John Eaves (Star Trek designer and illustrator) seems to have stumbled across a box of more of his work from Perpetual's version of STO, and has started posting them to his blog,
Eavesdropping.
He just posted a design for a
Starfleet "Command Center" that most people seem to think is a Defiant-esque Starbase command center.
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I'm trying really hard to refrain from posting that it's about the size of most of STO's ship bridges currently.
Comments
Make it happen, Taco.
Take note. Eaves "Starfleet Command Center", would be a PERFECT replacement for the hideous "Tactical" level in the FED Fleetbases.
To me, that felt like the Bridge of the Jupiter-class would be like.
But I will say this, this design does scream out "command center" than the Lackey base.
They didn't drop it...
It was taken from them by CBS...
Essentially, Perpetual, in the several years they had the rights, never got beyond the planning stage.
They had lots of pretty pictures and grand ideas, but no real game play development done.
Cryptic stepped up to bat (put in a bid) and said that They could get a game out in the amount of time Perpetual had left on their contract (about two years)...
What you see is the result of that promise... Warts & All.
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
That's because PE never playtested anything in a room the size of what you'd get from an accurate scale model of a Star Trek bridge.
*Tahoe-class excepted
I Support Disco | Disco is Love | Disco is Life
Perpetual had nothing BUT 'vission'. maybe if they'd actually developed a working engine and started to actually code sometnhing, they may have also found thweir nice conceptual drawings were not workable for an MMO. (Hell, Perpetual even admitted that a few mock up renders they did were so high reesolution that it was unlikely an averange end user desktop cpuld render them in an MMO enviroment.)
Perpetual talked big, buit in the end, after almost four years, delivered nothing beyond all this very nice conceptual art. It's why they went bankrupt, and why CBS pulled the license.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Actually, they definately had a working engine, as they had a game in beta phase.
Oooo! Oooo! I like both these Ideas! Make one of them happen Taco! Make it so nao!
That isn't exactly true. They had an engine, but never made it to Beta-testing.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Online_(Perpetual_Entertainment)#Development_information
I think you are misunderstanding how game development works.
Much like Cryptic uses one engine across all its games, perpetual intended to do the same. In this case, what I said was accurate, they had an engine, and a whole other game in beta testing. So, the original poster's assertion that PE never even produced an engine is incorrect, as Gods and Heroes went to Beta.
I do recall though reading an article by a former dev at PE, who said that their engineering team was terrible, and were never able to successfully adapt the engine to Star Trek Mechanics.
heh...
Seems they spent all their money on being Pretty instead of being Practical.
Like leaving the bar at closing time, thinking that you are with a Thousand Dollar Lady-of-the-Night...,
...but waking up the next morning next to Phyllis Diller and a case of crotch itch.
:eek:
I Was A Trekkie Before It Was Cool ... Sept. 8th, 1966 ... Not To Mention Before Most Folks Around Here Were Born!
Forever a STO Veteran-Minion
Perpetual deserves some credit for thinking beyond the very tired and over-used mechanics MMOs have come to be known for. They were basically doing what no other developer house except ArenaNet has tried to do, which is to say they didn't want to be standard fare.
http://johneaves.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/the-command-center-in-layers/
That last one screams Starbase Command Center.
Do want! That shinyness is not to be ignored!
Not variants, layers of the same command center, like a cutaway view. It looks like this is actually supposed to be the main command center of Starfleet Command HQ.
Raptr profile
The ones at the top aren't the same as the one at the bottom. Therefore, varient.
Most likely it wouldn't of been that much different. Most of what they wanted to do would simply not of worked at all, or have to be altered to the point it was nothing like the original plan.
You see a number of people posting how they wish a MMO game would break the mold, but in every case that it's tried the game has suffered for being too different, not having the standard MMO systems in it, and generally poor subscription numbers.
PE's version of STO would have ended up looking fairly close to what we have now, because most of what they wanted to do simply wasn't feasible. If their ideas had any real merit, then they would of been able to actually make a MMO and be a successful company. Instead they shoot for the moon, and ended up with nothing because the people there had nothing more then grand ideas.
Considering their approach led to no game and bankruptcy in the end when all was said and done (not to mention having 4 years of development and producing NOTHING that worked) - I don't feel they deserve credit for anything.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I'd say the deserve full credit for the massive failure that they were. It was their fault alone that they took no doubt millions of dollars and flushed them down a toilet trying to 'think outside the box'.
Most every MMO has the same basic systems for a reason. Mostly because that's the only way to make a MMO work with the current state of hardware and network infrastructure. Maybe 5-10 years from now when everyone is running fiber optic cable into their home and have PC's so powerful that a current top end looks like a TI-35 in comparison, something like what PE had in mind might work.
But then again, even if that were true, the fan base still is unlikely to accept it, because even though you see the occasional post from people bemoaning the lack of a truly innovative and new MMO... Most people want what they already know and are comfortable with.
If what PE was doing had any chance of being successful, let alone even being produced in the first place... It would of happened.
The fact that it was such a monumental failure is more then proof enough of what happens when you shoot for the moon, and have no concept of how to build a proper rocket.
They were a small studio working on a big game. They did produce something that worked--the information's been linked to in the thread. It just wasn't enough of a game to warrant continuing the project and sinking more money into it.
You sound bitter.
Getting a completely different game into beta, is hardly something I'd consider to be a success, and provides no proof at all on if they could of pulled off their vision of STO.
The fact that they went bankrupt and had to have a different company finish the one game they had in beta, says everything that needs to be said about PE's abilities.