We’ve been focused on the transition from Cryptic to Deca for Star Trek Online and Neverwinter, but Cryptic other MMORPG, Champions Online, often gets forgotten. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether that’s going to change anytime soon, as apparently, the last Cryptic dev working on the game has announced her departure in conjunction with an event plan.
“February 28th will unfortunately be my last day working at Cryptic, and this will be my last official costume contest,” Kaiserin writes. “It’s been an amazing 10 years working on this game, thank you all for everything. This is a anything goes costume contest. I want to see your favorite costumes!” The contest begins at 6:30 p.m. EST on Friday, February 28th, and it’ll be streamed on Twitch too. Frankly, the message sounds probably more ominous than intended.
“And because this contest is extra special, every participant will earn not one, but two attendance titles: ‘You Are the Champions’ and ‘Thank you for a great 10 years’ and the Turntable emote. Embrace this bittersweet moment by showing off your favorite costumes and making this farewell contest one for the history books!”
But of course, we still haven’t gotten any word out of Deca about the fate of the game – whether it will be maintained, supported, maintenance-moded, or cut loose entirely by the new team.
As players in the unofficial Discord have noted, Champions has fairly low overhead as it uses the same infrastructure as other Cryptic MMOs as well as an IP that Embracer owns outright, so it’s certainly possible that it will continue on. A year ago, when Cryptic delivered what turned out to be its final stream about the games, the dev who was then running both Neverwinter and Champions Online posted a roadmap for the latter. That dev left in December, mind you.
But maybe here’s some consolation: We finally got our first missive from Deca on Star Trek Online on February 10th, with a message from the new community manager and a promise to ramp up. We still haven’t gotten a similar message from Neverwinter, in spite of the devs telling players last November that Deca was already working on two new modules set in east Faerûn and presumably slated for 2025. So it’s certainly possible that Deca prioritized STO and just has yet to get around to introducing itself to the Neverwinter and Champs playerbases. Either way, the lack of comms isn’t instilling any confidence in games where there was already little to spare.
