Quite a few. All the "Moar Story Missions RAWR" threads were getting to me.
The story missions are just the highest quality content we get. The story itself is rarely anywhere near acceptable. The very early missions regarding dealing with Orion pirates feel like the only part of this game's story which would fit in Star Trek canon to be honest.
I'd say the story is the weakest part of the game. I typically play games for the story rather than the gameplay, and I can barely get into the story here.
Joined: January 2010
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
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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.
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.
i suppose you also remember every single character from every single episode of every single star trek series eh?
I think we may be moving there. Spotlights are nice. But I'd like to see, in essence, paid Foundry authors with editorial oversight acting as an official publishing operation, telling morality tales that focus on the small, human stories and moral yarns that procedural and sandbox-y content can't do well. And then the big team releases being more sandbox-y but also more vetted for story logic and quality NPC dialogue.
I have found that you can get most of the story just from playing WoW. The game doesn't force the story on you, you have to piece it together little by little from what npc's tell you. I think it's a really nice way to to tell a story in a big world where your character is just an adventurer of (relatively) little importance. However, WoW (as anything Blizzard, especially Metzen writes) seems to get most of its story inspiration from saturday morning cartoons, superhero comics and shounen manga/anime, so everything is horibbly predictable and clicheed.
STO's story is terrible in its own way. In an apparent effort to mix things up, Cryptic has made made every major race come to the Alpha quadrant to wage war with one another. From that point we go back to saturday morning cartoons for inpiration. The way the story is presented doesn't help matters, either. I cringe every time I'm forced to watch one of those cinematic cutscenes.
Erm... actually... half of STO is in the Beta Quadrant. No one's really sure where Gamma Orionis is...
Yeah, almost all of Romulan Space is in the Beta Quadrant. Cardassian space is in the Alpha Quadrant. Federation space is in both. Klingon space is also mostly in the Beta Quadrant. The Hirogen... Um, they're interesting because Voyager established their civilization as being stretched across half the Delta Quadrant and into the Beta Quadrant.
Erm... actually... half of STO is in the Beta Quadrant. No one's really sure where Gamma Orionis is...
Yeah, almost all of Romulan Space is in the Beta Quadrant. Cardassian space is in the Alpha Quadrant. Federation space is in both. Klingon space is also mostly in the Beta Quadrant. The Hirogen... Um, they're interesting because Voyager established their civilization as being stretched across half the Delta Quadrant and into the Beta Quadrant.
Gamma Orionis is in the far 'southern' Alpha Quadrant, where Federation space actually wraps around the Klingon Empire for a long stretch. The Star Charts stuck a lot of planets visited in TOS, along with the Mutara Nebula, down there. So, basically, the Borg are bulldozing the original 1701's legacy.
This game seems it could take a leaf or two out of EvE online's Book. When I saw STO for the first time I Expected it to be very Open world. Then I began Reading... and the game lost a bit of its appeal but i still played it at Launch and stopped just before F2P.
Basically Cryptic Designed this to be WoW-Trek where they should have made it more EvE-Trek.
I love the game play. Space battles are fun and Ground Combat isnt bad either. The Story, I didnt Hate it but there was just so more they should have done. Im sure Most of Us are Familiar with Star Trek: Legacy. They way that each 'arc' is told in that game should be how each Story should be told in STO. Not so much in the Cinematic/Voice over way. But also in the way its currently being delievered [Read a Box of Text, Go and do what it says].
There should also be repercussions and changes based on what you picked. Now, I know it came out much later, but Swtor told each of the class stories Brilliantly. As an Imperial agent in swtor you could secretly work for the Republic. It wouldn't take much for a 'Captain' to become sympathetic to the Klingon's and hand them information, Reports etc. And after enough of these 'Reports' are handed in we see a Klingon Advance on a certain sector, Maybe even Read/hear about it. Even a mission or two when you 'rendezvous with a klingon ship in a shuttle to Hand over secret documents/new technology' and Some NPC Fed ships catch you, This leads to you choosing weither to shoot at the federation Or Klingon NPC's or You then Either help destroy the Fed ship or say this was the Klingon's Idea and they were giving information to you and the fed ship's presence blew it. Thus saving your cover. Same could be done with the Cardie's, Romulan's etc etc etc.
Cryptic/PWE could even add stuff for the Klingon's/Fed to the C-store based on Ingame events. (This would be mostly in the form of Ships of course) I mean, The Dev's Keep a Record of Documents/Technology sent From one faction to the Other, Then upon reaching X ammount of Documents/Tech sent a Federation/Klingon Hybrid ship gets released. Like a Klingon BoP with Ablative armor generators etc.
While I tend to blame the nature of the game as a MMO for the shortcomings of anything really resembling a story, the existing story is completely awful. It borders on incomprehensible.
You have to read a novel. You have to read a jumbled "path to 2409." Then, you get to play STO and try to make connections between what you are doing and what you think you're supposed to be doing. Every once in awhile, in between something that seems to auto-generate random reasons to go here, press f, or go there and kill <insert bad guy>, you get some kind of nugget that seems to somehow relate to the story... only it tosses you some table scraps, some of which contradict other table scraps. Or, it throws you a pretty decent self-contained FE story that doesn't seem to relate much to the story that you're looking for... AND that little nugget of a good story (unrelated to the novel or the path) might end on an unresolved point that will never, ever be explained.
Now we have this jumbled mess of Iconians controlling the Undine, which started a war where we KILL everything!
It's not the fault of a writer. It's the fault of the game being what it is: an arcade shoot em up.
It is what it is. There is pretty much nothing that they could do at this point to actually resolve the majority of the threads, tangents, and diversions that somehow come together to create an actual story beyond:
"This is war. Blow stuff up. Don't ask questions. Feed the quarters into the machine."
I don't think it's fair to say, "Foundry authors can tell good stories! Why can't Cryptic?" We are writing stories for an entirely different type of Star Trek game, not the one being produced and designed by Cryptic. Our good stories are occupying their MMO real estate, but they don't mesh well with their "traditional" MMO approach. Well... my grinder and some other battleship grinders do.
This game seems it could take a leaf or two out of EvE online's Book.
Sweet Zombie Jesus, no! We don't need another "Trolls Online"
It is what it is. There is pretty much nothing that they could do at this point to actually resolve the majority of the threads, tangents, and diversions that somehow come together to create an actual story beyond
Nah. It's easy;
1. Present your undeniable evidence of Iconians in Fluidic space to ambassadors. They decide to send you to talk with the Undine.
2. Present evidence to Undine. Discover Tal Shiar with Borg tech trying to kill you.
3. Suddenly find all the wars over. Begin to work with allies to defeat evil Romulans.
4. Epic Tal Shiar beat down. Borg assimilate their survivors as poetic justic.
5. Drive out Iconians with unexpected Undine help.
See. Five episodes. Go back to chasing space rabbits. You can use you diplomacy rank to talk your way through a lot of it if you'd like.
First of all, STO's story is very weak and laced with a lot of missed opportunities. Then the devs didn't even take the chance to keep the story lines going or end them, but keep them wide open and opened up more wide open story that seems to go no where or they introduce a new story element without even explaining it. I still don't know why the Tholians are doing what they are doing at Nukara.
This game is difinitely not WOW-Trek. What work with Trek's most successful games like Armada and Bridge Commander were campaigns. This game does have campaigns, but they are more like half-assed campaigns and the worst part, the devs go and insert the FEs in places where they don't make any sense. They should have stayed at the end game not in the middle of the lame Klingon War story line which goes back and forth with the War being an extreme side note.
The devs need to go redo some missions and add some others before starting new ones like New Romulus or Nukara.
3. Suddenly find all the wars over. Begin to work with allies to defeat evil Romulans.
Yet, your PvE queue is filled with story-less reasons to kill X numbers of every ship of every notable race in the galaxy, while your STFs will keep you fighting a never-ending stream of Borg. At some point, given the tasks that this game wants you to complete over and over again, you have to give up on finding a reason to kill 5/5 bad guys.
They are bad guys. It is that simple with STO. Kill the bad guys. Get some lootz. Upgrade your gear. Fly an enemy ship if that makes you spend $$$. Rinse and repeat.
It was different prior to F2P. The game at least seemed to want to tell something resembling a story. Now, it wants you to do tasks. It doesn't seem to care who you are fighting. Just fight. Your reason? Dilithium.
"Work with allies" can mean either "Shoot five" or "Come up with a clever plan with Dahar Master Worf".
Yes, it's likely they'd go with "shoot five" simply because its easier to code and everyone complained about non-shooting parts of 2800. But it'd be a good reason to use those Romulan Rep and diplomacy ranks aside from the transwarps and instakill weapons.
In the idea I outlined, the final two would require shooting. If they were clever enough with the writing, your top level Romulan reputation character could convince a lot if the evil Romulans to abandon Sela. Heck, the Iconian face off could be nothing more than you and all if the NPCs standing united and forcing the Iconians to either back down of come to the negotiating table.
Star Trek is always about swatting the mosquito that keeps you from a sound sleep. Even the bad guys chill out after the mosquito is dealt with. I see this as fitting in.
But it seems they have plans already. Denise Crosby seems to be involved. I doubt it'll play out like I described it and it might just be a bunch of pew, pew.
Regardless, they can easily put the story to bed. I just outlined one way above and I'm an evil silver. And I think that after years, its about time that they do.
You mean the re-hash of the good old "Enemy was influenced by a hidden enemy"-trope? Like the one DS-9 used?
Yawn.
And then they inceptioned it.
The Klingons fight the Federation because the Federation didn't believe every power in the quadrant was taken over by Undine which turned out to be true but they don't stop fighting. The Undine are doing it because they think the Federation is trying to hurt them, which they're not and even though we've proved it, they're still doing it because there's an iconian gate in fluidic space that was totally put there twenty years ago by the federation.
AND THEN OMGWTFBBQ BORG/THOLIAN/ROMULAN/ICONIAN CLUSTERFRACK.
I feel like the rommies are the main character sometimes because they're tied into every major event.
The last two parts of the Cardassian storyline is my favorite, the one dealing with Pa Wraiths and then the 2800 miniseries.
It made sense, it was interesting, and explored creative play styles.
While I do understand the point you do make I am not completely sure about it. Do notice you do focus on NPCs. What truly meaningful story can a NPC tell? He is but a prop. A good writer can turn this prop into a representation of human nature and condition, yes, but let us be honest here: Videogame writers do by general rule suck, and videogame stories do by general rule amount to little more than escapist formulaic pulp. Even in literature few writers are able to capture the human condition in either prose or verse, and those who do are not usually writing videogames about pew pew... in space!
Good as many Star Trek episodes are, and me being here does mean I do like them for what they are, they do still fail to convey the same meaning the real stories both small and vast in scope that did happen against the backdrop of, say, a world war or the three kingdoms period do manage to convey. No one did write these stories. No one did plan the events to preach his or her worldview as correct. They are simply stories about humanity that do reveal much about both what is right and wrong with us and the world. Which does have the deeper lesson?
Along the same lines I did play a few Realm vs Realm and Guild vs Guild games and at least for me the moral and message is much stronger when there is real people playing all the roles in an emergent tale. Even in a videogame the actions, skill, and behaviour of other real people can teach you something about yourself and others. What can you really learn from a story that does play the way it does play just because someone did feel like preaching? The few truly meaningful situations I did either participate of or witness in videogames do come from these games.
Let us take the Prime Directive violation story you do mention for an example. How meaningful will the result be? Without the actual control mechanisms that do regulate our behaviour (peer pressure, the consequences of breaking the law, death, or ruining a civilization that could have reached greatness for example) there is no real consequence and most players will simply pick the choice that does give them the reward that better fits their playing style or the reward they do find to be the coolest.
Do compare to the story of a guild that does betray the plan the great guilds of its realm did come up to counter the attack of the two other realms to have the enemy capture the holdings of an allied guild it does have a long standing grudge against and then let them capture it for themselves so that they can go up in rank and become important while damaging the reputation and power of the guild they did dislike. This does happen a lot in Realm vs Realm PvP. This does have actual consequences for all the involved guilds both in power, reputation, trust, and more. It may have consequences for entire realms. And depending on how it does play it can have many different morals and lessons at the same time, as well as spawn many smaller stories of heroism, betrayal, grudges, revenge, and more.
Just to reinforce this point I would like you to check what Squidheadjax did wrote. Does not the "Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist cesspool like Eve" is reveal more about what is right and wrong about people than any number of stories born from the desire of a given writer to preach his or her worldview to all who would listen? And it is important to point at how many of the stories and situations that did emerge on Eve, it being the example others did give and not a game I do particularly enjoy, do echo the kind of stories times of warring warlords with no central government to answer to did spawn in our own history.
Hellish as you may find Eve to be it is actually telling a story about our own nature and about who we are behind the beautiful silks of civilization we do like to wear. Is there a deeper moral message? Is there a more meaningful tale? Will a NPC written by the kind of writters who do write for STO have more meaning?
MMO games do have the unique opportunity to have their players be the ones that do mold the world and the experience. If the designers do give us Faction vs Faction warfare, territorial control, and a political system inside each faction you will have more epic tales and moral messages than you can shake a Lirpa at before long.
And do keep in mind Cryptic's resources are stretched thin as it is. As I do see it we do have two options: We can have them pushing out half assed content all over the board or we can have the focus on high quality gameplay mechanics and depend on natural player interaction and the mission editor for our story content. While I doubt anyone would not like a game that does it all we do have to keep in mind Cryptic will not be able to do so. We do not discuss which would be the ideal outcome. We do discuss which of the realistic outcomes would be preferable.
Lord, that was long.
Do please forgive the lenght.
@ squidheadjax:
I see way too many people lumping in full-force PvP with sandbox to really hope for any sandbox game that isn't a Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist cesspool like Eve* - or even worse, a PvE sandbox that merely apes such a design and is thus left empty of the actual drive.
There is no need for that. There are many good and great Sanboxy games with Realm vs Realm warfare, Guild vs Guild warfare, or both out there where things do not degrade to that point. It all depends on the design of the game. There are many from which to learn what does work and what does not work, and the potential results of each design choice.
We could easily have a realm vs realm system with Klingons, Federation, and Romulans fighting it out for control and faction wide benefits that does limit PvP between players of the same faction to duels, warfare between guilds inside a faction to indirect power plays (give detailed information about the holdings of Fleet X to the enemy so they do lose their holdings in a surprise attack and then pay the enemy guild that did capture those so that they let you conquer them in the next Realm vs Realm event for example), and realm vs realm PvP to two to four hours each day (similarly to how events do currently work) where the leaders of the ten most powerful fleets in a faction do participate in voting policy that does affect the entire faction and do set objectives so that characters that do participate in the involved battles do get extra rewards to influence how the war does proceed (defend this place, attack this place, kill players from this enemy guild), and where a guild can only own a starbase on an actual system it does control (wich will change hands if the system is conquered by an enemy guild). This would keep the intrigue, power plays, betrayals, and peer pressure without the 'Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist' elements going in full swing as there are still rules and laws in place, both hard-coded ones and ones that the 'ruling houses' do decide to impose on the faction they do belong to.
That's just one random example.
@ jumpingjs:
How many of you actually read the mission text . Could that be why your claiming there is nos story. I agree it is not A+ but it is still quite good
I do read all of it. I do actually read all of it every single time I do replay a mission.
The dialogue is still painfully bad.
"Wahahaha! The strong will prevail! The weak shall perish! They did use a teen who did read too much Stirner and Crowley but was neither educated nor smart enough to understand the point to model me after!"
Sometimes it does make me wonder if I am a closeted maso.
I disagree about the quality of game writing and literature in general, I'm afraid.
And I'm a fan of the dialogue in a well done action movie.
Would you really rather play Call of Duty than watch Twister or Toy Story (both had dialogue passes by Buffy's Joss Whedon)?
What about Robert Downey Jr.'s great banter in the Iron Man movies?
Pacing, quips, and action flow are high art as far as I'm concerned. I don't want that to be emergent. I want it in the hands of a pro.
And I want Cryptic's content designers to be the pros and step up more in that regard.
What I don't want is a game where I can play with Three Steps from Hell cranked up in the background the whole time and pacing that isn't dramatically engineered but is just the result of whoever happens to be online and what they think is appropriate. I want rhythm and I want professionals acting as experts on that rhythm and timing.
It's akin to saying, "Most stand-up comics suck so I prefer to go to open mic nights. The cover is cheaper, everybody has fun when nobody tries, and I can heckle them." And my response is, "I want to see a good stand-up comic and I want to see the ones on stage try to be better."
I have seen WoW put people in tears or at least sniffles, repeatedly. I used to live in an apartment complex where everybody played. People talked about it. I haven't seen anyone really moved that way by STO content and I want to see that as a bar to shoot for. You may be a callous son of a gun who is immune to an emotionally manipulative quest in an MMO. But I have friends who are not that callous. I have fleetmates who are not that callous. And they're off playing WoW or TOR or Secret World or Fallout or even Starcraft half the time for that experience and I want them to get it here.
I am affraid we were not discussing the quips on an action movie. You did write:
Authorial fiat does allow for more epic stories with a controlled moral or message though as well as stories that build empathy for NPCs. You can't tell controlled moral fables or human "slice of life" stories about NPCs in a pure sandbox. That's the tradeoff.
And more along these lines. Thus we were discussing stories that do have a meaning, a point, a moral, and/or a message.
Comparatively few books, fewer movies, and even fewer games do have content of enough quality when mentioning meaning, point, moral, or message to hold greater value, as far as those points are concerned, than the stories and events that do grow naturally from the interaction among human beings in different situations.
Comparatively few books, fewer movies, and even fewer games do have characters of such depth as for one to find it easier to relate to and empathize with them than with an actual human being put through a much simpler drama.
And since it being 'controlled' was part of your point you can actually control the theme of the messages, morals, meanings, and points of a MMO game by molding the enviroment and creating rules and mechanics that do reflect and interact with these ideas. As Eve is one of the most mentioned games in these boards I will use it as an example: By removing, among other things, a central authority the players do have to answer to both and creating an enviroment in which both defeat and the price of victory do have a meaning and allowing the players to police themselves they did create, by art or by accident, a situation that does reflect several points of our history and does reproduce the themes and ideas these times do invoke. They did have 'control' about the messages, the morals, the meanings, and the points, and by creating an enviroment conductive to these elements instead of a scripted storyline in which they are involved they did manage to approach these topics in far more depth than a storyline by a hack writter approaching the same topics would be able to do.
Videogames are an interactive medium. MMO games are a both interactive and social one. By removing the interactivity from a videogame and the social element from an MMO a game does become little more than a bad book or a bad movie. An artist does use the strenghts of their chosen medium to express what he or she does want to communicate.
And this conversation is becoming so bloody :monocle:. XD
And on the other topic I have seen people brough down to tears, lose their faith in humanity, end or create long lived real life friendships, question their own morality, and be involved in long lived philosophical debates over the human and social happenings in an MMO they were very involved in far more commonly than I have seen people do so over the sad story or heroic sacrifice of an NPC. O.O
The only emotive heroic sacrifice I do remember from STO is that klingon that does throw himself in the doomsday machine's maw, and that's just because he did sing prettily. If it had been a player that would actually lose his very costly ship and most of his hard won character advancements and still did it to save his fleet from an enemy fleet's super weapon I would have probably have a crush on him. Bonus points if he did sing prettily over voice chat when doing so.
Edit:
And I do have to say the 'stand-up comic' example does not work properly. What I do say would be closer to prefering the naturally weird or comical situations, comments, and events that do happen in a social setting over the jokes of stand-up comics.
I did never say 'random people will write better stories than at least cheap writers.' I did instead say the natural development of social structures will organically create and develop storylines containing morals, meanings, and messages related to the enviroment in which this social development does occur and how does it interact with human nature, and thus about human nature itself. And if this enviroment does reflect a real enviroment then these messages, morals, and meaning will also reflect the messages, morals, and meanings that would naturally grow from the real enviroment it does simulate.
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.
(snip)
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.
As it stands , instead of giving you in-your-face stories , like the ones you had in TOS/TNG -- and like you had w/the 4 FE's , and pretty much most if not all of the STO story up till S.6 -- you are getting the inverse Babylon 5 story .
B5 had all kinds of stories that were threaded togather by a slow hints toward a build up towards the Big Bad .
STO is doing just the opposite .
In STO you have all the hints right up front , but no delivery on the Big Bad (Iconians) .
So instead you get filler in the guise of Main Content , with just enough "hints" thrown about to make you think that this is about the Iconians too -- which it really isn't .
S.6 was about Starbases .
S.7 was about Reformed Romulans who have Seen the Light and were willing to do things the Federation way (while the Klings just tag along , 'cause they don't have the budget for a separate story line 4 them) .
S.8 ... -- my guess : Voth ... which will give the players ample time to chance tiny cute dinosaurs w/huge red bows on their heads .
But the Iconians will not invade , we will not fight Iconians , because unlike Babylon 5 / DS9 , the STO producers don't know or don't want to ramp up things story wise .
Today's STO is all about "stuff to do" , stuff to keep you busy .
The rest ... -- well the term "afterthought" seems to be the kindest I can think of .
Sooner or later you will however ask yourself if you find what you do in STO interesting .
Is it interesting to tag Eppohs ? Is it interesting to fill buckets (starbases , rep systems et al) ?
Is STO really just about collecting stuff and scratching your itch for some random Sci-Fi violence (or more likely predictable Sci-Fi violence) ?
The sad thing is -- we did not just imagine this games potential .
We saw some of that potential come to fruition within the games lifetime .
And saddest of all ... we came to see the game change into a sub standard (pretty) sci-fi MMO not under different ppl ... , but under the same ppl .
If it would have changed under different ppl , we would at least QQ-ed for the old regime .
The current situation just mostly leaves me feeling nausiated when I think about it .
So I think about it less and less , just as I log in less and less .
I still thank those same ppl for showing some kindness tho (like the Breen ship) .
It's not all bad , just not what it could & should have been .
I disagree that Story should be the game's greatest weakness. Look.. when it comes down to it.. especially in regards to Trekkies.. Cryptic can come up and execute the best story ever and people would still complain about it. It's the nature of Trekkies.
First things first, you are assuming that everyone is a Trekkie, there is a distinction in my opinion between a Trekkie and a fan. Trekkie's tend to be more fanatical in regards to the Trek universe.
In regards to CRYPTIC creating the best story possible, I disagree with you. If they put their heart and soul into a story arc, flesh out the characters, and create a sensible Star Trek storyline, then you will have some very satisfied players.
We are NEVER happy with what we have. I am going to go out on a limb because I like ALL of Trek and say that Trekkies are one of the primary reasons why Voyager / Nemesis / Enterprise are badly received in general. Trekkies are the reasons why we'll never see anything else from the Prime Universe again.
Perhaps, but then again there is no helping bad scripts, bad concepts, rehash & stale premesis etc... Voyager, Nemesis, & Enterprise is what we deem toilet Trek, and for obvious reasons - They were godawful.
same with Enterprise.. same with Voyager. Trekkies need to learn to like things for what they are.. and stop nitpicking on every little detail. I'm not saying NOT to criticize.. but there comes a point where criticizing does nobody any good anymore and it just makes the fandom seem petty.
As I stated before both Voyager and Enterprise are trash. What even saved Voyager from complete cancellation was the inroduction of the borg and a bit of T&A from actress Jeri Ryan aka Seven of Nine, and even that was iffy - The series was kicked from a prime time station into an obscure station called UPN. However; they had more issues than just a weak storyline, it is a debate for another time.
Anyhow, back on track. There's no question that STO's greatest weakness right now is PVP and Exploration.
I also have to disagree that the graphics are its greatest strength. There are TONS of games that look alot better than STO. Have you ever seen the game at the lower graphic settings? It looks unplayable like that. The graphics aren't bad... but they could have been alot better. The ships are probably the best thing graphics-wise that Cryptic can boast about. New Romulus is a step forward on the environment bits. Now if only we could have more planets to go down to.
STO has "NO" exploration in regards to the fun aspect of exploring the universe, and as far as PvP, you stated it - right now it is one of its greatest weak points. PvP currently caters to the Klingon Faction and without an interested opposing Faction it is dead in the water.
As far as Graphics, the game is indeed pretty for being 3yrs old.
Back on Topic in regards to the Storyline:
Game story telling and TV series scripts are two different things - Writing a storyline for a game is not that difficult within the context of comparing it between a show and a game.
It almost seems like the writer or writer's from the Cryptic team simply rush things out to just have something for the player base. Minimum review and thought goes into it. Lets just make X a villain and create this far out and shallow plot. They even throw in characters from Voyager just for the sake of making some lame story arc about a klingon savior. The only interesting villian in that story arc was B'Vat, and even he was NOT entirely fleshed out.
Again I am using one of many examples in how the episode flow chart is handle.
To the Credit of CRYPTIC, I do find that the Klingon story Arc is alot more interesting, in which they used a good imagination to bring certain aspect of the KDF saga alive. Unfortunately; The most interesting episodic arcs are very short due to Cryptic's reluctance to complete the KDF.
I have seen WoW put people in tears or at least sniffles, repeatedly. I used to live in an apartment complex where everybody played. People talked about it. I haven't seen anyone really moved that way by STO content
Before I became "Mr.97% negativity" -- I was a different player .
Grand Noobus to be sure ... , but because I was not "infected" with the MMO principle of "it's all at End Game" -- I leveled my first toon for a looong time (about 6 months) .
I did that because the first time I stood next to the Guardian of Forever I just stared and stared and stared . I literally just stared for close to 30 minutes .
I had a similar first time experience (minus the 30 min stare) with the mission into the Hobus system where you warp in and come Nose to Nose w/a Rom Warbird .
It was the exact Nose to Nose that was used so often in TNG where they had to get two ships in one shot and the only way to do that was to have them at a squirt gun distance from each other .
I flew around a ton of empty space zones/instances simply because I found it to be oh-so-pretty (at the time w/a substandard graphics card that did not even render it all to it's full potential) , and i can't even tell you how much time I wasted just walking about the 23rd century missions/interiors and the TOS ship interior .
Sometimes it's so close you can almost smell it -- or come as close as you can to "it" -- be that whatever is Your personal era of preference .
All that movement forward , all that "personal discovery" came to a screeching halt in The Year of Hell .
Ironically I was actually somewhat lucky , as I did not burn through the original content too soon so I did not have a bankspace full of Borg Engines&Deflectors by the time YoH hit . But I did by the time F2P was denounced / announced .
So there was a feeling of enjoyment in the first year .
There was excitement , there was discovery (and yes , there was also rainbow Excelsior) .
At this point I'm not sure if that excitement and (for better or worse) that level of noobishness can be recaptured .
It is time to recognize that perhaps what we oldtimers are pining for are some of those initial feelings of excitement .
But we have changed , haven't we ? I know I'm way more bitter then I ever thought possible going in the first year .
And if we have changed , isn't it possible that the Devs have changed too ?
Isn't it possible that instead of the wide eyed , gleem-in-the-eye Dev of 2009 , we have a "back when we thought anything was possible (but we didn't have a budget) we made a list of stuff that we'd like to do --- and now when we have a stable budget and are about as jaded as some of our "fans" , now we simply pick stuff from that long list from 2009 and kinda sorta put it into the "seasons" w/minimum effort where possible , and even less enthusiasm . Way waaaaayyyy less enthusiasm .
We leave enthusiasm to PWE & Marketing .
We just don't have enthusiasm . We have no budget for enthusiasm . Enthusiasm is just too much work .
Oh , you could see enthusiasm in our initial year's work ? Well I suppose you can read anything into anything ... so why can't you read some enthusiasm into our current product ?
See , we're not at fault , you are ... playa ! " .
See Leviathan99 ... , from my perspective ... , it takes two to tango .
And I don't remember dancing enthusiastically w/a person who a standing in near stillness next to me .
And right now ... (unlike the first 13 months of STO , w/ it's gleem-in-the-eye Devs) , right now STO is standing still ... , and instead it's getting bloated sideways ... just like most of it's over-30-w/money to spend playrbase .
It is a shame when you have a playerbase that create far more interesting storylines than what you get via the writer of Cryptic Studio.
Imagine what these players could do if they had access to a better Foundry program that will allow them to even make cutscenes etc...
Check out the foundry and compare it the weak writing of the legitimate episode chart. It is an embarrassment that the Foundry files out shine what Cryptic has to offer via their professional tools.
The storyline if that is what you want to call it has been weak from day one, it had no direction and when it did seem to find it, it had fallen along the waste side yet again. You can find no solid storyline if their was one in the first place.
It is a shame when you have a playerbase that create far more interesting storylines than what you get via the writer of Cryptic Studio.
- That quote says more about the lack of storyline than anything else (Oh, some of the more interesting foundry missions just mystery got destroyed or lost by the foundry)
Commander Shran - You tell Archer, that is three the pink skin owes me!
I have to agree the story line in STO is ummm well...yeah......weak really doesn't even begin to cover it. I think the Biggest problem with the story line isn't so much the entire plot as it is that they are throwing the story together as you go.
Really the entirety of the Klingon episode mission have absolutely everything to do with a couple of pissed off Klingons and nothing to do with why the Klingon Federation war started in the first place. The rest of the Episode missions are much the same way, nothing really fits the overall story.
What they REALLY need to do is sit down and write the STO novel or in this case Novel Series. Start right from the very beginning of either right before or right when the Klingon's break from the alliance with the federation and declare war. Then it's just a matter of linking the Klingon Episodes into that story then the transitional link to the Romulans getting involved and the missions against them. Then we get a break from the main storyline with the Cardassian missions. Then it should actually be the Breen Missions where they are trying to steal the perserver tech which secretly ends up being because they are trying to prepare for the Iconians and do a territory grab when the iconians finally come in mass.
So then the Borg decide to take advantage of the chaos going on in the alpha/beta quadrants and decide to invade hence the Borg missions and another break from the main storyline. Then Transition back to the main storyline with the Undine and to be Tholians, and then another main story break with the whole New Romulus thing.
____
In this very simple way the entire main storyline could be linked together and make perfect sense. It would allow for the continuation of a story line while still holding onto the storyless STFS and PVE. Actually if the Normal STFS were lowered in starting rank to coincide with the placement of the borg missions they could be woven into the Borg invasion part of the storyline....ie prove yourself in battle against the Borg enough and you become trusted enough for the elite missions.
Another big part to the storyline is that it should be looked into as a Trilogy. Meaning every 3 years a main storyline is finished and they start with the next. The most favorite missions from the previous story line could be made into holodeck stand alone missions/episode strings, and the rest be retired out to make room for the new story line missions. I can honestly say I've never seen an mmo do somthing of this nature, but if they did it would really make them stand out.
STO Storyline takes the entire Trek universe and puts it smack center of pure Chaos.
STOverse is basically Chaos out of control to the max, it is meaningless violence after violence with the Federation smack dab at the center.
STOverse Klingon View -
"We are Warriors, let us reclaim our Pride and Blow every TOM, DlCK, and HARRY from the face of the universe !"
STOverse Federation View -
"Crowd control, Crowd Control, forget the Prime Directive or anything Trek related. Lets disregard rank and give an Ensign a commission - Now go out there and Fight those Klingon TRIBBLE, while you're at it - Kill Gorn, Nausicaans, Orions, every TOM, DlCK, & HARRY you see out there."
The Writer's view of Captains & Admirals:
Captain James Kurland - The most incompetent Captain in the history of Starfleet
Admiral Quinn -
No personality, I swear the guy is a wine'O - He never seems to be at his desk. Probably at the bar over at ESD Club. Regardless, there is no interesting aspect to this guy other than him shoving noobie missions in your face.
These are but just two small examples of no personality development for major NPCs of the game.
Let us not forget brave and heroic Captain Shon... He is unable to complete even the more basic of tasks. He does try his very best to sabotage what may be one of the most important diplomatic meetings at the time of the game. During the posterior escape is unable to arm himself without help. Even later he does need help to get the Belfast to safety without the player's ship giving him a hand. Then he does get his ship blown up.
He does receive the Enterprise F for his great service to the Federation. Then he goes and does manage to get it disabled on his very first mission as its commanding officer.
One does have to wonder who does write this stuff.
Basically Cryptic Designed this to be WoW-Trek where they should have made it more EvE-Trek.
...
I know it came out much later, but Swtor told each of the class stories Brilliantly.
I disagree with everything you just said, but those two quotes most trenuously. Eve I've already railed against, but the TOR part... The class stories that didn't just repeat themselves over and over on each planet until the first Act was over were still scattered and overwrought, and lacked the 'tell the story through gameplay' lesson that everyone in the gaming industry SHOULD have learned from Half-Life in 1998. Of course, STO also sometimes suffers the problem of boring talking-heads cutscenes for brief, immediate encounters instead of dialogue happening while you run into and around with a character, but not as consistently as that execrable, $200 million farce.
Just to reinforce this point I would like you to check what Squidheadjax did wrote. Does not the "Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist cesspool like Eve" is reveal more about what is right and wrong about people than any number of stories born from the desire of a given writer to preach his or her worldview to all who would listen? And it is important to point at how many of the stories and situations that did emerge on Eve, it being the example others did give and not a game I do particularly enjoy, do echo the kind of stories times of warring warlords with no central government to answer to did spawn in our own history.
Hellish as you may find Eve to be it is actually telling a story about our own nature and about who we are behind the beautiful silks of civilization we do like to wear. Is there a deeper moral message? Is there a more meaningful tale? Will a NPC written by the kind of writters who do write for STO have more meaning?
I don't need to play a game to find out that people left to their own devices tend to become petty tyrants on whatever scale they are able. That's the only story I ever actually see emerging from that sort of game and I have no desire to play that.
We could easily have a realm vs realm system with Klingons, Federation, and Romulans fighting it out for control and faction wide benefits that does limit PvP between players of the same faction to duels, warfare between guilds inside a faction to indirect power plays (give detailed information about the holdings of Fleet X to the enemy so they do lose their holdings in a surprise attack and then pay the enemy guild that did capture those so that they let you conquer them in the next Realm vs Realm event for example), and realm vs realm PvP to two to four hours each day (similarly to how events do currently work) where the leaders of the ten most powerful fleets in a faction do participate in voting policy that does affect the entire faction and do set objectives so that characters that do participate in the involved battles do get extra rewards to influence how the war does proceed (defend this place, attack this place, kill players from this enemy guild), and where a guild can only own a starbase on an actual system it does control (wich will change hands if the system is conquered by an enemy guild). This would keep the intrigue, power plays, betrayals, and peer pressure without the 'Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist' elements going in full swing as there are still rules and laws in place, both hard-coded ones and ones that the 'ruling houses' do decide to impose on the faction they do belong to.
That's just one random example.
None of those suggestions would make a proposed game less Eve-like, but they'd sure as hell make it less Trek-like. PvP-driven sandbox mechanics always either devolve into (or are designed as) a playground filled with bullies because that's what they are.
Something like the original design of SWG*, where the primary sandbox aspect was building rather than tearing down what other people have built, would be the starting point. Before the Holocron grind destroyed the society and economy that people had built with the intention of actually living and interacting with the world, it was a game that had its life breathed into it by the players and their work. One of the huge aspects of that was putting what almost every other game treats as merely a side thing, the non-combat professions, on the same game-mechanics footing as combat and treating it as part of a coherent** characer-development system.
*Of course, setting aside the innumerable structural flaws that demonstrated the SWG dev team's lack of ability to actually competently implement their design.
**Again, to the extent that SWG was coherent at all. But SOE's incompetence doesn't mean someone else couldn't succeed.
I don't need to play a game to find out that people left to their own devices tend to become petty tyrants on whatever scale they are able. That's the only story I ever actually see emerging from that sort of game and I have no desire to play that.
Do pay attention to context. My post was mostly in response to someone who did mention the presence of moral messages and similar in videogame stories. A moral message isolated from human nature is little more than delusional. A moral message that would not reproduce itself naturally in a conductive enviroment is isolated from human nature.
PvP-driven sandbox mechanics always either devolve into (or are designed as) a playground filled with bullies because that's what they are.
I did never met these armies of bullies everyone does seem to find in PvP driven MMOs and I did play several. And what I did describe was more of a Realm vs Realm driven MMO than an open PvP sandbox one.
Comments
I'd say the story is the weakest part of the game. I typically play games for the story rather than the gameplay, and I can barely get into the story here.
Fanfiction! ZOMG! Read it now!
kate-wintersbite.deviantart.com/art/0x01-Treachery-293641403
i suppose you also remember every single character from every single episode of every single star trek series eh?
Do you even Science Bro?
I made a proposal that included this very thing a week or so ago. In essence, it would alternate between random sandbox environments ripe for exploration, and rigid, railroaded story missions.
I agree with everything in this post.
Including movies, there are a total of 727 episodes of Star Trek. I remember most of them.
Yeah, almost all of Romulan Space is in the Beta Quadrant. Cardassian space is in the Alpha Quadrant. Federation space is in both. Klingon space is also mostly in the Beta Quadrant. The Hirogen... Um, they're interesting because Voyager established their civilization as being stretched across half the Delta Quadrant and into the Beta Quadrant.
My character Tsin'xing
Gamma Orionis is in the far 'southern' Alpha Quadrant, where Federation space actually wraps around the Klingon Empire for a long stretch. The Star Charts stuck a lot of planets visited in TOS, along with the Mutara Nebula, down there. So, basically, the Borg are bulldozing the original 1701's legacy.
Basically Cryptic Designed this to be WoW-Trek where they should have made it more EvE-Trek.
I love the game play. Space battles are fun and Ground Combat isnt bad either. The Story, I didnt Hate it but there was just so more they should have done. Im sure Most of Us are Familiar with Star Trek: Legacy. They way that each 'arc' is told in that game should be how each Story should be told in STO. Not so much in the Cinematic/Voice over way. But also in the way its currently being delievered [Read a Box of Text, Go and do what it says].
There should also be repercussions and changes based on what you picked. Now, I know it came out much later, but Swtor told each of the class stories Brilliantly. As an Imperial agent in swtor you could secretly work for the Republic. It wouldn't take much for a 'Captain' to become sympathetic to the Klingon's and hand them information, Reports etc. And after enough of these 'Reports' are handed in we see a Klingon Advance on a certain sector, Maybe even Read/hear about it. Even a mission or two when you 'rendezvous with a klingon ship in a shuttle to Hand over secret documents/new technology' and Some NPC Fed ships catch you, This leads to you choosing weither to shoot at the federation Or Klingon NPC's or You then Either help destroy the Fed ship or say this was the Klingon's Idea and they were giving information to you and the fed ship's presence blew it. Thus saving your cover. Same could be done with the Cardie's, Romulan's etc etc etc.
Cryptic/PWE could even add stuff for the Klingon's/Fed to the C-store based on Ingame events. (This would be mostly in the form of Ships of course) I mean, The Dev's Keep a Record of Documents/Technology sent From one faction to the Other, Then upon reaching X ammount of Documents/Tech sent a Federation/Klingon Hybrid ship gets released. Like a Klingon BoP with Ablative armor generators etc.
Just a thought.
You have to read a novel. You have to read a jumbled "path to 2409." Then, you get to play STO and try to make connections between what you are doing and what you think you're supposed to be doing. Every once in awhile, in between something that seems to auto-generate random reasons to go here, press f, or go there and kill <insert bad guy>, you get some kind of nugget that seems to somehow relate to the story... only it tosses you some table scraps, some of which contradict other table scraps. Or, it throws you a pretty decent self-contained FE story that doesn't seem to relate much to the story that you're looking for... AND that little nugget of a good story (unrelated to the novel or the path) might end on an unresolved point that will never, ever be explained.
Now we have this jumbled mess of Iconians controlling the Undine, which started a war where we KILL everything!
It's not the fault of a writer. It's the fault of the game being what it is: an arcade shoot em up.
It is what it is. There is pretty much nothing that they could do at this point to actually resolve the majority of the threads, tangents, and diversions that somehow come together to create an actual story beyond:
"This is war. Blow stuff up. Don't ask questions. Feed the quarters into the machine."
I don't think it's fair to say, "Foundry authors can tell good stories! Why can't Cryptic?" We are writing stories for an entirely different type of Star Trek game, not the one being produced and designed by Cryptic. Our good stories are occupying their MMO real estate, but they don't mesh well with their "traditional" MMO approach. Well... my grinder and some other battleship grinders do.
Sweet Zombie Jesus, no! We don't need another "Trolls Online"
Nah. It's easy;
1. Present your undeniable evidence of Iconians in Fluidic space to ambassadors. They decide to send you to talk with the Undine.
2. Present evidence to Undine. Discover Tal Shiar with Borg tech trying to kill you.
3. Suddenly find all the wars over. Begin to work with allies to defeat evil Romulans.
4. Epic Tal Shiar beat down. Borg assimilate their survivors as poetic justic.
5. Drive out Iconians with unexpected Undine help.
See. Five episodes. Go back to chasing space rabbits. You can use you diplomacy rank to talk your way through a lot of it if you'd like.
This game is difinitely not WOW-Trek. What work with Trek's most successful games like Armada and Bridge Commander were campaigns. This game does have campaigns, but they are more like half-assed campaigns and the worst part, the devs go and insert the FEs in places where they don't make any sense. They should have stayed at the end game not in the middle of the lame Klingon War story line which goes back and forth with the War being an extreme side note.
The devs need to go redo some missions and add some others before starting new ones like New Romulus or Nukara.
Yet, your PvE queue is filled with story-less reasons to kill X numbers of every ship of every notable race in the galaxy, while your STFs will keep you fighting a never-ending stream of Borg. At some point, given the tasks that this game wants you to complete over and over again, you have to give up on finding a reason to kill 5/5 bad guys.
They are bad guys. It is that simple with STO. Kill the bad guys. Get some lootz. Upgrade your gear. Fly an enemy ship if that makes you spend $$$. Rinse and repeat.
It was different prior to F2P. The game at least seemed to want to tell something resembling a story. Now, it wants you to do tasks. It doesn't seem to care who you are fighting. Just fight. Your reason? Dilithium.
I hope STO get's better ...
*Mumbles* Danm he has a point
I hope STO get's better ...
Yes, it's likely they'd go with "shoot five" simply because its easier to code and everyone complained about non-shooting parts of 2800. But it'd be a good reason to use those Romulan Rep and diplomacy ranks aside from the transwarps and instakill weapons.
In the idea I outlined, the final two would require shooting. If they were clever enough with the writing, your top level Romulan reputation character could convince a lot if the evil Romulans to abandon Sela. Heck, the Iconian face off could be nothing more than you and all if the NPCs standing united and forcing the Iconians to either back down of come to the negotiating table.
Star Trek is always about swatting the mosquito that keeps you from a sound sleep. Even the bad guys chill out after the mosquito is dealt with. I see this as fitting in.
But it seems they have plans already. Denise Crosby seems to be involved. I doubt it'll play out like I described it and it might just be a bunch of pew, pew.
Regardless, they can easily put the story to bed. I just outlined one way above and I'm an evil silver. And I think that after years, its about time that they do.
You mean the re-hash of the good old "Enemy was influenced by a hidden enemy"-trope? Like the one DS-9 used?
Yawn.
Yet another reason to end it and start anew.
And then they inceptioned it.
The Klingons fight the Federation because the Federation didn't believe every power in the quadrant was taken over by Undine which turned out to be true but they don't stop fighting. The Undine are doing it because they think the Federation is trying to hurt them, which they're not and even though we've proved it, they're still doing it because there's an iconian gate in fluidic space that was totally put there twenty years ago by the federation.
AND THEN OMGWTFBBQ BORG/THOLIAN/ROMULAN/ICONIAN CLUSTERFRACK.
I feel like the rommies are the main character sometimes because they're tied into every major event.
The last two parts of the Cardassian storyline is my favorite, the one dealing with Pa Wraiths and then the 2800 miniseries.
It made sense, it was interesting, and explored creative play styles.
While I do understand the point you do make I am not completely sure about it. Do notice you do focus on NPCs. What truly meaningful story can a NPC tell? He is but a prop. A good writer can turn this prop into a representation of human nature and condition, yes, but let us be honest here: Videogame writers do by general rule suck, and videogame stories do by general rule amount to little more than escapist formulaic pulp. Even in literature few writers are able to capture the human condition in either prose or verse, and those who do are not usually writing videogames about pew pew... in space!
Good as many Star Trek episodes are, and me being here does mean I do like them for what they are, they do still fail to convey the same meaning the real stories both small and vast in scope that did happen against the backdrop of, say, a world war or the three kingdoms period do manage to convey. No one did write these stories. No one did plan the events to preach his or her worldview as correct. They are simply stories about humanity that do reveal much about both what is right and wrong with us and the world. Which does have the deeper lesson?
Along the same lines I did play a few Realm vs Realm and Guild vs Guild games and at least for me the moral and message is much stronger when there is real people playing all the roles in an emergent tale. Even in a videogame the actions, skill, and behaviour of other real people can teach you something about yourself and others. What can you really learn from a story that does play the way it does play just because someone did feel like preaching? The few truly meaningful situations I did either participate of or witness in videogames do come from these games.
Let us take the Prime Directive violation story you do mention for an example. How meaningful will the result be? Without the actual control mechanisms that do regulate our behaviour (peer pressure, the consequences of breaking the law, death, or ruining a civilization that could have reached greatness for example) there is no real consequence and most players will simply pick the choice that does give them the reward that better fits their playing style or the reward they do find to be the coolest.
Do compare to the story of a guild that does betray the plan the great guilds of its realm did come up to counter the attack of the two other realms to have the enemy capture the holdings of an allied guild it does have a long standing grudge against and then let them capture it for themselves so that they can go up in rank and become important while damaging the reputation and power of the guild they did dislike. This does happen a lot in Realm vs Realm PvP. This does have actual consequences for all the involved guilds both in power, reputation, trust, and more. It may have consequences for entire realms. And depending on how it does play it can have many different morals and lessons at the same time, as well as spawn many smaller stories of heroism, betrayal, grudges, revenge, and more.
Just to reinforce this point I would like you to check what Squidheadjax did wrote. Does not the "Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist cesspool like Eve" is reveal more about what is right and wrong about people than any number of stories born from the desire of a given writer to preach his or her worldview to all who would listen? And it is important to point at how many of the stories and situations that did emerge on Eve, it being the example others did give and not a game I do particularly enjoy, do echo the kind of stories times of warring warlords with no central government to answer to did spawn in our own history.
Hellish as you may find Eve to be it is actually telling a story about our own nature and about who we are behind the beautiful silks of civilization we do like to wear. Is there a deeper moral message? Is there a more meaningful tale? Will a NPC written by the kind of writters who do write for STO have more meaning?
MMO games do have the unique opportunity to have their players be the ones that do mold the world and the experience. If the designers do give us Faction vs Faction warfare, territorial control, and a political system inside each faction you will have more epic tales and moral messages than you can shake a Lirpa at before long.
And do keep in mind Cryptic's resources are stretched thin as it is. As I do see it we do have two options: We can have them pushing out half assed content all over the board or we can have the focus on high quality gameplay mechanics and depend on natural player interaction and the mission editor for our story content. While I doubt anyone would not like a game that does it all we do have to keep in mind Cryptic will not be able to do so. We do not discuss which would be the ideal outcome. We do discuss which of the realistic outcomes would be preferable.
Lord, that was long.
Do please forgive the lenght.
@ squidheadjax:
There is no need for that. There are many good and great Sanboxy games with Realm vs Realm warfare, Guild vs Guild warfare, or both out there where things do not degrade to that point. It all depends on the design of the game. There are many from which to learn what does work and what does not work, and the potential results of each design choice.
We could easily have a realm vs realm system with Klingons, Federation, and Romulans fighting it out for control and faction wide benefits that does limit PvP between players of the same faction to duels, warfare between guilds inside a faction to indirect power plays (give detailed information about the holdings of Fleet X to the enemy so they do lose their holdings in a surprise attack and then pay the enemy guild that did capture those so that they let you conquer them in the next Realm vs Realm event for example), and realm vs realm PvP to two to four hours each day (similarly to how events do currently work) where the leaders of the ten most powerful fleets in a faction do participate in voting policy that does affect the entire faction and do set objectives so that characters that do participate in the involved battles do get extra rewards to influence how the war does proceed (defend this place, attack this place, kill players from this enemy guild), and where a guild can only own a starbase on an actual system it does control (wich will change hands if the system is conquered by an enemy guild). This would keep the intrigue, power plays, betrayals, and peer pressure without the 'Hobbesian, anarcho-capitalist' elements going in full swing as there are still rules and laws in place, both hard-coded ones and ones that the 'ruling houses' do decide to impose on the faction they do belong to.
That's just one random example.
@ jumpingjs:
I do read all of it. I do actually read all of it every single time I do replay a mission.
The dialogue is still painfully bad.
"Wahahaha! The strong will prevail! The weak shall perish! They did use a teen who did read too much Stirner and Crowley but was neither educated nor smart enough to understand the point to model me after!"
Sometimes it does make me wonder if I am a closeted maso.
And I'm a fan of the dialogue in a well done action movie.
Would you really rather play Call of Duty than watch Twister or Toy Story (both had dialogue passes by Buffy's Joss Whedon)?
What about Robert Downey Jr.'s great banter in the Iron Man movies?
Pacing, quips, and action flow are high art as far as I'm concerned. I don't want that to be emergent. I want it in the hands of a pro.
And I want Cryptic's content designers to be the pros and step up more in that regard.
What I don't want is a game where I can play with Three Steps from Hell cranked up in the background the whole time and pacing that isn't dramatically engineered but is just the result of whoever happens to be online and what they think is appropriate. I want rhythm and I want professionals acting as experts on that rhythm and timing.
It's akin to saying, "Most stand-up comics suck so I prefer to go to open mic nights. The cover is cheaper, everybody has fun when nobody tries, and I can heckle them." And my response is, "I want to see a good stand-up comic and I want to see the ones on stage try to be better."
I have seen WoW put people in tears or at least sniffles, repeatedly. I used to live in an apartment complex where everybody played. People talked about it. I haven't seen anyone really moved that way by STO content and I want to see that as a bar to shoot for. You may be a callous son of a gun who is immune to an emotionally manipulative quest in an MMO. But I have friends who are not that callous. I have fleetmates who are not that callous. And they're off playing WoW or TOR or Secret World or Fallout or even Starcraft half the time for that experience and I want them to get it here.
I am affraid we were not discussing the quips on an action movie. You did write:
And more along these lines. Thus we were discussing stories that do have a meaning, a point, a moral, and/or a message.
Comparatively few books, fewer movies, and even fewer games do have content of enough quality when mentioning meaning, point, moral, or message to hold greater value, as far as those points are concerned, than the stories and events that do grow naturally from the interaction among human beings in different situations.
Comparatively few books, fewer movies, and even fewer games do have characters of such depth as for one to find it easier to relate to and empathize with them than with an actual human being put through a much simpler drama.
And since it being 'controlled' was part of your point you can actually control the theme of the messages, morals, meanings, and points of a MMO game by molding the enviroment and creating rules and mechanics that do reflect and interact with these ideas. As Eve is one of the most mentioned games in these boards I will use it as an example: By removing, among other things, a central authority the players do have to answer to both and creating an enviroment in which both defeat and the price of victory do have a meaning and allowing the players to police themselves they did create, by art or by accident, a situation that does reflect several points of our history and does reproduce the themes and ideas these times do invoke. They did have 'control' about the messages, the morals, the meanings, and the points, and by creating an enviroment conductive to these elements instead of a scripted storyline in which they are involved they did manage to approach these topics in far more depth than a storyline by a hack writter approaching the same topics would be able to do.
Videogames are an interactive medium. MMO games are a both interactive and social one. By removing the interactivity from a videogame and the social element from an MMO a game does become little more than a bad book or a bad movie. An artist does use the strenghts of their chosen medium to express what he or she does want to communicate.
And this conversation is becoming so bloody :monocle:. XD
And on the other topic I have seen people brough down to tears, lose their faith in humanity, end or create long lived real life friendships, question their own morality, and be involved in long lived philosophical debates over the human and social happenings in an MMO they were very involved in far more commonly than I have seen people do so over the sad story or heroic sacrifice of an NPC. O.O
The only emotive heroic sacrifice I do remember from STO is that klingon that does throw himself in the doomsday machine's maw, and that's just because he did sing prettily. If it had been a player that would actually lose his very costly ship and most of his hard won character advancements and still did it to save his fleet from an enemy fleet's super weapon I would have probably have a crush on him. Bonus points if he did sing prettily over voice chat when doing so.
Edit:
And I do have to say the 'stand-up comic' example does not work properly. What I do say would be closer to prefering the naturally weird or comical situations, comments, and events that do happen in a social setting over the jokes of stand-up comics.
I did never say 'random people will write better stories than at least cheap writers.' I did instead say the natural development of social structures will organically create and develop storylines containing morals, meanings, and messages related to the enviroment in which this social development does occur and how does it interact with human nature, and thus about human nature itself. And if this enviroment does reflect a real enviroment then these messages, morals, and meaning will also reflect the messages, morals, and meanings that would naturally grow from the real enviroment it does simulate.
As it stands , instead of giving you in-your-face stories , like the ones you had in TOS/TNG -- and like you had w/the 4 FE's , and pretty much most if not all of the STO story up till S.6 -- you are getting the inverse Babylon 5 story .
B5 had all kinds of stories that were threaded togather by a slow hints toward a build up towards the Big Bad .
STO is doing just the opposite .
In STO you have all the hints right up front , but no delivery on the Big Bad (Iconians) .
So instead you get filler in the guise of Main Content , with just enough "hints" thrown about to make you think that this is about the Iconians too -- which it really isn't .
S.6 was about Starbases .
S.7 was about Reformed Romulans who have Seen the Light and were willing to do things the Federation way (while the Klings just tag along , 'cause they don't have the budget for a separate story line 4 them) .
S.8 ... -- my guess : Voth ... which will give the players ample time to chance tiny cute dinosaurs w/huge red bows on their heads .
But the Iconians will not invade , we will not fight Iconians , because unlike Babylon 5 / DS9 , the STO producers don't know or don't want to ramp up things story wise .
Today's STO is all about "stuff to do" , stuff to keep you busy .
The rest ... -- well the term "afterthought" seems to be the kindest I can think of .
Sooner or later you will however ask yourself if you find what you do in STO interesting .
Is it interesting to tag Eppohs ? Is it interesting to fill buckets (starbases , rep systems et al) ?
Is STO really just about collecting stuff and scratching your itch for some random Sci-Fi violence (or more likely predictable Sci-Fi violence) ?
The sad thing is -- we did not just imagine this games potential .
We saw some of that potential come to fruition within the games lifetime .
And saddest of all ... we came to see the game change into a sub standard (pretty) sci-fi MMO not under different ppl ... , but under the same ppl .
If it would have changed under different ppl , we would at least QQ-ed for the old regime .
The current situation just mostly leaves me feeling nausiated when I think about it .
So I think about it less and less , just as I log in less and less .
I still thank those same ppl for showing some kindness tho (like the Breen ship) .
It's not all bad , just not what it could & should have been .
First things first, you are assuming that everyone is a Trekkie, there is a distinction in my opinion between a Trekkie and a fan. Trekkie's tend to be more fanatical in regards to the Trek universe.
In regards to CRYPTIC creating the best story possible, I disagree with you. If they put their heart and soul into a story arc, flesh out the characters, and create a sensible Star Trek storyline, then you will have some very satisfied players.
Perhaps, but then again there is no helping bad scripts, bad concepts, rehash & stale premesis etc... Voyager, Nemesis, & Enterprise is what we deem toilet Trek, and for obvious reasons - They were godawful.
No it was not bad, it was down right HORRID, don't believe me, check out the link below.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Nemesis/Pictorial-1.html
It is a pictorial review and synopsis of the horror that was named Nemesis.
As I stated before both Voyager and Enterprise are trash. What even saved Voyager from complete cancellation was the inroduction of the borg and a bit of T&A from actress Jeri Ryan aka Seven of Nine, and even that was iffy - The series was kicked from a prime time station into an obscure station called UPN. However; they had more issues than just a weak storyline, it is a debate for another time.
STO has "NO" exploration in regards to the fun aspect of exploring the universe, and as far as PvP, you stated it - right now it is one of its greatest weak points. PvP currently caters to the Klingon Faction and without an interested opposing Faction it is dead in the water.
As far as Graphics, the game is indeed pretty for being 3yrs old.
Back on Topic in regards to the Storyline:
Game story telling and TV series scripts are two different things - Writing a storyline for a game is not that difficult within the context of comparing it between a show and a game.
It almost seems like the writer or writer's from the Cryptic team simply rush things out to just have something for the player base. Minimum review and thought goes into it. Lets just make X a villain and create this far out and shallow plot. They even throw in characters from Voyager just for the sake of making some lame story arc about a klingon savior. The only interesting villian in that story arc was B'Vat, and even he was NOT entirely fleshed out.
Again I am using one of many examples in how the episode flow chart is handle.
To the Credit of CRYPTIC, I do find that the Klingon story Arc is alot more interesting, in which they used a good imagination to bring certain aspect of the KDF saga alive. Unfortunately; The most interesting episodic arcs are very short due to Cryptic's reluctance to complete the KDF.
Before I became "Mr.97% negativity" -- I was a different player .
Grand Noobus to be sure ...
I did that because the first time I stood next to the Guardian of Forever I just stared and stared and stared . I literally just stared for close to 30 minutes .
I had a similar first time experience (minus the 30 min stare) with the mission into the Hobus system where you warp in and come Nose to Nose w/a Rom Warbird .
It was the exact Nose to Nose that was used so often in TNG where they had to get two ships in one shot and the only way to do that was to have them at a squirt gun distance from each other .
I flew around a ton of empty space zones/instances simply because I found it to be oh-so-pretty (at the time w/a substandard graphics card that did not even render it all to it's full potential) , and i can't even tell you how much time I wasted just walking about the 23rd century missions/interiors and the TOS ship interior .
Sometimes it's so close you can almost smell it -- or come as close as you can to "it" -- be that whatever is Your personal era of preference .
All that movement forward , all that "personal discovery" came to a screeching halt in The Year of Hell .
Ironically I was actually somewhat lucky , as I did not burn through the original content too soon so I did not have a bankspace full of Borg Engines&Deflectors by the time YoH hit . But I did by the time F2P was denounced / announced .
So there was a feeling of enjoyment in the first year .
There was excitement , there was discovery (and yes , there was also rainbow Excelsior)
At this point I'm not sure if that excitement and (for better or worse) that level of noobishness can be recaptured .
It is time to recognize that perhaps what we oldtimers are pining for are some of those initial feelings of excitement .
But we have changed , haven't we ? I know I'm way more bitter then I ever thought possible going in the first year .
And if we have changed , isn't it possible that the Devs have changed too ?
Isn't it possible that instead of the wide eyed , gleem-in-the-eye Dev of 2009 , we have a "back when we thought anything was possible (but we didn't have a budget) we made a list of stuff that we'd like to do --- and now when we have a stable budget and are about as jaded as some of our "fans" , now we simply pick stuff from that long list from 2009 and kinda sorta put it into the "seasons" w/minimum effort where possible , and even less enthusiasm . Way waaaaayyyy less enthusiasm .
We leave enthusiasm to PWE & Marketing .
We just don't have enthusiasm . We have no budget for enthusiasm . Enthusiasm is just too much work .
Oh , you could see enthusiasm in our initial year's work ? Well I suppose you can read anything into anything ... so why can't you read some enthusiasm into our current product ?
See , we're not at fault , you are ... playa ! " .
See Leviathan99 ... , from my perspective ... , it takes two to tango .
And I don't remember dancing enthusiastically w/a person who a standing in near stillness next to me .
And right now ... (unlike the first 13 months of STO , w/ it's gleem-in-the-eye Devs) , right now STO is standing still ... , and instead it's getting bloated sideways ... just like most of it's over-30-w/money to spend playrbase .
It is a shame when you have a playerbase that create far more interesting storylines than what you get via the writer of Cryptic Studio.
Imagine what these players could do if they had access to a better Foundry program that will allow them to even make cutscenes etc...
Check out the foundry and compare it the weak writing of the legitimate episode chart. It is an embarrassment that the Foundry files out shine what Cryptic has to offer via their professional tools.
- That quote says more about the lack of storyline than anything else (Oh, some of the more interesting foundry missions just mystery got destroyed or lost by the foundry)
Really the entirety of the Klingon episode mission have absolutely everything to do with a couple of pissed off Klingons and nothing to do with why the Klingon Federation war started in the first place. The rest of the Episode missions are much the same way, nothing really fits the overall story.
What they REALLY need to do is sit down and write the STO novel or in this case Novel Series. Start right from the very beginning of either right before or right when the Klingon's break from the alliance with the federation and declare war. Then it's just a matter of linking the Klingon Episodes into that story then the transitional link to the Romulans getting involved and the missions against them. Then we get a break from the main storyline with the Cardassian missions. Then it should actually be the Breen Missions where they are trying to steal the perserver tech which secretly ends up being because they are trying to prepare for the Iconians and do a territory grab when the iconians finally come in mass.
So then the Borg decide to take advantage of the chaos going on in the alpha/beta quadrants and decide to invade hence the Borg missions and another break from the main storyline. Then Transition back to the main storyline with the Undine and to be Tholians, and then another main story break with the whole New Romulus thing.
____
In this very simple way the entire main storyline could be linked together and make perfect sense. It would allow for the continuation of a story line while still holding onto the storyless STFS and PVE. Actually if the Normal STFS were lowered in starting rank to coincide with the placement of the borg missions they could be woven into the Borg invasion part of the storyline....ie prove yourself in battle against the Borg enough and you become trusted enough for the elite missions.
Another big part to the storyline is that it should be looked into as a Trilogy. Meaning every 3 years a main storyline is finished and they start with the next. The most favorite missions from the previous story line could be made into holodeck stand alone missions/episode strings, and the rest be retired out to make room for the new story line missions. I can honestly say I've never seen an mmo do somthing of this nature, but if they did it would really make them stand out.
STOverse is basically Chaos out of control to the max, it is meaningless violence after violence with the Federation smack dab at the center.
STOverse Klingon View -
"We are Warriors, let us reclaim our Pride and Blow every TOM, DlCK, and HARRY from the face of the universe !"
STOverse Federation View -
"Crowd control, Crowd Control, forget the Prime Directive or anything Trek related. Lets disregard rank and give an Ensign a commission - Now go out there and Fight those Klingon TRIBBLE, while you're at it - Kill Gorn, Nausicaans, Orions, every TOM, DlCK, & HARRY you see out there."
The Writer's view of Captains & Admirals:
Captain James Kurland - The most incompetent Captain in the history of Starfleet
Admiral Quinn -
No personality, I swear the guy is a wine'O - He never seems to be at his desk. Probably at the bar over at ESD Club. Regardless, there is no interesting aspect to this guy other than him shoving noobie missions in your face.
These are but just two small examples of no personality development for major NPCs of the game.
He does receive the Enterprise F for his great service to the Federation. Then he goes and does manage to get it disabled on his very first mission as its commanding officer.
One does have to wonder who does write this stuff.
I disagree with everything you just said, but those two quotes most trenuously. Eve I've already railed against, but the TOR part... The class stories that didn't just repeat themselves over and over on each planet until the first Act was over were still scattered and overwrought, and lacked the 'tell the story through gameplay' lesson that everyone in the gaming industry SHOULD have learned from Half-Life in 1998. Of course, STO also sometimes suffers the problem of boring talking-heads cutscenes for brief, immediate encounters instead of dialogue happening while you run into and around with a character, but not as consistently as that execrable, $200 million farce.
I don't need to play a game to find out that people left to their own devices tend to become petty tyrants on whatever scale they are able. That's the only story I ever actually see emerging from that sort of game and I have no desire to play that.
None of those suggestions would make a proposed game less Eve-like, but they'd sure as hell make it less Trek-like. PvP-driven sandbox mechanics always either devolve into (or are designed as) a playground filled with bullies because that's what they are.
Something like the original design of SWG*, where the primary sandbox aspect was building rather than tearing down what other people have built, would be the starting point. Before the Holocron grind destroyed the society and economy that people had built with the intention of actually living and interacting with the world, it was a game that had its life breathed into it by the players and their work. One of the huge aspects of that was putting what almost every other game treats as merely a side thing, the non-combat professions, on the same game-mechanics footing as combat and treating it as part of a coherent** characer-development system.
*Of course, setting aside the innumerable structural flaws that demonstrated the SWG dev team's lack of ability to actually competently implement their design.
**Again, to the extent that SWG was coherent at all. But SOE's incompetence doesn't mean someone else couldn't succeed.
Do pay attention to context. My post was mostly in response to someone who did mention the presence of moral messages and similar in videogame stories. A moral message isolated from human nature is little more than delusional. A moral message that would not reproduce itself naturally in a conductive enviroment is isolated from human nature.
I do wonder how long did you play Eve if that's your opinion on what I did mention.
And do please tell me what is so 'Trek' about STO to begin with.
I did never met these armies of bullies everyone does seem to find in PvP driven MMOs and I did play several. And what I did describe was more of a Realm vs Realm driven MMO than an open PvP sandbox one.