Star Trek: Lower Decks potential new crew for STT?

Data1001

An open letter to whom it may concern at Tilting Point/Wicked Realm games…

At this point there may not be any firm plans to bring characters from the upcoming animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks, but if you happen to be in the early stages of preparation, or just thinking about that eventuality, I would like to strongly suggest one key thing: please do not render the artwork in the style of the cartoon.

We have gotten some TAS crew added to the game, and while they were generally closer to the realism side of things, even many of them were too cartoonish for my tastes. The real problem with this, in my opinion, is that such depictions would stick out too much from the existing characters in Timelines. Collecting quality character artwork is probably the main thing that keeps me playing after all this time. And if things go too far in the non-realistic direction as far as the art goes, it may very well mark the beginning of the end of this game for me. (And not that it matters, since all players' opinions should be equally valid, but I have been playing for over 3 years and am VIP 14 numerous times over.)

Honestly, I don't even know if it'd be possible to render these characters in a "real life" manner, since there would need to be a lot of interpretation done by the artists. If that's the case, I'd rather they not become part of TImelines at all, because getting in-game character artwork that looks like the images below isn't at all what I signed up for, so to speak.

Thank you in advance for your consideration. 🖖

Prime Lorca

Those colors are definitely too bold for me. I would be ok if they just tone down the color so they fit in with a bridge crew. Hopefully a little better than AoS Worf does. That's my biggest thing from the art perspective. I just want to be able to make bridge crews that look like they belong on the same ship.

Dirk Gunderson

I’ll sign on to this. One of the things that has surprised me the most (in a positive way) in the is game is how the TAS crew art looks so much better than the original animation. In particular, Aleek-Om, Bem, and Rescue Team Uhura could probably be called “amazing” in my book. This is not to say that Thelin, Arex, and Commodore April look bad (they’re still very nice), just they they are a little more on the cartoony side.

If the Lower Decks crew can be rendered like Lucien (Uhura had plenty of non-animated source material to work with, so I’m not counting her here) instead of like April, things will work out quite fine. Even if they are rendered on the level of Thelin and April, I think the art collectors among us will have no need of our torches and pitchforks. Just so long as they don’t look like copies of the show itself.

Data1001

Digging up this old thread to reiterate my feelings on the Lower Decks characters coming to STT, now that it's been officially announced...

My thoughts about the show itself (which I personally dislike) aside, I am not happy with this announcement. Even if it were characters from Star Trek Prodigy (a show which I've quite enjoyed), I would be similarly unhappy, because I'm sure that no effort would be put into making the characters realistic. I've seen what the company has done with recent characters from TAS and the Short Treks, where they are rendered with absolutely no realism. (And they never explained why some TAS characters (Rescue Team Uhura, Lucien, Thelin, Spock & I-Chaya, and even Robert April to an extent) are depicted more realistically, while most of the others (even ones which are more humanoid like Orion captain and Lara) are totally cartoonish. (Of course I know there are inherent challenges with abandoning the animation style and still making the character recognizable to fans of the original animation, but that doesn't mean it's an impossible task. It seems to me that the people who are in charge of directing the artwork for the game are just taking the easy way out.)

Having such cartoons alongside characters which are far more grounded in reality is, to be completely honest, an affront to my senses.

A big part of what drew me into playing Timelines (which I have been doing since about a year after it debuted), was the realistic depictions of space, the realistic depictions of ships, and the realistic depictions of Trek characters. Now, that's all been tainted.

I get the fan service, I do. But this is a blow to the integrity of the game.

Frankly, I feel like this may be what makes me stop playing STT. If I wanted to play a game with cartoons, I'd be playing Looney Tunes World of Mayhem or Animation Throwdown.

Do I think this rant will change anything? No, of course not. I'm not so foolish as to think one player in a multitude of players would have any sort of effect on this. The mighty dollar has spoken — and on top of that, I also know some players actually are excited for this. I merely wanted to state my case and let them know why some players who have spent thousands of dollars on the game may end up, at last, calling it quits.

Travis S McClain

Now that we've actually had Lower Decks crew added, I agree that they're conspicuously incongruous. Whenever I see them, even if it's just as someone's avatar, it does take me out of the game for a moment. That said, I do support their inclusion as is. I think the shading and coloring could stand to be tweaked a slight bit further but I expect to acclimate as I've acclimated to various other additions to the game over these past six years.

One concern I do have (on whatever trivial level it even constitutes a concern) is that the rest of the artwork not begin to skew toward a more cartoonish aesthetic. That first occurred to me with last month's Mok'bara Worf. He didn't look remotely realistic. Other artwork for live action characters since then has been consistently realistic so for the time being he's only a fluke.