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January 20 2010

So Star Trek Online’s open beta started a little over a week ago now, and things have been quite hectic. Two days ago Cryptic released a State of the Game address, you can check the full notes for it here . Today I’m going to offer up my own two cents on some of their key points in the post. So without further ado, here we go!

The first week of Open Beta has been amazing!

We have seen more signups and players than we ever imagined we could. So very many people have shown interest in Star Trek Online and logged in to play that we’ve actually had to scramble to support everyone. Our core engineers are this very second working like crazed technology wielding madmen to improve performance and stability across the board. We’re also adding a lot more hardware to accommodate our players.

Stability and Performance

Where the heck did you all come from!?!

Reality has exceeded even our wildest expectations. We looked at numbers from Closed Beta, numbers from games we’ve worked on in the past, and some numbers that float around the games industry. Based on those numbers, we predicted that about 65% of the keys we generated would eventually turn into active players (some keys never get delivered, others are lost in spam boxes, some are never redeemed, etc.). And, we predicted about 1/6 of those redeemed keys would turn into players that game at the same time. It’s what we call our concurrent users or CCU, for short.

The actual numbers crushed our predictions.

So, we tore apart our logs and began doing a lot of extra optimization work even while we stumbled upon some truly bizarre crashes that can only appear with this sort of load. The result? The shard has been steadily improving over the first few days of Open Beta. Given the hardware we’re adding and a couple more fixes we have in the pipe, shard performance and stability should continue to improve over the coming week.

Well the first week has been amazing, that’s for sure. This statement though seems a bit out of place to me. How could they not truly know the turn-out this game would produce for the open beta? Retailers report back constantly their pre order sales numbers to the company as well the fact that each key is registered to an account on Cryptic’s website, not to mention that this intellectual property is a Juggernaut of a beast as far as its followers, who are almost all of them “hardcore” gamers. I love you guys at Cryptic quite a bit, but you had to see this one coming. With that said they have gone a long way to sure up the number and catch up. The first week has been plagued by people getting kicked out of the servers, completely unable to log in at peak hours, numerous graphical and other hardware related events have caused people to not be able to fully experience the beta as of yet. It has gotten better but so close to release of the actual game it is causing some folks concern and throwing up some red flags.

Space Combat Alpha Strikes

There appears to be an issue with enemies performing devastating Alpha strikes in space—all ships will target the first player, take him out, and move through the rest of the squadron. This makes space combat, when you’re teamed up, very difficult.

We’re addressing this in the next major patch. For now, flying in a tighter formation with your team will help.

In layman’s terms, good luck not getting blown up. I haven’t noticed this too much but that’s because my ship is Tank spec. I can take a lot of abuse and have a lot of cooldowns to blow to stay alive and slog it out. Tactical tanks are designed to take a multiple point Alpha class attack (think BIG BADABOOM). Science and escort vessels (think casters and dps here) are not designed to take that much damage. As a result some players are getting blown out of the sky repeatedly and doing nothing but corpse running some missions. Keep in mind too that as you group the game ramps up the difficulty of your mission, so an alpha strike will likely be able to one or two shot some ships. I’m glad that they are fixing this, but this is something I was hoping would have been fixed before open beta. Keeping that in mind, it’s still a beta and there is still some time to correct this.

Klingon, Klingon, Klingon

Better stores are coming to Qo’noS. You’ll be able to purchase disruptors, consoles, and all the things a proper warlord needs to improve his starship and clobber his pathetic, cowering enemies.

Your ship’s starter gear is getting an upgrade as well. You won’t be able to sell this to the store for as much as you used to, but it packs a meaner punch out of the gate.

PvP maps and queues are getting a lot of attention. We’re working on all the queue and map issues we’ve seen reported and we’re jamming as many fixes as possible into the game.

I haven’t heard anything from the Klingon end, but I guess they were sub par to federation? Doesn’t seem like that on the missions though let me tell you. Klingons, even early on, hit like a damn truck. But I guess this was needed. I don’t really know but YAY balancing!

Bridge Officers

Starting at Lt. Grade 6, new and sometimes strange recruits from Starfleet and the KDF will periodically ask to be transferred to your starship. Every few Grades, you’ll automatically receive more Bridge Officers.

By popular demand, Bridge Officers can now be immediately renamed and tailor when they join your crew. Sex and species are still off the customization block, but pretty much everything else can be meddled with.

This… is awesome! Bridge officers are a HUGE part of the game. They give you special abilities and allow you to do some amazing things with your ship and on away missions. Picking a bridge officer is as important as the ship’s gear and fitting. The idea that I will automatically receive candidates is awesome. The idea that strange recruits will request my ship, that’s even better! Part of what makes Star Trek so much fun for me is the oddball characters and alien races. Growing up reading the New Frontier books with Mackenzie Calhoun were my favorites mostly because of quirky characters. They made the stories stand out and stay with me. I am looking forward to seeing what wacky characters are sent my way to join my crew! Oh, and the idea that we can tailor them and name them is also awesome, and potentially great for RP !

UI

The build you are playing does not feature an enormous amount of work the UI team has done.

For instance, the mini-map, team window, away team controls, and many of the HUD elements have all received an overall look and feel pass. The sector maps are way more useful and the galaxy map now tells you where you are, too. A gigantic number of small fixes have also gone in to tighten up the overall HUD experience.

Klingon UI is also looking great. Icons, buttons, FX and everything else has been re-styled in true Klingon fashion. The next major patch will have you piloting a Bird of Prey using a HUD General Martok would be proud of.

Finally, and most importantly, the crew bar on the space HUD now looks like little people… But it’s so sad when they get depleted!

Lets be honest here, the UI is the unsung hero of gaming here. It can completely make or break a gaming experience for people. Cryptic has gone to great lengths to ensure great UI’s in every game they make. Most recently in Champions Online you can really see their support and amazing UI work. It allows you to move all the elements around as you see fit, which is quite the undertaking for a game company. Right now the UI in STO is very simplistic in nature. It has everything you need, and you can move things around. It has a few cookies here and there (like the very Star Trek looking icons in ship mode) but nothing really dazzling… yet.  I’m looking forward to seeing these changes in effect and seeing how things are going to look especially when I’m piloting my ship (give me something out of The Next Generation console looking type interface and I’m a happy geek!).

Exploration Improvements

We’ve fixed many bugs in star cluster missions. We’re finding and crushing them. You target ‘em and we fire the torpedoes. So keep those bugs coming, please.

More alien races and stranger alien races will appear with greater frequency in those clusters now. Some are friendly and in need of assistance… Others, not so much.

This is good. This is very very good. Right now there’s not a whole lot of variety in the “random” ships and races we’re encountering in beta. I had thought it was a function of the beta to keep things simple while bugs were fleshed out. I might have been right… maybe. I like the fact that they are squashing the bugs being highlighted, but I’d like some more information. Which bugs? Where does priority lay? That’s what I want to know. I will say though the idea of encountering new and different races is one of the reasons I wanted to play this game from the beginning. Getting to see them fix some of the bugs and then introduce the alien races is starting to make it feel more like Star Trek, keep up the work on that one guys, I can’t wait to see them!

Scanning

Due to popular demand, we’ve added in-game scanning FX.

On ship and on ground, pressing the scan button located near the mini-map will point you to the nearest object that you can interact with.

Looking for that last alien artifact on a bizarre and unfriendly alien world, but you just can’t seem to find it? Hit the scan button! Looking for a particularly hard to find spacial anomaly in a far-off star system? Hit the scan button! Looking for Sulu? ... Look out! He’s right behind you!

There’s a reason there was a lot of demand for this. It’s another icon of the franchise. Scanning for anomalies and variances as well as gathering data was half of what Star Trek was all about. Being able to do that in the game helps immerse us in the universe and gives us those little things that make it Star Trek. Being able to scan and see things you can interact with is a huge boon. In games like EvE online, it was often times hard to see what you could and could not interact with, and so sometimes it was easy to miss objectives. In STO hitting the scan button will help us out with that, and at the same time it doesn’t take anything away from the game or franchise because it’s exactly what they would do in the shows! Hop into a system initiate scans!

Level Cap

Have no fear! The current level cap will be removed sometime this week.

We’re really looking forward to opening up the entire game for our testers. You’ll get to visit DS9, Memory Alpha and advance your characters past Lt. Commander.

Yeah… raising the level cap is great but what truly caught me about this was Getting to see DS9 and Memory Alpha. Memory Alpha really stuck out to me, for those of you who don’t know Memory Alpha is a planet with the Federation library where the collective knowledge of the Federation is stored. That’s pretty damn major. Being able to visit the repository of knowledge that the ships computers pull from, as well as the Starfleet academy… that’s pretty killer, and something I did not know about before!

Now lets talk about DS9. DS9 is formerly a Cardassian space station, Terok Nor. After the Bajorans liberated themselves from the long and brutal Cardassian Occupation, the United Federation of Planets is invited by the Bajoran Provisional Government to take joint control of the station, which (originally) orbits Bajor. The station is renamed Deep Space Nine the station is moved near the just-discovered Bajoran wormhole, allowing access to the distant, unexplored Gamma Quadrant. It quickly becomes a center for exploration, interstellar trade, political maneuvering, and eventually open conflict.

This is a damn important place. The station marked in the series the first time interpersonal conflict was highlighted. It became a melting pot of various alien races both friendly and unfriendly to the federation and also saw the Klingons more involved than any other show prior. This is important as well, in the game the Federation is at war with the Klingons. This station also saw the creation of the U.S.S. Defiant, the first ship custom tailored to fight the Borg. This is a HUGGGEEEEEEEE lore point, and being able to visit it before going off into the other regions of space. I can’t wait to visit both of these locations!

All in all it looks like all the things we’ve been waiting for are there and being rolled into the game, we just haven’t seen it yet in the beta, which is understandable as well… it is a beta. I’m getting more excited for this as time goes on, and even though there are bugs and certain things that don’t make sense, I remain hopefully optimistic.  Until next time, I’ll leave you with a quote to see you on your space faring ways

“It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.”
Cpt Picard

Until next time.

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