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'Weekly Episodes' Coming To Star Trek Online
As Star Trek Online ramps up for its Season 2 patch, the game's executive producer, Daniel Stahl, spoke in an interview about an interesting new feature: weekly episodes. Quoting:
"The team has wanted to capture the spirit of the TV shows by having something new to look forward to each week. We all remember when the various series were in full swing and there was the anticipation of tuning in every week to see what happened next. It wasn't always a continuing story, but it was always Star Trek in some way or another, and over time you became familiar with the characters and plots that developed. We are curious to see if this can be replicated through the game. Every week we plan to have something new for players to do. Sometimes it could be getting an assignment to resolve a trade dispute between two races. Other weeks it could be making First Contact with a new alien race. Other weeks you might find yourself deep in trouble and have to find a solution to your predicament."
I'm still waiting to walk down the corridors and crawl through the Jefferies Tubes.
Space game was great but the ground game was shallow, boring and not fun (it was like playing CoH without the superpowers). Too bad I had such high hopes for it. If they can fix the ground game up I would probably purchase a lifetime sub.
Maybe if a game studio other than cryptic had made it it would have been awesome.
Disclaimer: I know some people like all aspects, I personally could not get into the away mission part of the game. I absolutely loved the space part though.
There haven't been very many worldwide events in the current leading MMORPG. The gates of Ahn Quiraj was probably the coolest (and laggiest!) event I ever experienced before I quit.
I don't play STO, but I approve of any developer effort to keep a sense of wonder in the world.
For every Balance of Terror, the universe demands a Spock's Brain...
Seriously... I wonder how long they'll be able to keep it up until all that's left is... well... Spock's Brain 'episodes'.
Too short to base a reliable release-to-live cycle around, at least, especially when dealing with the complexity of MMOs and the legendary lack of forgiveness of MMO players. So unless they have a bucketload of these weekly releases already saved up, and fully integration tested, I'm betting that these will soon start to slip to weekly-and-a-day, then weekly-and-2-days, then they'll move them to fortnightly. Then scrap the idea entirely.
I really hope they pull this off, one of the things I really liked about Asherons Call from Turbine was the monthly updates and I played that for years thanks to the constant "hit" of new stuff.
From what I've seen of the engine (In both Cryptic games), I think they have some very good tools and can add stuff very quickly, so I think they may actually do it
Assuming the budget is big enough, you have a set of development teams working on a cycle of independent episodes.
e.g if you have 4 or 5 teams, each team only has to release one episode per month.
I would also presume that the MMO already has the generalised rules for handling quests built in, so its a matter of generating a scenario within the MMO, not coding the MMO itself
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
All I've heard about this MMORPG is its mediocrity. Whether it be its mixed reviews, low scores from players across all the review sites - or simply the fact that Star Trek Online does little to actually expand the frontiers of MMOGs; the glaring fact is that STO is just a forgettable game that is too entrenched in tried-and-tested formula to merit excitement. The grinding crutch that most games of the genre rely upon to retain players is very much intact in STO. I guess for diehard fans who make up much of the game's audience it can provide a great experience in the Trek universe, and there were clearly some competant artists employed to recreate Trek in this fashion.
However whereas EVE which is unique among MMOGs int that actually carving out an adventure or saga of one's own which can (albeit rarely) become something significant for many and even 'make history' as it were...STO just doesn't offer that. A friend of mine who partook in the beta lamented the lack of ease in gathering people together for activity, and as you'd expect from something so generic the philosophical and wondrous elements of finer episodes of Trek are mostly absent too.
If one is looking to experience life in the Trek universe then - as is true with many well-established franchises - one can look to past consoles and eras for Trek themed games: I don't mean pedestrian FPSs like Voyager Elite Force, but earlier with consoles such as the Amiga or early Windows titles: Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity and the 25th Anneversary edition (for fans of the original 1960s show). Oh yeah, more recent is Bridge Commander which I personally enjoyed for a good long while back in 2003.
Primarily it's these two that stood out in the 1990s era, but there are more worth playing: This page is a good point of reference. Acquiring the titles on PC whether emulated or not is not too much trouble in many cases with the titles mentioned.
they're having problems with subscriber retention......
Dunno, I actually liked the ground game too. Charging in with a bat'leth was a nice adrenaline rush. Granted, it wasn't something deep or complicated or with tremendous lasting power either, but sometimes playing slice-a-mole with the Romulans is good fun anyway :P
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm not interested in the "spirit of the TV show". I loved the show because of what it represented, it someplace I wanted to be. The whole weekly episode thing was just an artifact of the medium, and with an MMO, you don't need structure it like a TV series.
I love Star Trek. I am also a roleplayer. The Trek universe offers an amazing opportunity for Roleplay. Brave new worlds, things that spark the imagination. I'm not sure that's possible to capture in an MMO setting. Its /too/ large. It has to many players. I, personally, get my Trek Roleplay Fix on the various Mush games that still exist out there. Good Ole' Telnet. Sure, it birthed the often awful monstrosities that MMOs have become- but the base is still there, still roleplaying and generally still using their imaginations and words to find those brave new worlds and go where only man in his mind can go.
... features a group of exploration ships discovering a new form of life, just before Starfleet Dental (aka Goonswarm) crashes into them for fun and starts both a war with the creatures and a monolithic threadnaught on the forums...
Point your telnet machine to ats.trekmush.org, port 1701. Now -that's- Star Trek RPG'ing. :)
Seriously, the best RPGs were the text based, MUD/MUSH games where (most) people had to think about their actions, write out a nice action, etc. Not this point and click MMOPRGclickclick stuff. ;)
-Bitter and Old
Patch monthly, turn the NPC on for the next quest stage weekly. Done! AC has been doing it for a while and it seems to work well for them. The problem is it means monthly patching, which from all reports out of classic AC is really really rough on the dev team and burns them out quickly. They seem to have cut back the amount of content each month just a little, which seems like enough to let the team handle it nowdays, so STO could maybe make it work.
Then again how much new content do you need to entertain players who's space battles consist of "fly around the other guy in circles, try not to be too close when he blows up" and the fps-on-rails on the ground?
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Haven't ever played the game, but the weekly episode concept sounds intriguing enough to make me think about trying it out.
A good idea seems rarer and rarer these days.
Personally, I think this is a foretaste of the future of MMO's.
Certainly, they may or may not be able to successfully implement, but I've always wondered at how STATIC MMO's are.
Certainly, for those of us who used to buy a computer game, you were pretty much stuck with whatever the designer(s) envisioned was possible when the game went gold. Occasionally a content patch would be released that might add some little thing (now they sell these as "DLC").
Strangely, MMO's - despite their dynamic foundation and constant-connection to the source servers - have mimicked this pattern. AFAIK the only game that ever tried to really let content change over time was Ultima Online where players could impact (in fact, drove) the economy, and perhaps today EVE, where the player-sourced economy dwarfs whatever is hard-coded by the game.
I'm talking about something less economics and more "world". Certainly the complexities of balance, loot, xp gain mean that it would be a hellish effort to try to add significant BALANCED content on a weekly basis. But would it be so impossible to have NPCs change their clothes over time? Maybe quit jobs and be replaced? Have a merchant vessel arrive on infrequent occasions into a port city, offering rare or unique items for sale? I think WoW has discovered that, between meaningless achievement points and holiday celebrations that players really ENJOY things that add depth to a world without necessarily increasing their dps. The WoW world-events are fun (of course there's some bitching, because change is scary) and memorable.
Now if they just didn't seem quite so "bolted on", discrete, and above all, repetitive we'd be getting somewhere.
-Styopa
I Joined up 3 days ago, created a science officer and have been dissapointed that EVERY mission has me as a soldier, no exploration, no boldly going where no toon has gone before just travel to here, beam down, fight a 1 man war then rinse lather repeat. When i do get a mission thats not combat based it usually takes all of 5 mins for it to degenerate into a frag fest. Its a shame too as theres a lot of things it does well, but for me it completly misses the point that star trek is not star wars. Ive got 2 months to run and will stick with it till then as it does have potential but ill have to seriously think about carrying on when the time comes.
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
My personal quote: "If you cannot suprise the developer (yourself), then you will never suprise the player" Emergent and procedural content is necessary for MMOs to continue. YOu can only do so many "pumpkin quests" regardless of the genre or theme of the game. The key is to have solid, developed rules for missions\quests\content and have a systematic way to deploy that content for players to explore. No where in the rules of MMOs, RPGs, etc that ever fight need be winnable, rather that the payoff is acceptable to the player. So a well crafted Random Quest Generator, even in the event of an unwinnable scenario can still have a payoff for the player they can accept. Remember you can have adventures in which defeat is the outcome. (Case point Firefly fans, the whole story is driven by the fact they lost the war.) Imagine an infinite dungeon that doubles it's difficulty every floor. There is a point that a player can not mathmatically continue (the point where the mobs would 1 shot you for instance) but the player is free to push as hard and as far as they want to go. An arbitrary mechanism for mission\quest deployment is viable so long as there are controls (Mandatory Car References as needed): Clutch: a mechanism in a quest in which the flow of events is disenaged and success\failure conditions cannot be effected. This is common in FPS where they put you in a room and you have to kill all the mobs before continuing. Brake: A mechanism in the quest chain that allows the events to be suspended such that the player can do other things not impacting the quest(return to base for instance.) Step Reset: A mechanism in which the quest line of conditions can be backed up (e.g. you accidentally destroyed a quest item in your inventory and you need another one) Full Reset: A mechanism, depending on the nature of the quest to restart it (even if it is as simple as an abandon\re-get sequence) Re-deploy: A mechanism to reset the position\staging of objects. Triggers: Events that move along a story Hitch: A mechanism that links two quests\missions together Pay-it-forward: Always track the quest conditions to see if the player has already completed the quest (nothing worse then blowing up random named bad guy only to be told an hour later to go back and kill him. You did already!) etc.... (I actually have a prototype Q-Engine that makes 3 passes to randomly generate quests. QE1 is the casting engine, Q2 is the linking engine, Q3 is the deployment engine). Star Trek is about endless possibilities but at every turn they try to lock down the gameplay to conform to some IP that was never crafted for open ended, player driven game play. If you want Star Trek, go play Eve Online, seriously. If you cannot suprise the developers, you won't suprise the players... it comes back around to more grinding then.
-=[Idgarad]=- I Am A Savage In A Brave New World!