So what you are saying is that you want even LESS faction specific content then we have now?
I'd rather have half the faction specific content we have now, and have double the number of factions and room to add more.
Instead we out level the faction specific content halfway through, have to repeat it endlessly with each new character, and are now boxed in such that it's impossible to add more factions and experience their early specific faction content.
To me, the first option is far away the best.
And remember, the point is moot. This game ran off that cliff, this is a discussion only about "what ifs', what should have been, and lessons learned for any that follow after this game goes away.
They appeared in galleries of the various aliens made for TMP, and included makeup very similar to that used in Voyage home.
They did a lot of work on Aliens for TMP for some reason, and didn't really highlight any of them and showed only a few on screen. Good choice, the makeup wasn't all that good.
I remember one race being effectively a race of clones, they could produce millions of ground troops nearly overnight and were the Federation's ground army. Why was this important or even thought about for the TMP movie? No idea.
Movies and pilot episodes get bigger budgets. Doing things there paves the way to reuse them.
The new uniforms in First Contact were created because Voyager and DS9 were sharing uniforms and they were starting to wear out. But if you introduce new uniforms in the movie, suddenly DS9 gets a whole wardrobe stock. At one point, Riker, Sisko, and Chakotay were sharing the same outfits. They changed the uniforms in First Contact deliberately with the intent of getting DS9 new clothes and save Voyager's clothes from getting worn out from over-washing. (Which is also why Voyager didn't just fire up replicators and update their uniforms. The production didn't have the budget for extra uniforms and the split between DS9 and Voyager uniform styles was to justify washing them less.)
There's also a scene in "Encounter at Farpoint" where Riker randomly asks the computer where main engineering is and goes there for NO REAL REASON. Why? Because "Encounter at Farpoint" had a bigger budget than a typical episode and if they didn't spend the money building the warp core and main engineering for that episode, they'd have had to go for potentially the entire series without showing it. But they couldn't just build it to have it so they slipped a scene in the pilot script of Riker wandering there for no good reason. Because it was in the script, they had to show it. Because they had to show it, they had to build it. If they didn't spend the money to build it in the pilot, they wouldn't have gotten the money back to build it later. Or might not have.
I think you have something similar in DS9's pilot where they more or less design the plot to guide characters to areas of the station where they didn't absolutely need to be, so they could get the money to build those areas.
This still happens, I think. I seem to recall Dollhouse and Agents of Shield setting up their sets similarly (and Buffy too, come to think of it, and maybe Firefly). Sometimes, the work is done for a second pilot or immediately after a series gets picked up but the expectation is to have cheaper episodes for awhile after that. I seem to recall hearing that Dollhouse in particular spent millions on the underground lounge set, that most of it was pretty much "real" in that it was real wood, real floors, walls that were up to code as a place you could actually live or work in, and maybe the doors were actually remote controlled.
Similarly, I know the core sets on Community are pretty sturdy and generally also with How I Met Your Mother or (wow, I forgot how much of this stuff I followed) most cop and mystery shows. But when they visit, say, a character's house, it's often just like the kind of set you'd have for a play with canvas walls and such. Sometimes, it's a redecorated main set (HIMYM often redecorated McLaren's as almost every other bar and restaurant on the show) and really successful shows might have a generic set that gets reused (ie. one or two apartments that get repainted and decorated for every guest star) or something they inherit. (The Defiant stuff got reused a lot on Enterprise, I think?)
If it ain't in the pilot or a movie, it's gotta be really fake or one of the existing sets redecorated.
(Community and Buffy both have, I think, one or two school hallways a piece that get redecorated. When you see somebody turn a corner, you're typically seeing the actor walk down the hall they just left with altered decor, filmed hours or days later. Trek is often more efficient because the halls look the same.)
And what you are suggesting is literally more of that, by making even more content shared between the two, and thus even more content you have to play with every single character.
I am not sure if you are intentionally ignoring that fact, or you are simply blind to it.
Everything you are complaining about would only get WORSE in such a system.
I don't need special content all the way to the endgame, it's counter productive- but absolutely critical for the early character experience.
I can't be blind to what I'm suggesting, I've played in systems that did it both ways, and reached the end game in all of them. And for me games like LotRO does it so much better that there's no comparison.
They also do emulation of their setting far better than STO does theirs.
There's only two things STO has that keeps me playing: Starships and the Fleet holdings. Not its horrible broken faction/race system and poor Star Trek emulation.
Movies and pilot episodes get bigger budgets. Doing things there paves the way to reuse them.
Good point.
Didn't seem to work out with the work done on TMP aliens, and I don't think doing that sort of groundwork on the makeup side of things (as compared to sets) gives the same return.
Doing a lot of factions would have been a terrible idea, as the content needed to make a lot of factions viable and fun would be atronimical.
Its why literally every single MMORPG has either one "faction", ala guild wars 2, or only two factions, ala WoW.
Because custom content is generally more expensive to produce for each faction.
Instancing saves a game money and makes it run on more systems but the design of an open world game (like WoW) makes it cheaper to add content to existing zones or have factions share quests (which about a third WoW quests are; almost the same between factions but they feel different because of different starting point and text).
The more factions you have, the more similar any manually created or scripted content needs to be between those factions. The more scripted or customized content is, either the less factions you have or the less content you have.
You could have a game with 20 factions. HOWEVER, at that point and with anything approaching a realistic budget ($20-$200 million for a major MMO, a LOT of which goes into basic infrastructure or artwork and not content), you basically would be forced to have scripted content be largely the same. (And WoW is towards the middle of that, budget-wise.)
So faction A uses swords. Faction B has pets. Faction C has guns. They might interact with the world differently, move differently, animate differently, have different kill and morality mechanics. But you would have very little room for anything scripted varying between the factions because pre-scripted interactions (dialogue, map decorations, specific costuming and placement of NPCs, cutscenes) is labor intensive, prohibitively so to make these things unique for 20 factions unless you have several billion to spend.
On top of all of that though, more factions rarely translates to more players and on any given server, one faction tends to dominate. WoW has often been close to 50/50 overall but on any given server, nobody wants to be in the smaller faction and so servers tend to be 75%+ one faction. And when City of Heroes added villains, you know what happened? They regained some lapsed players. It didn't attract new people. It split the existing players between the factions (especially since it required separate subs for each at first). I've heard it described as probably the worst decision they ever made because they very quickly realized they spent a large amount of money and had the same number of players. Did people want to play villains? Many did. Absolutely. But most of the people who did also appear to be people who were satisfied playing heroes.
Didn't seem to work out with the work done on TMP aliens, and I don't think doing that sort of groundwork on the makeup side of things (as compared to sets) gives the same return.
I think you might also chalk some of this up to creative ego.
Over 10% of the budget for Superman Returns went into securing footage rights to Marlon Brando and making his head in CG for a 10 second scene. For the money that was spent, Singer could have likely had any actor in Hollywood do that scene.
Even more was spent on a space action scene that was finished. And cut. And not included on the DVDs. And buried in a boxed set release somewhere.
On a certain level, part of that might just have been Robert Wise or Gene Roddenberry just wanted to spitball ideas and get a few hundred people in makeup before deciding what to put in.
Abrams' Trek had an unused Gorn and unused Klingon makeup tests. Because the money was there and his process involves making a lot of stuff and then seeing if he wants to use it.
I think you might also chalk some of this up to creative ego.
And as you noted trial and error.
It may be that they thought they could make alien aliens, and realized that what they ended up with wasn't good enough and then pushed them all into the background or dropped them completely.
I seem to remember a TOS reference in one of the genesis star-cluster missions; it was one of those beam to the planet and scan 5 things ones. I think it was an energy cloud or mist or something...
Unfortunately, the details escape me now. Anyone else remember this?
It was a reference to the Gorgons from "And the Children Shall Lead"
They aren't coming out with a Cardi faction.
A: They shot themselves in the foot when they released the Galor in the first lockbox.
B: Renaming said Galor won't change a thing.
C: I believe its been said that they are not planning anymore factions. Not enough ships to flesh out a faction unless you include Dominion ships, which were made available via Lockbox as well, AND of course the Holy Bugship.
The Cardassians have... the Hideki, the Galor, and the Keldon. Not to mention the Cardassians (Outside of the True Way) aren't really allowed to field a military anymore under treaty with the Federation, Klingon Empire, and... well... I guess I can't say the Romulan Star Empire anymore.
There is the CDF, which fields fully operational warships. A "defense force" tends to count as a military arm. It's nowhere what it was back in the days of Central Command and the mighty Orders, though.
And you left one out of the list above: The Union is, for all intents and purposes, a protectorate of the United Federation of Planets. And one they are slowly grooming for membership in said UFP.
Just slightly ahead of the Devidian back end... I believe :P
*STO*Its mission: To destroy strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations... and then kill them, to boldly annihilate what no one has annihilated before!
Movies and pilot episodes get bigger budgets. Doing things there paves the way to reuse them.
*snip*
Funny how it is actually like that in STO, too. We only got the Voyager Interior because they used it in the missions. They wouldn't be able to justify the cost without that.
We won't get a new home world or star system if they don't create an episode or more in it.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Ok, so, with that all in mind, do you all really thing Cryptic will mess with TOS cannon fact and add in Kelvans as allies or will they make them part of the casualties, because I would think the Iconian aggression STILL would cause the Kelvans to be defeated.
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Comments
I'd rather have half the faction specific content we have now, and have double the number of factions and room to add more.
Instead we out level the faction specific content halfway through, have to repeat it endlessly with each new character, and are now boxed in such that it's impossible to add more factions and experience their early specific faction content.
To me, the first option is far away the best.
And remember, the point is moot. This game ran off that cliff, this is a discussion only about "what ifs', what should have been, and lessons learned for any that follow after this game goes away.
Movies and pilot episodes get bigger budgets. Doing things there paves the way to reuse them.
The new uniforms in First Contact were created because Voyager and DS9 were sharing uniforms and they were starting to wear out. But if you introduce new uniforms in the movie, suddenly DS9 gets a whole wardrobe stock. At one point, Riker, Sisko, and Chakotay were sharing the same outfits. They changed the uniforms in First Contact deliberately with the intent of getting DS9 new clothes and save Voyager's clothes from getting worn out from over-washing. (Which is also why Voyager didn't just fire up replicators and update their uniforms. The production didn't have the budget for extra uniforms and the split between DS9 and Voyager uniform styles was to justify washing them less.)
There's also a scene in "Encounter at Farpoint" where Riker randomly asks the computer where main engineering is and goes there for NO REAL REASON. Why? Because "Encounter at Farpoint" had a bigger budget than a typical episode and if they didn't spend the money building the warp core and main engineering for that episode, they'd have had to go for potentially the entire series without showing it. But they couldn't just build it to have it so they slipped a scene in the pilot script of Riker wandering there for no good reason. Because it was in the script, they had to show it. Because they had to show it, they had to build it. If they didn't spend the money to build it in the pilot, they wouldn't have gotten the money back to build it later. Or might not have.
I think you have something similar in DS9's pilot where they more or less design the plot to guide characters to areas of the station where they didn't absolutely need to be, so they could get the money to build those areas.
This still happens, I think. I seem to recall Dollhouse and Agents of Shield setting up their sets similarly (and Buffy too, come to think of it, and maybe Firefly). Sometimes, the work is done for a second pilot or immediately after a series gets picked up but the expectation is to have cheaper episodes for awhile after that. I seem to recall hearing that Dollhouse in particular spent millions on the underground lounge set, that most of it was pretty much "real" in that it was real wood, real floors, walls that were up to code as a place you could actually live or work in, and maybe the doors were actually remote controlled.
Similarly, I know the core sets on Community are pretty sturdy and generally also with How I Met Your Mother or (wow, I forgot how much of this stuff I followed) most cop and mystery shows. But when they visit, say, a character's house, it's often just like the kind of set you'd have for a play with canvas walls and such. Sometimes, it's a redecorated main set (HIMYM often redecorated McLaren's as almost every other bar and restaurant on the show) and really successful shows might have a generic set that gets reused (ie. one or two apartments that get repainted and decorated for every guest star) or something they inherit. (The Defiant stuff got reused a lot on Enterprise, I think?)
If it ain't in the pilot or a movie, it's gotta be really fake or one of the existing sets redecorated.
(Community and Buffy both have, I think, one or two school hallways a piece that get redecorated. When you see somebody turn a corner, you're typically seeing the actor walk down the hall they just left with altered decor, filmed hours or days later. Trek is often more efficient because the halls look the same.)
I don't need special content all the way to the endgame, it's counter productive- but absolutely critical for the early character experience.
I can't be blind to what I'm suggesting, I've played in systems that did it both ways, and reached the end game in all of them. And for me games like LotRO does it so much better that there's no comparison.
They also do emulation of their setting far better than STO does theirs.
There's only two things STO has that keeps me playing: Starships and the Fleet holdings. Not its horrible broken faction/race system and poor Star Trek emulation.
Good point.
Didn't seem to work out with the work done on TMP aliens, and I don't think doing that sort of groundwork on the makeup side of things (as compared to sets) gives the same return.
We're done.
To me it's clear that you have want you want, and want more of and the rest of the world be d**ned. You're not someone will continue to talk to.
Because custom content is generally more expensive to produce for each faction.
Instancing saves a game money and makes it run on more systems but the design of an open world game (like WoW) makes it cheaper to add content to existing zones or have factions share quests (which about a third WoW quests are; almost the same between factions but they feel different because of different starting point and text).
The more factions you have, the more similar any manually created or scripted content needs to be between those factions. The more scripted or customized content is, either the less factions you have or the less content you have.
You could have a game with 20 factions. HOWEVER, at that point and with anything approaching a realistic budget ($20-$200 million for a major MMO, a LOT of which goes into basic infrastructure or artwork and not content), you basically would be forced to have scripted content be largely the same. (And WoW is towards the middle of that, budget-wise.)
So faction A uses swords. Faction B has pets. Faction C has guns. They might interact with the world differently, move differently, animate differently, have different kill and morality mechanics. But you would have very little room for anything scripted varying between the factions because pre-scripted interactions (dialogue, map decorations, specific costuming and placement of NPCs, cutscenes) is labor intensive, prohibitively so to make these things unique for 20 factions unless you have several billion to spend.
On top of all of that though, more factions rarely translates to more players and on any given server, one faction tends to dominate. WoW has often been close to 50/50 overall but on any given server, nobody wants to be in the smaller faction and so servers tend to be 75%+ one faction. And when City of Heroes added villains, you know what happened? They regained some lapsed players. It didn't attract new people. It split the existing players between the factions (especially since it required separate subs for each at first). I've heard it described as probably the worst decision they ever made because they very quickly realized they spent a large amount of money and had the same number of players. Did people want to play villains? Many did. Absolutely. But most of the people who did also appear to be people who were satisfied playing heroes.
I think you might also chalk some of this up to creative ego.
Over 10% of the budget for Superman Returns went into securing footage rights to Marlon Brando and making his head in CG for a 10 second scene. For the money that was spent, Singer could have likely had any actor in Hollywood do that scene.
Even more was spent on a space action scene that was finished. And cut. And not included on the DVDs. And buried in a boxed set release somewhere.
On a certain level, part of that might just have been Robert Wise or Gene Roddenberry just wanted to spitball ideas and get a few hundred people in makeup before deciding what to put in.
Abrams' Trek had an unused Gorn and unused Klingon makeup tests. Because the money was there and his process involves making a lot of stuff and then seeing if he wants to use it.
And as you noted trial and error.
It may be that they thought they could make alien aliens, and realized that what they ended up with wasn't good enough and then pushed them all into the background or dropped them completely.
It was a reference to the Gorgons from "And the Children Shall Lead"
There is the CDF, which fields fully operational warships. A "defense force" tends to count as a military arm. It's nowhere what it was back in the days of Central Command and the mighty Orders, though.
And you left one out of the list above: The Union is, for all intents and purposes, a protectorate of the United Federation of Planets. And one they are slowly grooming for membership in said UFP.
Just slightly ahead of the Devidian back end... I believe :P
We won't get a new home world or star system if they don't create an episode or more in it.
Come stand with us in supporting Star Trek: The Animated Series content for STO! (It's canon!) #TASforSTO
Time travel and glass-cannon ships hurt my head and is NOT what Trek is about. Trek is exploration, becoming better as a species, and gaining scientific knowledge while holding on to the traditions that got us where were are.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!