Ground combat! Star Trek Online community answers
Your answers on ground combat in Star Trek Online are here and we think you'll be pleased with the results. This week, your questions were answered by Andy Velasquez, producer at Cryptic and all-around knowledgeable Trek guy. It's a hefty Q&A, so we hope you've got a few minutes to spare while you whittle your way through all this text. Enjoy!
Tekwolf: Besides flanking and some special skills and kits, what are you adding to make ground adventures as interesting and exciting as the amazing space combat system?
Andy Velasquez: We have been recently working on a set of ground movement and combat updates that the dev team is pretty excited about. In space the feeling of flying your starship is fun in of itself and once you layer on the overall combat mechanics the player has a really rich gameplay experience. To match this same dynamic on the ground our most recent changes have been focused on making it fun to move and act in the world; add flanking, your kit and weapon powers and the Expose/Exploit system on top of all that and ground combat becomes that much more fun and engaging.
We have rolled these changes out to our Beta players for feedback and iteration so the details might change a little bit but players should definitely expect to be sprinting forward to engage enemy groups, rolling out a grenades way or behind a large rock to break line of sight and dropping to a knee to aim and deal more damage with your precision shots.
jealouspirate: What do you feel is iconic about Star Trek ground combat, and how has this translated into game mechanics?
The biggest thing that comes to mind is your away team. The idea of a team of mixed disciplines going down to a planet or space station to solve a problem is very iconic for the Star Trek license and is core to gameplay on the ground in STO.
Anytime Picard asked Riker to assemble an away team he would pick the bridge officers that he thought would help him the most for that given scenario. Deciding which of their many bridge officers is right for the situation is something that players will have to do as well when they begin any ground gameplay scenario.
One of the other iconic ground moments in Star Trek is vaporization via Phaser fire and nothing is more rewarding on the ground than exploiting an enemy and watching them fall to dust!
David Skillin: Just how big are these ground maps?
On the dev team we use "ground" as shorthand to mean anything that involves your captain avatar instead of your ship avatar so a "ground map" has an immense range when talking about overall scale. So the answer of "how big" a ground map is totally depends on what ground map you are in.
If the episode I am in takes me to the interior of a Klingon ship the scale will be appropriate for that location. There will be tight grated hallways with some larger spaces like a bridge, engine or ops room but in general will feel like, well the interior of a ship.
If the episode I am in takes me to a farming colony on the ground of a planet there will be sprawling crop fields with a few buildings that make up a settlement and then a good amount of wide open uncultivated land, for example.
kryptoson: Will there be exploratory missions and puzzle games in the planet?
Being able to continually discover new things and explore are things that we have been working really hard on since the beginning of the project in the form of the genesis system. The genesis system in STO is a set of features that will programmatically assemble systems so that players can just fly around continually get new content; essentially players can explore indefinitely.
There won't be a ton of pure puzzles such as rotate and slide these blocks so that the flow of water can trigger the door to get to the next room but there are some diplomatic missions that will require the player to gather information and solve problems based on the information that they have gathered.
Arachnidus: What type of weaponry can we expect from the start for Federation players? Simple hand phasers or compression rifles?
Yup!
Federation players will absolutely start with standard issue phaser pistols...Starfleet knows what works .
As the game progresses players should also definitely expect to upgrade to newer and more exotic weapons such as Romulan Disruptor pistols, Starfleet compression rifles or Tetryon bolt rifles.
Iaquinta: Are there penalties to groups in open or closed instances (like how Champions have runners - which by the way is absolutely no fun. Constantly chasing runners != fun. Unfriendly support beamed in seems more STO style. I hope you handle it this way instead).
STO does not penalize players for grouping. Encounters will scale to be an appropriate challenge for groups of players but we absolutely don't want to discourage players from playing as part of a team.
Specifically we don't have "runners" like Champions does.
InfamousBrad: On average, how many times am I going to have to zap someone with a phaser before they fall down?
Average is hard to nail down with so many different inputs into a given character's combat effectiveness.
Take my character for example, I play a science officer who loves to stun, debuff and otherwise hamper the enemies. As such I carry with me a stun pistol and all my kit choice has a hold and a couple heals, I've also chosen to upgrade my support skills more than my direct damage skills so it will take me quite a few phaser shots to take down an enemy.
If you look at one of my coworker's captains though, a tactical officer who spent all of his energy units on the newest sniper rifle, and has a ton of kit powers aimed at augmenting his own direct damage, he will take down that same critter decidedly quicker than my science officer would.
If you are still looking for a general range somewhere between 2 and 10 shots might be about right, but you'd have to be either really good or really bad to achieve those results .
