Nice summary, thanks! :) I hope we will know soon for a fact who is working on STO now. I think Cryptic is good enough, let's hope it is them.

A good summary there.  I didn't know of NCSoft, but then again I pretty much gave up on gaining information of STO with the PSI issue.

Although I would like to make this comment about the "Beta" of STO and NCSoft.  Just some thinking out-loud here.
If STO was to be ready for Beta in three months time, surely the restructuring of NCSoft would not have meant that NCSoft would have dropped it.  As that would mean, not a whole lot of money would be required to get STO out the door.  Although restructuring of NCSoft may have played a part, I'm more inclined to believe that the management of NCSoft wasn't confident or liked what they saw.

And apparently no other publisher was confident either at the near finished product.

I would believe that the "beta" was more of an "alpha" in the original sense.


But heck... Betas now-a-days can mean up to a year or more...  No longer just three months.

Well there is some things to think of by PE going with a publisher.
Originally PE was going to use the SOE publisher system to allow PE to own the rights and be self-sufficient (for the most part).  This meant that PE had sufficient money to make that happen.  But we know what happened with Gods and Heroes.
PE then lacked funding to continue with STO, so a publisher was needed to carry it on (as explained above, that publishers need to provide millions of dollars).  I'm guessing that was one of the reasons of the casual style of game play too, as publishers want to take control of titles.

Indeed, new concepts do frighten off big companies.  Most prefer to take something that works and make it better, not something new.  Only such new concepts are given to those with proven years of experience.  A new company or developer with innovations seeking our money? Hah!
Well then, looking at the positive side of things, I would say that was good (in terms of the spirit of the game, not for the lost of jobs and such) that NCSoft or a major publisher did not take it.  Otherwise STO would have become what we are seeing today of MMO's from those major companies.


What I would like to know, was how the decision was made, with facts and projections, of WHY Gods and Heroes got the go ahead, the major effort and funding, and not Star Trek?
(Was Star Trek too difficult at the time technology speaking, such as only 2D space combat and not full 3D?)

Just a side note, not to counter anything of what was typed, just adding to it.

Just in reference to photo-realistic capability of a MMO platform, it is very well possible for any 3D platform to do so (well within the last 10 years).  As long as the environment (terrain, water, etc) has a low amount of objects and there are few mobile models around, higher resolutions can be used.  A key item is to use high resolution texture files, such as 2048x2048, as oppose to 256x256 (WoW).  For a naval setting this would be possible for a MMO, since most of the environment is water, no trees or limited land, no buildings, etc.