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Are you happy that most of the old developers were replaced?
kelthuzad
Member Posts: 37 Arc User
I, for one, am happy and welcome the new overlord, DECA!
{Edited thread title. - BMR)
{Edited thread title. - BMR)
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Ask me in a few years after they have had a chance to show us what they can do.
I experience this myself a few years back - right before Christmas too!
It's an absolutely horrible thing to have happen to you, and it still hurts even after several years!
I spent almost 4 years unemployed, which wiped out my savings and took a massive toll on my mental and physical health!
Thankfully, I finally managed to get back into work just as all my money ran out.
I really hope that all those affected by Embracer's blunder manage to find work quickly!
Am I happy there is a different team? I have no idea yet, it will depend on what resources the new team has. When the owners switched to a cheaper team, did they use the per-developer cost savings to allow for more developers or did they keep the team size the same?
Even if the team is larger, they've lost all the years of experience from Cryptic staff so they'll probably be less productive at first. We'll need to wait and see the long-term results.
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Thanks. Knowing there's been a long transition period where the new hires had access to the Cryptic staff is a very good sign. If they've been keeping good notes of answers and their own investigations the code and tools might even be better documented now than they were before.
If it means we don't see any more baseball themed outfits though, as a European I'll be happy about that!☺️
Otherwise it's a wait and see what happens.
As of this writing I don't know DECA well enough to like or dislike them as we are still getting through the old guard's last bunch of decisions in game. We probably will be for a little while yet, too.
At this stage all DECA can do is either impress me, disappoint me, or bore me. I hope it is the former because I've had enough of the latter two.
However, I am cautiously optimistic that DECA Games will re-evaluate some of the decisions made by Cryptic, such as the starship interiors that ship aficionados like myself are very passionate about, as there are so many that are still missing.
Just off the top of my head, the game really needs one of the Enterprise bridges from The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan or The Voyage Home, as well as one of ones from The Final Frontier or The Undiscovered Country. I think the logical choices for these would be The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, since the way sets are built now, period accurate kits would allow the Reliant and Excelsior variants to be built as well.
Moving onto The Next Generation era, the Enterprise-E is the only hero ship from that timeframe without a bridge option. I believe First Contact would be the most logical choice, but the version from Insurrection with the standard viewscreen would also be very welcome.
Going back in time figuratively speaking, the NX-01 is very much in need of a suitable interior, with my preference being the original version used in seasons 1 through 3.
Of course, those were just from the old productions. More recently, there’s the Enterprise interior from either Discovery or Strange New Worlds, and the Stargazer/Titan-A bridge set from seasons 2 and 3 of Picard.
That’s excellent news. These three gentlemen not only have a wealth of experience with the inner workings of the game, but also an immense passion for Star Trek in general. Coupled with knowledge of the Star Trek universe being a key part of the job advertisements I’ve seen over the last year, I can only hope that the road ahead will be as bright as the next star to the right.
As far as DECA is concerned, I think I am aligned with most people's opinions - the jury is still out.
One other thing that hadn't occurred to me before - if the majority(or all?) of the development team is effectively moving to operate on German office hours, could that mean the maintenance schedule is eventually re-alligned to match?
Doubtful. Maintenance times have less to do with office hours and more to do with the lowest population times on the servers.
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I do think that the previous teams have done a decent job of trying to hold onto what star trek is given the pressure they're under to promote new trek and dissolve the old trek. This is a corporate machine, like all corporate machines in any market they are in, there is only one goal, anything goes to achieve it, give me all of your money. It doesn't matter what consumers, players, or employees emotions or opinions are. They either take your money or they don't. If they push it to far, they don't take your money and go out of business. These aren't the old days when some corporate owners had a soul, today's corporations have no scruples, ethics, and have long abandoned morals. There is no righteousness in corporations, so what does a consumers opinion or emotions have to do with anything?
There is certainly an argument to be made that the modern shows employ more contemporary language forms, but to say they’ve been dumbed down fails to take into account the real world science that went into concepts like the Spore Drive.
Vulgarity is also in the eye of the beholder. Take the use of profanity. When Chief O’Brien yelled bollocks when the time machine that sent his daughter into Bajor’s past wouldn’t work, it illustrated how worried and frustrated he was. Would that scene have worked better if he yelled something clean and wholesome? I sincerely doubt it.
As for what is and isn’t engaging, thought inspiring or entertaining, that too is in the eye of the beholder, and I enjoyed a great deal of the modern Star Trek shows to varying degrees, and I certainly aren’t a purveyor of mindless entertainment. If I was, I’d suggest Paramount look into creating the Real Housewives of Starfleet Command.
Not only that, but you also have to consider that it was probably TV Networks that imposed strict language rules, forcing shows to use less colorful language in situations where it would be natural. But even Captain Picard himself said something in TNG at least once, in the episode where he had to deal with the Sheliak and shut them down HARDCORE. Riker said "You enjoyed that", and Picard's response was "You're D*** right". So its not that it didn't exist, its that its a product of its time and Network Rules. Seeing Starfleet Officers swear IMO would not be out of place, especially as a reactionary response to something. Humans will Human after all. And of course other species will have their own colorful language.
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I am, however, optimistic. Since taking over, the new owners have been very generous. See for example the Typhoon and this year's big event prize. But also the very quick addition of new stuff to the Phoenix box, with a pretty popular ship even.
Together with this week's bug fixes (on the Temporal spec tree powers) it shows they're willing to devote precious time and resources not just to releasing new ships, but also to things that have been in the game for years now. Given that there are old winter kit modules that are still broken, as well as old content that has been unnecessarily buried and made less accessible, I think this attention for 'established' stuff is a good thing.
The Winter event on the other hand is a bit underwhelming in terms of new things to use (outside of the event itself I mean - I had hoped for at least new kit modules), but we know they're also busy working on the anniversary event.
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I'm not with Cryptic or DECA, but at work as a Windows app developer I have a queue of 50+ tickets, and the ordering of those tickets is done by management. I make recommendations and point out problems with leaving something unfixed but the final decision is not mine.
So the topic really should be asking whether you're happy that management has changed.
Mostly because Patrick Stewart thought that speaking with a French accent would mean he'd have to roleplay a pirate.
No... Picard is canonically French. He's from La Barre, France. The fact he didn't speak with a French accent in the show doesn't matter in where he was from. He did swear in French though a couple times in the early seasons of TNG.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Jean-Luc_Picard
Pretty sure Picard exagurated an accent to sell the disguise.
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The twisting and dumbing down are most noticeable if you use TOS as the baseline since what happened was a kind of devolution from the original as the Trek eras marched on. Obscuring that somewhat is the fact that TV production technology improved in leaps and bounds so the eye candy got better as the story quality (and the tech level in the setting) sank.
TOS was full-on soft sci-fi ("hard" and "soft" refer to the type of science that a work concentrates on, not to how scientifically accurate it is, btw) done in a mostly serious drama format. Then, between the end of TOS and TAS and the start of Phase II (the Trek series that was dumped in favor of TMP, not the fanflick series of the same name that came later) Star Wars (which was pure space opera) exploded onto the scene and Paramount decided that hijacking the new series was the most expedient way of catching some of that wave of popularity, and so introduced a lot of space opera into Trek. And the trend continued through the Berman era and then went into overdrive with the Kelvin movies and the various Trek series that followed.
DSC especially had problems because they dumped the drama format almost entirely in favor of melodrama, and a lot of sci-fi fans are uncomfortable with that kind of overemotional, wailing, teeth gnashing dialog and plot elements. Luckily, SNW has gone back to (at least mostly) drama and reintroduced a bit more of soft sci-fi, which makes it more palatable to TOS and other soft sci-fi fans.
As for the swearing, Roddenberry had a very funny monolog about some of the real behind-the-scenes fights that went on. One of the things that sparked a lot of those fights was the fact that despite being limited to the 10:00 to 11:00 time slot, the show was held to "kid show" standards and could not use language or do many other things that other series could do even in earlier time slots. The fact is that NBC, and Hollywood in general, were not comfortable with science fiction as it was done in novels, probably because "science fiction" was the label they gave both incursion/mad scientist style horror films and kid's show space opera serials and with the ratings being so tight they were risk-averse when something new came along where they didn't have a proven formula to work from, so they applied the restrictions of both to the new sci-fi series.
Also, on the in-story side of things, Picard is French but probably had at least some schooling in the UK, it isn't that uncommon that someone speaks a foreign language with a native accent (or at least outside of the US where multilingualism is more common anyway) if they have a very good ear for pronunciation and exposure to native speakers.