Star Trek Online

DECA Intro Stream - Highlights

00:00 - Introducing the DECA Team

Sunna (Community Manager): Working on MMO games for 5 years; has a degree in Science Fiction / Science Fiction Literature. Grew up with Star Trek.
Cam (Production Manager): "Accountable for the success of the game, oversee the roadmap, <...> general tiebreaker when it comes to decisions.". Has been in the games industry for over ten years, mostly only worked on live service MMORPGs, starting with Runescape at JagEx as a product manager for around 5 years.
Rich (Richard Hayden, Creative Director on STO): Started out by founding and running his own game studio where they made games that responded to music, procedurally generating levels and deciding what enemies would attack and when they'd attack based on this music. Started a Play by Mail RPG which won an award at 19. Then worked at Splash Damage working on Transformers Reactive (and other unreleased titles), followed by being Creative Director at a blockchain startup, then Realm of the Mad God for DECA. Now works as Creative Director for STO and another game he can't talk about.
Jeremy/Bort (Lead Designer, formerly System Designer): oversees content design and systems design; coordinates with the teams, art leads and production.

10:00 - Silence During Takeover

Cam: While they wanted to talk to us, legal stuff between multiple third parties prevented it until now.

11:20 - DECA & Plans for STO

Cam: DECA's model is taking mature games and breathing new life into them, investing more and increasing output where possible. Working with proprietary engines & not having the "tribal knowledge" has slowed them down, but they want to replicate the last few years of Cryptic's output and then when settled invest more and look at new features in the distant future.
Bort: A lot oft he last year has been training DECA and the transition lost Cryptic "experts" which hindered it. "Ageing and arcane, weird engine" doesn't conform to modern norms so training has taken longer, leading to recent updates being smaller.

20:20 - Reason for the Heart of the Matter mini-episode

Cam: They're still increasing capacity as a team and an episode is the most complicated piece of content to produce. They wanted to make sure the delivery was to the correct standard and quality, so went for a mini-episode to ensure expected content delivery time could be met.
Rich: "It's Jeremy's fault" - what we got started as a patrol that Rich and Phil Harris (Bort's 2nd In Command) had the idea for, fixated on the idea of a Borg Cube enveloped in a dark-side of terraforming. It got put on hold and expected that neither it or the Devil's Heart TFO would be released, but when Bort became designer he liked the idea but there was too much story for a patrol, leading to mini-episode.
Bort: As the content design team comes up to speed, it takes longer for things to be done. Releasing the then-experimental content let the rest of the team work on the next update, which was in pre-production as soon as the Anniversary episode started. More mini-episodes has "earned a place in repertoire" but there aren't any plans for them yet.

26:00 - Content Plans Beyond the Current Story Arc

Rich: Current story arc is 'epic on a grand scale' with lots going on, and will have an 'extremely climactic conclusion'. One of the things Flo (McQuibban) and he discussed was focusing on more personal stories with a change of pace, focusing on specific characters and "content that you've seen more in recent TV shows and exploring some of the unanswered questions around those elements". 3 additional stories already run past Paramount, and they really liked them with the Paramount creative consultant giving good feedback on them. Another episode was added to the current arc to give space for all the things going on
Bort: Current storyline (from the beginning of Kings & Queens) was written up by Al Rivera and Paul Reed, with DECA deciding to see those plans through and letting the original plans see the light of day with as few changes as possible beyond small story additions and giving it more time (extra episode) but the primary story hasn't changed so far. 16th Anniversary storyline wrap-up was the original plan, but with extra content it's unlikely to be then. Future arc will NOT be a universe-wide crisis but instead focus on exploring and personal stories.

34:00 - Future Live Streams

Cam: Hasn't been consistent (in part due to legal reasons) so they plan to do more live streams but not once per week. Part of that is to have the content creators leading the live streams like they have recently.
Sunna: Will definitely be a stream for the next ship release (either by Sunna or another content creator). The stream times are likely to be the same as this one, since it's a good middle-ground for different time zones for getting the devs on.

38:00 - Q&A

You guys open to story suggestions or ideas?
Rich: Legal reasons mean they can't take an idea from someone else but they're open to feedback and suggestions

Is there a plan in the future to make the learning curve for new players more intuitive?
Rich: Can't confirm anything, but he wants to make things more accessible to new players.
Bort: DECA transition has highlighted the pain points of learning the game, especially to the depth that designers need to know. Phil Donner (Art Lead) and Bort had a conversation about how challenging it is to understand the entire game.

"Cryptic had taken out a number of great episodes for reworking. Does DECA have plans regarding that?"
Bort: No plans they can talk about but conversations have been happening between Rich, Thomas, Bort and Flo.

Any talk about revamping old story content?
Rich: STO is huge but there are opportunities to "dust it off". No current plans around doing it yet, but they aren't against the idea.
Bort: a lot of the next steps are looking at the capacity of the teams to revisit content adn the scope of changes, including whether is can be done within the schedule or if it'd interrupt the focus on new content.

Are Mudd's Bundles sales going to start happening again?
Cam: "Yes." (That's literally all he said.)
Sunna: Heard it mentioned a lot, and they will come back but there is an internal date but they won't release it yet. They are coming and they are planned.