It could happen, but at smaller companies risk is taken a lot more seriously than ones like Google where they throw away billions making 500 different chat and messaging platforms to cancel and replace one after another.
Someone can look at potential profit, but then they look at potential risk.
STO 2.0 is like that: double staff costs for 3+ years in the hope that a new engine and clean code will pay for the costs by increasing the user base. Potentially a good profit, but a huge risk from the cost.
(I'd love to see STO with even Fallout 4 level graphics, which are already 6 years out of date.)
Hell, look at Final Fantasy 14... Most of its content is free, but then you have to buy the later expansions. And that game is growing. WOW is losing players to it.
Its free through the first expansion only. But you can't join a Free Company (fleet/guild) on a trial account. And the reason WoW is losing players to FF14 is because of the chaos over at Activision/Blizzard, and the toxic envionment. FF14, on the other hand still understands the meaning of the word "fun", and actually cares about the playerbase as players, not dollar signs.
Really sucks too. Activision was actually one of the good ones back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Blizzard was right up there with Bioware on story.
Its the "We're too big to fail" trap. EA gpt slapped for it with their BS in Battlefront 2, WoW is suffering from it while Activision/Blizzard is facing legal issues, Games Workshop is currently suffering from that as well and I HOPE they face international investigation (But that is a discussion for another time)...
But as they say...
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
The chaos at Activision/Blizzard may be the catalyst which caused many WOW players to jump ship, but many of them who have done so, expecting to hate FF14, have gone on record to say that they actually enjoy it. One of the common comparative themes is bashing Blizzard for making people read books or other external media for deeper lore, ...
Another nice possible addition for ship interiors. The ready room computer used to have story snippets IIRC; it could have all the story blogs that where homepage/forum only sorted by season.
> @theanothername said: > Another nice possible addition for ship interiors. The ready room computer used to have story snippets IIRC; it could have all the story blogs that where homepage/forum only sorted by season.
I couldn't imagine trying to read those long blogs on the STO dialogue box. It would be like trying to reach the Path to 2409 via the accolade tab isntead of on the wiki.
> @sirsitsalot said: > This is why I think that using the ship interiors to drive exploration-themed gameplay would make the most sense. Personally, if I had to go into my ship interior to do exploration content I would probably just not do it.
If I had to go into my ship interior to play holodeck missions, like the few TFOs that are holodeck based, I would probably just not do them since all the other TFOs are much easier to get into via the TFO menu. Exploration content would be great to have, but it should just be integrated into the game world/sector space more naturally. Not thrown into ship interiors to try to force them to have a purpose.
> @sirsitsalot said: > Okay.. So what WOULD make you interested in using your ship interior? I'm interested in everyone's ideas.
I'm not really sure TBH. The things that make sense for ship interiors like holodeck content, or DOFF missions, run into a problem of bad user experience if you make them solely ship interior based. On the other hand, if you allow them to be done outside of ship interiors then no one has a reason to go inside them. Other things like exploration don't really make sense for ship interiors at all, and would lead to the same bad experience trying to force them into ship interiors.
Being able to customize my ready room/captain's quarters would be nice. But I would probably get it the way I want it then never go back there.
> @sirsitsalot said:
> Okay.. So what WOULD make you interested in using your ship interior? I'm interested in everyone's ideas.
I'm not really sure TBH. The things that make sense for ship interiors like holodeck content, or DOFF missions, run into a problem of bad user experience if you make them solely ship interior based. On the other hand, if you allow them to be done outside of ship interiors then no one has a reason to go inside them. Other things like exploration don't really make sense for ship interiors at all, and would lead to the same bad experience trying to force them into ship interiors.
I can get behind that reasoning. I just see two elements that Cryptic has neglected, and figured that a good way to kill two proverbial birds with one proverbial stone is to combine the two. In theory, the combination of interiors + exploration would play like an actual Star Trek show, where all the characters are on board the ship and their activities involve doing things in the various rooms.
Being able to customize my ready room/captain's quarters would be nice. But I would probably get it the way I want it then never go back there.
Early on, ship interiors were meant to be STO's answer to player housing, an element that has always been popular in the MMOs that allow it. And you know, other MMOs have done some amazing things with customization of player housing spaces, even if those spaces have no other purpose than just owning a piece of the game environment and making it look cool according to individual taste.
SWTOR has strongholds that take the idea of player housing and scale it way way up. Players can go for a long time before they manage to unlock every section of a stronghold, thus making it a personal goal. Housing in Elder Scrolls Online is similar.In those games, the housing works almost like fleet holdings work in STO. Start out with nothing but the bare bones of an interior space and over time unlock rooms and other elements.
Our ships could have been personal holdings. That way the mechanics of having an evolving game environment would be accessible to everyone whether in a fleet or not. They could have capitalized on this by creating a semi-unique interior for every ship they release on the C-Store. By semi-unique I mean that while the layout of the interiors migh be the same geometrically, there could be a few subtle elements that would clearly define what class it is. Maybe the difference between two ship interiors is the color of the carpeting, or the environment textures, or the lighting. Something that a player could look at and know that they are on a Blablabla-class ship.
Personally, I think there needs to be a standardized ship interior for all standard-issue, non-C-store ships, and one for each C-store class that has ever been released.
The same layout in terms of corridors, but the environment pieces could be given semi-unique models that are designed to fit within a set of design rules, so the elements can be interchangable and still mesh together correctly. In addition to that, all interiors would be given common hard points, where characters stand or sit, and where certain props are placed, with all control pannels potentially interactable. These hard points would, in theory, allow interiors to be used in missions while retaining an individual's customization options.
Modern game engines have tools that make that sort of thing easier, but I am not sure how STO would go about adapting them or making similar ones for the STO engine. Unreal5 for example has tools that can abstract scene building to the point where changing an interior's style is just a few clicks, some of the tools make creating alternate maps for a scenario that functions on the same story and trigger events almost trivial.
From what I have seen in the livestreams about STO is that it is very static and labor intensive the way games about a decade and a half ago were, though apparently they have made a few upgrades since in a few small areas. It would be great if PWE allowed Cryptic a few tool developers to make some modern dev tools for STO, especially since they could probably be used for the Champions Online and Neverwinter variants of the engine which would diffuse the costs a bit, but from what I hear it is doubtful that they would.
If they did however, they could do some bottle episodes like the various series often did without a lot of duplicated work, and custom bridges or bridges/readyrooms could be connected easily to the standardized but reskinned interiors via the turbolifts just like how they are in missions. In fact, they could even use parts of the mission maps as rooms in the standardized interiors.
I love the exploration from ship interior idea! I don't think it will ever come to pass because of Presumably Worthless Executives, but it's a nice dream.
What would be logical and easily doable as a shipboard QoL upgrade would be full Bank access, not just Account Bank. Ships like the Ferengi Nandi have that (and Mail, Exchange and Dabo!), but Personal Bank on board should have been included on all ships from the get go. Your Personal Bank is basically a cargo bay. Account Bank is rather like beaming cargo between your various Alts' ships. Anyhow, it's a pretty basic feature, and IS doable aboard ships. I'm not suggesting a Dabo Wheel on a Bird of Prey (although, you CAN run the Dabo DOFF mission, so why not?), but getting Character Bound stuff from/to the character's own private Bank shouldn't require a trip to ESD/Qo'noS/New Romulus, etc., when we can access the shared Account Bank without such travel.
Oh, and Romulan chef DOFFs should be able to whip up Romulan Jumbo Mollusc and Osol Twists at the replicator. Just saying.
I'm...pretty sure they already do - other species of chef can craft their species' matching foods at a replicator, so I don't see why Romulan should be any different...though, given Romulans came out over a year after the DOFF system and the guy who made it left...maybe not.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
One thing that I think is fair to ask for is that the lockbox and Lobi ships, which by their very nature represent the generation of far more revenue than any C-store ship, be given unique interiors. I mean, if we are expected to spend the kind of money these ships represent, then they need to be feature-complete. And this needs to happen retro-actively, automatically being made available to those who have one of these ships, not requiring an additional purchase.
With how much time(aka money) it would take to make all the texture sets needed for those, even if they all used the exact same layout, I don't see how you could expect them to give them out for free. If they made them, it would have to cost an additional purchase to make up for the work put into them.
You do know that there are artists in modding communities who can create entire asset libraries in less time than it takes Cryptic. These modders don't get paid to do their work, and they only get to do it on their free time, while Cryptic's artists get paid and work full time. Yes, there's way more to it than click clickity click and done. But if non-orifessioonals can do more than professionals and in less time, then something is seriously wrong.
I don't really think this is a fair assessment.
Modders have always been able to do more in many respects, and its exactly because they aren't getting paid, and aren't doing it professionally, that they can. Modders don't have to worry about things like overall development deadlines. They don't have to worry about how many work hours are in day. They don't have to worry about pesky labor laws about things like minimum wage. They don't have to worry about things like performance costs. They don't have to worry about actually making money on what they do. They really don't have to worry about anything actual professional developers do.
This also ignores the various steps anything in game development goes through, that modded creations don't. While I don't know Cryptic's system, I know from various other game developers that pretty much everything, be it a full story mission, down to a single wildlife animal, goes through a standardized process going from concept art, to various stages of in development, to completion. This slows down how much they put out, but it necessary for larger scale production to run smoothly, and manage everything.
Swift showed how one game character — a melee warrior — is made, from initial concept art, through animation, to writing, voice-over, combat design, audio and special effects.
For example, a concept artist would likely spend two weeks making the character design, with a salary cost of about $3,000. An effects artist creating impact weapon-swing and impact animations might also spend around two weeks on this particular task, with a salary cost of around $3,000.
Other specialists working on the character would include a character artist, a technical animator, a combat designer, animator, programmer, voice actor and audio engineer. In a large studio working on a big budget game, this one character might take about three months to take from concept to actual in-game asset.
Using published game industry salary averages and "being conservative" Swift reckoned on the total salary cost for the character to be $46.5K. But she also added costs such as office space, computers, software and utilities. The total cost for one character, she said, is around $80K.
"That's just one character," said Swift. "Extrapolate that out to multiple characters and environments and it gets expensive, fast."
The same thing can be done to the material visuals used in texturing 3D models. By using filters and layers against a master material, you could take say, a federation corridor and make it where the carpet and wall framing can be recolored just by playing with sliders. When satisfied, just export the new skin. Maybe an excelsior class has gray and blue carpet with light gray wall frames, and a Nova class has gray and olive green carpet with dark gray wall frames. The color variations are all that would change. The material textures would remain the same.
That fine for Federation ships, but what about the Tholian, Xindi, Sphere builder, Tzenkethi, Na'kuhl, Ba'ul, Malon, Kazon, Hirogen, Vaadwaur, Hur'q, Ferengi, Elachi... on and on ships where just recoloring the carpet doesn't work.
Half those things DO exist, though - we've had missions inside Tholian, Sphere Builder, Tzenkethi, Na'kuhl (possibly), Hirogen, Hur'q, Undine and Elachi ships, and we know what Ba'ul architecture looks like from Discovery - those ships at least could have interiors built for them.
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
All the things you say they don't have to worry about should be reasons why the results of modders are inferior to and take more time to develop than the results of professionals. Many of them don't have 8 hours a day to work on their projects. They've got a job to go to. And here's the kicker:
A lot of them end up working for a professional developer. And even though they are capable of delivering amazing results quickly, the bureaucracy ties their hands. Hurry up and wait. Hurry up and wait. It doesn't have to be that way. That it is that way is a crying shame. It's like having a computer system that can run the newest games in their highest resolution at 60+ FPS, and then installing bloatware that slows it down to a crawl and saying "This is how I roll!"
The point is, if a modding team can produce more content at superior quality to that which so-called professionals manage, then perhaps there really are too many steps involved on the so-called professional side.
I say "so-called" because the tier of modders I refer to have a master-level grasp of the tools and master-level skills with them. The only thing keeping them from achieving the label of "professional" is not working on a paid project. They've got the proper aptitude. They've got the proper atitude.
Modders can more easily put out individual items, like a gun, or a piece armor, at a faster rate, but you look at any large scale modding project and they are all messes that take years to put out something thats far less expansive then an actual game. I can think of many larger scale modding projects like New California, Frontier, Falskaar, Sim Settlements, the various "remake X Bethesda game in Y Bethesda game engine" mods, that had years in development, only to get a fraction of the playable content compared to the game they are built around, despite already have all of the actual game mechanic built for them. The quality of these larger modding projects also tends to be much lower then the games they are built around, lacking the same level of detailed world, lore, and quest complexity. And they are all this way exactly because they don't follow these sorts of processes.
I know this from my own job as well. At my job we get tons of stuff from around the country, and for the stuff we get to go from one end of the pipeline to the other it has to go through like 7-8 different departments, and takes around a week to do so. I could hand walk any individual thing we get through these steps in a single day if I had access to all of these departments, but you can't just do that for every single thing because there is so much of it that there is no way to do that for everything we have without things getting missed.
The sort of wild west, shoot from the hip, style of game development you can use for a small RPG Maker game doesn't really work on a larger scale project if you want to maintain the same level of quality and consistency throughout. Even indie studios follow these same design patterns because they are necessary to make sure everything gets done in a timely fashion.
Comments
Someone can look at potential profit, but then they look at potential risk.
STO 2.0 is like that: double staff costs for 3+ years in the hope that a new engine and clean code will pay for the costs by increasing the user base. Potentially a good profit, but a huge risk from the cost.
(I'd love to see STO with even Fallout 4 level graphics, which are already 6 years out of date.)
Its free through the first expansion only. But you can't join a Free Company (fleet/guild) on a trial account. And the reason WoW is losing players to FF14 is because of the chaos over at Activision/Blizzard, and the toxic envionment. FF14, on the other hand still understands the meaning of the word "fun", and actually cares about the playerbase as players, not dollar signs.
Really sucks too. Activision was actually one of the good ones back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and Blizzard was right up there with Bioware on story.
But as they say...
"The bigger they are, the harder they fall."
Another nice possible addition for ship interiors. The ready room computer used to have story snippets IIRC; it could have all the story blogs that where homepage/forum only sorted by season.
> Another nice possible addition for ship interiors. The ready room computer used to have story snippets IIRC; it could have all the story blogs that where homepage/forum only sorted by season.
I couldn't imagine trying to read those long blogs on the STO dialogue box. It would be like trying to reach the Path to 2409 via the accolade tab isntead of on the wiki.
> This is why I think that using the ship interiors to drive exploration-themed gameplay would make the most sense.
Personally, if I had to go into my ship interior to do exploration content I would probably just not do it.
If I had to go into my ship interior to play holodeck missions, like the few TFOs that are holodeck based, I would probably just not do them since all the other TFOs are much easier to get into via the TFO menu. Exploration content would be great to have, but it should just be integrated into the game world/sector space more naturally. Not thrown into ship interiors to try to force them to have a purpose.
> Okay.. So what WOULD make you interested in using your ship interior? I'm interested in everyone's ideas.
I'm not really sure TBH. The things that make sense for ship interiors like holodeck content, or DOFF missions, run into a problem of bad user experience if you make them solely ship interior based. On the other hand, if you allow them to be done outside of ship interiors then no one has a reason to go inside them. Other things like exploration don't really make sense for ship interiors at all, and would lead to the same bad experience trying to force them into ship interiors.
Being able to customize my ready room/captain's quarters would be nice. But I would probably get it the way I want it then never go back there.
Modern game engines have tools that make that sort of thing easier, but I am not sure how STO would go about adapting them or making similar ones for the STO engine. Unreal5 for example has tools that can abstract scene building to the point where changing an interior's style is just a few clicks, some of the tools make creating alternate maps for a scenario that functions on the same story and trigger events almost trivial.
From what I have seen in the livestreams about STO is that it is very static and labor intensive the way games about a decade and a half ago were, though apparently they have made a few upgrades since in a few small areas. It would be great if PWE allowed Cryptic a few tool developers to make some modern dev tools for STO, especially since they could probably be used for the Champions Online and Neverwinter variants of the engine which would diffuse the costs a bit, but from what I hear it is doubtful that they would.
If they did however, they could do some bottle episodes like the various series often did without a lot of duplicated work, and custom bridges or bridges/readyrooms could be connected easily to the standardized but reskinned interiors via the turbolifts just like how they are in missions. In fact, they could even use parts of the mission maps as rooms in the standardized interiors.
What would be logical and easily doable as a shipboard QoL upgrade would be full Bank access, not just Account Bank. Ships like the Ferengi Nandi have that (and Mail, Exchange and Dabo!), but Personal Bank on board should have been included on all ships from the get go. Your Personal Bank is basically a cargo bay. Account Bank is rather like beaming cargo between your various Alts' ships. Anyhow, it's a pretty basic feature, and IS doable aboard ships. I'm not suggesting a Dabo Wheel on a Bird of Prey (although, you CAN run the Dabo DOFF mission, so why not?), but getting Character Bound stuff from/to the character's own private Bank shouldn't require a trip to ESD/Qo'noS/New Romulus, etc., when we can access the shared Account Bank without such travel.
Oh, and Romulan chef DOFFs should be able to whip up Romulan Jumbo Mollusc and Osol Twists at the replicator. Just saying.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Modders have always been able to do more in many respects, and its exactly because they aren't getting paid, and aren't doing it professionally, that they can. Modders don't have to worry about things like overall development deadlines. They don't have to worry about how many work hours are in day. They don't have to worry about pesky labor laws about things like minimum wage. They don't have to worry about things like performance costs. They don't have to worry about actually making money on what they do. They really don't have to worry about anything actual professional developers do.
This also ignores the various steps anything in game development goes through, that modded creations don't. While I don't know Cryptic's system, I know from various other game developers that pretty much everything, be it a full story mission, down to a single wildlife animal, goes through a standardized process going from concept art, to various stages of in development, to completion. This slows down how much they put out, but it necessary for larger scale production to run smoothly, and manage everything.
With all of these stages, and all of the cost involved with everyone, even a single texture in a video game can end up costing over $1,000. I found an article about how long, and expensive, it can take a single character to be made in a video game
https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/29/9222257/how-much-does-it-cost-to-make-one-game-character
That fine for Federation ships, but what about the Tholian, Xindi, Sphere builder, Tzenkethi, Na'kuhl, Ba'ul, Malon, Kazon, Hirogen, Vaadwaur, Hur'q, Ferengi, Elachi... on and on ships where just recoloring the carpet doesn't work.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
I know this from my own job as well. At my job we get tons of stuff from around the country, and for the stuff we get to go from one end of the pipeline to the other it has to go through like 7-8 different departments, and takes around a week to do so. I could hand walk any individual thing we get through these steps in a single day if I had access to all of these departments, but you can't just do that for every single thing because there is so much of it that there is no way to do that for everything we have without things getting missed.
The sort of wild west, shoot from the hip, style of game development you can use for a small RPG Maker game doesn't really work on a larger scale project if you want to maintain the same level of quality and consistency throughout. Even indie studios follow these same design patterns because they are necessary to make sure everything gets done in a timely fashion.