Star Trek MMORPG Announced

We wonder why this has not happened sooner; there are some very popular science-fiction licenses out there. But now Perpetual Entertainment has obtained access to the entire corpus of Star Trek culture, and we can expect the final massively-multiplayer product in 2007. Read more here.

Comments

[ren]

1.

Speaking of licence driven MMO that just might suck big virtual ones: The Matrix Online (www.thematrixonline.com) is set to envelop us during October i.e. before Christmas, WoW and EQ2. But things seem to be pretty quiet on the PR front. Or is this just the way things seem from the UK.

On Star Trek, oh the version wars, can the afford to just run TOS or Next Gen. I guess I’d log just to play with then blast a few tribbles but further than that I’m not sure.

Trek is interesting as while it is one of the bigger SF universes out there (see: The Spice Must be Litigated: http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/07/most_gamers_kno.html) it is framed through the lens of short morality plays. So it would be interesting to see how the utopian values of the federation might be put in the context of an MMO, unless of course they just use the same kind of story arc mechanics as Star Wars Galaxies but with Federation / Romulans.

OMG there are going to be even more people RPing in Klingon aren’t there - I’ll be sinking a cold one in Pages bar.

[Timothy Burke]

2.

Let's put it this way: if Star Wars has turned out to be a complicated creative liability in terms of actual MMOG design (as opposed to attracting players) then Star Trek is going to be hot death, because the game mechanics it suggests are really unsuitable for MMOGs in their typical or "classic" design. If this is really going to happen, then the developers had better think really hard about doing something fairly different than the norm.

[Flatfingers]

3.

I've been waiting for this announcement for a while (as others have, I assume) -- it just seemed too obvious for the other major SF license not to have its own MMOG.

But I'm not so certain that STO is doomed before it starts even if it's implemented as a conventional MMOG. The Trek universe has some features that should translate well to a MMOG that breaks little new ground:

* "away missions" = directed content
* political alignments = faction
* teleporter = spawning
* rank = structured skills progression system

Other plusses include:

* well-defined starship operations protocols
* lots of iconic technology/weapons/vehicles
* lots of iconic alien races
* lots of iconic locations

Still, as ren mentioned, there is that question of morality. Stories set in the Trek world has always been highly moralistic... so the question has to arise: Would a Trek MMOG be accepted if it's implemented as merely another amoral fighting game for the powerlevelers? Or does the long-term financial success of STO ride on atrracting Trek fans who (unlike powergamers) will probably expect their actions in that virtual world to have some moral meaning?

In which case, two questions:

1. How do you pick the moral positions to be expressed in your game?

2. How do you code something like that?

--Flatfingers

[Kirk Job-Sluder]

4.

In contrast to some of this skepticism, I think that it would be really bad if the game ignored the existence of the Star Trek roleplaying ethos that has developed over the last few decades. Many of the fan groups evolved in ways to mirror the social structures presented in the game. Some fan groups identify themselves as fictional ships with a Captain (president), First Mate (vice president), Communications Officer (secretary), etc., etc..

Believe it or not, this is not the first attempt at building a Star Trek based virtual world. There is probably at least 15 years of historic information on how to do Star Trek roleplay that can be leveraged.

[Betsy Book]

5.

This is quite a coup for Perpetual Entertainment. Looks like the mgmt team are EA veterans.

I suppose things like replicators, star ships and latinum will be showing up on eBay sometime in 2007 as well then. Anyone want to take guesses as to how they'll deal with it?

[Lee Sheldon]

6.

A Star Trek MMO has been announced at least twice in recent memory. The latest until now: Verant/Sony announced a deal to produce one, then they signed the Star Wars deal with Lucas and the Enterprise was grounded yet again.