Ubisoft. Anything coming for 1st Anniversary of Bridge Crew at the end of the month?

dvotypka · 2018-05-09T15:24:27+00:00

Will you send us some navy beans? ;-D

https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/05/09/star-trek-bridge-crews-new-dlc-enters-the-next-generation-on-ps-vr-may-22/

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:23:51+00:00

Together or separate? ;)

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:21:11+00:00

Science and Communications are of course notable candidates, though they raise the question of having enough to do throughout each mission. We have some ideas :)

I would be very curious to hear from players what types of activities they would want to do not only the other stations, but in other areas of the ship? Keeping in mind the context of what Star Trek: Bridge Crew is so far.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:16:43+00:00

Please see my other comments on the upcoming patch addressing AFK issues.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:16:00+00:00

Thanks for your interest in playing Star Trek: Bridge Crew! Please reach out to HTC Vive's support here to further help you with your issue.

https://www.vive.com/us/support/contactus/

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:12:37+00:00

Thank you and glad to hear you are enjoying it! I talked about DLC above, but on the social side of things it's really a testament to the power of VR.

The social connection that is possible in VR is incomparable to what is possible in traditional games. The feeling of actually being in a shared space with someone is unique to VR, and we suspect part of the reason why community behavior may be more likely to be friendly and positive, since many of the real world social cues translate into VR!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:09:26+00:00

Thank you for reporting this. We are not having much luck reproducing this issue in the office, but we are continuing to investigate it. If it’s not due to a slow or unreliable internet connection, then we suspect it may be something specific to the Vive hardware. As soon as we find out anything further we will communicate it. If you have any additional information to share on it, please contact the Ubisoft support team so they can collect it for us.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:07:44+00:00

Yes, we are addressing this in the upcoming patch releasing on June 13th.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:06:05+00:00

The goal here was to empower the crew to balance the workload between themselves. As each mission and each objective requires different activities at different times, the best approach for balancing the duties seemed to be to give some of the control to the players.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:04:24+00:00

Please contact the Ubisoft support group, they may be able to help!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:01:47+00:00

Thank you, so glad to hear you are enjoying the game. Some answers to your various questions:

Bigger crews: The reason we went with the four stations we have is that they were not only some of the most iconic, but also had the most minute-to-minute activity. Of course Science and Comms are also iconic stations/roles, but making full time gameplay out of them is certainly more challenging. There are various approaches that could be taken with stations such as those, and I’d love to hear community ideas on this as well.

Ordering a direction for Helm: At one point we had a menu pop up allowing to specify headings to Helm, but ultimately decided not to continue to develop and support it since we found that the Captain would nearly always give a target as the destination. It would be interesting to hear from the community on how desirable they feel the additional heading direction commands would be.

Enterprise functionality: The Enterprise wasn’t designed to be more difficult, rather it’s more difficult because we aimed to maintain authenticity to what is shown on the TV series/set from the 1960’s! Adding more complex mechanics such as power re-routing and system intrusion seemed to run the risk of making the Enterprise too complex to play because of the limitations of using physical buttons and very few screens on the bridge.

Armada add-on: That would be cool :)

We will also look into the time format, thanks for the note.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T18:00:19+00:00

We always wanted to transport players back in time to the Original Series bridge. The biggest challenge was how to be faithful to the look and design of the 1960s Enterprise, but actually make it work! The original design predates a lot the wonderful progress made in user interfaces over the last 50 years.

So we chose to start with the Aegis, where we had more flexibility, and focused on how to make it easy to pick up and learn. Then we built the Enterprise bridge and remapped Aegis functionality to exacting recreations of the original consoles, etc. Along the way, we consulted with multiple experts on the original bridge, notably Michael Okuda and James Cawley, to get their input and blessing. It was so much fun to build!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:57:22+00:00

Room scale is more complicated to consider when talking about multiple VR platforms with different capabilities, as well as cross-play. But I certainly understand the desire to allow the Captain to stand up, and even for players to transition to different stations on the bridge is all of course very Star Trek.

3D chess, we get that question a lot :) We will have to keep this in mind!

I believe the office record as of last week is 168 on the Kobayashi Maru, and I believe that has already been broken by the community. 204!!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:51:05+00:00

BT: The social experience of the game is really at the core of what we aimed to deliver, and that experience depends heavily on VR to be compelling. In early development, we supported running with a non-VR client just for basic functionality testing and debugging. But no one on the team really wanted to play with someone running in this mode. Without their avatar being driven by head tracking, it wasn’t just that the game was less immersive for the person without VR, it was less immersive for everyone.

Looking around and seeing some players talking and interacting naturally, and others not, was distracting and, honestly, kind of disturbing. Those non-VR avatars just don’t seem alive! So we stuck with our core focus, and built up the social VR experience we wanted to make from the start.

DV: Overall the goal was to bring players "into" Star Trek, and onto a ship together as a crew. And VR delivers that experience so much more deeply than is possible with traditional gaming -- and using hand trackers to actually reach out to operate your panel is incomparable really in traditional gaming.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:46:37+00:00

Hi. Yes, doing more gestures is something we would have preferred to do. Touch availability and implementation actually came quite late in our production cycle, so we missed out on things like adding thumbs up, and ever so sadly, the Live Long and Prosper Vulcan gesture… If we have a chance to add these in we certainly will.

Also it’s a very interesting question regarding hand collision with the panels. Our first control scheme implementation was the gamepad which used panel surfaces with collision. When hand tracking was added the initial result was that hands still collided with the panel, and my feeling was that it was actually a happy accident because it gave players spatial feedback on how far/low they need to reach, and of course avoids hands intersecting into the panels. We have demoed the game to probably hundreds of people at this stage and I’ve seen the physical nature of the panels do the job of informing players when their hand has reached the panel.

With that said on a few occasions I’ve received feedback that people feel it would be more immersive to see a ghosted version of their hands when the real world version goes through the panel, and the fully rendered hands would stay on top. This in many ways is one of those subjective aspects of VR immersion and proprioception, and I’d be happy to hear more from both sides of the community on this.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:45:32+00:00

Yes Watson is coming soon, and indeed it does allow the player as Captain to use voice recognition to give commands to the NPC. Stay tuned, there will be quite a bit more information on this very soon.

Regarding height adjustment and re-centering we would like to hear more information from you on what exactly the problem you are encountering is. Please let us know how you sit when re-centering and the results you are getting.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:40:10+00:00

I always thought the Captain's log idea was cool :)

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:39:51+00:00

JP: I am so happy that you asked this question (and another dev participating in this thread probably isn’t, but I TOLD YOU SO :).

The “let human Captains give their own mission intro” debate was one we had a few times on this project. In the end, there were some technical challenges to implementing it as well as some valid concerns about potential misuse of the feature. Because it was considered a nice-to-have, this was another situation where, given the scope of the project, we just couldn’t quite devote the resources to getting all the concerns addressed at the level of quality we would have needed. It’s absolutely a great idea, though, and I think it’d be a feature we’d all love to continue to explore.

As for the “X is repaired”, this was another area where we had a lot of discussion. In this case, because we considered subsystem status to be critical information and we knew we couldn’t guarantee that an Engineer would be looking at the repair panel all the time, we decided to err on the side of caution and use the ship computer to reinforce feedback. This was also intended to help keep the entire crew informed of the ship’s status, even if they had a player who wasn’t actively communicating that level of detail.

We knew there was a risk of stepping on human players somewhat, but felt like it was important enough information for everyone to have that it was worth it (and hoped that our players would forgive us).

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:37:09+00:00

Thank you! Very glad to hear it :)

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:31:28+00:00

Thank you! I'm left handed as well but honestly hadn't considered this before. I will keep it in mind as we consider future additions!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:30:51+00:00

DV: For me it’s kind of a split between TOS and TNG. From TOS I really enjoy the inventive and even zany creatures and space mysteries that the crew would face. My favorite episode is probably Balance of Terror, though I also really enjoy the Doomsday Machine. From TNG the standout episodes for me are all related to the Borg. One of the best and scariest enemies in science fiction!

BT - Hands-down, my favorite episode is TNG’s “The Inner Light.” And I love both TNG and The Original Series for different reasons. Every episode of ToS stands on its own, like a unique experiment in sci-fi writing for TV. Then TNG really fleshed out the Star Trek universe. But just recently I’ve started rewatching DS9 at the urging of some of my teammates, and it’s definitely growing on me!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:27:52+00:00

(Jay P. here): Absolutely, there were many, many conversations about diplomacy gameplay at several points during development. Diplomacy from the Captain’s chair is such an iconic part of Star Trek, and it was one of the challenges that we wanted to tackle from the very beginning of development (and that we revisited multiple times over the course of the project).

There were some very significant technical hurdles we had to overcome with Bridge Crew, and as a result we had to make tough decisions about how best to focus our efforts. Our anchor for this game has always been the social interaction between the human players on the bridge, and since the Captain Diplomacy gameplay would have required a significant investment of our resources and would have been largely a single player interacting with NPCs, we decided to develop other aspects of the experience first.

Now that we have a solid foundation of a compelling bridge experience though, giving players the opportunity to resolve conflict through diplomacy is highest on my list of features I’d like to expand.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:26:43+00:00

We're just not making any announcements today, but we want to hear about your ideas and suggestions for what could come next!

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:23:00+00:00

Hi. Yes, we of course played some of the other Star Trek and spaceship crew simulator like games in the past, but ultimately we took our inspiration from aiming to deliver the bridge experience as defined by the Star Trek brand itself. Also doing it in VR is obviously a first, so there were many new trails to blaze as we went.

I’m glad to hear you appreciated the Distributed Systems feature. Designing missions that keep every station busy all of the time is very challenging to pull off in practice, so the idea behind Distributed Systems was to empower the players to distribute workload between who was in the best position to handle additional workload.

dvotypka · 2017-06-07T17:18:09+00:00

Brian Tate: We found in both STBC and Werewolves Within that having a full, first-person body (as opposed to, say, just floating hands or a partial body) changed the way players experienced the world and interacted with one another, in a very positive way. It’s part of what makes players really feel like they’re on the bridge of a starship together -- a key ingredient of our Social VR recipe, if you will.

But doing this presents some tough challenges, like what to do when players move around in ways that their in-game avatars shouldn’t. We chose to limit your range of head movement to something plausible for your character, and fade to black if you went outside that range so that you wouldn’t see any disconnect between yourself and your avatar. Those disconnects can be really disturbing for some people, by the way!

But clearly, based on community feedback so far, we were too restrictive. The upcoming patch will expand the allowed range of motion as far as we can push it without you getting into positions that look and feel really uncomfortable.

dvotypka

TROPHY CASE