It's official: Star Trek Online releases February 2nd, 2010

Suck to hear JP.

I really think MMO developers are missing the point of MMOs. They are quickly becoming massively single player games.

What I wanted from a Trek MMO was to have a group of people pilot a star ship. Sure, someone acts as captain, but that would be like a raid leader. The engineers make sure the ship keeps running and repairs the damage. The pilot seers the ship. Science officer scanning space. Etc... It could have been very cool.

And for the more solo play, there are ships in Trek lore that can be piloted by individuals. Some are quite powerhouses too. Maybe not floating science labs or anything, but enough to explore the universe too.

JP, I concur, there is going to be a shitstorm around this game, Star Wars fans are bad enough, ever pissed off a Trekkie?

Brian!, what you describe sounds basically like Puzzle Pirates in space.

@brian: that sounds like it would be fun if they had designed it that way. unfortunately it sounds like its going to be watered down. sad.

I agree completely but it's too late. I just hope Cryptic can handle the license and produce a quality game.

Amen on developing RP tools. Modern MMO designers seem to be braindead when it comes to the idea that implementing actual game mechanics for RP can be hugely beneficial to MMOs. Just look at the SIMS. 90% of that game is RP and it sells more than WoW does.

They also need TIME! Everyone wants to copy features from WoW except the one thing they should be copying, taking years to develop and properly test your game and not releasing it till it's done. WoW took over 5 years to develop, all the other Devs want to look over that point because they just KNOW they can do it in under 1.5-2 years with a team that's 5 times smaller.

There's some WoW props from someone who really didn't care for the game. But I'm not blind to what they did right.

Can't say much due to NDA for STO but can confirm that the beta test periods for CO (also developed by Cryptic) were limited to a couple times per week for a couple of hours only.

Cryptic has some pretty bad Beta ideals. Champions was only 2 days a week for a few hours until a few weeks before release. I don't know an MMO that has such a limited testing phase.

Of course, it resulted in a complete retooling of almost all the powers in the game the week after launch. Something that could have easily been avoided during the actual beta of the game. The problem is, if I have 3-4 hours to test a game in a week, then I am going to power through my session. If I know the servers are up 24/7, then I might take some extra time to explore the virtual corners and find more bugs.

Of course, Champions is part of a new breed of MMO-on-rails. You don't have much of a choice than to go to point A, B, C, D in that order. A far cry from earlier MMOs where you, at least, had various starting areas branching to many other areas. Or a super far cry from UO and earlier days where the world was yours to explore. Any direction was as good as any other to get kill or be killed in the wilds.

Another problem with the CO model was not only just the strange 2 times a week thing, but WHEN it was going on. I'm sorry, but I have a real job and I'm not getting paid to test MMOs, so testing a game that runs from 2100 through midnight on a Tuesday isn't something a lot of people are going to handle. The day before (or in some cases, a few hours before) e-mails informing us of when CO was going live wasn't much help, either. The entire testing system was flawed right off the bat.

Testing is supposed to find problems in the game, not just mechanically but content wise. Running testing sessions where few individuals can contribute leads to improperly functioning servers and imbalanced games. Pretty much how CO launched. Even if the resources aren't available for 24/7 testing, limited testing periods should be left to weekends, starting Friday evening and leaving it running through early Monday, using the typical workweek to iron out problems and letting it loose again the following weekend to see how it works. Otherwise, the testing period is just a horrible marketing campaign and a big waste of money.

That is what is so disappointing to me. I cannot express how much I was looking forward to CO as a "CoH 2" only to be horribly disappointed with the final product. I always loved CoH but found "end game" lacking horribly and after "raiding" Hamidon so many times it was on to WoW.