>Unfortunately, its lead designer is Jack "Statesman" Emmert, former
>lead dev on City of Heroes, who spent the first three or so
>years of that game's life resolutely striving to make it less fun in
>various ways having to do with adherence to his Design Vision. The
>crew over at Paragon Studios are still, in many ways, working to clean
>up the mess. (And then he went off to do the same to Champions
>Online, swearing to "get it right" this time, and now the team
>charged with maintaining CO are dancing the same dance.) As such, I
>have fairly low confidence in STO. I thought when it was announced,
>"Hello, that's a strange concept for an MMO. It'll take a very deft
>touch on the developers' part to make that work," and then, well.
>Based on prior experience, I sincerely doubt that Jack Emmert is the
>man to pull that off.
> All in all so far, STO is at least doing well on initial stuff. I swear Cryptic believes game design should be tackled in the same way as most High Schoolers do the Mid Term Project (80% of what moves it from fail to passing (and on occasion high marks) takes place the Night Before it's Due).
That said, the biggest worry I have, which ultimately is what is Champ's current biggest failing is, is the lack of support and quality/speed of what support AFTER the initial stuff. And in Champ's case, there was fundamental underpinnings that weren't addressed. To use that quote from Have I Got News For You in a different context:
Healing.... we're running out!
Celestial class a very rudimentary patch and, well, we've yet to really see super expansion since.
Is STO so far actually decent to play? Yes. Excellent to play, I'm hoping it works up.