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What Kind Of Star Trek MMO Do You Want?
Via Gamecloud, a Nielsen survey on the Star Trek Online site giving some interesting insight into what kind of game people want. From the article: "Another surprise was that the Borg is the most appealing opposing player faction. We knew the Borg would be a popular enemy, but we didn't expect that actually playing as a Borg drone would be so appealing. Though it was a surprise, I think we can understand why they would be a popular player faction. In fact, these results would appear to contradict the overall conclusion that faction value is marginal. One explanation is in the wording of the question. We asked people to select their favorite opposing faction. I can only guess that this wording had the effect of swaying people away from the Federation. Still, this point clearly deserves more research." Interesting to see some thought going into player reaction to development plans.
Do the sysadmins play as the Q?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Give me a single-player, Shenmue-like action adventure game set in the Star Trek universe, and I'll be happy.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Take a look as Wesley. It was ensigns scoring (well, at least *meeting with*) all the hot chicks!
Shapeshifters of course.
I want one where I can be one of the green chicks who hangs around waiting for Shatner to come along...
I also find it sad there wasn't a cowboy neal question for every category that had an answer of Wesley. Cause who wouldn't want to be a traveler. heh
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
I'd want the ability to enlist numerous red-shirted, no-named ensigns, who will run up to the action when a fight starts, and gladly sacrifice themselves for the good of the "named" Enterprise crew!
Also just make sure you don't announce a major game overhaul the day after an expansion goes on sale!
And they said zombies weren't real!
It was interesting reading the analysis of the survey. I suspect a lot of gaming companies do this, yet keep things fairly quiet. Trade secrets and all.
Still, there were cases where the survey results were being ignored. For example, ground combat was listed as a fairly low priority, yet it still seems to be part of the core design. In another question, people responded that they really wanted to play Klingons, yet it looks like they're not part of the initial races to be offered.
There's always tension in surveys, deciding what really reflects people's interest and what is simply a badly worded question. Hopefully they'll be careful with this one. It would be a shame if they had another Star Wars Galaxies on their hands, deciding that virtually no one could play Jedi even though that's what everyone wanted to do.
I'd do anything for an hour on the holodeck with 7 of 9.
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
The difficulty in creating a Star Trek MMO is that you're dealing with a much less combat-intensive universe than is normal for a franchised MMO. With Final Fantasy, Star Wars, the Matrix etc, combat has always been the most notable aspect of the universe, so having a game based heavily upon it is understandable. Of course, this also means that you end up with the Galaxies situation of having to spend weeks running around hitting wamp rats with a stick before you can do anything interesting.
The challenge for Star Trek Online, or whatever they call it, is to break out of the traditional MMORPG mode by balancing combat more evenly against other game elements and offering new modes of progression. My own suggestion would go something like this:
Players start out by picking an affiliation to one of the game's factions. Probably Federation, Romulan, Klingon and a couple of other races if the devs have time. I'm not really sure Borg would work. Players start out with a 1 man shuttlecraft, the bare minimum of skill to find it and a couple of whatever resource unit the game decides to use as currency (which is a major issue in itself). From here, players can choose to develop their character (who would start as a blank template - no class selection) through their actions. Participating in exploration, combat, trading etc would all increase the player's stats in that field. So far, so Galaxies. You've got people running around on planets exploring, encountering monsters, trading with eachother and so on.
However, where the Star Trek franchise really has the potential to turn into a great MMO is in the social and interstellar sections of the game. What I'd really like to see, and what would make me vastly more likely to buy the game, would be some kind of co-operative ship-control system. Make it so the smallest ships, shuttles and whatnot, can be flown by a single player, but also make it so that they're fairly useless except as runabouts.
However, make it so that controlling a starship requires a team of players, each with their own specialisations. So, for example, a specialist helmsman would be able to turn a starship more efficiently and execute more complicated manoeuveurs. Make it so that master engineers could coax more speed from a ship's engine and repair shields faster. For the stuff that doesn't directly involve turning or shooting a ship, use minigames whose difficulty scales depending on the player's skill level. Remember Paradroid for the C64? The minigame you played to take over an enemy droid? Have stuff like that for engineering, sensors and whatnot, with the difficulty scaling depending on both the player and the size/type of the ship. Imagine fighting a battle between two capital ships where not only do you have 1 player turning and one shooting, but you've got other players in the background doing their own thing to keep the ship functioning effectively.
Now extend it so that you can do more than just fight each other ships. Add appropriate minigames etc to incentivise research, exploration, negotiation etc and, most importantly, MAKE IT FUN.
Now add in an optional military command system (I'd have players start as Civilians with the option of joining their faction's military) and you've got a game I might consider playing.
The moon on a stick would be nice, as well.
"I don't want a Star Trek MMO."
"I just thought I'd wander into a topic that doesn't interest me and spend 20 seconds posting that I don't care about the topic."
"Derp de derp."
Screw diplomacy unless we're talking about the gunboat variant. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
The second they get out enough info I am gonna create a fan site. Maybe that way I can get into the beta.
I know that just about everyone who had a WoW fansite was allowed into the alpha and beta testing.
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
1. No leveling. What? Did Captain Kirk constantly go on away missions to zap thousands of space rats with his phaser just so he could travel to a more dangerous planet? Hell no!
2. Realistic ships. By god, they have documented each varient of the enteprise down to the excact inch and they better not make any mistakes.
3. Non-loot oriented. Well... Unless you play as the Ferengi faction, but Federation member shouldn't have to buy armor or their own equipment (unless they are stranded on a planet and have to buy a phase modulater from a Ferengi at twice the price and to triangulate their coordinates via subspace to a passing vessel, but not on the ships).
4. Make it open ended and that you always have the choice of which planet to go to.
5. Make it so the players crew the ships. Not some NPCs.
That's all I got.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Actually it was more like, "Hmm. This headline is asking me a direct question, and there are no replies. I think I'll answer it."
:)
But hey, that's trolling for ya!
And you will make us strong!
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
I'm not a huge Star Trek fan but it seems to be a universe that is not strictly combat dependant and where diplomacy might play a larger role. I would like to play as a merchant for instance, and run a lucrative trade while exploring the galaxy. Also, I am tired of Elves and Orcs so a good Sci-Fi MMO game would be appealing. I just hope it is not too geek heavy where I must speak fluent Klingon in order to make an impression on people.
There needs to be a Kahn class that allows you to control other players with brain bugs (as a skill, of course). Additionally, you could master the skills of stealing ships, making unstable planets with Genesis Devices, using famous quotes, etc.
Every time ANY ship fires in the game, the camera system MUST zoom in on a shaking captain grunting the word "FIRE!" through clenched teeth and shaking his fist.
Mechanical skills will be completely unnecessary for the Engineer class, but Irish/Scottish accents will be mandatory.
Likewise, medical skills will be completely unnecessary for the medic class, but their "quirky" trait must be off the charts.
All science officers get horny at exactly the same time, once every 7 game years. Their super strength and berserker mentality will make them able to take over ships at will.
Machines should fail when most needed. Teleporters should only have a 1 in 50 chance of working.
All intergalactic wars must begin with some ridiculous premise that makes us think about today's society.
Every patch should cause all rules to be completely re-written. If one race is bitter enemies with another race, that should be flip flopped causing them to be friends. If the Prime Directive was followed last revision, it must be "loosely interpreted" in the new patch.
I think that about covers it...
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I'd find it interesting if they allowed family and kids. After all, the larger starships and stations had them.
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I don't like MMOs, at least not existing ones. And I don't like Star Trek. Spare me the pain of many many articles talking about something I couldn't care less about.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Me, I'd like the Star Trek HMO. If you get lucky, you get Dr. Crusher. If you're not you the the bloody holo-doc from voyager. If you want to hear a bunch of "that's not my department" you get Dr. McCoy.
www.netrek.org
Green women.. green.. Orion.. women..
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Star Trek Galaxies, a completely non-combat game based on farming and fishing and virtual work. Then the developer would realise it sucks, and revamp it into a hacky space-themed MMO.
sweet....
Somehow you would have to include "the unknown ensign" into the game. The cannon fodder of the sci-fi world. Star Trek could not exist without this lovable yet disposable character.
http://www.kubuntu.org/
No one player should be able to drive a starship. MMOs already lend themselves to 'guilds', so why not build this into the game? One guild can be the crew of a given starship. A starship needs various crew, from weapons officers to helmsmen to a Captain to an engineer, and guild members can fill out these positions.
Hm. Actually, let's take that a step further: As I collect experience points, eventually I'm going to eclipse a certain total. Once that happens, the game will offer me command of a pretty ratty ship. I can either take the command, or continue on with the ship I'm currently on. I can put in for a transfer to another guild if I like-- it'll become pretty obvious which ships are the elite ships in the game, but the other guild has to accept me.
As my XP increases, Starfleet (or whoever's side I'm on) would offer me better ships. I get promoted, as opposed to "gaining levels". The way you get around the "Everyone wants to be Captain Kirk" problem is you _let 'em_. A few hours of play would net you enough XP to be offered a garbage scow or something like that. Rank n00bs, who need a ship to be crew on to gain XP, will happily join you. If you suck as a Captain, you wind up in command of this garbage scow for a good long while, where a good Captain will keep a good crew and pick up XPs and be offered command of better vessels.
But if you suck as a Captain, you're not stuck there, and you don't have to be one. Sign on with a "guild" (read: some other ship's crew) and you can collect XP and get bennies doing one of the other jobs available on a starship.
You know what galls me about Trek? For all that it was ground-breaking in race mixing at a time when that wasn't ever done on screen, since then it only ever got more racist. More precisely, speciesist. Every species has one personality, one government, one religion, one language. Each of them represent some fixed quality, for example, Ferengi greed, Vulcan logic, Cardassian brutality. Even humans are stereotyped as Starfleet functionaries or generic colonists from a bland, humanity-spanning culture. Where a character has any individuality, it's unusual enough to drive plot.
It's as if the socialists who write it can't easily bring themselves to consider people outside of their species collective. Like there's something broken in their heads.
Compare Serenity, where people can be good, bad or indifferent - or even Star Wars, where species mix it in together on the basis of shared individual goals, and where a shared planetary culture creates different individuals. A lot of SW characters are from Tatooine, but they aren't all "Tattooine-ians".
That Star Trek was one the first shows to show people of color as equals. Even the first interracial kiss wasn't on Star Trek.
I Love Lucie didn't just have an interracial kiss but the first and for a long time only mixed marriage on TV. The fact that no one noticed it show just how well they did it/
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The Borg should be required to speak to eachother in all caps and maybe leetspeak. CAPTURE 477 71F3F0RM5. Furthermore, to be totally acurate, the Borg would have to maintain a strict although dynamic hierarchy in accordance with their wireless network ranges. And any player with greater hierarchy would be able to see the point of view of any lesser player, and if needs be take CONTROL over said player. This would ensure that all players in the Borg faction would conform to the will of the Borg.
Likewise Klingon factions should always have the option of fighting a higher ranking officer to the death to gain their position. I mean seriously what's the point of having multiple races in a MMO if they all have the same play mechanics.
Wait... depending on which show/movie you're watching*, the Borg have either a hive mind or a hive queen. Either way, individuality does not exist for a borg drone unless he or she is cut off from the collective.
The only way to accurately portray the Borg would be if they were all directed by one massively-multitasking director. Of necessity, that would make them controlled by the server (though I suppose you could distribute decisions among peers) -- In other words, Borg would have to be NPCs.
I suppose you could have an ex-Borg player class with characters like Hugh or Seven of Nine, or have an entire ship's worth of Borg played by a single player, but still...
*I've seen maybe 5 episodes each of Voyager and Enterprise, so it's entirely possible they've altered the concept again and I haven't noticed.
Nobody wants to be a Jem'Hadar? They can turn invisible!
If you could fight anyone in PvP who would it be?
I'd fight William Shatner!
All of these tasks are accomplished by, you guessed it, puzzling. And the sheer destructive power of a 60-man brig crew all puzzling together cooperatively is a wonder to behold, especially when there are fleets of brigs involved in a major attempt to take an island.
But, sadly, no hot alien chicks. Plenty of "dock tarts", though -- although don't get any ideas, this game is PG.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Hmmm.. play a monthly fee to play a klingon.. Jeebus, I am a geek/nerd... but not that much..
i do not suffer from Insanity... I revel in it.
Yeah, it's a MUSH, but it's one of the longest-running Star Trek themed MU*s out there, that hasn't completely shat upon the concept of Star Trek.
Been running for almost a decade, and it's still going strong, with continuing plotlines stemming from the dawn of the game, just about. Political intrigue, space combat, exploration, it's all there, along with almost every known race in Star Trek canon (straight from the old FASA source books, if I remember correctly).
Rather than wait years for a shitty Trek MMO, why not try out a tried-and-tested-and-fucking-amazing game that's already running?
"If Common Sense was so common, it wouldn't be such a valued trait."