GDC10: New playable faction and more coming to Star Trek Online
We spent some time talking with Cryptic's Craig Zinkievich at GDC today, and got some fun new information on Star Trek Online.
The most exciting thing was news of a new playable faction in Star Trek Online. We can expect that sometime "within the year", and we as players get to help decide. Borg, Romulan, it's up to you guys. Zinkievich says: There's a huge amount of the dev team right now interested in doing Romulan. I think the Borg would be really interesting as just something totally different, totally different gameplay. There are a lot of really cool mechanics, a lot of really cool things you can do there. Really, if you're in the MMO for the long haul, there are going to be a lot more playable factions, you can't stop with those two. There's Jem'Hadar, you're going to be going to the Dominion, there's Cardassians [...] so many playable factions that we can and will be releasing with the game.
Cryptic is looking at the next big update to arrive for Star Trek Online around July, with another possibly near November: "We know that we just had a player survey when you first arrive at the site, and, like, ship interiors. [Players] want a whole lot more there, want a whole lot more functionality, why are other players coming to my ship, what's going on there? So we're making sure in July that's one of the things that we do. There's a big huge outcry for first contact missions, diplomacy missions, more non-combat within Star Trek, so we're really making sure with that July update we're really focusing on that."
It sounds like we can look for a lot of new content tailored to what the community wants coming with the July update, so we'll be keeping a very close eye out for more information. (There was brief mention of the Horta being a playable race as well. We can only hope.)
