All the way back in Beta many players, including myself, indicated to the Devs that the ships are as much a character in the series and movies as actual characters are. Star Trek is not Star Trek without ships...even DS9 had to learn this lesson.
I feel the ships are the anchor for all things Trek, but in this game they are no more than combat characters in space. The interiors are still in very poor condition, underutilized and unappreciated.
Now, if the masses do not care that we do not "play" inside our ships, so to speak, then fair enough. It's one of the few reasons I rarely play this game though I have been involved in the Star Trek game industry for almost two decades now.
This game has improved immensely since it's launch. It is now, in my opinion, a AAA title....and it took quite a while to get there. But it is still missing the third pillar...our starship, IMO, is more than just a gun platform.
It is the very vehicle that allows us to boldy go where noone has gone before.
Ship interiors should be story content and the key to more rapid releases. I don't expect it tomorrow or 9 months from now but I think it's worthy of an expansion centered on it. I favor interiors as reputation, as personal holding, areas as fleet holdings (a state room, for example), as story content, as adventure zone, and as a social hub.
It is a challenge. It's a worthy challenge. I'm thankful Taco came here but this is a feature that probably needs the coordination of every team on the game and planning/coordinating from upper management. It can be hard. I think it's worth it.
It's not as easy as "just do it" and while there are challenges, they aren't impossible ones with some sacrifices and some long term strategic planning.
Foundry interiors are DOA for those not aware. NW's Foundry won't be getting ported to STO.
My solution to the multiple interiors is to build the content to the interior. nYou don't need to remake the same missions for the Belfast interior that the standard or TOS interior get. It also doesn't need to be strictly factioned.
What I think works is to have mission chains, for example, that use the Belfast interior. If you have this interior on your ship, you can launch these from your bridge. If you don't, you can visit a friend who does or track down a Defiant family class patrol ship in the open world and play these missions aboard an NPC Defiant.
This model could also allow for gradual development of three deck interiors for all types of ship because developing a full Wells/Mobius interior, for example, is no longer strictly for the lockbox players. Developing a full Orion, Gorn, Dominion, alternate Klingon, etc. interior is no longer just for people who fly those ships.
It becomes something tied to ships of that type in the open world. Again, using a Nimbus/Dyson Battlezone/etc. model and a feature episode model.
Ship interiors become a new setting for Featured Episodes and adventure zones, for fleet holdings, for personal holdings. That's how you do it.
I hate basically all the interiors. First, because they are anormally huge, and you will never feel that you are in the interior of a starship. Second, they dont even have the shape of your ship. All the interiors are the same, with no relation to your ship structure anywhere. So, honestly i will not like content in the interiors, not unless they made em more "real". It will be just other missions to play, thats all. I know the interiors are so big for utilitary purposes, but i played a lot of missions with narrow corridors in em, and i didnt have a problem.
This is because the game focuses on one type of play COMBAT. If there were more of a focus on SOCIAL and CRAFTING types of gameplay, then you could make it worth your wild by attracting a more diverse crowd of the Star Trek fanbase and MMO playerbase.
Even if you gave us skeletons of corridors and the main rooms, then this rumored "Room Editor" You would bring in a whole slew of different gameplayers that just like to do deco and create (SWG was full of these type of players). Give them a new non-combat class with a different leveling path etc.. They could create rooms that are saved that you buy from them or you could hire them to work on your ship. In addition, Cryptic could sell pregen rooms or updated rooms to fill the slots. A room/lab could be a reward for a mission. Heck these could even be the missing DOFF rewards. But that is getting into social gameplay and the possibilities are limitless.
Now what to do in the interior? Well if there was a better crafting/resource system that is where you could do minigames in various labs to refine materials and assemble items. There you can monetize, reward, etc.. for the labs. But that is if you had a solid crafting/resource system.
You might say if you do all of this what will happen to social zones? People will not go there. In STO most social zones are chore centers. That would need to be fixed so they are mission/adventure hubs. More akin to what you guys are doing with the adventure zones.
This is something that I wholeheartedly agree with. What people are asking for is "story content" that takes place in ships, not just "things to do". (While that would be nice.)
Even if it meant making only a single interior available to each faction initially (besides specials like the TOS and Belfast interiors), I would love to see them hook up story content to inside of players' ships, like in the shows. (This shouldn't be a problem for the uni-design Romulan interior.)
I'm tired of player ships being just a maneuverable weapons platform and anomaly scanning device. I want to have ships be the characters that they should be, with their own stories to tell. I want to be able to fend off a boarding party, or deal with a trapped, dangerous energy being. I want to be able to protect my crew from a macrovirus invasion, or stop a rogue officer from defecting and taking valuable intelligence with them. I want to be able to play poker, or run a holodeck simulation with my crew, even if it goes awry. Especially if it goes awry. I'd also love to host a tactical planning session with my crew in the briefing room on how to deal with a situation that has arisen onboard or outside of the ship.
I can also think of ways that starship interiors could be "monetized", such as adding in customizations that work more like trophies and Starbase/Embassy/Mine/Spire projects. Something that can be toggled, chosen, disabled, and interacted with. Want a tribble habitat in your ready room instead of an aquarium? You can get that, and even use it to store (and possibly display) all of your tribbles. (Although you could anyway in a biology lab option.) Want to change the targets in your holographic firing range into the enemy type of your choice? You can get that. Want to change the paintings and plants in your ready room? Sure, why not. You could even potentially get options to display small craft outside the ship windows, or even space fauna.
This is something that I wholeheartedly agree with. What people are asking for is "story content" that takes place in ships, not just "things to do". (While that would be nice.)
Even if it meant making only a single interior available to each faction initially (besides specials like the TOS and Belfast interiors), I would love to see them hook up story content to inside of players' ships, like in the shows. (This shouldn't be a problem for the uni-design Romulan interior.)
I'm tired of player ships being just a maneuverable weapons platform and anomaly scanning device. I want to have ships be the characters that they should be, with their own stories to tell. I want to be able to fend off a boarding party, or deal with a trapped, dangerous energy being. I want to be able to protect my crew from a macrovirus invasion, or stop a rogue officer from defecting and taking valuable intelligence with them. I want to be able to play poker, or run a holodeck simulation with my crew, even if it goes awry. Especially if it goes awry. I'd also love to host a tactical planning session with my crew in the briefing room on how to deal with a situation that has arisen onboard or outside of the ship.
I can also think of ways that starship interiors could be "monetized", such as adding in customizations that work more like trophies and Starbase/Embassy/Mine/Spire projects. Something that can be toggled, chosen, disabled, and interacted with. Want a tribble habitat in your ready room instead of an aquarium? You can get that, and even use it to store (and possibly display) all of your tribbles. (Although you could anyway in a biology lab option.) Want to change the targets in your holographic firing range into the enemy type of your choice? You can get that. Want to change the paintings and plants in your ready room? Sure, why not. You could even potentially get options to display small craft outside the ship windows, or even space fauna.
Problem is, most players would instantly hate the idea of everyone having the same bridge/ship layout. Even though they may not visit their ship, they'd instantly go ballistic over a unified "everyone has the same" layout. And really? I'd rather have ANY story content. I don't care where it is.
Yes, I'm that Askray@Batbayer in game. Yes, I still play. No, I don't care. Former Community Moderator, Former SSR DJ, Now Full time father to two kids, Husband, Retail Worker. Tiktok: @Askray Facebook: Askray113
Problem is, most players would instantly hate the idea of everyone having the same bridge/ship layout. Even though they may not visit their ship, they'd instantly go ballistic over a unified "everyone has the same" layout. And really? I'd rather have ANY story content. I don't care where it is.
They use the same 3 builds everybody uses, have the same gear, do the same content, but having the same ship internal they don't use would be an issue?
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Problem is, most players would instantly hate the idea of everyone having the same bridge/ship layout. Even though they may not visit their ship, they'd instantly go ballistic over a unified "everyone has the same" layout. And really? I'd rather have ANY story content. I don't care where it is.
You missed the fact that I said "initially". I wasn't saying I *wanted* there to be only one layout for player ships, more that I was willing to accept only one being available at firstif it meant in-ship content/story could be implemented. Something that is SEVERELY lacking in this game, based on a property where that was where a lot of the story took place.
I recently made a mention in my first blog post on called the Role Players's Guide to the Galaxy on priorityonepodcast.com. I suggested the use of a social reputation system that allows you to earn items like the trophies that we can display on our interiors.
Why can't we place that trophy system idea in other rooms of the star ship interiors to decorate the rooms differently. A Social function on the interiors can be to show off your interior. Fore role players it would be great to enhance your interior to fit the character you have created.
I role play as a Bajoran, and would love to see Bajoran Cultural pieces on display around his personal quarters.
- FULL Ship interiors cost a LOT of time/manpower/money to develop.
- There is, as players repeat constantly, nothing to do there, so players don't USE their interiors.
- There used to be more to DO in your interior, but people complained about having to run all over their ship, so all of that was consolidated to your bridge.
- There is no good reason to throw money at making these huge interiors with nothing to do in them, when players are going to run around them once, and then ignore them for the rest of time.
- Currently we've been focused more on story content, which I believe is what more players are into atm.
In other words, we won't be developing new FULL interiors without some kind of major rework to the whole system, new content surrounding them, or other major improvement to them.
Note that bridges are NOT Full interiors, and we will continue making them, I'm sure.
That doesn't mean that someday we won't shift focus away from story content, back to interiors, develop fun stuff to do there, and/or put in something like the above exploration system. It's just not going to happen right now. We have other priorities at the moment.
A complete revamping of interiors wouldn't be a bad x.5 season thing. Interiors have been fairly useless since launch, and your statement does give me hope that this might be addressed sometime down the road. With everything that's been done with the Dyson region there is no reason that couldn't be applied to ship interiors for mission purposes its fairly obvious that spawn points can be shifted around easy enough on any interior. There is no reason that interiors can't be fully upgraded and put to very good use. It is a very unexplored and un-monetized aspect to the game.
The thing is this has been looked at from the wrong aspect by Cryptic. Fully developing interiors could be a way to expand content quickly while not needing to develop drastic graphical resources. New maps take a lot more resources to produce, the interiors would change a lot less and once they were put in place they would only need maintenance or occasional updates. In essence once developed these things would occur on the same set of maps and occasionally add a new map.
Example:
C-Store products of course include the bundles with the awesome bridges and interior types.
The interiors could serve as a personal reputation area that could enhance abilities of the interior. Such as crafting which has been broken and worthless since F2P. Putting work into your ships engineering section could reduce need of resources to craft. Putting work into the ships labs and sensor systems could increase the yield of anomalies. A disaster of a doff assignment could trigger an inship mission. Limited customization of personal quarters could be a means of providing easy and effective player housing. Which could put small items for purchase in the C-Store to put in the quarters. Security could allow the player to use the ship interior like the contested zone for "boarding" and allow the player to enhance their security NPCs. An onboard holodeck could be used to generate unique scenarios like Captain Proton, or the Dixon Hill type of stuff and this could be slowly expanded on. A cargo bay could be used to try and make commodities and be used for the trade doffs.
In addition to reputation, quarters customization and crafting, there is the mini mission and mini game aspects. The diplomacy stuff for the briefing rooms could be integrated. Here are some example mission types all triggered from the interior.
Holodeck rescue - The holodeck has malfunctioned and you need to rescue your crewmates.
Medical Emergency - Engineering accident that inundates sickbay and the doctor needs help.
Fire suppression - EPS conduits have ruptured on Deck x and fire suppression is offline.
Intruder alert - Find clues and capture the intruder.
Prisoner Interrogation - Question a prisoner for information. (Klingons could make this interesting)
Shuttle repair - A shuttle was recently damaged on a mission and needs repairs.
Warp core diagnostic - mini games to properly get your warp core functioning better.
Warp core breach! - Something has caused the warp core to go critical prevent the breach.
First contact - Already in place but could be integrated
Resolve a dispute between x and x - More diplomacy stuff (like the Bajor one)
So on and so forth and this is based on systems that are currently in place. I would hope to see something new but this was an example of how it could be done using existing tech while also being feasible for Cryptic to invest the time and resources to capitalize on this. Interiors would need the following. Bridge, Ready Room, briefing Room, Sickbay, mess hall or Ten Forward, Captain's Quarters, , Holodeck, Shuttlebay, Astrometrics lab (not those crappy generic labs), Main Engineering and possibly a cargo bay.
The feds would actually have the more complicated interiors to do seeing as there are quite a few examples Galaxy, Sovereign, Intrepid, Defiant, Origin (which is close to sovereign), TOS, TMP, ENT. The Dyson interiors could be duplicated for the new ships easily enough.
Well, before anything else you should know that the developers themselves stated that ship interiors are basically gone. They won't rework those since it's too much effort that can't be monetized and I'm not exaggerating. That's what either JamJamz or Tacofangs implied (I think since they are the ones spending most times with us, the forum crowd ). So there won't be love for your ship interior, ever. EDIT: As Tacofangs pointed out, he used different words. My apologies for that.
Regarding the exploration there has to be something done but I'm not sure more clunky cutscenes will do the trick. I would like a roguelike exploration experience involving randomly generated space and ground maps you can explore alone or in teams. The important part is that you PLAY those parts, no cheap DOFF or menu slider cop-outs. Maybe you need to establish a ground base/colony, placing guards, defend from raiders, scan the topography, send out exploration teams etc etc, same in space. Construct an outpost, guard the facilities, order NPC patrols and science ships do stuff. The rogulike element would also bear the possiblity that your mission fails - imagine the dice say a Borg cube warps in and trashes your outpost - you either have a tough five man player team to beat or you have to evacuate and abandon the outpost. Those are missions I'd like to see
I totally agree. i dream of something like that. thx for your post
the real feeling of being in the Star trek universe; not a DPS race, and stupid events
Cryptic created an amazing base builder for City of Heroes, why can they not do the same this here for ship interiors?
If anything it should be simpler. The list of options can be much more restricted by limiting certain parts to certain ships.
Intrepid and variants have certain options and Galaxy and variants have others.
Maybe even limit customization to key areas and keep the corridors generic based on basic hull type.
And the reason only 1% of the CoH population used that feature was because only 1% of the population had editing privelages of super groups. EVERYONE in sto has a ship...
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
Sometimes a lot of work is worth it for the devs, and worth the wait for the players. You guys have learnt a lot then, as evidenced by the fact that the Hideout feature went over better than the SG Bases. I think you guys could pull this kind of thing off now, especially with the kind of quality that's being put into the newest story missions and their environments. Updates to previous missions and areas, too.
I would wait, if it meant that in-ship story content and expansion on starship interiors would be coming. And if the quality of everything you guys have been making lately is any indication, it would be well worth it.
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
I really appreciate the honesty on the 'why' of this.
I would like a revamped ship interior, but I do understand why it is not probable.
It is something a lot of people have wanted. I know the duty officer system was envisioned as allowing customization of crew uniforms (another thing people wanted), but compromises were made for the sake of deadlines and tech limitations. In the end it was decided to make the doff system a card game of sorts due to the functionality of it.
I can use that as an example as to why priorities are shifted to actual game content than a facelift pass on ship interiors very few people use.
That said, if ESD is getting a cosmetic overhaul (the third time since STO launched), why is this important if ESD is already functional? It's a map that was expertly done 'well enough' the first time. And the second revamp made it even more polished and shiny.
I don't see the point in making something like ESD a labor priority when it serves its functional use perfectly as it currently stands, but things like ship interiors are on the way far back of the backburner because there's nothing to do there.
If ESD already meets the requirement goals for functionality, and there's nothing more to do there -- why does Stephen D'Angelo think it needs to be revamped in the 'near future'? I know you can't speak for him, but it's things like this that really make me scratch my head.
Some parts of the game are neglected for years at a time while others are on their second/third/fourth iteration. It seems Cryptic has time and money to do their same work over and over again (like ESD), but not enough time to do it right the first time... even though to the rest of the playerbase, things like ESD already serve their functional purpose perfectly and have enough polish that it could be considered as 'done'.
Out of all the complaints for STO's maps, I have never heard "ESD needs to be given a facelift/overhaul" as one of them. I don't see the point in fixing something that is not broken.
As i see it..it could be a great gameplay opportunity for fleet admiral. You can fly around in your standard ships, but when you face certain situations (maybe exploration), you report to your command ship, fully equipped.
What does equipped mean?
-fleshed out interiors, with 3 basic skin color schemes..when going out in deep space, negotiate, harbour, discover or fight life forms
-Collect and store samples, discover new combinations by experimenting...to take for crafting back home
-command and lead your boff captainsinto battles, using your standard ships like fighters that warp in or escort you.
..what this does is make one (or a few) baseline maps to build story and missions on. If players want their standard ships, that choice is available, but without stories associated with fleet admiral command missions.
Devs can periodically add on as story or need arises, slowing the demanding pace.
The tech that puts a player into a temporary ship exists, so it could work as a starting point.
- FULL Ship interiors cost a LOT of time/manpower/money to develop.
- There is, as players repeat constantly, nothing to do there, so players don't USE their interiors.
- There used to be more to DO in your interior, but people complained about having to run all over their ship, so all of that was consolidated to your bridge.
- There is no good reason to throw money at making these huge interiors with nothing to do in them, when players are going to run around them once, and then ignore them for the rest of time.
- Currently we've been focused more on story content, which I believe is what more players are into atm.
In other words, we won't be developing new FULL interiors without some kind of major rework to the whole system, new content surrounding them, or other major improvement to them.
Note that bridges are NOT Full interiors, and we will continue making them, I'm sure.
That doesn't mean that someday we won't shift focus away from story content, back to interiors, develop fun stuff to do there, and/or put in something like the above exploration system. It's just not going to happen right now. We have other priorities at the moment.
Speaking as someone who loves the ship interiors and regularly plays/played with people who also felt similarly, I wish there was more ship interior development.
I understand that casual players and other sorts may not appreciate the ship interiors, but it's a great portion of Star Trek that takes place within such and wish there was more to to with them instead of things being made simpler or easier, such as what you say about people complaining about having to run around.
I've always felt that if things are made too simple and quick to do or cutting out things that barely take a few minutes to do, that you may as well cut out the entire game and just have a screen with a single button people can press to "win the game," so to speak >_<
Aside from a variety of the gameplay-related suggestions made in this topic, I do feel it'd be easier to visit or re-visit ship interiors if the current ones were given a little dev lovin'. For instance, the standard engineering room no longer has appropriate engineering warp core "pulse" sounds going on, the TOS bridge has chairs that don't face the consoles and the interior itself has a handful of DOff-related NPC's that aren't even in TOS dress, and for some reason bridges on the whole no longer staff themselves with my BOffs and have generic no-names instead, etc.
Not only that, but having an option to turn off the massive "use me!" glow on certain consoles and furnishings would be nice.
I am partial to the idea of being able to customize ship interiors and I was a big user of CoH's base creation stuff. Though I'm not sure how that'd work with the way it's done now, but I'm really hankering for more interior stuff!
...also, TMP/TWOK+ era interiors...*wishes fervently for*
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
I have read the post and I have been waiting for a real intrepid interior for a long time. The only part I disagree with your original post is that people like a set interior, from one of their favorite trek shows and given any fed vessel they would still like to have it. Thing is to actually apply this to marketing they would have to be useful for missioning which you guys were on to something with the Dyson area no reason it can't be applied to a smaller area and monetized by reputation or C-store or something that money can be made on or some other means of making it worth it. But here is the real reason below.
Hesitant of doing it again kinda implies nothing was learned from the last two experiences so we quit trying, that is not inspiring. You don't push gaming boundaries or make them better without taking risks on new features that didn't work before. STO is not a super hero game and what works for us probably won't work for the other 2 or NWN. Yet another revamp of Earth Spacedock is worth the time when it isn't broke?
It's a catch 22 situation. Developers aren't going invest time in something unprofitable and players aren't going to invest money in something unusable, but it is not a situation that the players created, nor is it one that players can rectify, if developers want interiors to be a worthwhile endeavor then they are the ones who are going to have risk spending time developing content involving ship interiors.
In spite of what a few people have been saying here, in Star Trek the ship has been one of the stars of the show. A significant amount of time throughout the franchise is spent on the ship, not just on the bridges but in engineering rooms, sickbays, holodecks, cargo bays, science labs, hangers, crews quarters, ships lounges, a plethora of jeffries tubes and even a warp nacelle. Many an episode in one series or another would take place entirely inside the ship, so if this is a Star Trek game, why don't we have anything like this in this game?
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
Meh, there are different interpretations for everything. You see us giving up on something that COULD work if we kept trying at it. We see us giving up on something that didn't work, and focusing our efforts on things that do work.
Neither is wrong, just different perspectives.
Edit: As for ESD, part of this is the same reason we've revamped early missions recently. Yes, YOU have played that mission a thousand times. But, there are always new players, and making the early parts of the game (including ESD) suck less, so people stick around more and keep playing.
ESD is at it's root, functional. But it fails in a lot of ways. It's confusing. It's not good at imparting that "Star Trek" feel. There's no "wow" moment for a new player. And for those later in the game, there's a lot of running to get to some things. Hopefully we can fix some of that.
Wildstar has one main draw that is appropriate to this discussion, Housing. Housing is where you get your own floating island where you can customize the house however you want and there are plugins that add special features to your floating island like Mining, Gardening, and other fun stuff. Also, you can make your island public so anyone can visit, only friends can visit, or only you can visit. Also, items can drop from various areas, quest rewards, etc that allow you to upgrade your island.
The main reason to add something like this is most of Star Trek aired inside the ship or space station in the case of DS9. So giving us the ability to customize what content we can do on our ship and how the ship interior looks would go a long way in giving our ships life. I find the main problem with the Duty Officer ship contacts was that they were too similar to the Duty Officer system. If the crafting contacts actually seemed more like a crafting mini-game instead of just a Duty Officer assignment, then it wouldn't have seemed as pointless.
Functionality and Looks can be obtained through various methods like the C-Store and Reputation. Want to your ship to have Borg Alcoves and glowing green hallways, then buy the Borg Interior C-Store pack. Want to have a Voth Research Lab, then run a Dyson Reputation project that might give something extra like more Dyson Marks.
Meh, there are different interpretations for everything. You see us giving up on something that COULD work if we kept trying at it. We see us giving up on something that didn't work, and focusing our efforts on things that do work.
Neither is wrong, just different perspectives.
Edit: As for ESD, part of this is the same reason we've revamped early missions recently. Yes, YOU have played that mission a thousand times. But, there are always new players, and making the early parts of the game (including ESD) suck less, so people stick around more and keep playing.
ESD is at it's root, functional. But it fails in a lot of ways. It's confusing. It's not good at imparting that "Star Trek" feel. There's no "wow" moment for a new player. And for those later in the game, there's a lot of running to get to some things. Hopefully we can fix some of that.
The thing is, what you just described accurately describes the situation with starship interiors as well.
New players will see the starship interiors, especially when compared to the revamped early missions - ESPECIALLY when compared to - and they will see that they suck, meaning that they will be less likely to stick around. "Why aren't the interiors like in the shows and movies?" "Why can't I do missions inside of my ship like in the TV shows?" "Why do the interiors not looks like the ones in the tutorial and missions like 'City on the Edge of Never'?" These would be just some of the things that they'd ask, before giving up when the answer is "there are no plans to implement this at this time".
Starship interiors have functionality, but it's sub-par, like with ESD. It doesn't impart that "Star Trek" feel, either. More so than even ESD. There's none of that "wow" moment there, either. Sure, not adding in more things to do there makes it less obvious from less people going there, but that's just the same as hiding how much ESD sucks by adding in something to make people want to go elsewhere. You'd be better off just cutting out starship interiors completely aside from bridges. Then people wouldn't be able to see just how much it needs to be improved.
I think it's more that the dev team is hurt and jaded after what happened with SG bases and Hideouts, and doesn't want to risk being hurt (emotionally or financially) again.
There are lots of people clamoring for this and even providing suggestions on how it could be made to work (even monetized), but it's mainly ignored in terms of being used. You say it didn't work and won't work ever, but the players disagree. Sometimes things fail, even several times, before an iteration that's a monumental success rolls around.
You'd be better off just cutting out starship interiors completely aside from the bridges if that's really how you feel about it. What's the point, right? It failed before when the company was younger and more inexperienced, so it couldn't possibly work now, after you've all learnt and improved vastly since then. Right?
If companies were like this when videogames were first invented, the whole videogame industry never would've made it off the ground. Megaman? Never would have had a second game. Nintendo itself wouldn't have survived to become the videogame company it is now, if they'd had an attitude like that when they first got started making videogames. They nearly didn't. Sure, stuff goes wrong. Sure, sometimes things go disastrously. But ruling something out because it failed before when there's now a chance that it could actually work is denying the possibility of what it's being added to becoming something even better.
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
As someone who got to play around with that editor, let me say a few things:
Editing privileges were highly guarded. There were a variety of reasons for this:
1) It was a joy to use. Competition was fierce to get to use it.
2) Individuals had design sensibilities that were hard to balance with one another. Aside from when our fleet jot hijacked, you know what one of the biggest sources of drama in Caspian has been? The fleet emblem. It's been a source of dischord whenever anyone in a position to edit it edited it. Do I like it? Not really. I'm not sure how many people like the emblem we have But whoever changed it before wound up starting heated arguments in the fleet because the fleet leadership had strong opinions about how it should look.
Points 1 and 2 boil down to the problems with a tool that versatile being shared. It couldn't be. So by its design, it wound up being cut off from most players. The only way a tool like that could work is as a personal tool. Which brings up point 3:
3) It was so versatile that you could make a base unusable. Which further necessitated super-groups restricting access.
I think the tool had social issues which mandated it be something most people never got to use.
Now... To go further, I don't see why military installations should be that custom in STO. We saw different ships of the same class in Star Trek. Bridge modules varied. There were key distinctive features like warp cores and ready rooms.
But by and large, within a class and within an era, ships had the same basic looks.
And deck plans were not dictated by ship class until the plans got tacked on later. By and large, the Undiscovered Country Connie had the same curvature of halls, the same decks, etc. as the Galaxy in TNG. Because they were the same sets with a coat of paint. They swapped out the warp core, used the movies bridge as the TNG battle bridge, and re-dressed the briefing room from TNG as the stateroom. The Sovereign used further re-dresses (albeit more radical) of the same sets.
The Wells timeship bridge? That's the Enterprise-E bridge with Voyager bridge consoles stacked all over it and the Voyager sickbay backdrop relit as a transporter pad.
I think had the trophy system expanded and used some projects ala starbases, you could have plenty of customization in non-essential area that get cut off in story missions or have flags flip on mission maps to swap out basic customizable details like warp cores to the mission owner's.
Ship interiors not being used for story content seems like an artificial trap that a handful of diehard players and designers seem to be cutting off. Whereas having a stock set of maps that could be used in a hundred missions would enable creation of huge volumes of story content.
I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for the Foundry but one trick I always used there was to start with a map that I would design in different states and then built the story around that, knowing that I could use any of the map's states along the way.
If you have a map with enough state options, you could do a mission a week with a small team. I also think you could even have random content that works better than the current exploration content because the randomness in exploration is largely irrelevant to the mission. Yes, that makes it easy to produce on few seed variables but it also makes content that is unplayable. Whereas something tight with lots of well tuned seed variables may be a nightmare to develop but it eventually generates content worth replaying.
I really appreciate you being here, Taco. It's great to have interaction. But I think it's also fair to say that doing this right would require more than just the map artists and a few content guys on board. It's a whole team venture.
It's not that I think it would be easy or that you could do it tomorrow or that you alone would be financially justified in doing it six months from now.
It's that I think it's inadequate as a feature in terms of the existing maps. Not in terms of their beauty but in terms of overall commitment to developing them as a story and gameplay hub. It's a poor seller because it's inadequate. The reasons for not making a full team effort out of this are inadequate. There is literally nothing else that could be a better launching platform for new systems, expansion of current systems, indirect and direct monetization strategies, and affordably produced new content than the framework that interiors would present.
Not factions. Not space away teams. Not combat revamps. Not swaths of new adventure zones.
Online sales are shown to be driven by trust and emotional investment. That's what bringing the kind of environment where 3/4ths of the IP took place into the game represents. It can't just be a map, no matter how gorgeous. It has to be a game experience.
Player housing with dynamic and social features is a core feature in DCU Online, EvE, Star Citizen, and Mass Effect games. WoW is making Garrisons the central feature of its next expansion.
These aren't just trophy rooms. They're crafting and questing hubs with reasons to bring other players there, which have relevance to the game world and which interface with other systems.
Anybody who expects you or your team to do that alone is nuts and anyone who expects something less dynamic and integrated to function on its prettiness is impractical. This isn't something people are asking you to do. This is something people are asking the whole live development team to do.
I think if Captainsmirk pitted mechanically relevant ship interiors with projects, features, and story content up against space armadas, ground 3.0, a new alien adventure zone, or a fourth faction in a poll, we're now at the tipping point where the interior focus might win out as a primary expansion feature. I am biased because I always wanted this but I think tech advances have made this more viable than it would have been 4 years ago and I think community attitudes have shifted and enough other desires/needs have been filled that this may now have more support than those other features. Those other features are hungers that have been at least partially sated. Whereas ship interiors are by and large just a few gorgeous maps away from what they were at launch.
Aside from account bank and duty officer system. And I'd be really curious how many people don't DOff or, on the other side like me, stopped caring about DOffs aside from for their active roster powers. And the DOff system has been outclassed largely by other systems and the emotional appeal of it got gutted when the potraits got removed. And many stopped when the DOff grinder went away. So you have what I suspect is a very largely dead system (DOffs) being pushed as the primary feature of a system that was never developed aside from some very nice artwork (ship interiors).
Unless they can come up with some really stellar content for ship interiors, I'd rather they just ignore them and work on the other content in the game that has been really stellar. Trying to plug in tedious tasks covered in mini-games in attempts to force players to use the ship interiors are really just a way to create frustrating content that will ultimately not be very fun.
Yes, a lot happened in the interiors on the show, but most of that was dialogue the pushed the story of the episode forward, and sometimes it was combat. We already have been told having multiple interiors would mean that any combat mission would have to be designed for each type of interior, and it wouldn't really be our ship interior anyhow, it would be a duplicate interior used in the mission.
For dialogue, the effort vs reward for trying to change dialog so instead of the big view screen menu we use speech bubbles while walking along a corridor with one of our BOFFs doesn't seem all that great, even just sitting on the bridge while they talk to us from their station, seem like that would get to be a tedious exercise to do every mission.
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All the way back in Beta many players, including myself, indicated to the Devs that the ships are as much a character in the series and movies as actual characters are. Star Trek is not Star Trek without ships...even DS9 had to learn this lesson.
I feel the ships are the anchor for all things Trek, but in this game they are no more than combat characters in space. The interiors are still in very poor condition, underutilized and unappreciated.
Now, if the masses do not care that we do not "play" inside our ships, so to speak, then fair enough. It's one of the few reasons I rarely play this game though I have been involved in the Star Trek game industry for almost two decades now.
This game has improved immensely since it's launch. It is now, in my opinion, a AAA title....and it took quite a while to get there. But it is still missing the third pillar...our starship, IMO, is more than just a gun platform.
It is the very vehicle that allows us to boldy go where noone has gone before.
IMO it deserves more.
Modeler, Mesh mechanic, designer
Ship interiors should be story content and the key to more rapid releases. I don't expect it tomorrow or 9 months from now but I think it's worthy of an expansion centered on it. I favor interiors as reputation, as personal holding, areas as fleet holdings (a state room, for example), as story content, as adventure zone, and as a social hub.
It is a challenge. It's a worthy challenge. I'm thankful Taco came here but this is a feature that probably needs the coordination of every team on the game and planning/coordinating from upper management. It can be hard. I think it's worth it.
It's not as easy as "just do it" and while there are challenges, they aren't impossible ones with some sacrifices and some long term strategic planning.
Foundry interiors are DOA for those not aware. NW's Foundry won't be getting ported to STO.
My solution to the multiple interiors is to build the content to the interior. nYou don't need to remake the same missions for the Belfast interior that the standard or TOS interior get. It also doesn't need to be strictly factioned.
What I think works is to have mission chains, for example, that use the Belfast interior. If you have this interior on your ship, you can launch these from your bridge. If you don't, you can visit a friend who does or track down a Defiant family class patrol ship in the open world and play these missions aboard an NPC Defiant.
This model could also allow for gradual development of three deck interiors for all types of ship because developing a full Wells/Mobius interior, for example, is no longer strictly for the lockbox players. Developing a full Orion, Gorn, Dominion, alternate Klingon, etc. interior is no longer just for people who fly those ships.
It becomes something tied to ships of that type in the open world. Again, using a Nimbus/Dyson Battlezone/etc. model and a feature episode model.
Ship interiors become a new setting for Featured Episodes and adventure zones, for fleet holdings, for personal holdings. That's how you do it.
This. Agreed.
This is something that I wholeheartedly agree with. What people are asking for is "story content" that takes place in ships, not just "things to do". (While that would be nice.)
Even if it meant making only a single interior available to each faction initially (besides specials like the TOS and Belfast interiors), I would love to see them hook up story content to inside of players' ships, like in the shows. (This shouldn't be a problem for the uni-design Romulan interior.)
I'm tired of player ships being just a maneuverable weapons platform and anomaly scanning device. I want to have ships be the characters that they should be, with their own stories to tell. I want to be able to fend off a boarding party, or deal with a trapped, dangerous energy being. I want to be able to protect my crew from a macrovirus invasion, or stop a rogue officer from defecting and taking valuable intelligence with them. I want to be able to play poker, or run a holodeck simulation with my crew, even if it goes awry. Especially if it goes awry. I'd also love to host a tactical planning session with my crew in the briefing room on how to deal with a situation that has arisen onboard or outside of the ship.
I can also think of ways that starship interiors could be "monetized", such as adding in customizations that work more like trophies and Starbase/Embassy/Mine/Spire projects. Something that can be toggled, chosen, disabled, and interacted with. Want a tribble habitat in your ready room instead of an aquarium? You can get that, and even use it to store (and possibly display) all of your tribbles. (Although you could anyway in a biology lab option.) Want to change the targets in your holographic firing range into the enemy type of your choice? You can get that. Want to change the paintings and plants in your ready room? Sure, why not. You could even potentially get options to display small craft outside the ship windows, or even space fauna.
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They use the same 3 builds everybody uses, have the same gear, do the same content, but having the same ship internal they don't use would be an issue?
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You missed the fact that I said "initially". I wasn't saying I *wanted* there to be only one layout for player ships, more that I was willing to accept only one being available at first if it meant in-ship content/story could be implemented. Something that is SEVERELY lacking in this game, based on a property where that was where a lot of the story took place.
Why can't we place that trophy system idea in other rooms of the star ship interiors to decorate the rooms differently. A Social function on the interiors can be to show off your interior. Fore role players it would be great to enhance your interior to fit the character you have created.
I role play as a Bajoran, and would love to see Bajoran Cultural pieces on display around his personal quarters.
That is my 2 cents.
A complete revamping of interiors wouldn't be a bad x.5 season thing. Interiors have been fairly useless since launch, and your statement does give me hope that this might be addressed sometime down the road. With everything that's been done with the Dyson region there is no reason that couldn't be applied to ship interiors for mission purposes its fairly obvious that spawn points can be shifted around easy enough on any interior. There is no reason that interiors can't be fully upgraded and put to very good use. It is a very unexplored and un-monetized aspect to the game.
The thing is this has been looked at from the wrong aspect by Cryptic. Fully developing interiors could be a way to expand content quickly while not needing to develop drastic graphical resources. New maps take a lot more resources to produce, the interiors would change a lot less and once they were put in place they would only need maintenance or occasional updates. In essence once developed these things would occur on the same set of maps and occasionally add a new map.
Example:
C-Store products of course include the bundles with the awesome bridges and interior types.
The interiors could serve as a personal reputation area that could enhance abilities of the interior. Such as crafting which has been broken and worthless since F2P. Putting work into your ships engineering section could reduce need of resources to craft. Putting work into the ships labs and sensor systems could increase the yield of anomalies. A disaster of a doff assignment could trigger an inship mission. Limited customization of personal quarters could be a means of providing easy and effective player housing. Which could put small items for purchase in the C-Store to put in the quarters. Security could allow the player to use the ship interior like the contested zone for "boarding" and allow the player to enhance their security NPCs. An onboard holodeck could be used to generate unique scenarios like Captain Proton, or the Dixon Hill type of stuff and this could be slowly expanded on. A cargo bay could be used to try and make commodities and be used for the trade doffs.
In addition to reputation, quarters customization and crafting, there is the mini mission and mini game aspects. The diplomacy stuff for the briefing rooms could be integrated. Here are some example mission types all triggered from the interior.
Holodeck rescue - The holodeck has malfunctioned and you need to rescue your crewmates.
Medical Emergency - Engineering accident that inundates sickbay and the doctor needs help.
Fire suppression - EPS conduits have ruptured on Deck x and fire suppression is offline.
Intruder alert - Find clues and capture the intruder.
Prisoner Interrogation - Question a prisoner for information. (Klingons could make this interesting)
Shuttle repair - A shuttle was recently damaged on a mission and needs repairs.
Warp core diagnostic - mini games to properly get your warp core functioning better.
Warp core breach! - Something has caused the warp core to go critical prevent the breach.
First contact - Already in place but could be integrated
Resolve a dispute between x and x - More diplomacy stuff (like the Bajor one)
So on and so forth and this is based on systems that are currently in place. I would hope to see something new but this was an example of how it could be done using existing tech while also being feasible for Cryptic to invest the time and resources to capitalize on this. Interiors would need the following. Bridge, Ready Room, briefing Room, Sickbay, mess hall or Ten Forward, Captain's Quarters, , Holodeck, Shuttlebay, Astrometrics lab (not those crappy generic labs), Main Engineering and possibly a cargo bay.
The feds would actually have the more complicated interiors to do seeing as there are quite a few examples Galaxy, Sovereign, Intrepid, Defiant, Origin (which is close to sovereign), TOS, TMP, ENT. The Dyson interiors could be duplicated for the new ships easily enough.
I totally agree. i dream of something like that. thx for your post
the real feeling of being in the Star trek universe; not a DPS race, and stupid events
If anything it should be simpler. The list of options can be much more restricted by limiting certain parts to certain ships.
Intrepid and variants have certain options and Galaxy and variants have others.
Maybe even limit customization to key areas and keep the corridors generic based on basic hull type.
I miss those bases. I REALLY miss those bases.
And the reason only 1% of the CoH population used that feature was because only 1% of the population had editing privelages of super groups. EVERYONE in sto has a ship...
Currently cruising the Pi Canis Sector Block...
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showpost.php?p=4908901&postcount=7
"No, we built the super base editor even before CoV (i.e. long before the sell off)
We heard very little praise back then for the editor, and got almost nothing but complaints. Our statistics showed that only about 10% of people used the base for anything other than a quick door to teleport around the rest of the world.
All of that is one reason we've been hesitant in doing it over again. We tried a new method with Hideouts in Champions, which seemed to be met with moderate success, but took a lot of work to build."
Sometimes a lot of work is worth it for the devs, and worth the wait for the players. You guys have learnt a lot then, as evidenced by the fact that the Hideout feature went over better than the SG Bases. I think you guys could pull this kind of thing off now, especially with the kind of quality that's being put into the newest story missions and their environments. Updates to previous missions and areas, too.
I would wait, if it meant that in-ship story content and expansion on starship interiors would be coming. And if the quality of everything you guys have been making lately is any indication, it would be well worth it.
I really appreciate the honesty on the 'why' of this.
I would like a revamped ship interior, but I do understand why it is not probable.
It is something a lot of people have wanted. I know the duty officer system was envisioned as allowing customization of crew uniforms (another thing people wanted), but compromises were made for the sake of deadlines and tech limitations. In the end it was decided to make the doff system a card game of sorts due to the functionality of it.
I can use that as an example as to why priorities are shifted to actual game content than a facelift pass on ship interiors very few people use.
That said, if ESD is getting a cosmetic overhaul (the third time since STO launched), why is this important if ESD is already functional? It's a map that was expertly done 'well enough' the first time. And the second revamp made it even more polished and shiny.
I don't see the point in making something like ESD a labor priority when it serves its functional use perfectly as it currently stands, but things like ship interiors are on the way far back of the backburner because there's nothing to do there.
If ESD already meets the requirement goals for functionality, and there's nothing more to do there -- why does Stephen D'Angelo think it needs to be revamped in the 'near future'? I know you can't speak for him, but it's things like this that really make me scratch my head.
Some parts of the game are neglected for years at a time while others are on their second/third/fourth iteration. It seems Cryptic has time and money to do their same work over and over again (like ESD), but not enough time to do it right the first time... even though to the rest of the playerbase, things like ESD already serve their functional purpose perfectly and have enough polish that it could be considered as 'done'.
Out of all the complaints for STO's maps, I have never heard "ESD needs to be given a facelift/overhaul" as one of them. I don't see the point in fixing something that is not broken.
What does equipped mean?
-fleshed out interiors, with 3 basic skin color schemes..when going out in deep space, negotiate, harbour, discover or fight life forms
-Collect and store samples, discover new combinations by experimenting...to take for crafting back home
-command and lead your boff captainsinto battles, using your standard ships like fighters that warp in or escort you.
..what this does is make one (or a few) baseline maps to build story and missions on. If players want their standard ships, that choice is available, but without stories associated with fleet admiral command missions.
Devs can periodically add on as story or need arises, slowing the demanding pace.
The tech that puts a player into a temporary ship exists, so it could work as a starting point.
Speaking as someone who loves the ship interiors and regularly plays/played with people who also felt similarly, I wish there was more ship interior development.
I understand that casual players and other sorts may not appreciate the ship interiors, but it's a great portion of Star Trek that takes place within such and wish there was more to to with them instead of things being made simpler or easier, such as what you say about people complaining about having to run around.
I've always felt that if things are made too simple and quick to do or cutting out things that barely take a few minutes to do, that you may as well cut out the entire game and just have a screen with a single button people can press to "win the game," so to speak >_<
Aside from a variety of the gameplay-related suggestions made in this topic, I do feel it'd be easier to visit or re-visit ship interiors if the current ones were given a little dev lovin'. For instance, the standard engineering room no longer has appropriate engineering warp core "pulse" sounds going on, the TOS bridge has chairs that don't face the consoles and the interior itself has a handful of DOff-related NPC's that aren't even in TOS dress, and for some reason bridges on the whole no longer staff themselves with my BOffs and have generic no-names instead, etc.
Not only that, but having an option to turn off the massive "use me!" glow on certain consoles and furnishings would be nice.
I am partial to the idea of being able to customize ship interiors and I was a big user of CoH's base creation stuff. Though I'm not sure how that'd work with the way it's done now, but I'm really hankering for more interior stuff!
...also, TMP/TWOK+ era interiors...*wishes fervently for*
I have read the post and I have been waiting for a real intrepid interior for a long time. The only part I disagree with your original post is that people like a set interior, from one of their favorite trek shows and given any fed vessel they would still like to have it. Thing is to actually apply this to marketing they would have to be useful for missioning which you guys were on to something with the Dyson area no reason it can't be applied to a smaller area and monetized by reputation or C-store or something that money can be made on or some other means of making it worth it. But here is the real reason below.
Hesitant of doing it again kinda implies nothing was learned from the last two experiences so we quit trying, that is not inspiring. You don't push gaming boundaries or make them better without taking risks on new features that didn't work before. STO is not a super hero game and what works for us probably won't work for the other 2 or NWN. Yet another revamp of Earth Spacedock is worth the time when it isn't broke?
No offense to the moderators. Just an opinion.
In spite of what a few people have been saying here, in Star Trek the ship has been one of the stars of the show. A significant amount of time throughout the franchise is spent on the ship, not just on the bridges but in engineering rooms, sickbays, holodecks, cargo bays, science labs, hangers, crews quarters, ships lounges, a plethora of jeffries tubes and even a warp nacelle. Many an episode in one series or another would take place entirely inside the ship, so if this is a Star Trek game, why don't we have anything like this in this game?
Neither is wrong, just different perspectives.
Edit: As for ESD, part of this is the same reason we've revamped early missions recently. Yes, YOU have played that mission a thousand times. But, there are always new players, and making the early parts of the game (including ESD) suck less, so people stick around more and keep playing.
ESD is at it's root, functional. But it fails in a lot of ways. It's confusing. It's not good at imparting that "Star Trek" feel. There's no "wow" moment for a new player. And for those later in the game, there's a lot of running to get to some things. Hopefully we can fix some of that.
The main reason to add something like this is most of Star Trek aired inside the ship or space station in the case of DS9. So giving us the ability to customize what content we can do on our ship and how the ship interior looks would go a long way in giving our ships life. I find the main problem with the Duty Officer ship contacts was that they were too similar to the Duty Officer system. If the crafting contacts actually seemed more like a crafting mini-game instead of just a Duty Officer assignment, then it wouldn't have seemed as pointless.
Functionality and Looks can be obtained through various methods like the C-Store and Reputation. Want to your ship to have Borg Alcoves and glowing green hallways, then buy the Borg Interior C-Store pack. Want to have a Voth Research Lab, then run a Dyson Reputation project that might give something extra like more Dyson Marks.
The thing is, what you just described accurately describes the situation with starship interiors as well.
New players will see the starship interiors, especially when compared to the revamped early missions - ESPECIALLY when compared to - and they will see that they suck, meaning that they will be less likely to stick around. "Why aren't the interiors like in the shows and movies?" "Why can't I do missions inside of my ship like in the TV shows?" "Why do the interiors not looks like the ones in the tutorial and missions like 'City on the Edge of Never'?" These would be just some of the things that they'd ask, before giving up when the answer is "there are no plans to implement this at this time".
Starship interiors have functionality, but it's sub-par, like with ESD. It doesn't impart that "Star Trek" feel, either. More so than even ESD. There's none of that "wow" moment there, either. Sure, not adding in more things to do there makes it less obvious from less people going there, but that's just the same as hiding how much ESD sucks by adding in something to make people want to go elsewhere. You'd be better off just cutting out starship interiors completely aside from bridges. Then people wouldn't be able to see just how much it needs to be improved.
I think it's more that the dev team is hurt and jaded after what happened with SG bases and Hideouts, and doesn't want to risk being hurt (emotionally or financially) again.
There are lots of people clamoring for this and even providing suggestions on how it could be made to work (even monetized), but it's mainly ignored in terms of being used. You say it didn't work and won't work ever, but the players disagree. Sometimes things fail, even several times, before an iteration that's a monumental success rolls around.
You'd be better off just cutting out starship interiors completely aside from the bridges if that's really how you feel about it. What's the point, right? It failed before when the company was younger and more inexperienced, so it couldn't possibly work now, after you've all learnt and improved vastly since then. Right?
If companies were like this when videogames were first invented, the whole videogame industry never would've made it off the ground. Megaman? Never would have had a second game. Nintendo itself wouldn't have survived to become the videogame company it is now, if they'd had an attitude like that when they first got started making videogames. They nearly didn't. Sure, stuff goes wrong. Sure, sometimes things go disastrously. But ruling something out because it failed before when there's now a chance that it could actually work is denying the possibility of what it's being added to becoming something even better.
As someone who got to play around with that editor, let me say a few things:
Editing privileges were highly guarded. There were a variety of reasons for this:
1) It was a joy to use. Competition was fierce to get to use it.
2) Individuals had design sensibilities that were hard to balance with one another. Aside from when our fleet jot hijacked, you know what one of the biggest sources of drama in Caspian has been? The fleet emblem. It's been a source of dischord whenever anyone in a position to edit it edited it. Do I like it? Not really. I'm not sure how many people like the emblem we have But whoever changed it before wound up starting heated arguments in the fleet because the fleet leadership had strong opinions about how it should look.
Points 1 and 2 boil down to the problems with a tool that versatile being shared. It couldn't be. So by its design, it wound up being cut off from most players. The only way a tool like that could work is as a personal tool. Which brings up point 3:
3) It was so versatile that you could make a base unusable. Which further necessitated super-groups restricting access.
I think the tool had social issues which mandated it be something most people never got to use.
Now... To go further, I don't see why military installations should be that custom in STO. We saw different ships of the same class in Star Trek. Bridge modules varied. There were key distinctive features like warp cores and ready rooms.
But by and large, within a class and within an era, ships had the same basic looks.
And deck plans were not dictated by ship class until the plans got tacked on later. By and large, the Undiscovered Country Connie had the same curvature of halls, the same decks, etc. as the Galaxy in TNG. Because they were the same sets with a coat of paint. They swapped out the warp core, used the movies bridge as the TNG battle bridge, and re-dressed the briefing room from TNG as the stateroom. The Sovereign used further re-dresses (albeit more radical) of the same sets.
The Wells timeship bridge? That's the Enterprise-E bridge with Voyager bridge consoles stacked all over it and the Voyager sickbay backdrop relit as a transporter pad.
I think had the trophy system expanded and used some projects ala starbases, you could have plenty of customization in non-essential area that get cut off in story missions or have flags flip on mission maps to swap out basic customizable details like warp cores to the mission owner's.
Ship interiors not being used for story content seems like an artificial trap that a handful of diehard players and designers seem to be cutting off. Whereas having a stock set of maps that could be used in a hundred missions would enable creation of huge volumes of story content.
I've lost a lot of enthusiasm for the Foundry but one trick I always used there was to start with a map that I would design in different states and then built the story around that, knowing that I could use any of the map's states along the way.
If you have a map with enough state options, you could do a mission a week with a small team. I also think you could even have random content that works better than the current exploration content because the randomness in exploration is largely irrelevant to the mission. Yes, that makes it easy to produce on few seed variables but it also makes content that is unplayable. Whereas something tight with lots of well tuned seed variables may be a nightmare to develop but it eventually generates content worth replaying.
I really appreciate you being here, Taco. It's great to have interaction. But I think it's also fair to say that doing this right would require more than just the map artists and a few content guys on board. It's a whole team venture.
It's not that I think it would be easy or that you could do it tomorrow or that you alone would be financially justified in doing it six months from now.
It's that I think it's inadequate as a feature in terms of the existing maps. Not in terms of their beauty but in terms of overall commitment to developing them as a story and gameplay hub. It's a poor seller because it's inadequate. The reasons for not making a full team effort out of this are inadequate. There is literally nothing else that could be a better launching platform for new systems, expansion of current systems, indirect and direct monetization strategies, and affordably produced new content than the framework that interiors would present.
Not factions. Not space away teams. Not combat revamps. Not swaths of new adventure zones.
Online sales are shown to be driven by trust and emotional investment. That's what bringing the kind of environment where 3/4ths of the IP took place into the game represents. It can't just be a map, no matter how gorgeous. It has to be a game experience.
Player housing with dynamic and social features is a core feature in DCU Online, EvE, Star Citizen, and Mass Effect games. WoW is making Garrisons the central feature of its next expansion.
These aren't just trophy rooms. They're crafting and questing hubs with reasons to bring other players there, which have relevance to the game world and which interface with other systems.
Anybody who expects you or your team to do that alone is nuts and anyone who expects something less dynamic and integrated to function on its prettiness is impractical. This isn't something people are asking you to do. This is something people are asking the whole live development team to do.
I think if Captainsmirk pitted mechanically relevant ship interiors with projects, features, and story content up against space armadas, ground 3.0, a new alien adventure zone, or a fourth faction in a poll, we're now at the tipping point where the interior focus might win out as a primary expansion feature. I am biased because I always wanted this but I think tech advances have made this more viable than it would have been 4 years ago and I think community attitudes have shifted and enough other desires/needs have been filled that this may now have more support than those other features. Those other features are hungers that have been at least partially sated. Whereas ship interiors are by and large just a few gorgeous maps away from what they were at launch.
Aside from account bank and duty officer system. And I'd be really curious how many people don't DOff or, on the other side like me, stopped caring about DOffs aside from for their active roster powers. And the DOff system has been outclassed largely by other systems and the emotional appeal of it got gutted when the potraits got removed. And many stopped when the DOff grinder went away. So you have what I suspect is a very largely dead system (DOffs) being pushed as the primary feature of a system that was never developed aside from some very nice artwork (ship interiors).
Yes, a lot happened in the interiors on the show, but most of that was dialogue the pushed the story of the episode forward, and sometimes it was combat. We already have been told having multiple interiors would mean that any combat mission would have to be designed for each type of interior, and it wouldn't really be our ship interior anyhow, it would be a duplicate interior used in the mission.
For dialogue, the effort vs reward for trying to change dialog so instead of the big view screen menu we use speech bubbles while walking along a corridor with one of our BOFFs doesn't seem all that great, even just sitting on the bridge while they talk to us from their station, seem like that would get to be a tedious exercise to do every mission.