAAANNNNN!!!!!
Had to be said.
#34 by Viz on January 16th, 2008
ubvman, I seem to recall that the Federation was some kind of socialist paradise where the reward for doing things was self-development, so given that it doesn’t seem quite so implausible that the holodeck would be used for dickering bloody fake Leonardo DaVincis.
#35 by Jeff Freeman on January 17th, 2008
What the heck is an Elephant doing on an alien planet?
Taking over.
(Excellent book, btw)
#36 by Jeff Freeman on January 17th, 2008
Incidentally, the best idea I’ve heard was to set it in the parallel evil mustache universe.
Character customization might be a bit more limited, but it’d be worth it!