After seven years at Cryptic Studios and two-and-a-half working with Star Trek: Online, Zinkievich will be leaving to be replaced by Daniel Stahl.

“I’ve decided to take a break from Cryptic Studios for a bit and focus on other things, like hanging out with my kids over the summer, walking my goat more and taking care of my bees,” said Zinkievich. “(Jack never told you about them, did he?)

“Getting to work on Star Trek Online has truly been the highlight of my career. Since I was little, I’ve been a fan of the shows and movies. And since the internet and MMOs became prevalent, I, along with you guys, have watched, hoped and waited to get the chance to explore that universe online. I still can’t believe how lucky I was when it became my responsibility to help make STO a reality. I’m often asked in interviews or online, ‘Isn’t your job the coolest job ever?” Yes, yes it is.”

Zinkievich spoke about Star Trek fans and his trepidation when he first came into the Star Trek: Online project. “It’s been a joy to work for you guys,” he said. “The press has asked me about the ‘rabid Star Trek fans.’ I’ll admit that I was scared coming onto the project. However, as much as we fans like to argue about which captain was the coolest, when certain events took place and how important that making sure the windows on the Galaxy model are perfect, we accept everyone who has a respect and love for the franchise and what it means. You guys accepted Cryptic with open arms, and we’ve appreciated every post, comment and word of encouragement. It’s been easy to try the ‘daring thing’ and be open with you about what we’re doing in STO, working with you on that has even been cooler. You guys really are the best fans in Sci-Fi. Thank you so much.”

Star Trek Online continues to be a work in progress, with improvements constantly being made, much of it in response to player comments.

What We’ve Been Up To:

4 STFs – Infected, The Cure, Khitomer Accord, Undine: Terradome
2 New Fleet Actions
Fleet Actions for Klingons
Klingon Star Clusters
Difficulty Slider
Injury System
Borg HUB, Episodes, Star Clusters, deep space encounters …
Memory Alpha rework
Space auto-fire improvements
Klingon Joined Trill
Fleet Mail
Inventory Stacking improvements
Respec
Civilian Clothing options
ToS Skirts
Aid Mission Revamp
Lifetime Perks
Veteran Rewards
Fed vs. Fed PvP
Ground Assault PvP
MkX equipment stores
More costume pieces and playable species
And, like, a billion pages of patch notes of other stuff

Everything Coming Soon:

• The Accolade System
• The Squad System
• Balance Adjustments
• UI Improvements
• Bug Fixes and Improvements

Season Two:

• Minigames
• Federation Diplomatic Corps
• Faction Free Episodes
• Klingon Exclusive Episodes
• Bumping the Cap
• Ship Interiors
• Weekly Content
• Fleet Logos, High End Content and beyond

Full details and Season 3 additions can be seen at the official Star Trek: Online

The popular game will instead be updated as it is needed. “I’m not really sure it makes sense to create a sequel in the MMO market,” explained Craig Zinkievich, executive producer for Cryptic. “Typically, you see a MMO called a sequel because either a new team worked on the property or the original team wanted to reboot their IP.

“With Star Trek, the beauty is the story is never really finished, so as the IP continues to grow, so can we. Barring a new edition of our engine, I can’t really see us doing a sequel.”

Star Trek: Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich said that it wasn’t a matter of not having the technology, as the game had already been set up and tested on consoles, but a matter of money.

“It’s pretty much in the same boat as the [Champions Online] console version right now,” said Zinkievich. “So, currently, just like Champions, the console version of Star Trek Online is on the back burner.”

Other than some server issues, the release of Star Trek: Online went well, according to Zinkievich. “We were just blown away,” he said. “Aside from some server stuff, and I think we handled that extremely well, launch was just great. The amount of people interested in the game was staggering and humbling, and we’re really dedicated to keeping those people happy for the long-term.”

The server issue was a problem though, that had to be addressed right away, and was a result of the popularity of the MMORPG. “A big [hurdle] was improving our server infrastructure after the large influx of players that came to the game,” said Zinkievich. “That required a lot of coordination between not just the STO team, but the network operations and production teams to get everything working quickly and securely.”

Regarding the future, expect improvements and new additions. “We’ll have more Special Task Force missions available soon, and our major content update, Season One: Common Ground, is due to release this month.

As we get more feedback from players, we can definitely work on different ways to add variety to missions. If you look at the latest Special Task Forces, which are our most challenging endgame encounters, the gameplay is much more varied. That’s just stuff we’ve been working on at the end of the development cycle. As we add more missions into all areas of the game, I’d expect some more surprises along the way.”

Other possible future addition might be ship interiors. “We’ve already got bridges available in-game,” said Zinkievich. “We want to get those perfect, and then look into expanding beyond them. Ship interiors themselves are something that will take a lot of time to create, just due to the size of the ships we’re talking about. Some of the larger ones are the size of small cities. There’s a lot to consider there, but it is something we want to accomplish if we can make it interesting and worth the player’s time.”

Community input is important when it comes to tweaking the game, fixing problems or adding new features. “We’ve been keeping an open dialogue with our community, both those that are happy with how things are and those that aren’t,” said Zinkievich. “It’s shaping the decisions we make in a very positive way.”

Star Trek: Online‘s Executive Producer, Craig Zinkievich, described the mood of the development team, now that the game has been launched. “Everyone’s relieved that the game has finally made it to shelves, and we’re getting some real, live feedback from people across the globe,” he said.

“We’re also very excited for this next chapter of development that is currently underway, where we’re working on a live game, making new content, and trying our best to get that feedback from our fans into the game.”

Zinkievich addressed complaints regarding the quest system and the prevalence of “kill X of Y” type missions. “Well, bear in mind we have episode missions, which are quite varied and go beyond the standard “X of Y” missions,” he said. “We’ll definitely be adding more of those to the game as time goes on, as well as more varied missions of all types. That’s not to say missions that demand you exercise your tactical abilities will go away, but we do plan on giving players a lot to do as time goes on.”

Some players prefer starship-based missions as opposed to ground missions. Plans are to improve the ground missions to make them more attractive to players. “We will be working on ground missions to get them up to par with space,” said Zinkievich. “We want to take all aspects of gameplay and continually make it better. So, yes that means working on ground missions to make those better and more engaging, but also delivering better improved gameplay across the board.”

What about the future? “The great thing about creating an MMO,” said Zinkievich, “is that if it’s something that you liked but for whatever reason couldn’t get it in at launch, you can revisit that idea and implement it later down the road.”

Now that the launch of Star Trek: Online is past, the emphasis is on fixing problems, tweaking the game and planning for the future.

“So very, very much has happened over the last few weeks,” said Zinkievich. “It feels like every single time I began to write a new State of the Game, we’d have to quickly douse live shard fires, juggle major play tests and push critical late night patches. By the time the dousing, juggling and pushing was done, the outline of my State of the Game would be hopelessly out-of-date.”

One important element for Zinkievich is maintenance and support. “Our objective,” he said, “[is to] implement as many of the stability and gameplay adjustments you asked for as soon as humanoidly possible (as safe practices allow, of course). To this end, Community has put more effort into moderating the boards and CS has recently staffed up in order to get through your tickets quicker. The idea being, ‘we can hardly fix what we can’t see.’”

Early server issues were a problem, but “we’ve also thrown a metric ton of hardware and man hours at getting the server capacity up. Our network operations crew has been performing admirably, to say the least.”

Zinkievich listed the game adjustments that are on the way.

• Respec
• Death Penalty
• Difficulty Slider
• More open auto-fire
• Replayable missions
• Improving Memory Alpha
• Fixing those Commodity Missions

“And there are a bunch more,” said Zinkievich. “We’ve heard you and are working on all these issues, but we want to make sure that they come out clean and finished. We hate rushing out features, it inevitably leads to us accidentally breaking things we didn’t have time to test.”

If Star Trek: Online is embraced by gamers, expect to see such things as further “full-scale” releases/packs to complement the game in future. “Much will depend on the success of Star Trek Online,” said Zinkievich. “We would love for this game to do well, not just because it will earn us money, but because we’re all huge Star Trek fans.”

“We definitely want to have free new patches and full-on new expansion packs,” added Zinkievich. “But like I said much will depend on the success but we would love to take this game where no game has gone before.”

The game has proven to be popular thus far, to the point where the servers were straining to keep up. According to Star Trek: Online, that problem should soon be in the past. “We just wanted to update you on our in-game server capacity status,” said a notice posted at the official site. “Throughout Head Start we noticed the overwhelming response to the game and we are working on changes to further increase the number of people who can play Star Trek Online at any given time. Our current plan is to have these changes in place sometime this coming weekend. We will, of course, keep you updated on progress as it happens.”

Even though Star Trek: Online is set in the future from the time-frame most familiar to Star Trek fans, it will still be possible to reconnect with famous personalities from the past. “In the future, most of the characters that you know and love from the series, from the shows, maybe they’ve died, passed, moved on,” said Zinkievich, “but obviously it wouldn’t be a Star Trek game without time-travel so you may run into some of them in the past.”

In Star Trek: Online, the Klingon Empire and the Federation are at war. Players will choose to either join the Klingon Defense Force or else join Starfleet. No matter which side they join, the game will have the familiarity of an aired episode. “I think the big thing that sets Star Trek Online apart from other MMOs that’re out there is really the episode structure,” said Zinkievich. “We want to make it feel like you’re playing in one of the movies, playing in one of the TV shows, so you’re constantly moving back and forth between space and ground.”

You’re going to be doing ten to fifteen minutes of space combat…and they’re you’re going to beam down with an away team,” said Zinkievich. “I think going back and forth throughout the story is going to be one of the big things that sets Star Trek Online apart.”

The first three minutes of the video at the Electric Playground website contain the interview with Zinkievich.

Star Trek: Online Executive Producer Craig Zinkievich explained why this was the case. “We didn’t want to have interiors at launch,” he said. “We thought it was just a little bit too much.”

But Zinkievich realized that it might be a better idea to rethink at least part of that attitude. “We really wanted to make sure we delivered a really deep experience,” he said, “but your bridge not being in the game, it really felt like a hole in the game, and it was just something that we had to put in.”

Now, players can choose from approximately twenty different bridges, which will focus as social hubs where gamers can “hang out online” with their bridge officers and other captains.

Star Trek: Online is “familiar, but it’s new,” said Zinkievich. “I think that’s what keeps us from stepping on the hardcore Trekkies’ toes. The team is made up of Star Trek fans and avid MMO fans, so if we can make a game that doesn’t churn our stomach, then I think we can definitely satisfy the fans.”