Via Tobolds, more news: apparently Perpetual and STO have been on deathwatch for awhile, and last-gasp development is trying to change the direction of the game to more casual. It didn’t sound very hardcore to me anyway… Free to play? Merde… This is definitely not how I saw the game being released.
Reaction on the STO Forums and [ STO Source ] has been muted. Perhaps with months of little attention to the title, it’s slowly lost fans to keep the community alive.
F13.net has some usefully cynical commentary, as usual.
How I think it went down? Perpetual wanted to get Gods & Heroes out the door and get money coming in, its engine shaken down, experience managing a live MMO, and then turn all its attention toward STO. Unfortunately, it ran out of time or money on G&H and was forced to stop development, and went bankrupt. They were apparently then approached by a mystery company who wanted Perpetual for its Star Trek license as an easy entry into the video game world, what remained of Perpetual was put toward rewriting STO to be a casual, free-to-play game, likely entirely different from what we’ve seen so far of the design — which had very little of the fan-desired ability to be a bridge officer on the Enterprise and was more like “Shuttlecraft in Space”.
So people left, more people will be brought in, and assuming STO finally goes into production (up until now has been pre-production exclusively), what we get will have the Star Trek Online name… but will it be recognizable?
I’m thinking Star Wars Galaxies NGE, where you pick your class from a series of pictures “CAPTAIN: James T. Kirk. ANDROID: Data. SCIENCE OFFICER: Spock.” Etc.
Time will tell. But it does not sound good.
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