It’s Funny Because William Shatner Is A Shaman
Apparently making games is hard. And expensive. From Tobold’s blog:
The reader who goes by the symbols = # # = pointed out the news that Perpetual Entertainment, the company that cancelled Gods & Heroes to concentrate on Star Trek Online, liquidated its assets last month and is now under new ownership under the name Perpetual, LLC. A letter was distributed to the employees stating that STO would be redesigned to be “more casual”, and could possibly be financed by microtransactions instead of monthly fees.
Which brought me to F13 (via Tipa), which brought me to the MOGD interview with Daron Stinnett, Executive Producer of Star Trek Online. Stinnet seems to have seen the writing on the wall back in September:
So, when do I get my first ship? “Everyone gets their own ship,” said Daron, “Each player starts out with a small shuttle early on in the game, and then they graduate to successively larger ships as they gain in rank. They use that ship to get around the galaxy to fight against other enemy races, and to do missions for Starfleet on various planets. They will be able to group up with other players in space or on the ground.”
Which promted this spectacularly poignant F13 comment:
Remember that episode where Kirk, Bones, Spock, Sulu, and Scotty, flew their pack of ships to lower Neutral Zone, and camped some Romulans? Scotty forgot to repair, so the group broke up early. One of my favorites.
Stinnet on classes:
Star Trek Online will have classes similar to existing MMOGs, although they are called “professions”. I asked if they will be tightly focused and defined, or if they’ll have overlapping skills, allowing development of the quintessential “mage-tank”. Stinson responded, “We are going to make pretty well-defined categories for the professions.”
Stinnet on starships:
“The largest ships, the ones that players dream of walking around on and working with, those are the equivalent of “player cities.” It gives us a way to fill up these spaceships with real people instead of NPCs.” The alternative would have required people who control massive ships to sit around in a hub somewhere looking for enough people to man something of that scale. Not exactly fun; we all hate waiting.
(Yes, there’s simply no alternative to player cities starships. I mean, we could have gouged out your eyes with a potato peeler, but we chose to give you player cities starships instead.)
Stinnet on groups:
My next query was about group size; will three be as effective as eight? “It’s not something we’ve finalized yet, but we’re probably looking at a typical group size of five,” said Stinnett, going on to say “We’ll also have raids, called ‘Armadas’ and guilds, which we call ‘Fleets’.”
The game will also boast crafting, called “Space Crafting.” It’s like crafting, but get this: IT’S IN SPACE! Also, you can only use the transporter if you’re 20th level (called “levels”) or higher. At 50th level you get an epic transporter.
§
Related Posts
- Don’t Worry, That Slightly Yeasty Scent Is Just William Shatner Marking His Territory
- Wayback Machines Are Teh Funny
- Mark Jacobs to EA: “BTW Your Tea Is Floating In The Harbor, Bitches”
- Don’t Worry, J. J. Abrams Will Eventually Make It Cool With Shakey Cams And Improbable Plot Twists
- Grab Your Gun And Bring In The Cat
Welcome back. Was the turkey good?
Interesting topic, I foresee everyone on the same ship will be fighting each other for the captain’s seat, that is where the epic battle will start (or forced to hire NPCs, that will be a great idea).
JuJutsu, make a blog please before your name is taken. Right now anyone can fake to be you and there is no one place to verify that.
BWAHAHAHAHA!!
Yes, Captain Kirk is a Shaman… He told us he is, right? Perhaps some icons shouldn’t move to MMO? Would it be better if the guild leader was a captain of a starship and the rest of the guild served on the ship to support the adventures that they embark upon for Starfleet? Hmmm…
I call Mr. Scott!! Damn it Amber, I’m a Dr. not an Engineer! Er wait… That’d be Bones, eh?
*grin*
Turkey was great! Spending time with family is always a mixed bag, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Except for the Cranpires. (That’s a Cranberry Vampire.) I could definitely do with fewer Cranpires around the holidays.
K1rk64: LFC
ROFLSPOCK: lolololol
Sulu: qqq
EnsignRicky: rez plz
That must be the most uninteresting, soul-sucking work experience out there. Everybody marking time on that project must be aware of the level of failure awaiting the launch. How depressing.
It’s sad that Gods and Heroes, which really _did_ sound like it had some new ideas, got canceled for this.
No way. I was in beta for SW:G and that MMO was ‘da bomb-diggity’ and anyone who says that this game will not topple the 9-million-pound gorilla of WoW is just a Blizzard fan-boi and they need to go home and stop touching themselves.
In reality, I was actually in beta for Star Wars: Galaxies. I am glad I was so I did not waste any money actually buying that POS. That being said, I look forward to getting into beta for STO so I can see how badly it fails and scratch it off of my games I need to buy.
Oh, this board doesn’t read brackets. I had sarcasm brackets around the first paragraph in my above post. I am not actually that trollish.
The second paragraph is all snark-from-the-heart though.
I can imagine the brainstorming:
Exec: “What we need is World of Warcraft…IN SPACE!”
Designer: “Uh…but…Star Trek is a valued franchise with fans the world over who are notoriously picky and particular. We had better get this one right!”
Other Designer: “Yeah, remember Star Wars Galaxies?”
Exec: (looks blank) “Did you hear what I said? IN SPACE! Nobody’s done that before, right? Right?”
Designer: “Right. We’ll get right on that.” (Updates resume on his BlackBerry.)
Can I be a red shirt? Can I, hunh? Please… oh, pleasepleaseplease I so wanna die and re-rez for the next episode. That’s realistic. I mean, the game would be like the series that way. I will TOTALLY sign up for the game if I can log on, step out of a transporter beam, look behind a big rock, and get eaten by a Cranpire.
Or, if it’s like SL, I’d like to have sex with blue chix in zero-G. Either or.
This is why you all are my *real* family. When I mentioned Cranpires at the “adult” table, I just got stares. Then I got sent back to the kids table.
True story: When I was little, my aunt was putting some cranberry sauce on my plate. I said I didn’t want any. She said “you have to take some, it’s traditional.” I took some, decided I liked it, and a little later on I said “may I have some more traditional please?” Ever since, cranberry sauce has been affectionately called “traditional” at my house.
The Cranpire story is true also. I might have had a little too much of my cousin’s plum wine by that point, and it really did seem like a funny word at the time.
I know how you feel. No one appreciates my funny words, either. Bajingon. Say it out loud. Tell me that’s not ridiculous. It’s also Star Trek related, but that’s sort of just coincidence and I’ll let you guys figure it out.
Secondly, why is it that people who don’t know what makes a franchise good always end up at the helm when moving it to a new medium? I shouldn’t say, “always” I suppose, but this seems sadly common. It’s almost as if they buy this IP in order to leverage the extant fan base and then make a list of things to do. At the top of this list is “1. Alienate existing fans in order to negate the money we spent on this IP.” I’m no calculition or anything, but that doesn’t seem to make fiscal sense to me. Maybe that’s why I’m not running some big company or whatever.
Ben…I think it’s because of the underlying contempt most upper-management types have for the medium of Science Fiction and Fantasy and fans of same. It’s always struck me that those in charge of studios or large production houses have to fake their sincerity about supporting the fan base or remaining true to the material. As such, they always have the impulse to try and “broaden the appeal” by making the game/film/whatever “easy for the newcomer to understand/get into.” This means, in film adaptations, adding T&A, idiot sidekicks, or juvenile humor…in games, it means following whatever paradigm seems to make the most money. Therefore for SW:G we got EverQuest In Space and for Star Trek we’ll probably get WoW In Space.
Let’s face it. To many of the Money Men (and Women) true fans of the medium are the the weird ones in costumes going to geek conventions – and our opinions are considered those of fringe loonies. But, you know, it’s funny; every so often someone’s let loose on the material and stays mostly true to it – Peter Jackson and LOTR, for instance – and guess what? The films make a tremendous amount of money. It’s unfortunate that the adaptations we see of popular material are good by exception rather than by rule.
Should I be worried that, curious about cranpires, I googled for them and found a picture of a cranpire?
http://www.watchfarscape.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25456
Search for cranpire to flip down the page and see a picture of a red cranpire.
tannenburg: Yeah. As I was reading your post I was about to say something about sucking the original fan base of all its money (much as a cranpire might? I have no idea).
I think that these people are (probably) so obsessed in their personal lives with being “normal” that they can’t conceive of the level of fandom that some of us have for some franchises. I actually don’t know if I could match up even modestly with an average geek on any given topic, but I at least understand it. In any case, they don’t see that there are already people lined up with bills in hand to give over to them. They don’t know that that’s there and so they don’t see it walking away when they “broaden the appeal”. They pick up extra hits in the box office, say, from the general audience who’s never heard of, you know, Iron Man or whatever, but none of them were ever going to buy the DVD. And they’re also losing the DVD sales to people who were going to because they’re such huge Iron Man fans, except they hated the movie and so went home and tortured small mammals instead.
I have no idea if the Iron Man movie is an example of this. I am neither very familiar with the original source nor the movie information that’s out. I just picked a dork thing off the top of my head. I also don’t want to imply that fans of Iron Man would take small mammal torture as an acceptable #2 hobby. I hope my meaning was clear in all this. To tell the truth… I think I may have lost the thread of it myself.
The are so many shiny things on my desk.
Geek is fashionable. But not THAT fashionable, OK? I’m going to get a little fashionable geek cred by optioning this crap that I don’t understand but will make a pile of dough. I’m then going to transition my fashionable geek cred into more fashionable distancing myself from you weirdos while ripping you all off Hollywood cock-sucker cred. You know, like X-Men 3. It’s like in High School when I fucked the nerdy girl so she would do my homework, then totally dusted her after she had ditched her world for an attempt at mine. The sweet, sweet sounds of people drowning in betrayal are only improved by the cha-ching of taking all their money, too.
You’ll always have a home with us, Amber. A funky, twisted, scrambled, disorderly home that kinda smells like Cheetos and Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum. A home where your creepy uncle is only creepy to other people. A home where everyone knows that the only ways to kill a cranpire are to smother it with garlic mash potatoes or drive a breadstake through its heart. A home that most people would run screaming from, and you/we would run screaming around in.
I got dibs on the pleather bean-bag chair.
Breadstakes are delicious. And more
deliciouseffective if they’re garlic breadstakes.