Impressive

Star Trek Online continues to impress me.  In their latest Engineering Report (which is awesome, by the way), Producer Dan Stahl laid out their plans for the future.  This is what monthly communication should look like.  They are very clear in what their plans are, so there is very little room for misunderstanding.

What has me so excited?

We are currently going back to our master schedule and reworking it so that we will be able to deliver more Feature Episodes more frequently. This means more than 5 series a year and hopefully closer to 9 or 10 which would be ideal and lead to little or no downtime between new episodes. I’m also in discussions with Jack over how we could staff up to support more content in general.

I am a huge fan of the Featured Episodes, they are actually the reason I play STO.  It seems I am not alone as Dan mentioned that they had more traffic than they could handle at times when the finale was released.  Now Cryptic wants to almost double the amount of FE's per year AND increase staffing for them.  Great news.

The other big announcement was:

March 28th is the tentative date on when we expect the Foundry to go live on Holodeck.

If you're not familiar with the Foundry, it is STO's user generated content system.  I like to think of it as Feature Episode - Lite.   Players are really embracing the system and making interesting experiences.  Not everyone is interested in gaming the system for power leveling.

Feature Episodes, Foundry missions and Remastered Episodes will bring more high quality content to STO.  Since STO is all about scaling, I don't see much of a reason to do the 'progression' content.  Instead I can do the good stuff at whatever level I happen to be at.

Posted in: STO