I remember being ultra stoked for this game back in 2007. You could stay down in engineering if you wanted to be an engineer? Oh yes. Players could optionally work together to control a ship? Awesome. Ship interiors that stayed true to the series? Great!

However, life caught up and I didn't get a chance to try out the game until now. I am satisfied with the final result, but what ever happened to the things that they were working on during development? Can I ever live my dream of looking at anti-matter levels all day as an engineer? I see the only thing that survived from when I last looked at the game was the ability to have player replace the NPC officers, but even then that is nothing as I expected.

Are there any plans to implement these old features, or were they tossed a long time ago? I do enjoy the game but I would really like it if I could control my ship entirely through the bridge, at least... Heck, I'd rather just have them get rid of sector space and have that area be controlled through a map on the bridge.

Speaking of bridges, why are they so ridiculously huge? The captain's ready room is perfect size but the bridge and the hallways are extremely spacious. Like earth spaceport spacious. A lot of players wont be running through the individual ships, no need for them to be that big. It isn't that big of a deal but I have no idea what the devs were thinking with that one.

I still enjoy the game overall (ended up purchasing a subscription), but it really isn't what I expected.

2007? Whoa, that's WAY back. But that also explains why you aren't seeing the things you saw at the time. The game was under a completely different studio before it was moved under Cryptic's wing, and they pretty much scrapped just about everything that the previous studio had done, all while still getting the game out on the same time.

So to answer your question, pretty much, yeah, ALL the stuff that you remember hearing about all those years ago, was dropped when the game changed hands.

For good or for ill is up to you, but that's how it happened.

Yeah, the original work was done by Perpetual, but they ended up with a lot of concept art but no functioning gameplay that we know of. They went under, and the game went to Cryptic, which had to hurry to meet the original license deadline.


I have doubts that a lot of the early ideas would have actually worked in a successful MMO. But if you want micromanagement, the doff system allows you to fiddle with starship operations and avoid missions almost entirely if you want.


Bridges are oversized because they wanted to be able to have gameplay (like combat) on them while allowing the third-person camera room to move. A few missions involve fighting on someone else's bridge, but considering your personal bridge isn't used for that, the original decision was probably more problematic than helpful.

Artists have since been able to squeeze the interiors down closer to canon dimensions. Sizes are much better in some of the more recent bridges (TOS and Belfast/defiant class), but bridges don't come out often these days, so the vast majority are still super huge relics of the old style.

Anyone that thinks it would have been fun to change anti-matter levels the entire time you play is either drunk or lying. It would be like role-playing a townsperson in a starter town on WoW. Funny for five minutes, not for hours on end.

I wanted to be a doctor.

I wanted a science officer position similar to Spock or Lt Cmdr Data instead I'm a Vice Admiral who spends most of his time endangering his life on away missions. Mining for dilithium or running around on New romulus doing stuff that the romulans are to lazy to do

Keep in mind most of the responsibilities of a 'simple science officer' in a video game would probably be the same sort of stuff you're doing on New Romulus. Would it suddenly be more fun if it fit your officer's job description?

Note that if you really want to do missions adjusting antimatter levels, you could probably make them in Foundry.

I don't know if anyone would PLAY them, but you could!

An interesting challenge would be to use the engineering as a skin over what amounts to a puzzle game.

Didn't Spock and Data spend most of their time endangering their lives on away missions? What did you want to do, play a 'scan for lifeforms' mini-game over and over?

While singing the little ditty "Lifeforms. Pretty little Lifeforms, Where are you?"

Absolutely. Hey, if Data can do it, so can we.