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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.
Star Trek Online Forever?
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
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 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!
If you want Star Wars there's no need to wait, just sign up for Star Wars Galaxies today. Warning: Gameplay may change suddenly.
I read the internet for the articles.
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 ;)
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.
Have you not seen Star Trek: The Next Generation? Patrick Stuart's voiceover in the title credits had already changed it to "where no one has gone before" in 1987. Considering this game takes place 30 years after Star Trek: Nemesis (a Next Generation movie), it's fitting to use the Next Generation wording.
"Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose." --Douglas Adams
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.
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.
Then replace "Star" with "Tek" and you'll have the greatest MMO of all time.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
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
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)
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.
Yes, but it's only a TV show. :)
He's a witch. Burn the witch!
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!
The size of the crew has less to do with the era when a ship existed and more to do with her size -- you'll see a much smaller crew on a destroyer than you do on a carrier. The TNG Enterprise was a much larger ship (really, two ships held together with latches and explosive bolts and such) so you need a larger crew to man her and, to some extent, many positions are duplicated to some extent in the event the ship splits up into two parts.
Ships of the line in the 18th century had large crews, too, don't forget. HMS Victory was only about 57 meters long, yet had a crew of 850. That's a lot, comparatively, for a ship of that size -- no automation means humans had to do everything.
i am a soviet space shuttle