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Ten Forward Weekly 6/15/2022
protoneous
Member Posts: 2,981 Arc User
From: https://reddit.com/r/sto/comments/vdv7ly/ten_forward_weekly_6152022/ Credit to: https://reddit.com/user/TheSajuukKhar/
- Risa has been Scot Boyd's(Lead Environment artist) baby, always trying to make it look better.
- Redid the Risa dock planks because he thought they looked bad, gave Risa a new transporter pad, added ropes as railings instead of wood railings, and added new stairs off the docks instead of ramps. New huts on the docks using the new planks, and made a new roof for them. Added ropes to the jetpack launch pad to give reason to why the wood is being pulled up. New palm trees.
- Larger structures on Risa not touched in this update.
- Can't do day/night time changes in the current lighting system. Though Scot asks if people want a night version of the map, or a midday version of the map, for the different feels.
- Can't do different times of day on different instances of the map due to having game logic issues thats far beyond what they can reasonably do. Every instance has to be the same version of the map, they will just change what version of the map(mid day, night, sunrise, etc.) they are using that year if they make them all.
- Updating the map each week of the Summer Event with a different lighting style would likely cause too many unforeseen issues.
- Not super likely they would add new events to the summer event. Though Thomas has wanted to add a baseball mini-game to Risa, but they would need a new place to put it.
- Scot always wanted to do another pass on Starfleet Academy, so was glad he got to do some updates to it for the revamped tutorial.
- Space maps are a lot easier to update then ground maps since you can just uprez the planet material texture, or tweak some lighting. Scot is a big fan of dark side/light side planets, where one half is lit, and the other is not. He feels a fully lit planet in front of the player just feels flat.
- Summer Event is happening on PC/Console at the same time. Starting June 30th.
- Its on Scot's plan to port over the Starfleet Academy updates from the tutorial to the social zone. Was going to call up one of the designers to talk about that today(Wednesday). Because the tutorial map is a separate map, he wanted to make sure none of the changes broke the social map in some way by just porting it over immediately. Plans to get started on the porting over either this week or next week. Should be coming relatively soon.
- Porting over the new Fed interior kit into old missions would be a lot of work. Scot believes that the new Fed kit works on a grid of 30 feet by 30 feet, while the old Fed kit may work on a grid of 40 feet by 40 feet, due to the older maps being made ginormous back then, so they don't line up correctly. Took around 2 weeks for artists and designers to redo that relatively small part of the tutorial with the new Fed kit. Redoing something like a Fed ship interior with lots of hallways would take much longer. Wouldn't likely redo it unless they used it in a new mission.
- Took 6 weeks to get Forged in Fire to work with the new DS9 interior. Involved taking out some of the kiosks and other items to open it up a bit to make combat easier in the tight space. Final layout of the cargo bay took about 3 days to decide on, built using kit pieces originally designed for the ore processing room.
- If time wasn't a factor he would love to go back and redo the Iconian ship interior because, while he thought the idea was cool, he feels like theres so much more they can do with it.
- Past Iconia was the first map Scot worked on in STO.
- Scot asks, though states they aren't going to change how they do it, if people would rather have more quality content with higher fidelity textures, cutscenes, etc. or more stuff to do that has a lesser quality. Chat answer was largely quality > quantity.
- Scot loves that they aren't under the crazy time schedules they were in the past where they were just made to pump things out, and now they can take a lot more time to make things. Feels more proud of the stuff hes putting out now.
- Scot mentions Adventure Zone like New Romulus or Defera likely took multiple "sprints", a sprint being 6 weeks, to do. They could build a big city(uses Spiderman on the PS4 as an example) and fill it with various encounters, but that doesn't really incorporate into the story, so it would just be building a giant sandbox, and Cryptic is more story focused.
- Kael states Adventure Zones were the baby of the producers/lead designers of the time, but they don't really fit the kinds of stories they want to tell in STO.
- Scot also talks about ROI on these sorts of zones. They can spend a lot of time/money on these adventure zones, but they don't really do anything for STO, so future content has to have changes(in the negative) to account for that. Cryptic is more focused on doing things they know will help keep the game going.
- Scot states they spent so much time and man hours on the Lukari Colony world. One of the first things Scot did as a lead environment artist. In the long run, while they got story missions out of it, it was probably more then the should have done. And they probably wont do something like that again because the ROI wasn't good.
- Scot mentions hes really pound of the team, and the leadership. Hearing all the things that the devs come up with during meetings, and the positive encouragement they get during those meetings. He's worked at companies in the past that were very toxic, but the STO team is very healthy, and nice. And he wouldn't stay here working on STO if the team was toxic.
- New ship being revealed next week that isn't the summer ship.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Probably not, unless they can get enough people or good enough tools to make the things efficiently. They are not cost effective otherwise.
I'd rather have a fun sandbox where I can create my own stories and fantasies than play a stiff bit-actor in someone else's fan fiction (of 'my' character). It's almost insulting, but I also understand I'm in the minority and that the majority of the playerbase appears to prefer being told a story instead of engaging with one of their own (guided) creation.
(My first character was leveled to max without ever completing the first/klingon war story arc. I made it all the way to level cap back then via the planetary patrol missions - every single one - and exploration/dse clusters. Mind you, this was before even romulan patrols were added and the exp-scaling was still curved towards being a dragged-out subscription game instead of 'free to pay'. When New Romulus and Dyson Sphere were added, I was over the moon at having so many new 'playgrounds' to explore and immerse myself into.)
BZ-specific tangent:
Kobali and Tzenkethi both missed the mark due to sadistically overzealous encounter-gameplay design instead of focusing on being interesting places to explore and just be there. If there's anything enjoyable about slogging through the overpacked vaadwaur who constantly try to run around to 'flank' you every 3 feet on Kobali, I haven't found it or heard of such from anyone else. Because of it, I honestly couldn't tell you what the zone actually looks like beyond the temple(all I remember is.. rocky passages/canyons) - there's just no time to actually admire anything that zone might actually have in it(halving the encounter density of the zone would be a great first step to fixing that place). Tzenkethi.. I don't mind as much these days, but I still think it needs more progression-structure and less wack-a-mole(there are a myriad of ways to accomplish that).
Agreed with some of the things you said.
Though I don't mind that Kobali Prime is filled with enemies. I don't go there often, but that's especially because I don't like the purple-pink city and bare, rocky terrain.
The Dyson zone and New Romulus, on the other hand, are indeed great places to be just to spend time being there. There are enough mini-missions, enemies in some places and just a great environment to look at. The only thing that they could use more, are random events happening ('earth'quakes, wild animal attacks, power malfunctions, Tal Shiar showing up in other places and so on). And of course it wouldn't be bad if these maps were made bigger, or new ones added to combine with the existing ones.
I find it strange that they say that exploration/adventure/battle zones aren't popular enough. Literally all of them are well-populated most of the time with multiple instances filled. They're probably even more popular than more than half the queues, some of which can take forever to start.
I don't find it hard to believe that it takes much more time to create them, but I think they're wrong when they say that it's not worth it because they don't help keep the game going. And most of them actually DID tie in to the game's story.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
As for:
I'm not sure how they measure return on investment of a zone. But the reason the Colony World is less popular than the other zones probably has a lot to do with the CW being linked to grinding an immense amount of resources to build an entire fleet holding. People do tend to get tired of that after a while, and that's not surprising.
As much as I appreciated their devotion to letting us build up things and creating colonies, mentally it's linked to some very annoying tasks that you needed to get out of the way so the thing could then automatically collect its own resources.
I'm not sure what they have in mind, but this could be interesting. Especially the map from Midnight is among the best ones in the game.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.
Defiance (especially in their Silicon Valley map though it had variants of it everywhere) had that so while there was the usual regular pattern of encounters cycling, they were always slightly different depending on what people were doing (or not doing) with other encounters. For instance, there were a number of encounters where hellbugs would spawn, tear up the local area a bit and then take off cross country and do things like ambush convoys and whatnot, then finally ending up at one of the "boss battle" type major encounters.
If you did things like kill the bugs at the spawn sites, rescue the convoys, and just generally potshot bugs when you see them those boss encounters would go much smoother because there would be fewer enemy reinforcements showing up. If on the other hand you just surf instances to catch the major stuff (triggers reacting to player actions causing encounters to take longer or end sooner would send the various encounters out of sync with their counterparts in different instances) you could end up getting buried in enemy units if no one else is taking care of the smaller encounters.
They also did the reverse, where players would have to rescue enough convoys and whatnot to trigger the 'boss' encounters (which were usually an attack on a base or resource site) which is somewhat similar to the STO battlezone strategy, but with more interactive dependencies modifying them, making them seem less repetitive though you really just follow the same general pattern over and over.
They could do something like that here in STO, for instance the various DSEs could be rally points for enemy forces and doing or ignoring the various types could influence some big encounter, like for instance determining which one goes off depending on how many of the DSE groups got their units through unmolested.
For workload/ROI consideration those triggered 'boss' encounters would probably have to start very generic so any of the enemy groups would work (or possibly even the top two or three together, like where the Tholian RA has mainly Tholians but also Borg and Terran Empire units, as long as it would make sense), but as more of those top-level encounters get added over time they could be more tailored.
It could also be done by adding some logic to regular missions, patrols, TFOs, etc. in order to set up a metasituation that is resolvable by doing suggested/emergency/whatever activities (which themselves could be anything depending on how the devs would want to shape it) from the usual admirals or other quest giver types.
Those top-level encounters could be mass battlezone style things or individual/small group things or a mix of both. And the system as a whole could work on a single-shard level or across instances and influence the whole game at once.
The downside is that Cryptic would probably have to hire someone who is very good with emergence and AI systems in games since that is still a rather niche specialty (and a badly managed emergent AI can be serious trouble), but the upside is that the more the AI can keep people entertained with variety of response the less pressure there is for constant, frequent content drops and fewer rants about new content being used up in a few hours and having to wait weeks or months for the next one (especially with the previous relief valve for that pressure, the Foundry, gone).
It would be a mobile research/development support facility for one of my Voth scientist toons. I've tried a few dreadnoughts for him but none of them felt really right for a crew consisting of both Starfleet and independent research teams. With that one, I'd have something I can consider different enough from regular Starfleet ships while not being too alien.
If it moves like the Kirk class (not too much movement along the Z-axis when turning left or right) it'd be perfect.
[3/25 10:41][Combat (Self)]Your Haymaker deals 26187 (10692) Physical Damage(Critical) to Orinoco.