Is this the same game that Perpetual was working on?  Or did Cryptic start from scratch?

Originally posted by Odysses

Is this the same game that Perpetual was working on?  Or did Cryptic start from scratch?

 Perpetual had nothing except a concept . Cryptic took CO , reskinned , looked at othe successful ST games and tried to implement gameplay from those onto STO . for example SFC III.  You can see some of that game in the space combat . Of course copying it outright would have meant a court date with Activision , god knows they barely had money to launch and dev STO.

Yea, perpetual had MORE than a concept.

I distinctly remember an article where the planet generated for the magazine article.  ORIGINALLY the concept was every new planet would generate randomly for them and add something new to the universe.  

I don't think Cryptic used it at all when they took over.  Pretty sure it was just a cut and paste of CO's mechanics.

I just remember reading that perpetual turning over all art assets.  Didn't know if they turned over systems code.  I know Bioware was impressed enough at the time to licence the engine from perpetual.

I haven't played CO, but there's definitely a similar feel to City of Heroes, their game  before CO.

The starship combat really does remind of SFC, but a lot of that was borrowed from the game Star Fleet Battles. So sort of fair.

Originally posted by Ikeda

Yea, perpetual had MORE than a concept.

I distinctly remember an article where the planet generated for the magazine article.  ORIGINALLY the concept was every new planet would generate randomly for them and add something new to the universe.  

I don't think Cryptic used it at all when they took over.  Pretty sure it was just a cut and paste of CO's mechanics.

Perpetual had a concept and some concept artwork they eventually couldn't pay for, but that was it. It came out later that all of those 'screenshots' were mock-ups made for the articles in question, but were never actually in the game because the game didn't exist. Everything you sawe was made from the basic engine they had, but no game creation work had been done. All Cryptic recieved was the artwork, which was why they had to use CO's engine; there was really nothing else for them to use from Perpetual. Remember that one article 'screenshot' of the slug/frog looking alien and the conversation choices? That was created for just that article, but wasn't anything actually real (as in, in the game).

Originally posted by trancejeremy

I haven't played CO, but there's definitely a similar feel to City of Heroes, their game  before CO.

The starship combat really does remind of SFC, but a lot of that was borrowed from the game Star Fleet Battles. So sort of fair.

That's because the Cryptic 2.0 engine was merely a copy of the CoH/CoV.

SFB gave Taldren the thumbs up to use the SFB rules as a basis for their game, with the understanding that certain things were off-limits. For example: in SFB, plasma using ships can turn a larger plasma torpedo (Say, a Type R) into several small ones (Type Fs) called a 'plasma shotgun,' but Taldren weren't allowed to use this. I wish Cryptic would have gotten permission from the SFC license holders to use the basic mechanics from those games, so that things such as tractor beams and such were actual ship abilities instead of crew skills.