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Browser-Based Deep Space Nine MMO Coming In 2011
A publisher based in Germany has announced Star Trek: Infinite Space, a browser MMO based on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The game will be free-to-play, and it's planned for sometime in 2011. "Gameforge also contracted Michael Okuda, who served as scenic art supervisor for every live-action Star Trek series except for the original program, as a consultant. His wife Denise Okuda, who was a video supervisor and scenic artist for several of the sci-fi series' films and shows, will serve as a consultant, too."
go pick the worst star trek and make a game of it
yippy
It can't possibly be worse than Star Trek: Online.
Cool game bro
Will i be able to play this in chrome on linux, or will this be some windows only plugin for IE/FF job?
and yeah, DS9, not my choice... (despite the copious involvement of romulans in the later seasons)
People, what a bunch of bastards
There's also an upcoming MMO for Battlestar Galactica.
Will you have the fastest ship in the delta quadrant, be trying to go straight home as quickly as you can, and yet still keep running into the same enemies each time you make a stop?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From my experience with trying a lot of MMOs... yes it can. You don't even need to try hard to end up with something that sucks more ass than the toilets on the space station.
Add one of those "free to play" (but you need to pay a few hundred bucks just to get the same you'd get in the first month on WoW, and generally we'll try hard to make your character suck if you don't) setups, and it can really really suck.
And generally, don't underestimate how much room downwards there is in any domain. Just about any time I said "it can't be worse than that" or "nobody can be even more clueless", some altruistic soul promptly came along and showed him-/her-self as proof that I'm wrong. Be it MMOs or programming a simple web site or just about anything at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...or is this going to suck? DS9 was the worst Star Trek tangent ever.
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
Rather than tell stories like a real RPG, MMORPGs keep people playing by grinding. In the DS9 universe, what could they grind?
A situation with replicators in every cafeteria is going to make grinding pretty difficult.
Quest - "Go to the replicator and fetch me ten cups of racktageno."
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
[Disclaimer: I work at Gameforge]
Ok, so hear me out.
1.) Approximately 70% of our company is comprised of Nerds and Geeks, most of which are your Type A RPG, Comic, Star Wars and Star Trek fan. I can go on babbling all day about *anything* that interests me and I'll never get a stupid look, since nearly everybody knows what I'm talking about all of the time. Be it obscure Monty Python references or anything computer and software related. Or, as the case might be, SciFi stuff.
And since a lot of us are Trekkies, nobody here wants to screw this up. Every inhouse title goes through thorough inhouse play-testing, so the Trekkies will be all over the Product Team like a pile of bricks if they screw around with the StarTrek universe. It's convenient for this sort of thing that we *all* are in the same complex, 300 meters appart at most. From Alex (our CEO) and the upper Board across development and marketing all the way to Community Management.
2.) We actually know how to do Browsergames. We've raked in quite a few prestigious rewards and gained a solid reputation with our inhouse titles like Ikariam, Europe 1400, Wildfire and OGame and judging from the numbers they are *very* successful - and for good reasons too. I've been playing OGame and Wild Guns and both are solid fun right up to flat out addictive. We do have some not-so-spectacular acquired & redone B titles to fluff up the Portfolio, but even most of those astonishingly fun to play, although I really couldn't say why (play a round of Tanoth to see what I mean :-) )
Bottom line: We have a hoard of Trekkies right here on our team and we know how to make a fun game. IMHO that's a good foundation for building a neat DSN MMO.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I happen to only remember Star Trek Online.
I'm a Niner and am waiting to see what comes of this. Should be interesting... I hated ST:O. Good luck.
P.S. It's DS9 not DSN :)
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
DS9 was failing and then along came babylon 5... DS9 copied that genius of a show and invented the incredibly derivative 'arc' of the dominion war (whatever). The DS9 universe is so far from the STNG universe that it is almost in another dimension.
Your grand-parent poster said: "pick the worst star trek and make a game of it.".
By that, I think he tried to subtly imply that DS9 may have been that series.
Your parent poster said "Will you have the fastest ship in the delta quadrant [...] ?"
This I read as being a fairly reasonable attemt at a joke. The punch line being
that he replied to an implicit reference with another implicit reference, thereby
unexpectedly changing the subject implied in the original post to "Star Trek: Voyager".
That is a trope often used in geek humour, which - in this case - actually fits well
into the topic of the discussion.
You said: 'That's Voyager. DS9 was Space Station, Wormhole, Cardassians'
You may have failed to recognize the joke and took the post seriously. Regrettably,
there is a slashdot meme concerning such mishaps.
Be prepared for replies which involve the (metaphorical) sound of the joke going
over your (metaphorical) head in the way an aeroplane or bird would.
Which is not realy funny any more, except perhaps for moderators.
And thank the prophets it isn't on Facebook. I wonder if it will follow the show, and - if so - will it wade into the unmitigated awesome of the Relaunch series? (Disclaimer: Switch awesome to failure if you didn't like DS9:Relaunch. I thought it was very well done, but that was me.)
Never underestimate the potential of Human stupidity. -Heinlein
For one there's just the problem with browser based MMOs seeming to universally suck. However also the fact that there's a lot of Trekkies is not a good thing IMO. Trekkies, or really anyone over devoted to a given universe/philosophy/whatever have a tendency to get a little dogmatic. Things have to be "right" above all else. Well in a game, that isn't how it should be. Things have to be fun above all else. That can mean some major changes to franchises sometimes. This is something people like Trekkies (ESPECIALLY Trekkies) don't like.
We'll see what happens, but I remain skeptical till I see the product.
Also I would direct your attention to Plinkett's review of Star Trek http://www.redlettermedia.com/star_trek_09.html for a comment on screwing with the Star Trek universe. Namely, that is screwed with itself extensively even before the new reboot. While there are various iconic things (such as how the ships look and the general idea of exploration) it is very much an "anything goes" universe.
DSN == Deep Space NEIN!!!!
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
You start as DS9 Janitor, cleaning the bulkheads... then work your way up to waiter in Quarks bar. Eventually you earn enough experience to start crafting, such as becoming a seamstress in that cardassian tailor sweatshop. You can then work your way up in the tailoring guild to earn enough to purchase a bachelor suite on the officers deck (no more slumming around in the lower quarter with the pirates and refugees! [p]From there you will be able to purchase credits to use the replicators and make furniture for your new babe-magnet of an apartment (complete with million dollar view of the wormhole!)... the women will be all over you. Of course, all the female card dealers from Quarks will actually be basement dwelling 30 something white guys (buyer beware!)[p] Other promising careers will include, security attendant, cook, cargo bay inventory officer assistant, and of course, plumber - all jobs include full Federation pension and partial dental. As you can see, life on virtual DS9 will be nothing like real life, not at all!
Just remember that Nemesis was directed by a trekkie and we all know how craptastic that turned out
Oh lord, does this mean we're going to start out on a space station near a single luxury resource and have to make more space stations in other solar systems if we want more than one luxury resource?
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
...what could possibly go wrong....
r...dale?
[Disclaimer: I work for Gameforge]
Gameforge games are all flash based
Wrong. You're talking nonsense.
I've always stopped playing for the same reason, too much advantage for the paying gamers (I can't stand it even as a paying customer myself).
Which is up to you. A fact is that 80% of our players don't pay anything at all and they seem to enjoy themselves just fine. As for the pay-advantages: Yes there are some. But most of them are of the meta-advantage type, like additional slots in building-queues, better overviews and such which means you don't have to check your status as often as without them.
Most of our paying customers get by very fine with 1-3 dollars worth of pay-features per month. For hours and hours of fun in return - a fair deal if you ask me.
As for those publishers taking 300$ from someone to put him at the top of the highscore list - that is shortsighted and stupid and pisses off your userbase beyond repair - which is why we don't do it. OGame has been running for approx. 7 years and still is a successful Browsergame for that very reason.
Maybe you've been mixing up our games with others?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
One day, about six months into the project, there'll be a slashdot story that they lost everything and can't bear to start over again. Instead, they will release it as a MineCraft expansion.
My guess is that they were inspired by the very recent news of large models of the starship enterprise being created by an amateur, impressed by his results (which he later lost, a whole six months of work) and decided it was a lucrative investment. All thanks to slashdot!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Hmm. I can't find that one here:
http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Rules_of_Acquisition
Therefore it might be:
(The unwritten rule) When no appropriate rule applies, make one up.[15] VOY: "False Profits"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
None of these will ever achieve the greatness of text-based RPG MUSH and MUXes like ATS:TrekMUSH (which still exists) and TNG TrekMUSE.
Because that's all DS9 was. A truck stop on the interstate.
"There are no facts, only interpretations." --Friedrich Nietzsche.
Franz, get back to work, its not like your previoust job - Duke Nukem Forever or whatever was the name of the project you were working on
Schnell!
Alex
I just hate it that you guys are german and not dutch (or the other way around, that i am not german), because if you were, my resume would land on your virtual doormat within seconds after reading this post
People, what a bunch of bastards
As in, the game will only use standards such as HTML5, WebGL, Javascript and CSS?
If it requires a plug-in, then why bother making it "browser-based" at all? If I can't play on both my Mac mini and my iPod touch, it's not browser-based.
When DSN came out it was the result of a rush-job(quickest to date in the industry at the time for a major series) by Paramount in an attempt at dealing with Babylon 5 and its perceived threat. As such, it was boring, inane, and the single worst Sci-Fi series by a major studio in the last couple of decades, with the possible exception of Andromeda.(The recent Flash Gordon series would have gotten third place, but it was mercifully killed off). Thankfully almost nobody under *40* remembers it, so for a while there I thought that there was some hope for TV in the U.S.
I'm a talkative guy. To the point where most of the time my friends are telling me to shut the hell up, but even I am at a loss of words to describe how bland, useless, and thing will be. Even I can't explain how bad it will be except to say that I could write a Thesis on the badness of it and still not have covered a tenth of it all. I honestly feel for the poor people. From the developers and programmers to the artists to the actors and everyone else. Paramount has this pathological desire to milk this dead rotting carcass for every last drop of blood that it can. There's a reason none of the characters want to go to any of the conventions - it's career suicide and most of them would rather do their taxes or get a root canal at this point. But enough ranting, let's get down to just a little of why it will suck:
1 - The big problem with the TV series was that like my title says, "To Boldly Go... Nowhere" It's a series about a bunch of guys on a station in the middle of nowhere and that's it. Paramount really did cobble this turd together in 3-4 months in order to beat the competition to the punch. And then refused to let it die until Babylon 5 had died off(mission accomplished!). Now think about translating all of that into a MMOG. It's like playing EVE online with only ONE STATION. One giant area with basically nothing to do but walk around and do... nothing. And this stems from the fact that the original had nothing to do other than maybe deal with keeping the station from falling apart. There is no real plot or action behind it all. Maybe this would work as a cute web-driven single player resource management game, but as a MMOG? What in the world is Paramount thinking?
2 - The setting is ancient and played out. Literally nobody under 40 watched this show(maybe 35 if they caught the reruns), so it utterly fails to even come with a DECADE of the core MMOG demographic. "Hey - let's make a MMOG of stuff only OLD PEOPLE will understand!".
3 - The series was not about combat or anything fun. DDO, as perhaps one of the worst currently running examples of MMORPG gaming, still has a basic "kill the monsters get the loot" concept which works. There's something a little fun there for the fan of grinding. And even stuff like the typical crap out of Korea appeals to the collect everything and chat on your cell phone at the same time crowd.
4 - Free to play. Now, this seems like a bonus at first, but free to play means three things for the players. Advertising, spending money to obtain even a reasonable character, and a budget for support and upgrades that is microscopic. DDO is a great example, again, of this idiocy in action. New Update! Now the same exact 5 monster templates... underwater! Good games make you pay and deliver huge content for your hard earned money. Free games usually get a few cookie-cutter ad-ons thrown in and you're done.
5 - Perhaps the saddest thing of all is how many kids will try this and be turned off of MMOGs or go back to stuff like WoW. It's truly amazing that after five years, nobody has come up with a decent replacement for EVE. Consider that seriously for a moment. Five years and it's still alive and the best outer-space MMOG that is available. That really makes me want to cry. Nobody is stepping up to the plate. Nobody is offering an alternative. And when something like this comes along, it just makes the situation that much worse. Paramount could have done a space-based exploration MMOG based upon the NEW SERIES, and perhaps been a little bit fun, but this is just utter failure waiting to happen.
And since a lot of us are Trekkies, nobody here wants to screw this up.
Then shouldn't that be Trekkers?
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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
We'll apply the famous "Jayne Cobb" bargaining theory to this particular announcement
Will there be shootin? Hmm, didn't really say..
How about brawlin? Hmm, not specific as to how..
Well hell, will it not be gorram dull? Let me do the math here...
Nuthin, plus nuthin, minus nuthin..
I'll be in my bunk.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Director Stuart Baird was a self-claimed Star Trek virgin who had never even watched a single episode of "The Next Generation".
From an interview with Stuart Baird himself:
Q. Did it cause any problems on set that you were such a Star Trek virgin?
A. I'm not an aficionado. There were little hiccups here and there when some people were offended I didn't quite understand the back story. It's incredibly important to them, so some of them would think directing this one, you surely should know it all. But god almighty, I wasn't going to look at 178 episodes. Ultimately, it wasn't a problem. My intention was since I was a virgin to it all, I wanted to make a movie that stands alone and doesn't rest on all the past history.
I don't actually play facebook games, but I'll definitely be signing up for this. DS9 has always been to me the one series most obviously suited to becoming an MMO - I can't wait to see what you guys come up with, and knowing that you guys are genuine fans is unexpected but awesome news.
I only hate that I don't have anything appropriate to put on a resume... *g*