The Fate of Tyrlon and other Dubious Things

Ok I jest, but it has risen from the dead.  After Perpetual tanked earlier this year it was rumored that the rights, the art assets and possibly some code had been transferred to another developer.  Even then, it was rumored that it was Cryptic Studios but that was confirmed yesterday morning when Cryptic announced that they had taken over development on the game.

Cryptic is best known for their CIty of Heroes/Villains MMO (now run by NCSoft) but they are also making another MMO called Champions Online.  Since I currently play City of Heroes/Villains (they’re one game now) and enjoy it a lot, i’m really looking forward to both Champions Online and now Star Trek Online.  I had almost given up hope on the game ever getting made after Perpetual messed around on it for several years and never produced much more than a few screenshots.

Cryptic knows how to develop MMOs and is one of the more experienced development houses out there.  The game will be running on the “Cryptic Engine” which is the same thing that powers Champions Online sans the cel-shading effects.

Perpetual was supposedly going to allow people to crew ships together but Cryptic has already stated everyone can be a Captain and the first two factions will be the Federation and the Klignons.  Since the timeline for the MMO is set at about 20 years after the events in the forgettable Trek movie “Nemesis”, there should be some Romulan fighting going on and hopefully the Federation and the Klignon Empire are still allies.  Some of my friends want to play as Klignons so i’d like to be able to work together with them.

In my idealized version of how this MMO could work I am thinking about an encounter with the Borg.  Say there are 3 of us on the bridge (real players) and we are all on voice chat of some sort.  The ship is under attack, someone is the Captain, someone is the helmsman, and someone is the tactical officer.  During the middle of the battle with the bridge falling apart around us the Borg figure out a way to beam through our paltry shields.  The tactical officer has to order some tactical teams around and then run over to the turbolift to fend off the invaders while some red shirt takes over his duties (now being ordered where to fire etc by the Captain).  All of this could be going on while someone could be down in engineering doing “mini-games” of some sort to re-allocate power / shields / weapons etc or to fix broken things on the ship.

If done right what I just described could be the ultimate in epic experience not to mention getting to do Holo-deck related themed missions, shipboard assaults, away missions and even general science/exploration/mystery type plotlines!  There is so much potential in the Star Trek universe to make something cool, let’s just hope it doesn’t get screwed up like Star Wars Galaxies..

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