Earlier this week we reported that the devs at DECA Games would finally be hosting an informational livestream that the studio promised many months ago. That stream did indeed come to pass, and while there’s currently no VOD on the studio’s Twitch channel at the time of this writing, a very helpful Redditor did provide some highlights from the broadcast that fans will likely want to read about.Play Star Trek Online for free

The stream introduced community manager Sunna, production manager Cam, and creative director Richard Hayden, as well as reintroduced Jeremy Randall, who was moved from systems designer to lead designer last year. The team then explained that the months of comms silence was a result of legal matters involving multiple third parties as part of the transition of development from Cryptic to DECA.

The stream also talked about the challenge of learning the “aging and arcane, weird engine” that powers the MMORPG, which has in turn hindered progress and made updates smaller. (Of course, readers might here point out that this was why it was such a terrible idea for Embracer to axe all the Cryptic devs who knew how the game worked and offload it to new hires in different countries without gobs of experience working on MMORPGs, especially old MMORPGs. We digress.)

To that point, the Heart of the Matter mini-episode was explained by Cam as a way to ensure DECA could hit expected quality targets while wrangling the “complicated” creation of in-game episodes.

That segues neatly into what DECA plans to do with STO once the current story arc is complete: The current storyline has already been written with the promise of an “extremely climactic conclusion” and few adjustments beyond some small story additions, but after that, players should expect some smaller, more character-focused narratives and exploration moving forward in the style of more recent TV episodes without a galaxy-wide crisis to contend with. Readers might recall this mirrors what DECA talked about in an internal interview this past May.

Finally, there are some additional answers to questions shared during the broadcast. Players shouldn’t expect weekly streams but will see more livestreams out of DECA (it’s letting content creators lead streams for the game, apparently), the studio is aware that the game’s learning curve needs to be smoothed out for new players, Mudd’s Bundle sales will return though there’s no ETA, and the devs are open to the idea of updating prior storylines but have no firm plans on doing so.