Quote Originally Posted by RobinGBrown View Post
It is surprising how Cryptic manage to take what should be a solid gold success and plate it with poop so that it sucks.

There must be one or two people in that place that are both influential and misdirected and that push the dev team into making it crap.
If you take Champions Online as your metric, it may be that they're doing MMO tie-ins with a staff of people who are way more into the MMO than the tie-in. It's important to have those people on staff because that is the game you're making, but it also shouldn't be a reskinned WoW -- a strong comic book or Star Trek feel might not permit some MMO conventions to remain intact. I think Cryptic fails to acknowledge that while the game is indeed god, the source has to have some muscle.

My favorite example is the one that eventually killed CO for me. Half the game is a clumsy attempt at pop culture satire. The fact that the CO writers aren't very good at it is almost beside the point (remember the Anchorman quest? Every step of it felt like it was just lines being parroted by a twelve year-old who doesn't understand the difference between being funny and reciting lines from a funny movie) -- the fact is that comic books generally don't do this. WoW does, though, so we got a ton of questlines, an organization or two and an entire zone based on pop culture references. At that point, never mind the things they got right, because the thing they got wrong constantly reminds me that I'm playing an MMO, not a comic book, and so they lost me.

I haven't played STO and am not a big Trekkie, but there is a lot about Star Trek that isn't supported by MMO conventions, and I expect that Cryptic will not show the proper respect for the source.