Pumping Irony

Darren woke up this morning and wrote an article (apparently before coffee, his typos and misspellings are increasingly glaring ) discussing a rumor that Cryptic Studios, of City of Heroes & Villains fame, is the unnamed mystery studio who has picked up the rights to Star Trek Online.

Darren and his commenters immediately implied Cryptic might make STO the same as CoX — a shallow and repetitive grind fest — which I think is unfair to assume any studio would simply rehash their exact same formula with every new IP under their belt. Yet, despite being a Star Trek fan (I wouldn’t go so far as to refer to myself as a Trekker, however) I cannot help but wonder if Star Trek is, in fact, a very poor IP for an MMO? If anything, I think that, much like WoW, Trek is too huge of an IP to take many risks with. With all due respects to the inevitable Worlds of Starcraft, I can’t help but imagine Star Trek Online will essentially be a “WoW in Space.” In other words, a very “safe” MMO with all the comfortable trappings we’re accustomed to, not taking risks within the MMO genre and certainly not taking risks with the Trek canon. Which leaves us with a sci-fi game that, despite the setting and premise of its original IP, leaves us able only to meekly go where everyone has gone before.

Gene Roddenberry presented us with a utopian universe where the protagonists, the Federation of Planets and its military wing Starfleet, are largely altruistic. In any good story, there must be conflict, so what we often saw in Trek was that while humanity has made great strides in overcoming our primitive, selfish and violent urges, true utopia is still out of our reach and we are constantly in a state of conflict, if not outright war, with various other societies such as Klingons, Romulans, the Borg, the Dominion, and so forth. This part can easily be shifted over to an MMO where 90% or more of the entire game play is conflict of the physical combat variety. A true, peaceful utopia would never work, would never succeed as a video game considering the video game industry — including its consumers — is still 99.9999999% violence-centric. I would therefore anticipate the introduction of the “Kill Ten Tribbles” quests and other activities promoting the slaughter of everything that moves on every new world we visit. In fact, that would fit in greatly with The Original Series where, when he wasn’t working his mojo on hot alien babes, Kirk’s mission largely appeared to be to seek out and destroy new life and new civilizations.

However I cannot fathom a successful mainstream game promoting altruism in any form. Whether we’re soloing or grouped in an MMO, we’re doing it to accomplish our own goals. After all, it is our individual time and money we’re investing, for own individual entertainment and each individual has his or her own preferences for what constitutes entertainment.

Players in MMO’s often seek some form of virtual individuality. Perhaps we try for a unique appearance. Yet in Trek all Federation crew members wear the same uniform. Color may indicate one’s job or station, but by and large the only variety in appearance is social clothing, and excuse me if I don’t have faith in modern developers to promote social or role-playing activities on a mass scale. Of course no one would want to be the dreaded Red Shirt but because we are not special, we would certainly and inevitably begin our STO journeys as exactly that.

Along with our appearance, we just love to progress our character’s weapons. How many various swords will one warrior wield throughout his career? How many wands or staves for the wizards or clerics? All with varying looks, statistics and abilities. Yet in Trek, the Federation has phaser pistols and phaser rifles, as do the Klingons. Romulans have their disruptor pistols, and Klingons have their bladed Bat’leth melee weapons. A phaser pistol is a phaser pistol is a phaser pistol. Tinkering with multiple levels or types of phasers and all sorts of bizarre weaponry (newly introduced alien races notwithstanding) is also tinkering with Trek canon and oh, will the purists rage.

MMO players are also inevitably driven to, if not obsessed by, the acquisition of virtual wealth. Yet in First Contact, Picard tells Lily that “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We wish to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.” There’s that altruism rearing it’s ugly head, and I don’t foresee players accepting an MMORPG with no financial gains for their characters. Would there even be an economy to speak of in a Trek game? There would have to be, yet here again we’d possibly be tinkering with Trek canon, at least if we’re playing as the Federation. Could you imagine a studio releasing a Trek game where we were unable to play Federation characters? No? Me either. No, we would very likely see resource gathering similar to asteroid mining in EVE Online, and the trade of those resources and other goods. We’ll still need consumables for those weekly Jefferies Tube crawls with the guild, right?

Another difficulty Cryptic, or whomever is actually developing STO, will have is building content for the various factions. We will obviously expect to be able to travel to other places, and will be fuming if fan favorites such as Vulcan, Romulus and Qo’noS are unavailable, as well as places like Deep Space Nine. For variety as well as PvP, STO will need more than one player factions just like WoW has Alliance and Horde. But look at all the various Trek factions over the years, that’s a ton of leveling content to create for characters of each faction. Players will want to be Human, Vulcan, or any number of the Starfleet/Federation races, which could be contained and introduced in a single “just joined Starfleet” starter area. But Klingons, Romulans, the Maquis, Dominion, and countless other popular “evil” (or at least, non-Starfleet) factions are individual and independent. Combining them into a single “evil” starter area would likely be tinkering with canon once again. Trek’s ultimate bad guys, the Borg, could not be a playable race as they are a collective and thus largely incapable of independent thought which in turn makes them an impossibility for players. This mirrors Turbine’s original reasoning why players could only play the Free Peoples in their Lord of the Rings Online because the evil races were all controlled by Sauron and not acting of their own free will. Later, however, in an IRC dev chat, it was admitted that the real issue was essentially that of creating two separate games — one for the Freeps and one for the Creeps — and Turbine did not have the time or at the very least was unwilling to delay launch to create an entire Creep game of the same size and scope as the Freep game. Blizzard had the time, and more importantly the money to hire enough people to create two separate leveling games for their two factions. I seriously doubt Cryptic, or anyone else, has the money and time to have compelling adventuring content for three, four, or more factions at launch that players would want and expect.

However, since I do believe Star Trek Online is an inevitability, what am I expecting? I don’t think technology is to the point of allowing a seamless space game-to-ground game transition, so I’d expect them to be separate games ala Star Wars Galaxies. Star Trek’s space combat is not the high-flying aerobatics we see in more action-oriented IP’s such as Star Wars (which was envisioned after watching footage of WWII dogfights) so I picture a more slow-paced capital ship combat like EVE. Smaller ships such as the Defiant class would certainly be available, but again slower-paced and somewhat easier to manage flight and combat mechanisms rather than the fast, repetitive “circle jerk” combat of Freelancer or Jumpgate.

The ground game would likely be a combination of persistent public “true MMO” zones on planets and stations as well as scripted instanced “away missions” ala Tabula Rasa, only at a slower pace, complete with the aforementioned “Kill Ten Tribbles” styled quests.

I recall Brent blowing off some steam a few months ago and chastising Perpetual over their use of capital ships as quest hubs rather than allowing players to control their own ships. On the one hand, having played Air Warrior back on GEnie which did have aircraft with multiple stations such as the B17 where one player was the pilot while others manned the turrets and bomb bay, I can see the appeal of such mechanics in a space setting. On the other hand, given the amount of players and our expectations and play styles now versus then, it could not only be a logistics nightmare for the developers but also a constant source of player drama. Now, one thing I can envision is that the capital ships could be the equivalent of guild halls. A full-fledged 3D environment for role-playing, training and trading. The guild’s leader, the captain, could set a course for travel and the ship could actually move around the various quadrants and the guild members could make their own away teams for adventure. Shuttle craft and other smaller personal ships (the equivalent of mounts) would be available for players to adventure in other places. This also enables guilds to form alliances for PvP by transporting their entire guild hall and arsenal to various locations to help allied guilds or to conquer new territories for their faction.

Just to be snarky, I would imagine the so-called “hardcore” players who revel in difficulties and miseries would avoid STO like the plague since, due to the proliferation of transporters and faster-than-light spaceships, travel has been dumbed down to an unprecedented level and now imbues no meaning whatsoever.

Ultimately, Star Trek was about the story. The characters, the settings and the technology were but tools to tell the story of Roddenberry’s utopian hope for humanity. Quite often, Trek was allegorical to real-world issues of warfare, authoritarianism, prejudices between race, gender or socio-economic class. MMO’s are about whacking and looting foozles and other players with nary a mention of story or relevance to be found. I cannot but fear that all the intriguing and inspiring aspects of Trek we find appealing in cinematic entertainment or novels may also be the same aspects that would render it impotent and uninspiring as an MMORPG…

Update: Ok something’s wrong here… Darren was able to leave a comment but now wp-comments-post.php is failing when anyone else, including myself, tries to leave a comment. Comments work fine for every other post but this one, so I have no idea what’s going on. I’m asking for help in #wordpress but given my history there and the lack of help I typically get for any minor or major issue, I’m not holding my breath… My apologies. Hey, does mean I get to blame Darren for breaking my site?

Update 2: I did notice someone submitted this post as a news link on Virgin Worlds (it doesn’t say who submitted it) so maybe the traffic killed the ability to post comments? Nah, that makes no sense whatsoever, the PHP should execute regardless but it’s only failing on this single article. And, as popular as Virgin Worlds is becoming, it isn’t Slashdot yet! I did have an idea of copying this into a new post then deleting the original and resetting the post slug to match, but… meh. Blogging is too fast-paced, and that window of opportunity has passed for discussion, unfortunately.  Whomever submitted the article, thanks, it was great to pick up a few new readers in any event!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 at 4:10 pm and is filed under MMO Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.