There is so much I wish I could tell everyone here that would calm all of you down ten-fold.

I am going to ask all of you to look back to Cryptics other games, City of Heroes and City of Villians.  Once these games were launched, Crpyitc spent the next 2 or 3 years releasing free patches and mini-expansions for that game adding in new content and such.

With Star Trek Online, it is very safe to say that any KEY features which are NOT there at launch, will be available six months or a year down the line through free content updates.  

I know alot of you have nothing to back this up, but just trust me on this one :)

Something as key as incorporating the insides of a starship will not be easy to add in, or may not even be possible down the line. To think they will get added later is a pipe dream. In all seriousness, they'll come out 6 months after launch, tell us they looked at it but it just wasn't possible, and move on.

Therefore we are looking at a WoW/EVE hybrid. EVE in space, WoW in the ground combat, and that's all it's gonna be.

Right but Ship Interiors ARE going to be there at launch, but only INSTANCED as part of missions.  You will not be able to invite other players onto your bridge or your ship, but the system for interiors will be there to some point.

They will just need to build on it later.

IF they can build it later on.

That PSI's in a fully explorable format are not going to be included at launch is an indicator that something has gone wrong, and they don't feel confident that they can sort it out prior to the game's release. Once the game releases, it will be incredibly hard to recode interiors to ships to allow full exploration or even partial exploration of every ship in the game.

PSIs, and the ability to go anywhere in your ship is part of the fundamental base code as it is tied to the environmental coding. To make massive changes to the environment after the game launches would take a significant allotment of time and resources. Look how long it took EVE to even incorporate partial exploreable interiors on just space stations.

The other issue in all this is player satisfaction, and the free expansion. A very smart friend of mine told me "If a company has to offer a free expansion, to add in features that should have been there at launch, then the game should not have launched." I whole-heartedly agree, and the players of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online undoubtably agree as well. Warhammer Online is the perfect example, and Cryptic should be taking a very close, hard look at Mythic right now. Mythic should be looking at beta-testing a pay-to-play expansion right about now. Instead, they are beta-testing a free expansion that finally adds in the last of the cut content that was supposed to go out at launch, as well as still sorting out launch content issues. On top of that, they are living with the fact that in less than 6 months, they have dropped close to half a million subscriptions.

I would hope that any company hoping to make money from an MMO, would be wise enough to be looking at the mistakes made in previous ventures, and attempting to do whatever is possible to avoid those same mistakes. If that means launch is delayed a year, even 2, then so be it. It's much better to deliver a complete and total product than it is to rush something out to try and capture some enthusasim (that will wane with the very next WoW expansion that comes down the road) and end up dropping the ball completely and ending up like a Tabula Rasa (going offline this month) or an Age of Conan. (not likely to survive into 2010)

I maintain that the exclusion of explorable ship interiors is really a bad move by Cryptic, and those who are looking forward to fully exploreable ship interiors down the line, just might end up disappointed in the long run.

The code to make PSI's is already a part of Champions Online, supergroup bases are not going to be in at launch for that game but they are already working on the tools that will enable players to build and customize their bases, however in the grand scheme of things relating to testing it isn't the main priority atm. This isn't a new thing for Cryptic, when they spent all that time making this engine for Marvel Universe Online they did so knowing the problems they had with City of Heroes and made sure that their engine could do all the things the previous version wasn't capable of.

Problem with that line of thinking: STO is not Champions Online. Supergroup bases are stationary, sitting in one place. Starships are not, moving at a variety of angles and speeds through the game's logical universe.

So it won't be an easy task to go from one day only having 3rd person views of ships, to explorable interiors on something moving through "space".

Instanced interiors don't count, because instances are a locked environment that is not attached to the ship itself.

Then I guess you're going to be disappointed, or should that be more disappointed.

Probably. From the very beginning (IE the Perpetual days) I have said that I don't think STO is on the right track, and certainly doesn't meet certain criteria that most MMOs follow. The purpose of an MMO is to provide players the opportunity to explore the world of the said MMO's IP. So in WoW, you are exploring the worlds of Azeroth, Northrend and Draenor. In Age of Conan, it's Hyboria, etc. STO should be looking at how to create the world (or universe) of Star Trek in a manner that allows the player to feel like a part of that world. That's what we call immersion.

Granted, for some, the immersion of simply having a ship flying around in space that looks like Trek ships we know might be enough. That wasn't me. I wanted to be that guy taking my ship out to the far reaches of space, and when I don't want to be exploring, pulling my ship over in some empty reach of space, and exploring life onboard my ship. Immersion is an important factor, something that most typical MMO players (IE those who don't even care that it is Star Trek) are going to be looking for, and will not find. Look at how many games out there have had their fans calling for personal property / living spaces. It is important to people, and yet, 90% of MMOs don't even have that.

The point is, the Star Trek IP opens up so many opportunities for the developers to not only be creative, but to give players a true sandbox, and to also give players alot of the things that other MMOs have not, and right now, it doesn't look like Cryptic is going to take advantage of that, and that is what I find most disappointing.

I think you nailed it on the head there Acidrain!

Nice post! Reputation for you!