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STO's Story is Overrated.
centersolace
Member Posts: 11,178 Arc User
I know STO's story has always been referred to as one of it's strengths, but I believe in reality it's one of STO's weaknesses. Let me ask you one question:
"Out of all the myriad story based missions, be they the base story, FE's, or side missions like the New Romulus ones, how many of them do you actually remember in great detail?"
Who were the characters involved? What were their motivations? What did you have to do? Were there choices? What choices did you make? What was your motivation?
Personally, I remember three. Coliseum, What Lies Beneath, and Alpha are the only missions I can remember in great enough detail to answer all of those questions. There are about 81 story missions in STO. I can remember details about Voyager episodes I haven't seen since they aired. This is not a good sign.
I mean, sure, I can remember specific details, like the Klingon that helps you fight the Doomsday Device, or the super fun times had in the Cage of Fire or Night of the Comet. Though, to be honest the latter two are due to unintentional reasons. (You who joined after Season Six were spared. SPARED! THAT **** FENCE!!!)
Oddly enough, it's the Grindy, not story based content that's where the memorable things happen. Whether it's the time I was still learning how STF's worked and I was stuck in a really bad KAGE PUG and the group severely underestimated my DPS and I destroyed a Gate by myself wiping out the entire group and killing the whole match in the process. Or the first time I ever did Gorn Minefield (the 20 man variant)and wound up with a hilarious looking several kilometer long reptile train.
You could argue that since we're forced to do them over and over again, of course theres a lot more room for memorable stuff to happen, but my counter to that, is since story missions are so ridged and instanced, theres very little room for the unexpected. But in the Fleet Actions and others like it, there's so many variables that something unexpected is guaranteed to happen. Even when you lose, theres still room for hilarity.
TL;DR The story isn't horrible. But I would much rather have one repeatable mission with randomized variables that throws me a bizarre curveball once and a while rather than 5 "meh" story missions with fixed objectives.
"Out of all the myriad story based missions, be they the base story, FE's, or side missions like the New Romulus ones, how many of them do you actually remember in great detail?"
Who were the characters involved? What were their motivations? What did you have to do? Were there choices? What choices did you make? What was your motivation?
Personally, I remember three. Coliseum, What Lies Beneath, and Alpha are the only missions I can remember in great enough detail to answer all of those questions. There are about 81 story missions in STO. I can remember details about Voyager episodes I haven't seen since they aired. This is not a good sign.
I mean, sure, I can remember specific details, like the Klingon that helps you fight the Doomsday Device, or the super fun times had in the Cage of Fire or Night of the Comet. Though, to be honest the latter two are due to unintentional reasons. (You who joined after Season Six were spared. SPARED! THAT **** FENCE!!!)
Oddly enough, it's the Grindy, not story based content that's where the memorable things happen. Whether it's the time I was still learning how STF's worked and I was stuck in a really bad KAGE PUG and the group severely underestimated my DPS and I destroyed a Gate by myself wiping out the entire group and killing the whole match in the process. Or the first time I ever did Gorn Minefield (the 20 man variant)and wound up with a hilarious looking several kilometer long reptile train.
You could argue that since we're forced to do them over and over again, of course theres a lot more room for memorable stuff to happen, but my counter to that, is since story missions are so ridged and instanced, theres very little room for the unexpected. But in the Fleet Actions and others like it, there's so many variables that something unexpected is guaranteed to happen. Even when you lose, theres still room for hilarity.
TL;DR The story isn't horrible. But I would much rather have one repeatable mission with randomized variables that throws me a bizarre curveball once and a while rather than 5 "meh" story missions with fixed objectives.
Post edited by centersolace on
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Comments
I agree with this. Who ever said that about STO?
Quite a few. All the "Moar Story Missions RAWR" threads were getting to me.
This...
STO's story has been pretty weak, with a lot of forgotten loose ends. On top of that, apparently the end to the Undine conflict (a healthy chunk of the 1-50 experience) was published as a short story in a Star Trek magazine.
The missions do some cool things sometimes, but it doesn't make us appreciate the characters very much, if at all, nor does it really lend any weight to events that happen.
STO's strengths lie more in its design. The space combat is pretty fun, and the character and environment art is also really nice at times (Facility 4028 and the Odyssey bridge are really nice set pieces, for example).
Starship design is up for debate. The older designs that are full of plated features and sharp angles are incredibly ugly to me, and I'm glad they've gone back to the smoother, more rounded design aesthetic for the newest ships.
Let's be honest here -- all of the frontline content for STO these days is usually a new environment to run around in, and new ships on the C-Store. They try for story, but they really need to refine how they approach the story's presentation, and scrutinize their writing a bit more before pushing it out there.
Good. I'm glad to see that more people agree with me than I thought. That hardly ever happens.
It's only when you are leveling alts that things get a bit boring.
Oh and best part of this story arc is the fact the Klingons were actually right about the shapeshifters as opposed to how the Feds were during the Dominion war. (Gowron being led to belive that Cardassia was inflitrated by changelings).
If anything, the story needs to expanded onto further w.r.t the Iconians (the big bads in STO). In my opinion though, their hand was revealed a little too early in-game and should have been a later surprise.
We still live!!!!! Hahahahahahahahaa! We live and we will conquer!!!!! Hahahahahaaha!
-Roach, when asked about Klingon extinction!
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
One yjey have never filly used or developed on what areas they have used for the game.
I like the story of PT2409.
R.I.P
I dunno. I think the fact that they've relied on these big huge baddies in big nasty epic encounters has actually weakened the story. As it stands, the game feels like DS9 with it's big, long overarching stories. While that's all well and good, that doesn't really work in a game genera that's more about bouncing around from point A to point B.
I think that if the game were more like TOS and TNG and was far more episodic with lots of self-contained stories, I think that would do a lot for the game.
I see your point. I generally tend to see the story arc of an mmo as the means of leveling, then I run around doing whatever activities of interest there may be. My take on that here would be "moar story if they increase the level cap to go along with it". But since the leveling arc was skewed you already have more story than needed for that so I feel like it's long enough. My issues with it would be better served by going back and writing variations into the missions that bring them a bit more to life. If you play as X race it's never acknowledged that you're playing as X race at any point in the story arc, most missions play the same for all classes, loose plot ends could be mitigated out, stuff like that.
I'm pretty abnormal though it would seem. I'm more in favor of things that make the game closer to a sandbox environment than a linear progression environment.
No more abnormal than myself. (Though that's not any indication of normality :P) I too would like this game to have a sandboxy environment. Star Trek is all about exploration. Let me explore!!!
The worst offender I do believe is the overarching story. The set up with the balance of power being broken and the chaos that does follow was a nice one. Did it really need the Undine, the Iconians, the Borg, and everything else thrown in? I do believe it would be better if they had just told a story of war and politics with the major powers all trying to take advantage of the situation.
And either way it would have been better with actual writters on board. The dialogue and the flow of the plot are painful, and the need of the Federation to end most of the random Cluster missions with a half-assed Aesop being forced down our throats is almost insulting.
Moreover I feel like the gameplay really isn't that great either, either for an MMO or a game in general. STO as it stands is sustained almost entirely by its IP, and the gameplay is truthfully only just good enough to be passable. Without the Star Trek IP holding it afloat, STO would be dead.
Which is actually even more damning than it sounds. An IP capable of making that big a difference is a powerful asset that could be exploited/leveraged to make a much bigger, better, more competitive, and much more profitable game. Any ambitious company would kill for a opportunity like that: a gigantic built-in fanbase with enough momentum to both multiply any successes exponentially and to forgive/cushion the most ambitious risks, but Cryptic/PWE is content to squander it doing (and earning) the absolute minimum. It's such a fantastic waste, from a business, a fan, and a gamer perspective all at the same time, and Cryptic/PWE should be smacked upside the head for taking what they've got for granted.
It's like seeing a guy spend all night listlessly browsing crappy amateur TRIBBLE on the net while Rachel Hunter sits dejectedly on the bed behind him. You just want to kick the ****er.
I agree a lot with centersolace. Thing is, I think Kestrel is a better writer than STO's story execution would lead you to think.
And while I'm not in the mood to go digging, Cryptic doesn't seem concerned with SELLING story. Not just in the C-Store sense.
In an old thread, I dug up a bunch of MMO trailers.
Cryptic's are game system laundry lists and pretty maps/costumes. (Interestingly, whenever h2orat did a trailer, this reversed a bit. And he did the F2P launch trailer.)
Virtually everyone else in the MMO business sells their patches based on story progression, Blizzard especially. You get next to nothing about game mechanics in their trailers and a lot of them boil down to a fight scene starting and three people talking.
But, heck, compare STO trailers to Perfect World trailers (including trailers for virtually any game published direct by PWE aside from their MMOFPS). Their trailers say virtually nothing about game mechanics and tend to push story harder.
It's the corporate culture.
It's like when the Jennifer Hepler Bioware controversy happened. (She suggested that games with interactive cutscenes should not only have skippable cutscenes for action players but should have skippable action forplayers who only want cutscenes.) Like most game devs, almost everyone I follow at Cryptic condemned the threats and harassment people heaped on Hepler. But I've also saw more devs at Cryptic than anywhere else indicate that they thought she was wrong about skippable action, whereas the bulk of game devs I follow at other companies seemed to think she was right.
I've also observed how Cryptic seems driven by arcade style play and mechanics and how their job ads seem to glamorize things like fighting game design experience in spite of it being what I think many would perceive as a declining genre and only looselyapplicable to MMOs.
Just as Bioware in "cinematic", my ten dollar word for Cryptic is that they are "paleoludic."
In general, there's a rift in game design theory between ludologists (action/play proponents who focus on the fun of abstract mechanics) and narratologists (who focus on narrative, not just in game design but maybe also in things like learning to play or UI flow).
Cryptic seems to value "play" and has a fairly conservative notion of "play" when compared to luminaries like Will Wright. The result is that Cryptic focus more on building theme parks than sandboxes but focuses more on kinesthetics, systems, and play experience than narrative. They're more likely to bend narrative to kinesthetics and than bend kinesthetics to narrative.
Which is kinda funny because that's not what most ACTUAL theme park designers do anymore.
The result is kindof a Busch Gardens or Six Flags theme park experience as opposed to Disney or Universal.
The Superman ride at Six Flags is about the kinesthetic experience of the coaster with the Superman brand reinforcing the flight element. And it would get reworked and rebranded as something else if need be.
Whereas the Wizarding World of Harry Potter or even something simple like the Kim Possible Scavenger Hunt at Disney focus on immersion (halfway, silly, or ironic immersion sometimes) and the mechanics of the attractions reinforce the immersion aspect.
That, or they suck at the very thing they're trying to specialize in.
Either way they need to give their philosophy a serious second look if they ever want to be a real player in the MMO market, 'cause right now they're limiting themselves to merely getting by... forever, while wasting what's probably the only IP other than Star Wars that could actually ever even come close to challenging WOW if it were handled with any ambition.
If you ask me.
we could be the SUBSCRIPTION only game king
but FTP and Grinding would have to die
Why else have the license if you don't utilize the content.
Another thing I also expected coming into the game was learning through the academy.
2 minutes into the game you are made captain of your own ship, well game over I guess.
And of course adding to that the near total exclusion of bridge action or gameplay or involvement, am I even playing star trek.
Also I am a grown man. In star trek I saw torture and killing of innocents and what not.
It just doesn't add up with mixing a cocktail for scotty in night of the comet.
I didn't feel any type of involvement at any time knowing I was playing a linear generic story made for children. It didn't make any difference what I thought or did, all I had to do was find the right place to press "f" in a world that's completely off.
So basically I rushed to level 50 to play stf with the other faction we are supposedly at war with and here we are.
Albeit I have to say it's a huge undertaking because for me when I play I am the story, so it has to impact my actual gameplay and I have to be able to interact back, so I certainly don't expect anything out of the developers.
Given the choice I'd much rather have them work on items or maps than useless cutscenes.
I would imagine that it's one thing to license a character, but quite another to license the likeness of a specific actor who portrayed that character. Superman has been played by enough people, and existed on his own, for them to be able to make a generic character that people will recognise as Superman. Jean Luc Picard has to look like Patrick Stewart, and then you're into a whole other ball game of licenses and fees. It's one of the reasons why you're not allowed to depict characters from the shows and movies in Foundry missions.
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
When I say iconic items it covers anything on the license including the academy and lack of bridge usage as I pointed out.
Others would probably point out exploration or maybe diplomacy.
The point was the expectations for a game with the license not the actual one single example.
- More episodic content
- the current FE's revisited and evolved
content is an important part of my STO experience. I really enjoyed the KDF storyline, and there are missions i love to replay.
Frozen, What Lies Beneath, Everything Old is New, The Vault, Cutting the Cord, Mine Enemy, Facility 4028, Alpha, Afterlife, even A Light in the Dark.. are my favourites.
too bad the maps are not available in the Foundry editor!
The option? More PvP? I'd rather play a real PvP game. More reputation grinding?
If there was any doubt before about him living in a fantasy land...
I, for one, have always thought that the story of the game was probably one of its only bright spots. Now, don't get me wrong... it's not perfect. There are a tons of things that don't make sense (particularly in Romulan space) and there is also a ton of room for Cryptic to improve overall.
Story though, as others have pointed out, has never really been something Cryptic has focused on. As much as people got all excited about New Romulus and Tau Dewa... there isn't much story to be had in those new areas. There's what.. .maybe like a handful of new cutscenes to tell the story? I like the New Romulus stuff.. it gives me something to do.. but it's getting boring quickly and well.. I just feel as if it was a massive waste of an opportunity to actually do something big. Now I'm not discrediting all the work they put in it. Cryptic's done alot of good stuff with New Romulus... I just don't think they did enough.. not for the amount of time they spent on it.
Then there is the Federation / Klingon 'War'. I have nothing against the war itself.. but it's been almost three years since the game has launched.. and nothing has been done about it which is just really sad. I don't know about anyone else but I remember the devs preaching about the Fed / Klingon War endlessly before the game was launched. It seemed to be such a big focal point.
I would really love to see a return to Featured Episodes.. which were advertised on a number of occasions to happen 'weekly' although we all know that was terribly misadvertised.
From the F2P Outline:
Realistically we haven't had new 'weekly episodes' for a very, very long time.. And I'm not counting the Foundry stuff because that stuff is not officially from Cryptic. I think the featured episodes were one thing people really enjoyed. It brought them online to play the game on a weekly basis when they were happening every week.
I get that Cryptic doesn't have a big team but alot of the stuff they're implementing right now... while they might be good for the long run.. it's just not doing anything whatsoever to move the story of the game forward. But... it's completely possible that they just don't really care about that.
Instead of a weekly new episode, which they obviously do not have time to make.. they should come up with a new mission every month.. or failing that.. every quarter of the year. At least then, something would be happening. People would have something new to look forward to.
Some part of the story is not really good, but some is cool. The end part of Romulan story arc, Klingon first missions or the 2800 are good. Some missions are simply awesome (coliseum, cutting the cord). Some involve unique gameplay (boldly they rode), and some awesome map (facility 2048).
Some need rework (borg and Undine seasons). And some have bad memories attached (Cage Of Fire pathfinding, horrible for years).
I won't answer to the question, because I'm biased. I can remember almost every mission, because I have quite a good memory, and can remember any plot and detail from any game/movie for years. Needless to say I don't watch my DVD very often
I can remember even the bad plot of bad movies/game. I can even remember the plot and detail about Unreal Tournament, and it's just a random plot. Liandri, and stuff, remember ? I do.
I think they should make Episodes every 3months or so, like new serie/season we have in TV series. Add some "easy to add" grind in between, like the romulan reputation or a single STF, so we have something to do in between. Add new romulus as a season with featured episode.
IMO content like Nukara, new romulus ground or deferi borg invasion use to much work, for little. I went once in deferi, and find the reward useless, and the content unfun. Nukara, I did both time, and find it was the same. New Romulus is GW2 with phasers, and it's more annoying than GW2. I won't do it again, except for the mission each tier.
I think they'll find more strength in making story based episode regularly, instead of useless and difficult to develop ground map. If they try to do the same than others MMOS, they'll fail, because others are already better about it.
How much time to develop the mission and cutscene of New Romulus without the whole map ? Just make the city and staging area, add a teleporter to mission, and that's it. You can keep the rest.
mainly because their my favorite... "bad guys" ... wish we have more stuff with the above factions....
As for species like the deferi, anyone got any pills that will help me make them forget them?
Not even a snowball's chance in a very warm place. This game does not even begin to approach the thought of a notion of being anywhere in the same galaxy as WoW, let alone the same league. Maybe not even the same reality.
Cryptic had to acquire their licenses specifically for that Featured Episode series. I didn't say it was impossible, as they appear to be doing this very thing with Denise Crosby right now, but it is additional expense in terms of licensing fees, and time spent wrangling out contracts with whoever it is owns the license to that character.
It is possible that it was easier for Cryptic to get the license for Scotty and Bones because James Doohan and DeForest Kelley have died. When the person portrayed is alive, there's all sorts of legal issues, but once they are deceased licensing can become easier. I would suggest that this is why we have seen Scotty and Bones in person, but only heard Spock over a voice only communication system.
This character is why I don't play my Romulan any more. Tovan Khev is NOT my BFF! Get him off my bridge!
If that's true then it's incredibly TRIBBLE that players of the game itself don't get the conclusion. Is there any reason it can't be posted here when the next months issue it out at least?
Well, I'd say its very obviously not in the same reality...
STO is super-soft-gelly-rip-off-canon-immitation of Star Trek, and Star Trek bases it self of the evolution...
Orcs and nightelfs don't really fit into that anywhere.