Inspired by this thread, and in the spirit of suggesting something positive we as players can do right now on this issue, I suggested earlier down in the Foundry forums that a future Foundry Challenge topic could be "Create a mission that takes place entirely within the player's ship."
Obviously this would not be in the proper interiors you can access in game, but rather normal Foundry missions, just taking place on maps meant to be the player's ship interior. Like a "bottle show" that you saw on the TV series. There are plenty of Fed and KDF and even Romulan interior maps available and enough parts and pieces to make decent custom builds. Doesn't solve any problems, but it could provide some fun stories on what is ostensibly the player's ship, hopefully to capture that nebulous "Star Trek Feeling."
- FULL Ship interiors cost a LOT of time/manpower/money to develop.
- There is, as players repeat constantly, nothing to do there, so players don't USE their interiors.
- There used to be more to DO in your interior, but people complained about having to run all over their ship, so all of that was consolidated to your bridge.
- There is no good reason to throw money at making these huge interiors with nothing to do in them, when players are going to run around them once, and then ignore them for the rest of time.
- Currently we've been focused more on story content, which I believe is what more players are into atm.
In other words, we won't be developing new FULL interiors without some kind of major rework to the whole system, new content surrounding them, or other major improvement to them.
Note that bridges are NOT Full interiors, and we will continue making them, I'm sure.
That doesn't mean that someday we won't shift focus away from story content, back to interiors, develop fun stuff to do there, and/or put in something like the above exploration system. It's just not going to happen right now. We have other priorities at the moment.
How about making that nice looking Federation ship interiors you made for the revamped tutorial availible to us players then?
If you look at the old TV episodes, the story half the time revolved around something going on, onboard the ship! I don't think this would be actually something hard to do. It would be like the temporal ambassador mission where they made your own boffs part of the story (well in a little bit of the way they did, but I believe that could be expanded). These don't have to be mega-epic storie missions, but something to add life to the interior. One of your favorite tactical boffs needs to talk to you in engineering. At that time your ship is boarded by naked feral ferengi women hell bent on breading, and you and that tac boff have to take phaser rifles and battle your way back to the bridge for control.. Or you and random boff (one the game chooses for you) get trapped in your ship's holodeck and have to complete some puzzles to get out. I think there is a ton that could be done here for interiors. Most of it will be single player, but it's the player's ship and his crew, so why not?
Also at some point take out the generic crew and replace them with full 3D avatars of Doffs from the player's own roster.. That would also breath some life into the ship. You might walk around your ship and see that romulan borg doff working on something, completely forgot that you had him or her and say to yourself "Im short on EC... how much could I get for you??" lol. When the doff is gone off your roster, they are gone off the ship. That would be kinda cool.
This is because the game focuses on one type of play COMBAT. If there were more of a focus on SOCIAL and CRAFTING types of gameplay, then you could make it worth your wild by attracting a more diverse crowd of the Star Trek fanbase and MMO playerbase.
Even if you gave us skeletons of corridors and the main rooms, then this rumored "Room Editor" You would bring in a whole slew of different gameplayers that just like to do deco and create (SWG was full of these type of players). Give them a new non-combat class with a different leveling path etc.. They could create rooms that are saved that you buy from them or you could hire them to work on your ship. In addition, Cryptic could sell pregen rooms or updated rooms to fill the slots. A room/lab could be a reward for a mission. Heck these could even be the missing DOFF rewards. But that is getting into social gameplay and the possibilities are limitless.
Now what to do in the interior? Well if there was a better crafting/resource system that is where you could do minigames in various labs to refine materials and assemble items. There you can monetize, reward, etc.. for the labs. But that is if you had a solid crafting/resource system.
You might say if you do all of this what will happen to social zones? People will not go there. In STO most social zones are chore centers. That would need to be fixed so they are mission/adventure hubs. More akin to what you guys are doing with the adventure zones.
So much this that it starts hurting in the chest to not see it ingame after all that time
That post should be printed out 1000 times and the walls of every cryptic/STO office be decorated with it.
Star Trek was never always about just going to a destination and having the action taking place there, a significant proportion of the franchise took place on the ships, it was an important element of Star Trek that is virtually nonexistent in this game.
I think there is room for the creation of a great many missions that could take place in a set of generic ship interior maps, some missions could be faction unique and some not. There must be some way to control map generation to switch styles and AI pathing depending on the faction of the player, so if the player is Klingon, his missions will take place on a Klingon ship, Federation a Federation ship, etc.
If something is not broken, don't fix it, if it is broken, don't leave it broken.
There could even be combat on your ship. Imagine we go full "First Contact" in a mission that shows Borg assimilating your ship. Of course "your ship" would be the reslt of a few semi-customizable generic parts but there would be deication plaques idenifying the ship as yours, you'd meet your BOFFs n the corridors, fighting etc.
Why not make it a new STF where one of the five player's ships get's chosen at random and you work together to save it.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
I am totally for the interior modification. I think I've made a post ones to add BOff interaction, and may be have some type of influence system with them, where may be you can do some quests with them or talk to them and learn some more things about who they are and what they do. May be like a generic female Andorian story arc, or a generic male Trill story arc, and have a few of those so that is we have many officers of the same race and gender then there would be a different story arc for each of them. That would already add something into the interiors! At least now we would be able to go there with an anticipation to see what new thing can we expect our BOff to tell us, or if it's possible to get to know more about them. Even this would change our view on interiors.
Also yes - it would be neat to see some of this stuff in exploration.
Now I must say I really do enjoy some of the new features the developers are adding in and I love the story lines, so please keep them coming, but the developers should still look at adding some more content into interiors and exploration. It is Star Trek after all.
Where the feature is that some customization is possible to ship interiors which translates to the mission map.
Only don't make the customizations for free. Add a reputation to it or make them Lobi items. Hell, interiors would actually give me a reason to get lobi!!!!!!!!
I also would not mind if you took all the old crappy bridges completely out of the game to make this possible.
Yes, some have cost money, but those players losing bought bridges could get some compensation in whatever currency you use for the new improved interior system.
The only interiors you should not take out ever are the TOS and the Belfast ones.
Keep those as vintage bridges/interiors available, but add a disclaimer that players who use them can't play the content for the new custom interiors or that playing those missions will not display them but a barebone standard interior.
Amateurs can make a online poker game with little effort, chess isn't that difficult either, 1980s computers were doing it.
amateur does things just fur fun. but fun don't always earn you your food.
and before you say "isn't that difficult" - try it yourself, make a game that bit more sophisticated then tic-tac-toe.
1. Put something on player's interiors, something friends and fleets can and want to do together. Games are one option, holodeck usage could be another.
huge work for no reward/money.
start in to foundry mode, make a one map yourself, count how many hours you have spent on it.
just for info, some of spotlight missions in foundry has been worked on by authors for months.
2. Make interiors customizable, this means you need a new system. Customized doesn't mean unlocked like the terrible fleet holdings. Give people the option to acquire what they want, and place it, move it, etc.
total waste. that was possible in city of heroes. huge chunk of code, less then a 1% of people have ever used it.
3. That's it, the money side looks after itself, if you give people something they want, they'll pay for it. If you can create e-peen contests for ship interiors people will pay stupidly for it. If you give reasons for people to want to go inside, then they'll be able to show everyone their e-peen and be happy.
what _you_ want isn't the same _people_ want.
fact is - only a single successful game based on that exists, its "second life".
its a niche product. it will never have the as big playerbase as WoW.
even in EVE online you can do stuff like colonizing the planets, building own starbases and such. believe it or not, only 1% of players will actually come in to that "fun".
Where the feature is that some customization is possible to ship interiors which translates to the mission map.
Only don't make the customizations for free. Add a reputation to it or make them Lobi items. Hell, interiors would actually give me a reason to get lobi!!!!!!!!
I also would not mind if you took all the old crappy bridges completely out of the game to make this possible.
Yes, some have cost money, but those players losing bought bridges could get some compensation in whatever currency you use for the new improved interior system.
The only interiors you should not take out ever are the TOS and the Belfast ones.
Keep those as vintage bridges/interiors available, but add a disclaimer that players who use them can't play the content for the new custom interiors or that playing those missions will not display them but a barebone standard interior.
I think its possible to put the content on any interior by placing the triggers not to map locations (impossible by all the different sizes as it is now) but to objects that all interiors share.
There also could always be the map parts that are shared for spawn locations; spots that might only change in texture but not size/collision. To pick an example with what we currently have take the engine room. Its the same on all 3 free federation standart interiors. Regardless if you picked small, medium or big.
But to make that real & useful you don't go for something big as the engine room (which is not the same on ALL interiors that have the luxury of having one) but for a number of very small maptiles that are on all ship interiors.
Or a mixture of bouth. It would not require to take any bridge/interior out but just tweak it a bit for the new functionality.
While we are at it, Cryptic could add a panel somewhere on the bridge with shows all bridge stations which could visually display a boff and give the option to place your boffs to these stations. It could also be used to even keep your complete bridge empty.
I think its possible to put the content on any interior by placing the triggers not to map locations (impossible by all the different sizes as it is now) but to objects that all interiors share.
There also could always be the map parts that are shared for spawn locations; spots that might only change in texture but not size/collision. To pick an example with what we currently have take the engine room. Its the same on all 3 free federation standart interiors. Regardless if you picked small, medium or big.
But to make that real & useful you don't go for something big as the engine room (which is not the same on ALL interiors that have the luxury of having one) but for a number of very small maptiles that are on all ship interiors.
Or a mixture of bouth. It would not require to take any bridge/interior out but just tweak it a bit for the new functionality.
While we are at it, Cryptic could add a panel somewhere on the bridge with shows all bridge stations which could visually display a boff and give the option to place your boffs to these stations. It could also be used to even keep your complete bridge empty.
Edit: The whole interior overall could become extensive enough that they'd have to dedicate the main part of a season update to it.
That would mean in addition to a FE taking advantage of the new mechanics they would have to add repeatable queue content taking place on the ships. Like combat drill scenarios or boarding party scenarios.
Could be pretty good, but they can't do it as a side project.
edit2
removed; missread something. Sry Alf.
Not convinced it would be that easy.
The vintage interiors have entirely different layouts and room shapes/sizes than the standard interiors.
Also there are so many alien ships in game now, that need to be taken into account.
Of course you could have a federation or klingon interior for those ships which would kind of break the immersion.
Or Cryptic makes a 4th kind of interior next to fed, kdf and roms which would basically be a generic alien interior which has a number of themed lobi customizations: Breen, Ferengi, Tal Shiar, Dominion, Cardassian....
I've only skimmed through the replies, but one major problem has yet to be mentioned.
It's antisocial.
An MMO is all about group play. Yes STO has it in the most basic and hollow sense possible, we don't exactly put our heads together to solve problems or figure out strategies, but there is a sense of teamwork and team effort.
I'm all for a revamp of exploration and crafting since they both need them, but it needs to remain simple and not overshadow team play.
An MMO is not all about group play. All it means is you have a lot of people playing the game online at the same time and that you can group up if you want to. That is why they all have content you can solo, or even group up for, and content that needs groups, thus allowing you to choose how you want to play and when.
Wow so many are clammoring for how to revisit the interior of ships, when there are so many better things to doing. Like exploring, seeking new life and new civilizations....
Sorry bottle episodes hold little to no interest to me.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
Wow so many are clammoring for how to revisit the interior of ships, when there are so many better things to doing. Like exploring, seeking new life and new civilizations....
Sorry bottle episodes hold little to no interest to me.
Then I suppose we should be thankful the player base is bigger than just you.
Wow so many are clammoring for how to revisit the interior of ships, when there are so many better things to doing. Like exploring, seeking new life and new civilizations....
Sorry bottle episodes hold little to no interest to me.
Star Trek always had both for budget reasons and for character drama a bottle episode sometimes is the better choice.
You can't have infinite exploration like in the real universe. it all is just a more or less elaborate illusion.
The less scripted something is the more generic it becomes, which is not always good and well either.
But I agree, that finding tomb stones from the Borg's 3rd dynasty era for the 167th time is not the pinnacle of what Cryptic should be capable of.
Humbly dear Taco, could we not get the best of both worlds by getting story content that takes place in a ship interior? this might be a time to consolidate interiors down so that we have a defiant type interior and the newer origin style interior for FED players, that way you can make it generic for action on other ships.
Granted this doesnt solve the issue of 'ship in a bottle' missions...but it could go a long way... (plus some interiors that aren't trashed for the foundry.... *hint hint*
That would take even more manpower to hook everything up to every single interior.
Then I suppose we should be thankful the player base is bigger than just you.
why would you want to waste time re living a ship episode? Sorry there are many other things in the universe going on. Yes I know on the show there were costs to consider. Guess what, we as players are not limited in this regard.
We can actually go explore and do things the show just couldn't do. Why waste it spending time groping through the ship?
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
I don't see why an episode couldn't be coded to have a section that occurs on your bridge map then jump to a generic corridor section then your sickbay map etc etc. But then I am not a programmer.
Anyway, in terms of pure wish fulfillment. I would like one "bottle show" style episode in the next series, preferably with variation based on career.
I like the idea of having a ship reputation level where each tier gives you a mini mission like the Romulan Rep. Ideally this could be linked into the DOFF system somehow (specifically I'm thinking the development level). But it wouldn't have to be. But anyway these mini-missions could (and should) be used to ape specific episode types, eg the holodeck malfunction episode, the "troublesome character comes aboard" episode, the warp core experiment gone wrong episode. Each level maybe unlocking something new that you could previously only access on ESD or somewhere but would now be permanently on your ship eg (EXCHANGE, improved replicators etc) and all culminating in the "Starship Mine" die-hard style mini episode where you defend the ship which you are now very attached to from some invaders all by yourself (I guess that would probably be like a cross between "To Boldy Go" and "Temporal Ambassador). Even better let you choose which of your BOFFs fulfil which roles in the mission before it starts to increase replay value.
Also a long way down the line this could be expanded to have different rewards for doing it on different ships (eg completing a science ships reputation get's you a sweet secondary deflector)
Ah but you see, we dont have just 3 federation interiors, we have 5.
TOS and Belfast interiors thats the issue, you cannot unring that bell as people brought and use those interiors and thats not counting ships with just a bridge.
If we get interiors for missions then all ships with just a bridge will need to have a interior as well, this means the Andorian, Tholian, D'Kora, Breen, Jem'hadar, Cardassian, Voth, Eliachi, Hirogen, Risa and Dyson that would have to be build, I dont think this is a issue because they would be maps that could be further used even if it would take significant time.
The current systems needs to be scrapped because simply it doesnt work for future use, we also dont need those 3 "standard" interiors since they are pretty much a rush job, the TOS and Belfast interiors should be the standard to use.
That was meant as example to eventually make make it easier to understand for some. Looks like its backfired
I do have the belfast on two of my defiant/variants and love it; also saw the TOS interior on a fleetmates ship and was really blasted away with its awesome quality & details (IMO even better than belfast but did not buy it though, feels to weird on modern starcruisers).
I'm aware that probably nothing that could be done to make interiors the fun & useful addition to the game that they should have been from the beginning is an quick & easy job. But its very far from impossible.
Of course there needs to be some stuff to do in there. Certain minigames like chess (either with another player or vs. AI in form of a boff) or some cardgames. It needs to keep the player invested in it; and that of course will not work with a halfassed try which only keeps 1% interested.
In the end it opens up a gigantic amount of new microtransaction options which sooner or later will be needed anyway (New Minigames; Furniture packs; Skinpacks [blue vs. orange LCARS]; etc).
If Cryptic restricts STO to just a space shooter with RPG elements they just shoot themself in the foot in the long run.
amateur does things just fur fun. but fun don't always earn you your food.
and before you say "isn't that difficult" - try it yourself, make a game that bit more sophisticated then tic-tac-toe.
huge work for no reward/money.
start in to foundry mode, make a one map yourself, count how many hours you have spent on it.
just for info, some of spotlight missions in foundry has been worked on by authors for months.
total waste. that was possible in city of heroes. huge chunk of code, less then a 1% of people have ever used it.
what _you_ want isn't the same _people_ want.
fact is - only a single successful game based on that exists, its "second life".
its a niche product. it will never have the as big playerbase as WoW.
even in EVE online you can do stuff like colonizing the planets, building own starbases and such. believe it or not, only 1% of players will actually come in to that "fun".
Um, really, why would the devs even develop a poker game? The logic is out there, modular for them to buy and insert with not that much difficulty. Chess is far less popular, but it'd be far cheaper to just buy it then recreate the wheel.
Where do your 1% stats come from?
There are many many games out there that deal with designing, customizing and building.
Putting bad systems in a game and not having them used isn't a valid point and rationalization that something doesn't or can't work.
The foundry isn't a in game object placement system, it also isn't what the devs use to make missions or scenes. This point is invalid.
At this point in the game, it needs new life in a major way. When S6 came it changed the game, but right now it is stale and dying. Anyone with half a brain has combat figured out and falls asleep during it, the power creep is really a power sprint. Shooting things that pose no real threat isn't fun, its a grindy mindnumbing mess.
But no, you are right, we don't want new stuff, we want more ships, more lock boxes, more missions that you have figured out half way through it the first time and only need to grind it 35x more to get something you'll never use. This is Star Trek, and anything that doesn't involve enemies and smashing a space bar shouldn't exist.
- FULL Ship interiors cost a LOT of time/manpower/money to develop.
- There is, as players repeat constantly, nothing to do there, so players don't USE their interiors.
- There used to be more to DO in your interior, but people complained about having to run all over their ship, so all of that was consolidated to your bridge.
- There is no good reason to throw money at making these huge interiors with nothing to do in them, when players are going to run around them once, and then ignore them for the rest of time.
- Currently we've been focused more on story content, which I believe is what more players are into atm.
In other words, we won't be developing new FULL interiors without some kind of major rework to the whole system, new content surrounding them, or other major improvement to them.
Note that bridges are NOT Full interiors, and we will continue making them, I'm sure.
That doesn't mean that someday we won't shift focus away from story content, back to interiors, develop fun stuff to do there, and/or put in something like the above exploration system. It's just not going to happen right now. We have other priorities at the moment.
May I quote you, well I just do it !!!
There was a hype for it and when you made some ships there were complaints from people indeed...
Before that was a thread from doing everything from your bridge where stahl and Gekko replied sector space is not going to be removed period....
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
- FULL Ship interiors cost a LOT of time/manpower/money to develop.
- There is, as players repeat constantly, nothing to do there, so players don't USE their interiors.
- There used to be more to DO in your interior, but people complained about having to run all over their ship, so all of that was consolidated to your bridge.
- There is no good reason to throw money at making these huge interiors with nothing to do in them, when players are going to run around them once, and then ignore them for the rest of time.
- Currently we've been focused more on story content, which I believe is what more players are into atm.
In other words, we won't be developing new FULL interiors without some kind of major rework to the whole system, new content surrounding them, or other major improvement to them.
Note that bridges are NOT Full interiors, and we will continue making them, I'm sure.
That doesn't mean that someday we won't shift focus away from story content, back to interiors, develop fun stuff to do there, and/or put in something like the above exploration system. It's just not going to happen right now. We have other priorities at the moment.
Any chance we can get a bit of time allocated to getting trophies working on Romulan ships? Such a beautiful interior, and you give us trophies as part of the first story arc, but no way to display them.
And for new ships that don't get full interiors can you at least do a trophy hookup in the ready room or something? Kinda bites that you give us trophies and then don't give us any way of displaying them.
Wow so many are clammoring for how to revisit the interior of ships, when there are so many better things to doing. Like exploring, seeking new life and new civilizations....
Sorry bottle episodes hold little to no interest to me.
Which is why I was suggesting this as part of the Exploration mechanic. Instead of supposedly "exploring" in a 2x2 zone, be in your ship as you fly "out there" looking for planets. As you find encounters, you interact with your bridge crew just like the shows did.
Then you beam down or over or cut to space battle mode and do the exploration mission as normal.
On the other topic this thread has grown into; Bottle Episodes may be predominatly boring, but they are Trek. I will agree that I'm not sure they could be done well in an MMO, not without a well-scripted storyline to back it up.
I totally agree with the poster from before who suggested a Bottle Episode as a Foundry Challenge.
Eh, I love my beam boats. I enjoy blowing up Borg cubes. I even have a good time gunning down Dino-Rider rejects. The game just needs more "Trek TV show" than "Recent Trek Movie". I think it could work, and would be well received.
But I'm no programmer, I'm just a guy with a keyboard and some Wall of Crazy ideas.
So what did happen to that lovely new interior that had time well spent on...you (CRYPTIC) flipped the switch or what have you for the damn bridge which isn't bad minus the oversized doors for the auto bridge now but the rest of that interior for the tutorial was just spot on and still has not seen light of day to be the standard for our ships...what gives seriously?
Which is why I was suggesting this as part of the Exploration mechanic. Instead of supposedly "exploring" in a 2x2 zone, be in your ship as you fly "out there" looking for planets. As you find encounters, you interact with your bridge crew just like the shows did.
Then you beam down or over or cut to space battle mode and do the exploration mission as normal.
On the other topic this thread has grown into; Bottle Episodes may be predominatly boring, but they are Trek. I will agree that I'm not sure they could be done well in an MMO, not without a well-scripted storyline to back it up.
I totally agree with the poster from before who suggested a Bottle Episode as a Foundry Challenge.
Eh, I love my beam boats. I enjoy blowing up Borg cubes. I even have a good time gunning down Dino-Rider rejects. The game just needs more "Trek TV show" than "Recent Trek Movie". I think it could work, and would be well received.
But I'm no programmer, I'm just a guy with a keyboard and some Wall of Crazy ideas.
And I get why you wanted it, you wanted to interact with the Boffs for once instead of just staring at them on a screen or just watching them follow you around like a pack of puppies.
I got no problem with that. What I had a problem with was the way people fixated on the whole inside the ship part. To me that's a SMALL part of trek. Real part, was out there somewhere.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
I'm no programmer, but shouldn't it be possible to implement a set of numbered spawn points in ship interior for internal missions? Each ship would have, say, 10 spawn points, numbered 1 through 10. The points would be in different locations for each interior, but would always be numbered 1-10.
When a "repel boarders" mission appears, the game could spawn groups of enemies at a set of numbered spawn points. Any enemy spawned at point 1 will always spawn at point 1, but exactly where point 1 is depends on the ship. It could be in sickbay on a Defiant and main engineering on a warbird.
You could do something similar with other NPCs, effects, and consoles.
Comments
Obviously this would not be in the proper interiors you can access in game, but rather normal Foundry missions, just taking place on maps meant to be the player's ship interior. Like a "bottle show" that you saw on the TV series. There are plenty of Fed and KDF and even Romulan interior maps available and enough parts and pieces to make decent custom builds. Doesn't solve any problems, but it could provide some fun stories on what is ostensibly the player's ship, hopefully to capture that nebulous "Star Trek Feeling."
How about making that nice looking Federation ship interiors you made for the revamped tutorial availible to us players then?
Also at some point take out the generic crew and replace them with full 3D avatars of Doffs from the player's own roster.. That would also breath some life into the ship. You might walk around your ship and see that romulan borg doff working on something, completely forgot that you had him or her and say to yourself "Im short on EC... how much could I get for you??" lol. When the doff is gone off your roster, they are gone off the ship. That would be kinda cool.
So much this that it starts hurting in the chest to not see it ingame after all that time
That post should be printed out 1000 times and the walls of every cryptic/STO office be decorated with it.
Yeah, I know, silly. But... *sigh*
I think there is room for the creation of a great many missions that could take place in a set of generic ship interior maps, some missions could be faction unique and some not. There must be some way to control map generation to switch styles and AI pathing depending on the faction of the player, so if the player is Klingon, his missions will take place on a Klingon ship, Federation a Federation ship, etc.
Why not make it a new STF where one of the five player's ships get's chosen at random and you work together to save it.
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Also yes - it would be neat to see some of this stuff in exploration.
Now I must say I really do enjoy some of the new features the developers are adding in and I love the story lines, so please keep them coming, but the developers should still look at adding some more content into interiors and exploration. It is Star Trek after all.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
A bottleshow epiisode set on the players ship.
Where the feature is that some customization is possible to ship interiors which translates to the mission map.
Only don't make the customizations for free. Add a reputation to it or make them Lobi items. Hell, interiors would actually give me a reason to get lobi!!!!!!!!
I also would not mind if you took all the old crappy bridges completely out of the game to make this possible.
Yes, some have cost money, but those players losing bought bridges could get some compensation in whatever currency you use for the new improved interior system.
The only interiors you should not take out ever are the TOS and the Belfast ones.
Keep those as vintage bridges/interiors available, but add a disclaimer that players who use them can't play the content for the new custom interiors or that playing those missions will not display them but a barebone standard interior.
and before you say "isn't that difficult" - try it yourself, make a game that bit more sophisticated then tic-tac-toe. huge work for no reward/money.
start in to foundry mode, make a one map yourself, count how many hours you have spent on it.
just for info, some of spotlight missions in foundry has been worked on by authors for months. total waste. that was possible in city of heroes. huge chunk of code, less then a 1% of people have ever used it. what _you_ want isn't the same _people_ want.
fact is - only a single successful game based on that exists, its "second life".
its a niche product. it will never have the as big playerbase as WoW.
even in EVE online you can do stuff like colonizing the planets, building own starbases and such. believe it or not, only 1% of players will actually come in to that "fun".
I think its possible to put the content on any interior by placing the triggers not to map locations (impossible by all the different sizes as it is now) but to objects that all interiors share.
There also could always be the map parts that are shared for spawn locations; spots that might only change in texture but not size/collision. To pick an example with what we currently have take the engine room. Its the same on all 3 free federation standart interiors. Regardless if you picked small, medium or big.
But to make that real & useful you don't go for something big as the engine room (which is not the same on ALL interiors that have the luxury of having one) but for a number of very small maptiles that are on all ship interiors.
Or a mixture of bouth. It would not require to take any bridge/interior out but just tweak it a bit for the new functionality.
While we are at it, Cryptic could add a panel somewhere on the bridge with shows all bridge stations which could visually display a boff and give the option to place your boffs to these stations. It could also be used to even keep your complete bridge empty.
edit2
removed; missread something. Sry Alf.
Not convinced it would be that easy.
The vintage interiors have entirely different layouts and room shapes/sizes than the standard interiors.
Also there are so many alien ships in game now, that need to be taken into account.
Of course you could have a federation or klingon interior for those ships which would kind of break the immersion.
Or Cryptic makes a 4th kind of interior next to fed, kdf and roms which would basically be a generic alien interior which has a number of themed lobi customizations: Breen, Ferengi, Tal Shiar, Dominion, Cardassian....
It's antisocial.
An MMO is all about group play. Yes STO has it in the most basic and hollow sense possible, we don't exactly put our heads together to solve problems or figure out strategies, but there is a sense of teamwork and team effort.
I'm all for a revamp of exploration and crafting since they both need them, but it needs to remain simple and not overshadow team play.
Sorry bottle episodes hold little to no interest to me.
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Then I suppose we should be thankful the player base is bigger than just you.
Star Trek always had both for budget reasons and for character drama a bottle episode sometimes is the better choice.
You can't have infinite exploration like in the real universe. it all is just a more or less elaborate illusion.
The less scripted something is the more generic it becomes, which is not always good and well either.
But I agree, that finding tomb stones from the Borg's 3rd dynasty era for the 167th time is not the pinnacle of what Cryptic should be capable of.
why would you want to waste time re living a ship episode? Sorry there are many other things in the universe going on. Yes I know on the show there were costs to consider. Guess what, we as players are not limited in this regard.
We can actually go explore and do things the show just couldn't do. Why waste it spending time groping through the ship?
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Anyway, in terms of pure wish fulfillment. I would like one "bottle show" style episode in the next series, preferably with variation based on career.
I like the idea of having a ship reputation level where each tier gives you a mini mission like the Romulan Rep. Ideally this could be linked into the DOFF system somehow (specifically I'm thinking the development level). But it wouldn't have to be. But anyway these mini-missions could (and should) be used to ape specific episode types, eg the holodeck malfunction episode, the "troublesome character comes aboard" episode, the warp core experiment gone wrong episode. Each level maybe unlocking something new that you could previously only access on ESD or somewhere but would now be permanently on your ship eg (EXCHANGE, improved replicators etc) and all culminating in the "Starship Mine" die-hard style mini episode where you defend the ship which you are now very attached to from some invaders all by yourself (I guess that would probably be like a cross between "To Boldy Go" and "Temporal Ambassador). Even better let you choose which of your BOFFs fulfil which roles in the mission before it starts to increase replay value.
Also a long way down the line this could be expanded to have different rewards for doing it on different ships (eg completing a science ships reputation get's you a sweet secondary deflector)
That was meant as example to eventually make make it easier to understand for some. Looks like its backfired
I do have the belfast on two of my defiant/variants and love it; also saw the TOS interior on a fleetmates ship and was really blasted away with its awesome quality & details (IMO even better than belfast but did not buy it though, feels to weird on modern starcruisers).
I'm aware that probably nothing that could be done to make interiors the fun & useful addition to the game that they should have been from the beginning is an quick & easy job. But its very far from impossible.
Of course there needs to be some stuff to do in there. Certain minigames like chess (either with another player or vs. AI in form of a boff) or some cardgames. It needs to keep the player invested in it; and that of course will not work with a halfassed try which only keeps 1% interested.
In the end it opens up a gigantic amount of new microtransaction options which sooner or later will be needed anyway (New Minigames; Furniture packs; Skinpacks [blue vs. orange LCARS]; etc).
If Cryptic restricts STO to just a space shooter with RPG elements they just shoot themself in the foot in the long run.
Where do your 1% stats come from?
There are many many games out there that deal with designing, customizing and building.
Putting bad systems in a game and not having them used isn't a valid point and rationalization that something doesn't or can't work.
The foundry isn't a in game object placement system, it also isn't what the devs use to make missions or scenes. This point is invalid.
At this point in the game, it needs new life in a major way. When S6 came it changed the game, but right now it is stale and dying. Anyone with half a brain has combat figured out and falls asleep during it, the power creep is really a power sprint. Shooting things that pose no real threat isn't fun, its a grindy mindnumbing mess.
But no, you are right, we don't want new stuff, we want more ships, more lock boxes, more missions that you have figured out half way through it the first time and only need to grind it 35x more to get something you'll never use. This is Star Trek, and anything that doesn't involve enemies and smashing a space bar shouldn't exist.
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Nothing to do anymore.
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May I quote you, well I just do it !!!
There was a hype for it and when you made some ships there were complaints from people indeed...
Before that was a thread from doing everything from your bridge where stahl and Gekko replied sector space is not going to be removed period....
"Coffee: the finest organic suspension ever devised. It's got me through the worst of the last three years. I beat the Borg with it."
Any chance we can get a bit of time allocated to getting trophies working on Romulan ships? Such a beautiful interior, and you give us trophies as part of the first story arc, but no way to display them.
And for new ships that don't get full interiors can you at least do a trophy hookup in the ready room or something? Kinda bites that you give us trophies and then don't give us any way of displaying them.
Which is why I was suggesting this as part of the Exploration mechanic. Instead of supposedly "exploring" in a 2x2 zone, be in your ship as you fly "out there" looking for planets. As you find encounters, you interact with your bridge crew just like the shows did.
Then you beam down or over or cut to space battle mode and do the exploration mission as normal.
On the other topic this thread has grown into; Bottle Episodes may be predominatly boring, but they are Trek. I will agree that I'm not sure they could be done well in an MMO, not without a well-scripted storyline to back it up.
I totally agree with the poster from before who suggested a Bottle Episode as a Foundry Challenge.
Eh, I love my beam boats. I enjoy blowing up Borg cubes. I even have a good time gunning down Dino-Rider rejects. The game just needs more "Trek TV show" than "Recent Trek Movie". I think it could work, and would be well received.
But I'm no programmer, I'm just a guy with a keyboard and some Wall of Crazy ideas.
Currently cruising the Pi Canis Sector Block...
And I get why you wanted it, you wanted to interact with the Boffs for once instead of just staring at them on a screen or just watching them follow you around like a pack of puppies.
I got no problem with that. What I had a problem with was the way people fixated on the whole inside the ship part. To me that's a SMALL part of trek. Real part, was out there somewhere.
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When a "repel boarders" mission appears, the game could spawn groups of enemies at a set of numbered spawn points. Any enemy spawned at point 1 will always spawn at point 1, but exactly where point 1 is depends on the ship. It could be in sickbay on a Defiant and main engineering on a warbird.
You could do something similar with other NPCs, effects, and consoles.