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Cryptic Studios Releases New Star Trek Online Details, Trailer
Two days ago, an AP interview with Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert provided new details about Star Trek: Online, which was lost in developmental limbo for quite some time. Today, Cryptic released a game-play trailer and a forty-minute webcast discussing the game.
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
Yes, you, too can be the Anonymous Redshirt, for only $14.99 a month!
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I'm a big Star Trek fan and I've been following the development of this game for over a year. I have to say that some of the visuals and proposed gameplay features seem stunning, but I'm a little disappointed by the extent to which the game's universe seems to diverge from Star Trek's in some respects.
Star Trek Online Forever?
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Just replace "Trek" with "Wars" and I'm sold.
The space combat and personal combat scenarios in "Star Wars" are just too juicy, but, all things considered I'd probably want to actually role play in the Trek universe.
is that you never make an entire planet feel ashamed right after first contact for not adhering to your superior future moral code. I mean that's basically the point of Star Trek.
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
From what they haven't said about avoiding current MMO problems I picture it like this:
... 49 levels later ... ... now just keep doing that again and again for increasingly diminishing rewards .... ... ...
NPC: Bring me 17 Tribble Scrotums.
Player: Ok, here you go.
NPC: Kill the renegade Klingon warlord.
Player: Done.
NPC: Invade the Borg ship and destroy it's power source.
Player: Mission accomplished!
NPC: uhh
Player: but didn't I already
NPC: SILENCE! Invade the Borg ship and
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
Emmert said "Star Trek Online" would definitely be available for Windows PC and perhaps Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3.
Translation: your choice of Microsoft, Microsoft or rootkit-installing Sony.
I'll pass on all 3 options, thanks.
I hope star trek online is way way WAY better than eve-online.
You can't ram a ship? pfft!
You can fly into a moon/sun and NO damage?
You can NOW buy isk with real money legally?
I hope star trek online is kick ass.
Makes me want to play netrek again. Where's my BerkRicksMoo client? Wonder if there are any Vanilla servers even still running.
What are you looking at? Get off my lawn!
I hope others here also used to play the old Duris MUD. I did through multiple wipes, the brief excursion to Basternae, back to Duris, etc.
Duris had a few elements done right.
- Full pkill and ploot.
- Fast and easy leveling.
- Useful gear easily obtainable (necessary for full ploot).
- Two distinct sides in combat with each other.
And the truly unique thing that made Duris what it was:
- One side is slightly more powerful than the other, but is far more difficult to level, live, etc, naturally keeping the population in check to balance the differences.
One side gains the numbers, one side gains the elite. It really did work out very well.
Later on, they even added a third side (Illithids) that were far far more powerful, but they had a hard limit, only so many could exist above a specific level, and they had age limits. Once you aged so much, you'd die permanently or lose levels (I forget which now), allowing someone else a chance to join the ranks.
Given all that, what Star Trek Online needs is the ability to play the Federation, Romulans, Borg, Species 8472, whatever. For once let people truly play the 'bad guys' and go full PVP.
I really loved some of the early Star Trek TOS games (like Judgement Rites) since they actually had a decent storyline. I would have loved to see something like Starfleet Academy ship-level control, integrated with a true story based scenario like Judgement Rites...
But lately, the Trek game offerings seem to be lacking in that respect. So much so that I've stopped playing Star Trek games, and started to help Star Trek episodes instead...
The place I work... (the Bridge of the TOS Enterprise)
If this game ends up being decent, then I guess I need to find time for both... I love video games too much not to.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
I would play this game just to be a jive talking womanizing Vulcan.
I have nothing compelling to say
Isn't this all a little premature? He went into how shocking it was that he said it was going to be less than three years, but can't tell us more than that...
I had a sucky sig.
Slightly off-topic but I just discovered Ur-Quan Masters, an old Star Trek-like RPG game that's pretty decent. Massive world to explore, engaging storyline. Open-source, too.
It's a little old, but worth a look. http://sc2.sourceforge.net/
This totally reminds me of having to fill up on crew members after losing "hit points" in a ship battle ;)
Cultural evolution does not require biological evolution. That's why racism in the US was acceptable 50 years ago to the "establishment" and is, at least officially, no longer acceptable.
Further, there is no reason to assume that other cultural imperfections cannot be overcome. In my view, consumerism can be replaced with a hybrid of socialist intent and capitalist mechanism. Energy resources can be shared through diplomacy and shared research for replacements rather than becoming the source of conflict and war.
It's a real pity that the hierarchies in place have such a strangle-hold on hope. In the last hundred years democratic movements have pushed and helped achieve many equal rights for women, minorities, and more recently indigenous people around the world. Protesting a war before it's even fought is something brand new to this century, and a sign that we are evolving much faster than biology could explain.
If you look at other games like WoW or Lotro or Everquest etc etc with each update the potential memory requirements just goes up and up.
Console games tend to get around the tiny memory on the hardware by having highly predicatable scenes where the designer limits what has to be loaded at anyone time.
But how are you going to do that in a MMO where you might have dozens of players on screen all with their own artwork?
SWG was supposed to be for the PS2, a game that ran best with 2gigs. Age of Conan is meant for the 360 a game that really needs 3 gig. Mind you, that is MAIN memory we are talking about, anyone actually play AoC with a less then 512mb videocard? Remember, 360 has 512mb TOTAL memory.
But of course, consoles don't run windows. True, but is the game of say Lotro quickly after launch reaches 900mb or so, what does that have to do with windows?
Looking at the trailer and the few real in game shots, we might be dealing with a MMO with very tiny areas. Tricky, where is the sense of scale then, the MASSIVE in MMO? Afterall a dozen people on a 100m square unexplored planet would be a bit silly.
It is high time MMO's cross over onto the consoles, but right now these consoles are so limited that I can't see it happen unless you get around the typical reasons why PC MMO's are such memory hogs.
Just remember why Deus Ex 2 sucked so much.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Unless you have reason to believe they are lying the eye candy is part of the game.
Thanks for trolling, try again.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The license trap is simple, HOW do you make an MMO game feel like the movies/book.
To bodly go where no man has gone before? Eh, this is a MMORPG. Not only has everyone already been there, you probably have to que for the boss.
Just how many Galaxy class starships are there going to be? How many horny vulcans and carebear klingon players are going to be running around?
How do you make space combat feel like naval engagements rather then sluggish fighters most Star Trek games have so far chosen to emulate?
It can be done, the original Star Trek RPG games were proper Star Trek (25th anniversary and Judgement Rites) but later games just wore Star Trek as a skin mod. But MMORPG have had a hard time with it so far.
Star Wars Galaxies had lots of bugs to be sure but the major gripe was that it just wasn't Star Wars. For me the real killer was that Storm Troopers were insanely hard to kill while of course in the movies they die if you sneeze at them. I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi. For that matter Han Solo wouldn't have been stopped and searched and nobody treated my noble character as a princess. Nobody ran away from my earlier Wookie either.
Matrix Online was a dud, never played it so can't say if it was like the movies.
Am playing Lord of the Rings Online and again, one of the things that make the game a bit of a hit and miss is that you just don't feel like one of the heroes from the book. Did Boromir constantly drop his weapon when fighting the orcs? Get knocked out every 30 seconds? Cower in fear? Fear, oh dear that was a stupid idea. You get Hope in safe areas where you don't need it but during the most tricky fights, hope is hard to come by and easily tripped. Oh yes, that makes me feel like a hero, slash half my health have me popping hope tokens on a 1hr cool down and spend most of the time cowering unable to move. Who is the hero NOW? PvP is even worse as monster players start at the highest level but a bit weaker but with killing other players gain ranks. Your average creep is now significantly more powerful then a freep. Yes, Lord of the Rings Online where the forces of darkness did not dare to move until they obtained a significant numerical advancement and sees small forces defeated by half a dozen free people has orcs/wargs/spiders that are more powerful then elves, by the truckload. Whoo!
It is tempting to ride on an existing license but hard to live up to the expectations people have of that license. So far from watching this game and knowing the previous games the company has done I see no reason but to expect this to be one of the biggest disappointments in MMORPG history. Yes City of Heroes was a success and a nice twist on the genre BUT it is hardly a good basis for a Star Trek MMORPG.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
To baldly go, where no man has gone before!
Am I the only one to notice the changed ending?
"To go boldly where no man has gone before" is suddenly "To go boldly where no one has gone before".
Political correctness at work again?
There are hundreds (TOS) to over a thousand (TNG) personel on a starfleet ship, yet less than 10 have regular speaking roles on the show(s). I would think that there would be many elisted men/women, with titles like Spaceman, Leading Spaceman (the wet navies had Seaman, Able Seaman, Leading Seaman etc. I think that Miles O'brien (Colm Meany, not the CNN news anchor) was a Chief Petty Officer or something like that (an NCO)
Well, I'm not the GP poster, but I think he meant, like many of use SW fans, a good SW game. Note the keyword there.
Actually screw that. We just want a Star Wars game. SWG wasn't even that, when you get at the bottom of it.
SWG from the start was not just incompetently done, but mostly a merchandising exercise. You know, like printing Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt. It doesn't really make it a better t-shirt, nor really SW equipment, it just serves to sell more copies and more expensive.
SW was launched as little more than a SW-themed DIKU MUD with graphics and lots of empty, generic, fractal-generated terrain, but (here's the important part) without vehicles, starships or Jedi. That tells you from the start how well the dev team and Raph Koster understood either SW or their target market segment. It's been a race against time from there to figure out how to put Jedi in, for example, and went from one clusterfucked abomination to the next clusterfucked abomination as results went.
And while the big gripe is gameplay, let's not forget that it wasn't very SW either. Their "solutions" to everyone wanting to be a Jedi was worse lore-wise than the problem. They required you to be already an accomplished and skilled adult before anyone trained you as a Jedi. Hello? That was exactly what they tried to avoid: training someone who's already used to taking all the wrong approaches, and has all the wrong reflexes.
Duly noted, it was the only MMO which allowed a flexible character build. It gets kudos for that, and many people stayed because of that. Many still remember it fondly because of that. But was its only merit.
And there was nothing particularly SW about that either. You could transplant the same system to a high-fantasy MMO and it would work just the same. Heck, something similar worked in Oblivion.
The NGE just managed to make it worse, and God knows that's an accomplishment. It's akin to making a rotten corpse even less sexy.
And again, it became an even more exercise in merchandising. Signature characters are used even more willy-nilly, in places and situations that make no sense for them, like in bad fanfic.
(Though if it makes anyone feel better, the actual game ignores not just the official lore, but also everything that their own tutorial told you half an hour ago.)
So, well, I think all of us SW nerds can be excused for wishing for a SW game, not for SWG.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yes, because those lasers and missiles were the key weapons in both of those events.
If they don't know that phasers and torpedoes are two completely different things, I don't expect them to understand the various intricacies of the franchise.
Oh well, a crap star trek game? At least it wont be disappointing, it's what we've come to expect.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Except that explanation is scientifically naive: evolution requires natural selection (which we stopped doing when we invented civilization), and doesn't necessarily make individuals morally better.
You have to remember the augments, WWIII and a miniature dark age happened before first contact and the formation of the federation.
After that, while the genetic evolution might have been minor, social evolution happened. At least in Kirk's time, not being able to 'fix' somebody's antisocial tendencies was rare.
I don't read AC A human right
Isn't it going to be a little unrealistic to have a million starships going around? Besides, what do you have to work up to? Admiral, then the game gets REALLY boring. You just sit behind a desk.
I mean, with games like WoW, its more realistic to have hundreds of people all at the starting point of the game because they are just people and there are lots of people in the world.
But if everyone starts with their own starship and you have a lot of people playing, its going to end up looking like that TNG episode where Worf quantum leaps several times. "Sir I'm receiving 250,000 hails". (Sorry Wil, I couldn't resist quoting you)
If everybody who served on a starship is an officer, how the heck do you get promoted? Does everybody start with a red shirt and the survivors get promoted to LT?
The bottom line is that the Trek rank structure is absurd. The majority of people on a vessel are enlisted and the enlisted do the majority of the work.
Try to imagine Trek policies used in the real world: (Bridge of an aircraft carrier) "Captain, the freighter doesn't respond to hails and we can't observe any activity." "Very well, tell Commander Smith and Lt Commander Jones to join me, I'm going over to investigate..."
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
I don't care who's captining the ship I want to re-route power from main engineering so fire a stream of einstinean particle from the buzzard collectors, or remodulate the ships power to be 180 deg out of phase (aka, sour the milk).
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
"Sacrifice of Angels", parts I and II.
You start the game with default clothing, basic black slacks and a red shirt. Then you spend half the game trying to earn a different color shirt. Just like all the others, except more desperately.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Which Star Trek game hasn't utterly bombed?
Problem: The narrative structure of Star Trek does not lend itself well to video games.
You could just as easily argue that the Trekverse is the ultimate triumph of capitalism: everybody's rich. And rich people consider it vulgar to talk about money. That would cover Data's poker sessions. If there's no money, what are they playing for?
They are playing for "chips". It's an arbitrary denomination, like playing for "High score" in a video game. One of the reasons they don't discuss money is that the replicator can provide them with whatever they need. They perform their duty and are provided for by the system. "Work according to ability, take according to need".
It'll be nice to see what kind of game engine they decide to use/make. Too think that if they use the GTA 4 engine or the WoW!!! Goose bumps!!! It would look cool!!!
If serving on ships works a little bit like Puzzle Pirates, I'll be very happy. In Puzzle Pirates, anyone (well, not total newbies, it takes like a week) can buy their own ship and take it out on the open waters. You can also, however, take jobs on other vessels...manning the guns, helping with the sailing, repairs, etc.
The most fun part of Puzzle Pirates isn't just having a boat, it's having a TEAM (whether they're your crew that you hang out with constantly, or just some random people that signed up on the docks). I've been thinking it would be fun to do that in space for a while... I think that being able to fill up all the stations on your ship with friends would be the best part of this game, if it's in there. (Exploring a presumably limitless array of fractally generated worlds, also vital.)
The only way that I could NOT like this game, is if it takes a hard stance of "one ship, one player", and my only interaction with other people is to fly alongside them against the enemy of the week. If I can't repel the boarding party shoulder-to-shoulder with my friends...then there's no point.
Anyone know which way it's going to be? I can't get at the podcast, and the first link isn't that informative.
Ahh, a new CoH with new skins, from the man who tried to ruin it.
"inside starship" = "in your supergroup base"
"fly starship through a system" = "overland in city zones"
"beam down to planet" = "zone into instanced mission"
I wouldn't hold your breath. He was really leveling up his nerf bat skills on CoH near the end of his tenure, and the game has vastly improved since he was ... removed from the decision making process.
According to the link you posted, Cryptic is still developing the MMO, it just is no longer going to be a Marvel-licensed product. It still shows up on the Cryptic Website (Champions Online is the working title). Still, now that they have something else to work on, where they don't have to directly compete with their past success, they may well decide to stop or defer the Champions project. I think if I were a developer, I'd rather work on a Star Trek MMO, which would tap a basically untapped market (Star Trek fans), instead of a market I already tapped in the past (Super Hero fans) and which still is running succesfully.
Although, there is something to be said for the idea that the market probably could use a successor to CoH. I've been playing it for over 3 years, but, honestly, it might be nice to play something super-hero themed, but which uses completely different game mechanics - just something new and fresh.
And I mean WOW. You are saying that your 360 can run a game 4 years old.
Then you go on to claim that you ran WoW on a 64mb PC? What does the HD have to do with it? MEMORY!
What are you smoking? Cause I would like some of it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Star Trek has ALWAYS made the space battles like naval engagements. Why do think their are called Photon TORPEDOES and not missles?
StarFLEET not StarWING
Geez, you would think people on slashdot would know the trek universe.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Am I the only one who finds it odd that there's only one player per ship & the crew is all AI?
I was expecting that the game would be started on a bustling space station & that you'd be teamed with other players to go on missions in a ship together.
They handily ignore that the rest of the systems hardware is severely limited, such as HD speed. Final Fantasy Online for the PS2 requires an HD to be added for instance.
Memory is currently the biggest constraint. Most console games are designed to have their art/content streamed of the CD/DVD while you are playing and pull tricks to make the actual content displayed limited.
For instance GTA on the PSP (never played it on other consoles) limits what type of cars drive around each section of town. Sure, you might explain it design wise, you won't find my super-cars in the ghetto but it is of course to save memory.
BUT as clever a trick as it is, it is also a clear limitation, IF gta was PC only you would have had a persitent world. That car crash you caused? Would still be there if you drove away from it and then back because the PC would have the memory to keep it.
People forget just how much memory is consumed in a modern MMORPG not so much by the enviroment or the enemies themselves but by people wearing a ton of different outfits, each a real hit in the amount of textures that have to be loaded.
Knowing all this, when a person then claim as X-box was equal to PC of that era, I get a bit tired of it all. Yes, it had a similar CPU to an UNDERPOWERED PC at the time. Yes, it gained a bit of performance from the fact it didn't run windows but to be fair, windows ain't a CPU hog and its capacity to soak up memory tend to fade when the average GAMER at the time had 512mb minimum.
Each generation of consoles I keep hoping that they finally add a decent of memory just for once. Oh sure, they add really speedy memory but guess what, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. It increases the FPS a tiny bit but doesn't make up for having to stream content from the HD (and a HD that is typically a very low performance one as well).
I would love to see MMORPG's to make it across to the consoles, MMO's are all about people and there are a LOT of console owners out there. With an infusion of millions of potential new gamers even smaller MMORPG's are bound to gain some new players.
It would also be nice to see some MMORPG's developed to be played with a gamepad and use voicechat by default for communication.
But sadly, each new console generation is the same story over and over again, an potential intresting CPU limited by the rest of the hardware and console fanboys unable to accept that their shiny new toy just can't run certain PC games.
What is even more amazing is that game companies themselves can't see this either. SOE wanted Star Wars Galaxy for the PS2, they kept that idea up well after players knew you needed 2 gigs to play it.
Funcom has plans to bring Age of Conan to the 360, a game that runs well only with 3+gigs and a very fast HD like a raptor.
Sad really.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.