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As part of @trekonlinegame's Year of Klingon, we did a series of updates and polish to the Klingon tutorial and early gameplay experience. Time to look at a little bit of what we did on the design side! (thread)
The Klingon tutorial starts with your character working on a Klingon ship that's engaged in some sketchy activities. The treacherous Captain Jurlek is working with enemies of the Empire! Naturally, we couldn't have you fight him without updating his character art.
Alongside this, our seasoned animator went in and updated our various cutscenes, so that your climactic confrontation with Jurlek feels more heroic.
Along the way, your character helps to defend the ship by repairing damage or reinvigorating the crew - depending upon your career choice. This underscores early on that your choice of career (engineering, science, or tactical) is meaningful.
In earlier versions of the tutorial, you'd interact with some steaming vents, or with some injured or demoralized crew, and then just keep going. But we wanted the game to show the effects of your work, so in the update your actions cause people to get back up or fix damage.
We also changed the holodeck simulation for combat training so that it's a simulated Starfleet ship and officers - letting us use newer environment assets and foreshadowing your conflict with Starfleet later.
We added visual pointers to interactable objects - early on in the game, players sometimes need extra indicators about what they should do, where they should go, and what they should click on. We also lit the doorways so that locked doors are red and unlocked ones are green.
We made sure to have lots of new voice work, because it's easier to tell what's going on when you can hear characters, not just read their text, and our animator redid many of the character contact poses.
In the "less cool" part we also worked on a bunch of under-the-hood connectors to fix potential issues with tooltips firing at the wrong time, or missions not handing off to the next stage correctly.
Once you reach Qo'noS, the social area is quite large and it's easy to get lost. To help players navigate, we added UI elements that clearly show where to go.
Many years ago this would be controversial - people argued about having games that directed you solely by in-world art.
Many years ago this would be controversial - people argued about having games that directed you solely by in-world art.
But accessibility is important! So we made sure that we have multiple ways of marking your destinations, whether in UI overlaid on the world or via your map tracker. We also tweaked the places you go on Qo'noS to stick to the major areas you need at first.
Little bits of polish matter - previously there was a mailbox right next to the tailor, whom you go to talk to during your investigation. This meant you'd get a button for the mail while you're trying to finish the tutorial. A little moving of items fixed that up.
Elevation changes can be difficult to navigate, especially if the player is looking at a map waypoint and wondering why they can't find their mission goal while they're inside the waypoint (because it's above of below). So it's important to make these kinds of paths very clear.
We also made sure that buttons taking you to the wrong places are grayed out while you're navigating the tutorial.
Lots of lessons learned. Some designers will tell you that your tutorial should always be emergent - that players should learn what to do and where to go based on simple cues in the environment, movement of the characters, and lighting.
But game complexity varies, and so does player experience! Star Trek Online players include people who never play video games, they just play STO because they love Star Trek. So we curate an experience that helps novices with our complex, long-running game.
With these changes and more coming, there's no better time to try out a Klingon in Star Trek Online! See you around the galaxy!
