In my conversation with Star Trek Online executive producer Craig Zinkievich, he asked me not to give my bridge officers any food or drink. He also explained how the game is a bit like having your own Star Trek series, why he feels "horrible" and "barbaric" when he's playing, and what risks they took making the game the way it is. You'll also find out developer Cryptic's plans for what changes are coming.

...with the next few updates later this year, we're definitely going to be adding [non-combat gameplay]. We've just scratched the surface of what the Genesis system can do with the exploration content we have and I really look to that realm of the game to be the place where the non-combat, where the diplomacy, where the first contact missions really start happening. I see us doing a lot of work over the next year to fill that gameplay out.

Read the Star Trek Online interview after the jump.

Tom Chick: One of my favorite things about Star Trek Online is how completely different it is from other MMOs. Nobody could play this and say, "Hey, you guys are ripping off World of Warcraft!". How risky that for you guys?

Craig Zinkievich: I'll be honest with you. In hindsight, it was pretty darn risky. When we got the license, we sat down and we made the conscious decision - and we had a very short timeframe - we made the conscious decision to make sure we made the MMO that Star Trek wanted to be, as opposed to making an MMO and putting some Star Trek uniforms on it. We wanted to make sure we got ship and ground. We wanted to make sure your bridge officers played an important role in the game. We wanted to make sure you're constantly moving back and forth between environments. I think in the grand scheme of things, all those things are pretty risky in terms of breaking the mold. And the time constraint we were under, to develop this MMO in less than two years, was pretty risky.

But I also think that's where the market is right now. Why bother trying to make another World of Warcraft? They did a pretty good job. I think it also behooves you to innovate.

TC: You mention the split between the stuff in space and on the ground. It must have been difficult to basically cut your game into two separate halves. It seems like you'd almost needed two developers.

CZ: What we ended up doing was almost doubling the work for the team. Coming up with the moment-to-moment combat, the progression, the way the gameplay feels. If you did use two developers, or two teams - which we did not, it was a single team focused on both aspects of the game - I think if you use two teams, you run into an issue where the two parts of the game didn't go together well. Quite frankly, in terms of vision, they both started off a lot different than they ended up. We ended up making changes to make them more similar. We got space combat where we wanted to really fast, then we ended up bring some of those mechanics - the positional nature of space combat - to the ground, to get those two bits of gameplay to feel more consistent. It was a big challenge, but one team is the way to go.

TC: Another element you mentioned that works wonders in terms of uniting the space and ground stuff is the concept of the bridge officers. You have a crew, they inform what you can do with your space ship and what abilities you have on the ground. Was this something you knew early on was going to be part of the design? Or was there a "Eureka!" moment? The bridge officers seem crucial to what makes the game not only play well, but feel like Star Trek.

CZ: There were several "Eureka!" moments along the way. We knew we wanted the away team. We knew we wanted every away mission to be five characters, and if it's not your friends, it's your bridge officers. And then it was, "Well, okay, what do your bridge officers do?" Let's give them the coolest powers, let's give them the thing that defines your role in space. I don't know if there was a "Eureka!" moment, but once it started running, here's an answer for you: When you're in closed beta, you end up doing character wipes every once in a while. You develop things, you change things in the game, sometimes your previous format is invalid and you have to delete characters. The first time we did a character wipe, I didn't care about my main, about the captain. But there was one of my bridge officers. Her name was Washington. She was my medical officer. And I still remember her to this day. As soon as I realized that she had such an effect on my gameplay that I cared more about losing her than my captain, then I was like, "Oh, man, we got it right!"

TC: In an odd way, you de-emphasize that traditional attachment to the avatar. That's part of the game, and that's certainly the initial hook when you're starting out your character. But one of the things I was most pleased to discover was how the avatar shares the spotlight with the bridge officers, and with the ship. All three of those things have their own sense of progression. All three can be customized and personalized. The fact that it's no longer just an avatar is kind of revolutionary for an MMO. Did you guys know it was going to be that big a deal?

CZ: I think it was another one of those risky things, to de-emphasize the captain. It's almost like you're progressing this nebulous idea of a season or a show. You have your bridge officers, and your ship, and your captain. That whole amalgam defines what you play. And it was risky since the whole player connection to an ingame character is an important part of an MMO. There were things we balanced, making sure that when you see other players in a social setting, you see their faces. That defines who they are, who you see. We didn't want to diminish the captain, but we wanted to build up other characters around you. I think we got a pretty good balance there.

TC: I love the idea of it being like developing your own season, or show. That so ties into the feeling of Star Trek, doesn't it? It was always an ensemble show, about not just the captain, but the crew as well.

CZ: Definitely. That's why it was easy to push your really cool powers to your bridge officers, and making sure your ship plays a huge part in what role you're playing. Star Trek lends itself to that.

TC: One of the criticisms for how it doesn't feel like Star Trek is that combat is so constant. You have a few non-combat missions, but most of the missions are basically centered around your combat model. To some fans of Star Trek, this might be a problem. Star Trek is traditionally about a different style of conflict resolution and yet an MMO tends to be about defeating things, killing them, blowing them up. Is this something you guys were aware was going to be a potential problem? Do you just see it as a necessary evil for an MMO?

CZ: I don't want it say it's a necessary evil for an MMO, and it's definitely something we were aware of along the way. When you make a game like this, you can attempt to satisfy everybody's desire. Some people just want to be the guy in the engineering room, some people just want to do diplomacy. There are all sorts of roles and all sorts of gameplay the Star Trek universe provides, and we could have taken a shot at providing something for everybody at launch. What we would have ended up with is a really broad experience, but probably not that focused and probably not that fun in the grand scheme of things, or in any of those roles. So we focused on the idea that you're the captain of this ship and it's during war time and this is what happens.

That being said, we did start putting down the seeds of non-combat. We did start putting down the seeds of diplomacy and exploration. And the great thing about MMOs is that you start off with these seeds and this focused experience, but what you get to do as game developers is keep adding to it, keep building all the things you dreamed of along the way. I don't want to call it a necessary evil, but that's the focus we chose. And it is kind of obvious. It's like, okay, look, we need some more of that exploration, we need some more of that non-combat, we need that diplomatic feel to the game. Those are things we definitely plan on adding as time goes on.

TC: How much can you say about specific plans for that in the near future?

CZ: Well, I really think with the next few updates later this year, we're definitely going to be adding things there. We've just scratched the surface of what the Genesis system can do with the exploration content we have and I really look to that realm of the game to be the place where the non-combat, where the diplomacy, where the first contact missions really start happening. I see us doing a lot of work over the next year to fill that gameplay out.

TC: Let's talk about the combat stuff you do have, which I think is wonderful. As a fan of those older space action games like Wing Commander as well as the strategic space games like Starleet Command, I love the balance you've struck. Tell me about how that balance evolved? How did it get to the current point where it plays a bit like an action game, but there's still so much strategy there?

CZ: When we got the project, we listed what we wanted to achieve. We had those day-long meetings for two weeks to sketch out our vision. Then you identify your biggest risks. You identify things like, "Hey, look, I don't know if we can do this, we've never pulled this of before". Those you tackle first. The overarching thing we knew we needed to tackle first was space combat. We'd done flight in our engine before, but of course in superhero worlds. The sense of scale in space. The pace of the combat. We knew it wasn't going to be dogfighting, because the show's not that. We knew it was going to be positional. So we sat down and got five or six guys working with the Cryptic engine. Over the first four weeks, we got space combat up and running. Then it took several months afterwards to tune it to the point it was what we wanted, that it was fun and something we could build on. It was very iterative. Doing a lot of work, playing the game in a conference room with a bunch of guys saying, "Let's try this", and then coming back two days later and doing the same thing over and over. There was a lot of hard work there. But to be totally honest, I think a lot of it was luck.

TC: Over the course of the development, did the space combat tend to pull one way or the other towards being more actiony, or more staid and strategic?

CZ: We probably wanted it staid and strategic. A little bit more positional. A little bit more like the shows. But when you say that out loud, people are like, "Well, that just sounds boring". So you want to make sure it's very engaging, so that while it's strategic and positional, you are constantly making decisions.

TC: How hard was it to make the away team members as competent as they are? When I first started playing, I figured the AI was going to be terrible, the team was never going to use their powers when I wanted them to, and the away team would just be a stopgap until I could group with other people. But now I almost don't want to play with my friends. I want to bring my bridge officers with me, because they are so good at using their skills. And I get personally attached to them.

CZ: The personal attachment is a big part of it. But don't give your bridge officers food, because right now they eat it right away. That's disappointing if you're trying to use them as extra storage bags.

TC: I did notice that. They're gluttons. When I give them soup or coffee or whatever, right then and there, they'll eat it. You pig! Save that.

CZ: I tried to do that to breed tribbles. Give them a tribble and give them some blood wine to see what the tribble will breed into, but the guys drink the blood wine right away. But, yeah, again, it's one of those things you get up and running and you iterate on it for as long as you can. There are still times where it's like, "Uhhh, did you see what my bridge officer just did?" Some of the funnest bugs are based on the bridge officers.

TC: I've spent a lot of time poring over the game trying to figure out how different skills interact and what I needed to do to get my photon torpedo damage up, or improve my turning speed, or whatever. There's a lot of detail the players have to piece together on their own. Since you don't do a longer tutorial that really digs into the nuts and bolts of the game, it's up to the player to look into that himself as he levels up and faces harder decisions. Is that intentional? Is that something you need to address in terms of explaining the detail in the game?

CZ: I think there's probably always more work you can do to explain the detail. I think the skill system is very cool. I like it a lot. It provides a very important mechanic. You wanted to make sure every thirty minutes you're advancing your character. So we needed these skills and we needed a lot of them. I think where we did fall down is explaining exactly what's going on. When you get this many skills, you end up getting a complicated web of dependencies between ship abilities, and captain abilities, and the equipment you have. How do you lay that out to the player in the best fashion? There's always work we can do to explain more complicated facets of the game, and the skill stuff is probably someplace we can continue to do work to help the community understand what's going on.

TC: I suspect this is something you've talked about to the community, because I can't imagine you haven't gotten a thousand forum posts about this, but where does Cryptic currently stand on letting players respec their characters at some point down the road?

CZ: Definitely respec is on the way. We're working on getting that in, making sure that gets out in the next month or two. It is something we definitely want in the game. It'll always be available with microtransactions, but more importantly you will be able to earn the ability to respec your character ingame. So, definitely it's coming. One hundred percent.

TC: Tell me a bit about the immediate plans for - well, it's not crafting, but it sort of fills the gap where crafting would be - where you collect research materials and bring them to the science station. Are there plans to evolve that?

CZ: There are two systems in the game where we tried to address crafting. The first is Memory Alpha, getting that data, bringing it back to the scientists at Memory Alpha. Of course, adding more variants of the data, more stores, more items you can craft. There are a lot of other things we're thinking of doing, but for the short term, it's just putting more stuff in and tweaking the costs. I think the other one that's a little less utilized right now, but that I expect to go up more, is training bridge officers. Again, we could have done a better job selling the feature. As you skill up your captain, you can train your bridge officers in specific skills. There are certain skills that are very hard to get for a bridge officer unless you've ranked up one of your skills. That's another one I expect that as time goes on and as people become aware of it, we'll do a little bit more work ingame to make that a bigger side of crafting. You'll see people who spend a lot of their time training bridge officers.

TC: That's an excellent point, Craig, and that didn't even occur to me to think of that as crating, because I think of crafting as messing around with gear and objects, with inanimate objects. You get so attached to bridge officers that you don't really see that's one role they play, that there's an equivalent to crafting in there. Now, tell me a bit about how the launch has gone for you guys. For me, personally, the server has gone down a few times, no big deal. But from where I'm sitting, it seems like it's been a smooth launch.

CZ: I guess I could say it out loud now, but I gotta find some wood to knock on. It has been a smooth launch, but the biggest issue we've run into, across the board, is the number of people. It continues to exceed our expectations. That's a great problem to have, but it's had our core engineering team and our network operations team running around, adding more hardware, making sure stability works well, making sure performance of the game doesn't degrade. But overall, in terms of the game, we're very very happy with how few problems there are within the game itself. Overall, the launch has been pretty smooth.

TC: I'm curious, as a producer, once the game launches, do you get to play? Do you even want to play?

CZ: Oh, yeah. I'll be honest, it's hard. For the whole team, we work so hard on the game and get so myopic about it, we look at the details so closely that towards the end of closed beta and the beginning of open beta, it's hard to step back and see the big picture and see what we've done. So the day before head start actually happened, we had a head head start internally. We shut down the whole team and all we did that day was eat pizza and play the game to take a look at the work we did. So it's nice to look at it from fresh eyes. Oh yeah, we get to play it. All the old rivalries come back between the guys who play Klingons and the guys who play Fed, the guys who play science and the guys who play escort. We still love to play.

TC: What kind of ship did you take?

CZ: I gotta go escort and tactical the whole way. It's horrible, I feel barbaric sometimes, but I'm one hundred percent "pew pew".

TC: Why do you say it's horrible and you feel barbaric?

CZ: You figure maybe something a little more subtle, maybe more thought out. But, really, when I get in the game, it's about loading up as many heavy cannons as possible and getting that photon torpedo salvo off.

TC: I can't deny the appeal of just hitting hard. Leave the finesse to other people.

CZ: Exactly. It's getting that killing blow. Getting the explosion.

TC: Well, Craig, congratulations on the launch going smoothly. I'm glad to know you guys are getting so much interest. I really like how you're doing things differently and I'm glad to hear so many people are responding. I wish you guys the best of luck going forward.

CZ: Tom, thanks so much.