14 DAY TRIAL // Star Trek Online is the latest MMO launch and the first big one of 2010, and the people at Cryptic are really working hard on making sure that those who were first attracted to the game because of the Star Trek theme will be staying for the wealth of fresh content the developers are planning to implement in the coming weeks.
In an official forum post, Craig Zinkivich, who is a producer working on Star Trek Online, has said that the upcoming changes will be bundled in an update and that “We're already working on it and it’ll be out before you know it.” The first priority for Cryptic will be aimed at introducing more Player versus Players content for the Federation players, more exploration missions for those who have joined the Klingon Empire, more large scale ground based public quests and better customization options for the ships.
On the longer term, the developers are also talking about introducing a wider array of playable species, one of the most important requests from the player base being the introduction of bigger high level missions featuring the Borg as the antagonists, a chain of missions based around Q and even some missions based around time travel.
There are also planned to introduce Raid Episodes, five man missions that will appeal to those who have maxed out their levels. These are set to be available to both Federation and Klingon players and will be released with a distance of a couple of weeks between them.
Cryptic has been criticized for their decision, which was probably heavily influenced by publisher Atari, to launch Star Trek Online so close after the release of Champions Online, with some worrying it would be just more of the same but in space. Outing a lot of content quickly post launch will probably limit the scope of this kind of criticism.