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Revamp the STO engine!
cavalerius
Member Posts: 126 Arc User
We're always hearing comments about how something cannot be done in the STO game because of its "outdated game engine," and the diverse yet largely obsolete functions it provides. Well, there's a simple (and yet not so simple) way to solve this problem.
Support & Demand a new game engine!
It would be a lot of work, hell just look at the coding for a simple game of Solitaire; but it can be done, otherwise Cryptic wouldn't have their 'Cryptic Engine.' Steal ( sorry, buy) another already existing engine or design a brand new one. As long as we get a Star Trek Online game which features new content not restricted by the game engine and not bug ridden.
Support & Demand a new game engine!
It would be a lot of work, hell just look at the coding for a simple game of Solitaire; but it can be done, otherwise Cryptic wouldn't have their 'Cryptic Engine.' Steal ( sorry, buy) another already existing engine or design a brand new one. As long as we get a Star Trek Online game which features new content not restricted by the game engine and not bug ridden.
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I definitely don't see the "to explore strange new worlds or seek out new civilizations" part of Star Trek
been feeling this since i joined but!! its still Trek and more so than Jar Jar Trek too
They can and have updated the engine and other programming to work out certain bugs and to introduce features that weren't available (or even possible) in older builds.
There is no easy, bug-proof engine that will feature new unrestricted content and keep all of the old content.
If they went about reworking (or creating a new) game engine, they'd not be making money. The game engine will likely get remade if/when the current engine simply can't keep up with what they're releasing. At the moment, the engine we've got does the job that Cryptic seem to want it to do, thus I doubt it'll be looked at.
I'd like to be wrong.
will never happen in this lifetime or space time continuum. i cant see pwe investing that much money and resources on rebuilding the game engine from the ground up.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I'm pretty sure STO isn't popular or profitable enough to justify a new engine. I suspect the only way we'll get one, is with STO 2.
Not feasible in the slightest. You ever wonder why MMOs are in development literally years before even their beta tests?
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Making a new engine would require tons of programmer time, and would thus be even less practical than adding functionality to the current engine. It isn't that the engine makes certain things impossible. It's that making it do things differently takes time, and for that matter, re-tooling the whole engine would take even more time.
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Because, surprise, surprise, MMO's are hard. :P
If Cryptic were to develop a new engine for STO, they would pretty much have to stop all development on the current iteration and focus entirely on the new engine if they wanted it out in a "timely" manner. And no new development in an MMO for several years is pretty much a death sentence.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
Or we could wind up with the horror that is the Source Engine. :rolleyes:
Actually, it doesn't sound easy at all to me!
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Face it, if they remake STO it will be called STO2 and all of our stuff will not transfer over. LTS will be negated (You are a Lifer on STO not STO2) :P and all the Zen you spent and Dil you made will not matter at all. The Free players will go over w/o a problem but most of the players invested in it will say FU and leave.
Now, our engine has a fair few limitations. Those are due to many factors (Being an MMO, Supporting low end machines, Decisions made early on, etc.), but it is what it is. We can, and have, and will again, improve the engine as we move forward. It is not a static thing.
you mean of course cryptics version of star trek. to destroy every world, and kill everything. yeah,
I agree, sto has never really been trek.. its just a general sci fi that happens to look like trek.
So you can't just turn the engine TRIBBLE to eleven then?
New functionality will be added as needed.
Of course they can! It's a conspiracy to put one over on us because, as we know, all developers are lazy and this is why anything we don't like happens! Because they're lazy and can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps! Return to the Gold Pressed Latinum Standard! Ron Paul 2409!
Seriously, demanding an all-new engine may as well be demanding Star Trek Online 2! I might not mind such a thing, but frankly, that's the kind of pipe dream to reserve for 2020.
And hey, has anyone noticed that WoW is ten years old and still runs on the same engine? Or that both SWTOR and the Elder Scrolls Online run on the same 2-year old HeroEngine platform? Or that EVE Online also runs on the same engine it did when it debuted?
All of these games have been updated up the wazoo, but none of them have actually traded in one engine for another. The very same concerns that keep Blizzard trying to cater to low-end machines while still making graphical improvements are the ones that constrain Cryptic as well.
People who talk trash about the Cryptic engine are know-nothings. Bearing in mind that an MMO engine isn't just about graphics but about handling an MMO in general, which is really, really difficult, the venerable Cryptic engine is one of the best around, and incredibly flexible, actually, and there aren't many that could do what it does even in STO, such as provide both ground and space combat.
Its earliest version, the CoH engine was mainly the product of one particular coding genius, and already way ahead of its time in what it could do in an MMO - full 3-d player controlled - i.e. flying - movement with combat, for example, or insane levels of customization. As a small comparison, even with a highly lauded and brilliant engine from top class developers, like the slightly later one in Guild Wars, you couldn't even jump, it only tracked movement and player control in 2 1/2 dimensions. Or consider how flight was only an on-rails travel option in WoW and most other MMOs, for ages, while CoH already had player-controlled superspeed, flight, superjump, etc. Or again, compare and contrast the difficulties CCP have had trying to make an engine that does both ground and space action in the same game. Seems simple, but really isn't.
And the Cryptic engine has already been the basis for 2 superhero MMOs, an s-f MMO and a traditional fantasy MMO, and even simply in terms of the relavitely unimportant criterion of graphics bells and whistles, there have been incremental improvements at each stage (even by modern graphics standards, Neverwinter looks pretty good). Quite an achievement really.
But yeah, it's getting long in the tooth, and while they could make it do whatever they wanted, given its age (especially the age of the version driving STO), it would probably take time and resources they evidently don't have, otherwise they would have done it already (e.g. things like being able to have multiplayer bridge action in combat, etc.)
So yeah, it's highly unlikely to happen, if ever. If one is interesting in seeing what a more modern game engine can do with the Star Trek theme, one is going to have to wait for UGC in Star Citizen.
To be fair, all the work that Egosoft put into X:Rebirth's new engine seem to have fallen to the wayside since the game itself was pretty terrible in measuring up to the previous games. :P
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
I wouldn't care one bit that my progress on this game didn't carry over to a new one. Actually, I don't want it to because the current game is nothing but a grind. The quest design has no appeal for its own sake. Negate the Skill points, XP, EC, Dil, Marks, and Lobi and what incentive do you have to play PvE missions? None, because they all suck. The only thing that is halfway decent is the PvP and that's kneecapped because Cryptic/PWE can't figure out how to turn that into a way to print money, thus they leave it half finished.
It's not just the engine that needs to be revamped, it's the incentives too. It's been too long that it's assumed that an MMORPG is, at its core, all about grinding levels and items. Role playing is about playing a part in a narrative. A level system is just another type of gate to keep players from getting to the most powerful items and outclass the NPC's, which would make the game too easy and lead to boredom. There is another way, however. Start the player with everything they will ever have in the game. Give them access to every piece of gear there is and let them figure out how to use them to overcome an ever-changing series of challenges. Make the player "level-up" their mind about how to use what they have to solve obstacles. Basically, take what they're doing with the reputation/captain traits and apply something similar to the whole game. You get everything from the start, but you have to figure out how to combine them in the limited number of slots available to you. You might have 100+ items to put into your ship/captain/boffs, but they can only hold about 20 of them at any given time. Your ship can have attributes, but only enough points to seriously invest in about 50% to 75% of them. The same with captain attributes, lots of options, but you can't use them all.
So how does Cryptic/PWE make money on all of this? They sell convenience and vanity services. Sell transwarp "tokens", but make conventional space travel worthwhile. To really make those tokens worth something to players, introduce limited supplies like torpedo ammo, ship fuel, and so on that they need to either hike back to a starbase to replenish or find a suitable source of it through exploration. Selling new ships, of course, through the C-store. They should be balanced with the existing ships, yet provide a new set of play options. Also, there's always consumables. Batteries, stat boosts, etc., can be sold for truly microtransaction scale prices (like 100 zen for pack of 5 quad batteries, thus 20 batteries would be 400 zen; dual batteries would be 25 and singles would be 10).
To be fair part of the reason the current STO Engine is so damn demanding is because it is a very heavily modified version of the City of Heroes Engine... which was then modified again for Neverwinter.
This said, with Neverwinter the core game design actually is well suited to the engine so the main modifications (which most had been done for STO "TPS Action Combat") would've been a relatively small step compared to trying create a game that can do both ground combat and space combat in a relatively "open world arena" style environment.
I mean remember STO was originally suppose to have Procedural Planet, Map and Mission Generation within the "Exploration" Nebula ... which c'mon even Cryptic cannot for a second say that is close to what they originally conceptualised.
All of the new Content they've added and been praised for by since what Series 5 with the Episodic and 6 with the "Adventure Zones" realistically worked better because they'd moved away from even attempting to do Procedural Content in favour of traditional MMO style areas that are all carefully crafted.
And that honestly is the whole issue, because really the more they do that sure for those who just want a traditional MMO with a Star Trek skin that's fine ... but it really it loses what little it had that made it feel like Star Trek, and even from launch it was dangling by a thread in that respect.
I mean every 10 Levels (Ranks... w/e it's the same thing and not even going to go into how that annoys me) there would be an amazingly crafted mission that just felt like an episode of TNG or TOS - before having more mindless MMO Grinding, pointless "Go here and do these 3 things" type missions that were just bland.
Diplomacy getting added was suppose to be amazing, but honestly it was just a memory challenge with a multiple answer test at the end.... and there really wasn't any variety at all.
Now I'd like to believe (although to be honest I don't) that most of these shortfalls with the game are literally due to the limitations of the engine stifling the creativity to craft that more open world full of adventure and intrigue that well we were promised.
And I remember the pre-launch build-up, how Cryptic were all BIG Star Trek fans... they'd read everything they could get their hands on, watched every episode, all the movies and this was going to be the definitive continuation of the prime universe with nothing to do with that JJ Abrams trainwreck action film with Star Trek painted over it.
Outside of some Fan Service aspects, what we have is a relatively by-the-numbers MMO sure with a cool concept for Ship Combat that like those movies is just Star Trek painted.
And sure I know there were a lot of people complaining about the length to reach "Endgame" and that there wasn't anything to do.... but again these are issues with a TRADITIONAL MMO with a Linear Progression System.
They did that to themselves, where in order to keep it interesting they have to keep adding content and power creeping content; with an engine that just gets ever more bloated and complex as they keep patching and hacking away to make it do what they need it to.
The sad thing in all of this is when the game was to go Free-to-Play, THAT was the opportune time to say "TRIBBLE it!" wipe the slate clean and rebuild the game from the ground up ... I mean at that point they already had basically had to custom write most of what they were doing, they had to rewrite foundry, the combat system, cut-scenes, etc...
Doing that would not only have the programmers busy redeveloping the engine, but also gives the artists a chance to move away from creating new content and go back to actually finish and polish the old content that needs it.
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It won't happen though, frankly I accepted that really this is the actual vision Cryptic had when they took over STO... they don't want to shy away from traditional MMOs to bring an experience that is not only unique but gives that sense of intrigue and wonder that Star Trek imbues in so many people.
And that is frankly what this IP (as does Star Wars) need, a company working on it because they don't simply know of or enjoy the odd thing about the Franchise they're developing for but are at their hearts truly fans that understand that in order to properly allow it to feel like your part of that universe and be a great adaptation ... it NEEDS to be a far more unique experience.
Still we'll never get that, no Publisher or even Developer is likely to take that kind of risk especially with a franchise - they want to appeal to fans of a Genre not a Franchise.
Didn't Anarchy Online change engines? It did take *years* to do though.
Edit to add:
Apparently they still are not done changing over!
http://forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php?p=6159820
Despite the superficial similarity, EVE is not a good comparison. Graphics are irrelevant, they're the easy part, although expensive time-and-resource-wise; and especially when you've got nothing to render but spaceships and a few gates and stations, changing engines isn't all that big of a deal. (CCP were of course quite cunning in limiting themselves that way.) Also, a submarines-in-space MMO with baked-in fluid mechanics and very little continuous/random player steering doesn't compare very well with the Cryptic engine's ability to track free player input in 3 dimensions across the internet. On the other hand, the baked-in nature of EVE's fluid mechanics is part of what enables it to handle massive battles - but then again, has EVE ever handled its massive battles to players' satisfaction (until TD, I guess)?
And in fact, it's notable that in the one area where CCP tried to genuinely innovate in EVE with their new engine - adding a ground-based element to gameplay - they've failed pretty spectacularly. And that's not just because space groignards - they'd have had far less trouble getting acceptance for their dream of a ground-based element in EVE, if the damn thing had worked out of the box, been more than one room with a door that never opens, and had some actual, functioning gameplay
will someone tell me why the server is kicking me off every five sec's this is bull TRIBBLE i cant evan log in now the servers are so laggy
In all likelihood, if it's only you or a limited number of people experiencing the problem, it's probably somewhere between you and Cryptic and not directly their fault. And even then, a new game engine wouldn't fix it.
The universe has a wonderful sense of humor. The trick is learning how to take a joke.
the only thing which could use a revamp is ground, i can imagine a firefall style (3rd person shooter) playstyle, but apart from that STO is pretty fine with what we got.