Star Trek Online is slowly approaching the release of another big update called Season 2.  With this in mind, Cryptic Studios just held another round of "Ask Cryptic".  If you're not familiar with this, Cryptic invites players to ask anything and everything about STO & the STO universe.  We've picked out a few of the questions that we thought most interesting.  To read the rest, check out the link at the bottom of the article.

Q: Direphoenix: Are we going to see any adventures taking us beyond the Galactic Barrier or bringing some action from beyond it?

A: Season 2 takes you into another dimension, but the Barrier is not a factor. As we expand STO one of the questions we'll be looking at is what is the Galactic Barrier and what will you find beyond it.

Q: V-Mink: What other sorts of mini-games is Cryptic looking at? Stratagema, tri-d chess... dare I ask it, klin zha?

A: If the community wants it - we’ll keep adding minigames as time goes on. 3-D Chess is one that people keep bringing up – I think that there are tons of different ideas. We want to make sure that the minigames aren’t just social games that characters played within the shows, but that we end up taking some of the more “mundane” tasks in STO, scanning, searching, analyzing – and make them into active little pieces of gameplay as opposed to just hitting "F."

Q: V-Mink: What sorts of changes or improvements is Cryptic considering implementing to make Exploration missions more enticing? You did a good job with the Aid the Planet missions, are Explo missions going to be given some additional zing?

A: We’ve actually been building a Federation Diplomacy Corp feature that helps spice Star Cluster missions up quite a bit. Along with new mission types, Federation players can gain Diplomacy Experience while doing non-combat missions and work towards new titles and rewards based on their Diplomacy rank. They will also be able to request Star Cluster missions from a Diplomacy specific contact to get less combat oriented missions.

Q: Azurian: Are we going to see missions on Cannonical worlds like Vulcan and Andoria?

A: Yes! One of our goals for upcoming releases is to add more life to social areas like Vulcan, and that includes missions that you may find as you explore the galaxy. You'll see some of these in Season 2, and we'll be adding more soon!

Q: Omegasyn6662000: Will we see more 'non-mission' based content? Things such as Games and other things to do in places like Risa, DS9, Captain's table, etc.

A: Absolutely. One of the things we have been focusing on—and will continue to focus on moving forward, assuming you all like what we’re doing—is filling out the great environments with more stuff to do. As just a few examples we’re adding more non-combat missions and plots in the social areas, games like Dabo, Trophies for your ship interior, the recent revamp of Memory Alpha and so on.

Q: Nack: Will we see missions that involve functional shuttlecraft?

A: You bet! This was something we tried to get in for Season 1 but we had a few last minute tech issues and had to pull it back. We have since had those issues fixed and are starting to use it as one of the tools in our bag of tricks.

Q: Xaben – Are there any plans for any spacesuit-missions (running on your ship like ST8 or a mission on a demon-planet)?

A: The art and animation requirements for environmental suits are significant, and we have to use our resources wisely to get as much content out as possible. So environment suit missions are not planned at this time. If the demand for them is strong enough, we'll consider adding them to a future update.

Q: Magnuson: Are there plans and if so when can we expect to see random in game events? For example a random enemy faction incursion that requires a group to repel or random distress calls while traveling through sector space.

A: This is something we’ve always wanted to do but were never quite able to squeeze in. We don’t have anything like this on deck for Season 2, but we’re chomping at the bit to layer content like this on top of our existing world.

(source StarTrekOnline.com)

Read the full set of questions here.