Our interview with Star Trek Online's executive producer Dan Stahl, part two

Massively: Can you tell us anything more about the fek'ihri? We know they're due to be major antagonists to the Klingons for Season 2, but we haven't seen them elsewhere...

Daniel Stahl: When we looked at making episodes for the Klingons, we didn't want them to just re-hash existing Federation content. We wanted to give them something unique and new, something that they would get to experience first. So we looked into the history of the Klingons — that's where the fek'ihri come from — and we decided that we were going to make this specific set of enemies unique to them, at least for their episode series. I'm not saying the Feds won't ever fight a fek'ihri, but these guys were designed for the Klingons to be their nemesis.

When we look at the episodes coming up for Season 2, the Klingons are going to get a chance to have this very unique story that is really all about their faction and their relationship to these old enemies, and have unique challenges and enemies to fight. They've got very unique abilities — they don't carry weapons, they use a more mystical set of abilities, and they're sort of the demons of Klingon mythology. They've got a different sort of technology, their ships are very different, they're very unique to fight in the game. I think it's doing some justice to the Klingon players in the game — they've always gotten what everyone else got, now they're getting something that's unique to them.

With the steady increase to player ranks in the game, what's going to happen with bridge officers perpetually stuck at commander as their top rank?

We do have a plan about that — we've been looking at a lot of forum suggestions on this. There are a lot of ideas that we like, and there are two that we really like and are going to be working on for the future. One is promoting your bridge officers to specific seats within your ship — first officer, chief medical officer — allowing them to have specific duties and responsibilities that give them certain abilities and traits. We love that idea.

The other is once you're a vice-admiral, being able to take bridge officers that you've sort of promoted under your wing, and make them their own character[s]. You've made a character the first officer, and you can say "you know, I want this guy to have his own unique crew" — and we love the idea that you can then open up a new character slot, and now you can play that character with his own ship and his own crew. We see that as a great idea and something to work on the future.

We'd also love to work on things like having away teams in space, where a vice-admiral could have a couple of his "minor" captains following him around. For the short term, though, it's really going to be about positions and converting bridge officers to playable characters.

That has actually opened up a lot of ideas. There are certain bridge officers that you can't just create — like, for instance, Liberated Borg. Or a Gorn — if you find a Gorn bridge officer, if we put those other systems in place, you can go through the work to promote him and give him his own ship, and now you have a playable Federation Gorn captain. It takes a lot to get that, but you get something very distinctive.

Are the new tier 5 ships going to be a mandatory replacement for the current tier 5 ships in the game, or will they be an optional move — lateral improvements in power compared to vertical?

We are looking at making certain ships available at admiral ranks, because we want there to be a wide array of ships. Players want to be able to fly the ships they're in love with, and there are a lot of ships that you can't fly at admiral level and be competitive. So we're going to be taking a look at what ships fit this bill, and asking if we can make refit versions of these ships for higher levels — so that you not only have the lower-tier version of the ship, but you can refit it and still fly it at a higher level.

That is something that the team is working on, and in Season 2 you're going to see our first attempt at that, with the Galaxy, the Intrepid, and the Defiant. They might have some unique abilities, but they all come at a cost. They might have a different configuration than other cruisers or escorts that even out and balance them with the other options. We expect that people want to fly the ship that they love, so we're trying not to make any one ship unplayable.

Is the team's current development focus on drawing out more elements from existing Star Trek backstory, or on creating new elements for the franchise?

We've done a little bit of both up until now. We've done a little bit of making sure that we have ships that are recognizable from the series, and we've also had a couple ships in Season 1 that were new. They were completely new designs; we had to work with CBS to get approval for those designs, and we feel that they've been a minor success. Some have been more popular than others, obviously.

But when we look at the forums and player feedback, we see a lot more people asking for known ships than new ships, so at least in the short term that's where we'll be focusing. That's where ships like the Excelsior and the Nebula, and ships like the Gorn ships and Nausicaan cruisers, come in. All of these ships that you see in-game that you can't fly — we want players to feel like the options are there and they can use the ships they know and love. We want to do both, but for right now we're leaning toward established ships.

There was a lot of player discussion and curiosity when you made a post that implied STO might be due for the free-to-play model...

It certainly caused a lot of curiosity internally, at the company. I had people in my office saying "what the hell are you talking about?" (laughs) I was commenting in a thread where people were talking about how games like Lord of the Rings Online going free-to-play was a worst-case scenario, and really the last gasp of a dying MMO. My comments weren't actually saying anything other than the fact that I don't think it's a worst-case scenario.

I don't look at taking Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play like that — I think [Turbine] is looking at the success [it's] had with Dungeons and Dragons Online and wants to replicate it. From that standpoint, it makes sense, and if it turns out to be a more popular business model — my point is that I don't agree that business plan is the last straw. So from my point of view, if STO were to do something like that, I just don't think it would be the last straw.

I think it would be an interesting idea, and something that the company should look at, as we have another company's success to observe. When I look at the news, there's a lot of player interest in the model, asking if World of Warcraft is going free-to-play — it's an interesting topic right now. It was just me saying it's an interesting business model, and I think a lot of people will be watching to see if it works, because there are only a few Western games that have made the conversion, and people wish to know if it's worse or better.

Lastly, is there anything you'd like to say to the often vocal critics the game has attracted?

One thing I think is important is [that] STO is six months into its life. It's only been out for six months, and we've already made a lot of changes. One of the most important things is where I think we had a hectic pace of putting out a lot of new things — we've added all these new features, all these new ships, new, new, new — but we have yet to go back and finish what we started.

I think the [criticisms], in some cases, are very true. There are bugs that have been around a long time that haven't been addressed. There are things like Memory Alpha that seem sort of interesting but aren't really developed. I think exploration is another area where we sort of had an idea about what we wanted to do, but it wasn't very well-delivered.

So moving forward, to answer the critics, we hear you, we understand things like ground combat not being everyone's cup of tea. So we're going to take time and slow down a little bit, and instead of adding a whole lot of new stuff, we're going to take the time to ensure that everything is working like it should, and it's all at the quality we want it to be.

On behalf of our readers, we'd like to thank Mr. Stahl for taking the time to answer our questions.