Well, hope you're not a major fan of Champions Online or Star Trek Online. Cryptic Studios is about to be sold off.

Atari made the announcement today, citing 7.5 million dollars in losses from last year. They say in no uncertain terms that their two major Cryptic Studios properties - namely, the aforementioned Champions Online and Star Trek Online - [b]will[/bi] continue to be supported and will remain online, especially Star Trek Online, which won Massive Online Gamer's Readers Choice Award for Best New MMO of 2010 back in January and has just now begun to show solid expansion in new subscribers. How long Atari will support the two MMO properties has yet to be decided.

Whaddya think? Just another MMO about to die like so many others before it, or a hasty decision on Atari's part?

Selling cryptic is one thing, but are they selling rights to STO as well or are they planning on scrapping it entirely. From the way they describe it:



Which makes me think they're planning on holding onto STO, but without selling the rights to that game who in their right mind would want to buy Cryptic?

Since it was just announced, I'd keep an ear to the ground for precisely what they're doing with the game rights.

~spidey

Given what I heard in general chat in-game last night, it looks like Cryptic will somehow hold on to the rights for STO and Champions Online and that Atari will soft support both of them for the time being (if this is the case, this is probably due to some nice, binding contracts). All Atari is doing is pulling financial support from Cryptic and selling Cryptic Studios as a developer, from what I've heard. The Cryptic dev/support teams still working on STO and Champions will remain in place and will even be bolstered (i.e. "replaced") by new hires, which arrive next week. I'll let you know if that means the games will still retain the hallmarks of previous support (namely: speedy and polite resolutions to trouble tickets and bug reports).

I would think that Atari is stronger than Acclaim. To see Star Trek Online go down like 9Dragons would be rather embarrassing.

You mean when they gave 9Dragons to GameFirst? The super-hasty transfer of data from Acclaim's servers to GF's and the lack of user accounts that resulted from that? Yeah, I don't see that happening for STO. It's Cryptic's baby, Atari's key to future profits and CBS' ca$h cow. You know they'll keep it profitable, whatever the future holds.

I hope Cryptic takes control of STO back from Atari. That was their initial plan, anyway: use STO as their flagship MMO to make themselves a solid MMO presence to challenge Blizzard (like that'll ever happen). While they're nowhere near being able to challenge anybody - their best MMO to date (City of Heroes) was made for some other company (namely, NCSoft) and their two latest properties are now Atari-owned - they could be a contender if they could just solve this problem. Beside that, I haven't been all that happy with Atari lately. Aside from Cryptic-made properties STO and Champions Online, the only major properties they've released in the past five years were the Unreal Tournament series, the Roller Coaster Tycoon series (yes, I included those in this list of "major titles"), Dungeons & Dragons Online, EVE Online, Ghostbusters: The Video Game and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Don't get me wrong, Atari publishes some fun games, but aside from Unreal and EVE Online, nothing they've published lately has been potentially as empire-building as some games we've seen from other developers (such as, say, the Halo series, the Half-Life saga, Call of Duty...).


In possibly related news, Star Trek Online is now going for $10 a copy online. I was able to nab a copy for a friend of mine at GameStop for less than that. It's a good property that has developed into a damn fine game since Open Beta last year; I'm sorry that it hasn't gotten nearly the press it should've.

I forgot about the major difference between 9Dragons and STO...Only one of them is worth the time and effort.

This is kind of a foray into the subject of Atari, but I kind of hate how they changed up Roller Coaster Tycoon. I know, not many people care about the genre, but RCT and RCT2 are on the long list of my favorite games that I played growing up, and RCT3 was too much of a change for me. Lol I probably don't know what else to say.

Never got into Roller Coaster Tycoon, but I've got the original laying about somewhere, so I think I'll give it a shot.

Heh. xD
It's only for the hardest of hardcore gamers.
"I mean, listen to this shizzit: You gotta build rides that don't kill people, then, of all things, you gotta feed the fuckers and give them a place to empty it all out. Then you gotta make paths that don't confuse the 'tards, connecting all of the buildings somehow so they can use them. THEN, boy am I telling you, you have to make MONEY from all this shiz! What am I, Jesus?
So therefore I use RCT to plant purty flowers lolbye"
-Anonymous reviewer

That actually sounds like where Universal Interactive got the idea for another of my favorite games.

Problem is: when I've had a hard day at work, I'm a damn sadist. I'd be the guy who would take that bad day at work out on my "customers" in Roller Coaster Tycoon. Build a roller coaster rail that sends the cars careening into a wall? Sure, why not? (C'mon, my theme park would be named "Death Rails". The morons should've seen it coming.)

For example: in the game I linked above, there's a popular strategy among the more frustrated players who get weary of pandering to their customers' every whim. Take a basic starter island, lay out very simple paths for the customers, pop in food vendors and bathrooms, whatever they need to make them comfortable. Build high security enclosure fences around the paths, fill them only with carnivorous animals. The key is to pick the most dangerous ones to exhibit. Those draw the most crowds.

Wait until you've built up a capacity crowd - at least 300 customers or more - before you enact Phase 2. You'll have to keep ticket prices fairly low for this, so you may lose money at first, but if they're low enough you'll make it back. Don't worry about that, though, money really isn't an issue for this strategy.

Once you have a capacity crowd, initiate Phase 2:

• Remove all entrances/exits off the island. Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. All 300+ customers are now stuck there. You will hear whining from them. Ignore that. If you're initiating Phase 2, then you've had a sickeningly horrible day already - your significant other dumped you, you got fired, your dog shit on your homework, you know the drill - and you really won't care what your customers in the game are saying. Believe me, when Phase 2 is in full effect, their complaints will sound sweet to you.
  
• Keep food vendors and bathrooms open. The customers must remain healthy for Phase 2.
  
• Remove the feeders from the cages. The carnivorous animals I mentioned? They are no longer receiving regular food intake. They will get hungry soon. Make certain they have plenty of natural water sources (ponds and lakes) in their enclosures so they don't outright perish; you don't want that for Phase 2. The animals must remain alive.
  
• Without regular food, carnivores will grow stressed and agitated. They will begin attacking each other; you may have to send your park rangers to sedate a few of them. If they begin attacking their enclosure fences looking for weaknesses, do not prevent them. Encourage this behavior.
  
• After a very brief time, your customers will be whining insufferably and your animals will be increasingly agitated, probably to the point of attacking one another. We must be kind to the animals. They require food, yes? Provide them this food. Remove the enclosure fences between them and your customers.
  
• If you've had a particularly bad day (your boss fired you for something that a co-worker did or your significant other was sleeping with half the town, for example), lock the game's camera onto an animal you favor (I prefer the raptors, of course) and watch them go to town. Hours of endless fun!

The really sad thing about this game (perhaps I should say "the most humorous thing?) is that, to your in-game Board of Directors, all your lost customers are little more than revenue streams. Each fatality caused by one of your insanely hungry animals is nothing more than a dollar sign to them.

Your Board of Directors and your park staff will be bitching endlessly as each customer costs you money. (Every death is a fine, and that fine has to be paid.) Rack up enough and you might get fired. If the Board hasn't fired you by the time your animals run through all your customers, simply use the "add more money" cheat code to pay off that fine and all repair expenses, then repair the enclosure fences, replace the animal feeders you took out of the enclosures earlier, have your park rangers round up the escaped animals and return them to their enclosures, then replace the park entrances and open the park for business again. Trust me, you'll have a steady stream of customers again in no time. You'd think customers wouldn't visit a park where hundreds of people just died at, but you'd be wrong. People are just that stupid. (Hell, if such a park existed in real life, those fatalities would probably add to the mystique of the place.)


Oh, back to the original topic, by the way:

• Chinese developer Perfect World is buying Cryptic Studios from Atari.