"Age of Discovery" Expansion coming this year!"

[dammitjim76]

Discovery is canon because CBS and the producers say it is.

[dammitjim76]

As most of us know, Star Trek: Las Vegas happened last week and there was a lot of news coming out about various things in the Trek universe. The team that usually appears on Cryptic's weekly livestream was in Las Vegas so there was no proper stream this week. However, Priority One uploaded a podcast (which you can listen to here) that covered a number of subjects. First and foremost, they had the audio from STO's Age of Discovery panel with guests Mary Wiseman (Sylvia Tilly), Al Rivera (STO lead designer), and Jeremy Randall (STO lead systems designer), and surprise guest Rekha Sharma (Discovery security officer Landry). Here are a few bits of info I was able to glean from the panel.

1. Age of Discovery will take place while Tilly is still at the academy (so presumably your character will be too).

2. There will be events leading up to and including The Battle of the Binary Stars

3. There will be new looks for Andorians and Klingons (obviously) during the Discovery era, with multiple uniforms for Klingons according to House.

4. Landry's backstory will be told at some point to find out why she's so hard-nosed and hates pretty much everyone.

5. The tardigrade (aka Ripper) will be featured.

6. The Anniversary event will revolve around Tilly's mirror universe counterpart, Captain "Killy."

7. The capture/destruction of Starbase One will be featured in the first episode and will be the subject of the first AoD queue


The podcast then moved to a one-on-one interview with Jeremy "Borticus" Randall, lead systems designer for STO, and here's what I got out of that interview.

1. Every reputation, not just the new one, will go to T6 with new unlocks, rewards, and (possibly?) gear.

2. Queues will be officially renamed as "Task Force Operations."

3. Some queues will unlock at lower levels to get more people playing them.

4. They're hoping to implement the player level-scaling mechanic from "Swarm" into other queues as well. (i.e. if two players at lvl 20 and two players at 60 and one at 65 join the queue, the players abilities and enemies will scale to about lvl 40-ish)

5. Cryptic is working on a new random queue mechanic that will let players who just want to play any STF to be put into a "hopper" and wait for other players who want to go random or play a specific STF and will then be put into that STF. In addition to the normal rewards for that STF, those who were in the random group will receive extra rewards. There will also be NO COOLDOWN for random queueing. I apologize if my explanation isn't that clear - Jeremy's wasn't that clear either.


Next came a one-on-one interview with Al "Captain Geko" Rivera, lead designer for STO. Here are the highlights.

1. The AoD story will take place both in 2256 and 2409.

2. You'll be able to start as a member of the Discovery-era Federation with a new starting ship, shuttle, weapons, costumes, and species choices.

3. AoD will eventully be a full expansion, just one that is rolled out over time rather than all at once.

4. The devs are hoping to begin treating entire accounts as "the player" rather than individual characters, which may bring about more account unlocks rather than per-character since they're having good success with the T6 ship mastery which unlocks JH Vanguard ships for entire accounts.

[RiverSong]

Thank you for all that info.

[MichaelGill]

That contains a lot of interesting info. Good to see they are finally addressing some of the game mechanics. They must be finally hearing the "cries" of the players. Thanks for taking the time to summarize this for us Jim. Be interesting to see where this game goes in the future.

[Mal]

Thanks a lot Jim. I'm looking forward to all the new features it'll have. I wonder what kind of spore drive stuff they have for Romulans lol.

[Belgevain]

I get why they are doing an Age of Discovery expansion as such, however it always pains me to see so many 'Unique' vessels flying round Sol. Maybe I'm a bit too much of purist though, I mean we've seen people use other factions ships even in the shows..

Maybe what I should do is remind myself that it's just a game, and I should really just relax...

[Mal]

I get why they are doing an Age of Discovery expansion as such, however it always pains me to see so many 'Unique' vessels flying round Sol. Maybe I'm a bit too much of purist though, I mean we've seen people use other factions ships even in the shows..

Maybe what I should do is remind myself that it's just a game, and I should really just relax...

I see what you're saying, i've thought of that myself. Instead I think about a story behind a story. The Federation is a constantly changing entity which continues to add new worlds and different civilizations to it.  So with that said, expect different style ships warping into SOL. Same applies to the KDF, they also have different worlds in their Empire. Take Orions and Nausicaans for example. KDF also now has Romulans pledging Allegiance as well as Jem'Hadar and Cardassians. 

Anyways this is how I think of it. Hope that helps you too lol

[warrynnpeese0791]

Could be interesting. Wonder how they will handle the overlap with VIL? Maybe the great response to VIL taught them nothing in this game sparks more interest than new content and all that goes with it.

Agreed.

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[tobywitczak]

A lot of whats happening and going to happen with Star Trek is based more of the politics behind the scene. Moonves head of CBS really does not care about Star Trek, hes looking for a quick payout. One of the major reasons Kelvin timeline looks and feels so different is because of the CBS/Paramount agreement. Paramount wants to do something with Star Trek, but the agreement more or less states that other then the names the it must looks and feel different from CBSrime. However to make things worse CBS is trying to make STISCO look and feel like Kelvin. In short it looks like CBS is trying to get rid of the Prime timeline in favor of a hybrid of the Kelvin and Prime. One in which Vulkin was destroyed by the events of the Kelvin timeline and also one in which Romulas was also destroyed by the events of the Prime. This way they can discard all the existing licensing for a brand new one controlled by CBS and get rid of those pesky royalties once and for all.

Because of recent events with STISCO, he may be on the way out

I guess the one bit of good news would be that STO with still be the definitive source for Star Trek, and with all the convoluted things happening, we are in for years and years of retcon to explain the CBS/Paramount bickering

I recommend
Star Trek Discovery and the Return of Picard: The Controversies Behind The Scenes by Midnight's Edge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLl17YXrAZY

[RWJP]

The expansion of Reputations to Tier 6 will certainly be interesting... I hope they re-balance the tiers slightly as the grind from Tier 4 to 5 is pretty obnoxious currently, so adding another on top would be even worse!