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Season 5 Dev Blog #33: Adding Officers to the Interior of Ships
Rohn
Member UncommonPosts: 3,730
According to the most recent dev blog, they'll be adding some officers - such as Engineer, Brig Officer, Bartender, and Doctor, among others - that can be interacted with to the interiors of ships. Similar officers will be added to DS9, as well as to the Academy areas.
These officers will offer and accept assignments that appear to have some similarities to the Duty Officer missions.
While it doesn't sound like a huge change, it is one more step in the right direction, in my opinion.
The entire blog can be found here:
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
Comments
I will not get my hopes up for this. As you say, it is a step in the right direction, albeit more of a tiny tip toe to be realistic. From the sound of it, these new officers do not offer anything that does not already exist in game. For example, I have dozens of torepedo turrets that were built by DOFF missions already. All they did was add in a person to click on instead of an icon in the UI.
Some things to consider;
To use these new contacts, you will need to beam up/down to use them adding yet another load screen
I am the Captain of the ship. Why do I have to go see them and not the other way around? They should be reporting to me on the bridge or in my ready room
You still cannot customize the uniform of your non-BOFF crew
These are not really the functionality the customers have been asking for since day one, such as;
Treat injuries in sick bay
Repair or improve your ship in Engineering
Craft items instead of having to visit Memory Alpha
Access to email, banks and the exchange
These new officers sound ok, but nothing to get overly excited about. From the blog, it just sounds like adding NPCs to click instead of the UI button. Color me unimpressed.
I think it is a good step in direction of having a more valuable ship interior. What I found more interesting in the dev blog is this:
"At the respective factions’ academies, Personnel Officers allow a captain to commission cadres of duty officers, and also to turn in five underperforming duty officers, plus a modest amount of Dilithium, for a random duty officer of the next highest quality. Too many duty officers of common (white) quality? Turn them in for uncommon (green) quality duty officers!"
I've been waiting on this. If the dilithium cost is not overly high, this will be a good way to clean up the crew a bit.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Agreed. Hopefully it will be a good way to make more improvements to one's own crew.
Overall, this looks like an interesting addition, one that will bring some life to ship interiors, though I hope they will continue developing more for them.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
It's not a step in any direction other then adding a bunch of fluff. The original design choice of the your avatar being the center of the game , and everything else revolving or enter some box is the limiting factor. All they've done is a add a static component or " Press F " item to a already exsisting box. It adds so little to the game, it hardly warrants it's effort. There is no customization to bridges and there will be no customization to these additions. Cryptic made bad design choice of cramming Champions Online into a Star Trek suit has permantently crippled the game.
You already get a modest amount of Dilithium and points if you dismiss a DOFF. This is not anything particularly new.
For those interested, this went live yesterday.
Each new officer offers additional DOFF missions according to the type of officer they are (i.e. Operations, Engineering, etc). There is also a terminal offering missions in the captain's Ready Room.
In addition to providing more "standard" missions, allowing the player to really focus on the types of missions they want to do, the officers give specific missions that appear to be regularly selectable. As an example, the engineering officer has duty missions to build each of the different types of ship batteries, while the science officer has missions to study each of the different types of tribbles.
All in all, pretty interesting, and does add a little usefulness to the interior of the ship.
Hell hath no fury like an MMORPG player scorned.
FYI. You can now access these missions, with the exception of the "static" missions, from the main doff screen rather than going inside your ship everytime you change a sector map. That was getting old quick.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil