We are tasked with killing practially everyone we encounter on every mission we play now OP do the math how many klingons and other people did you kill before divide at impera.
Now factor in how many people are in the ships you destroyed before you did divide at impera...does a small handfull of romulans and tal shiar for that matter mean more then all the others you just butchered?
Yup yup.
But, I still have to admit.. the first time I played Divide et Impera I was really shocked at the outcome. And every time I played through it afterward I felt really uncomfortable knowing exactly what I was doing.
Hypocrisy, definitely.. but I still felt a horrible sence of wrong ._.
Yup yup.
But, I still have to admit.. the first time I played Divide et Impera I was really shocked at the outcome. And every time I played through it afterward I felt really uncomfortable knowing exactly what I was doing.
Hypocrisy, definitely.. but I still felt a horrible sence of wrong ._.
But that is what you are supposed to feel. You should feel manipulated and upset by the end of the mission. It is supposed to feel wrong. That is why I wish they had not removed it. It is one of the few missions in the game where you can feel bad for all the people you killed - rather then just killing them by the hundreds and shouting out "cool" when they disintegrate from your phaser blast. It is one of the few missions that had a sense of morality.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
But that is what you are supposed to feel. You should feel manipulated and upset by the end of the mission. It is supposed to feel wrong. That is why I wish they had not removed it. It is one of the few missions in the game where you can feel bad for all the people you killed - rather then just killing them by the hundreds and shouting out "cool" when they disintegrate from your phaser blast. It is one of the few missions that had a sense of morality.
I did feel incredibly manipulated, and naive... like will this happen again? When will this happen again? Will I be allowed to stop it? I was literally paranoid all the way to to lv50 /cry
Yup yup.
But, I still have to admit.. the first time I played Divide et Impera I was really shocked at the outcome. And every time I played through it afterward I felt really uncomfortable knowing exactly what I was doing.
Hypocrisy, definitely.. but I still felt a horrible sence of wrong ._.
Tbh if the writing had been handled better i think divide wouldve been far better then what it was as for the topic of the body count thats irrelevant compared to bad writing.
STO's writing is bad. But Cracked.com is pretty atrocious. They constantly break up lists over multiple pages for no reason other than to get more people clicking.
Some of their authors are pretty juvenile. I'm not even sure they have professional writers. Just people who show up and refuse to leave.
I mean if we want to talk about how they tell a story and weigh it in terms of Trek vs gameplay, let us? You may not care, but we obviously do if we're having a conversation about it which is a rare thing on general without spiraling into kindergarten levels quickly.
There is nothing Trek about this tho.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]Age StarTrek-Gamers Administrator
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer Star Trek Gamers
Let's not lay this at the feet of "average gamers" or modern gamers or JJTrek. There have been combat-based Star Trek games for a long long time. Star Fleet Battles (1979+), for instance. Oh, or how about Star Trek:Strategic Operations Simulator on the Atari 2600? :P
(Hmm, actually, looks like there's been millions of Trek games made over the decades. A good fraction of which sound combat-oriented.)
Of course Star Trek games are combat oriented, that's what I said in the first place. :P
Like I said, games about Peaceful exploration don't sell well, hence why there are no such games.
And I'm not placing this at the feet of "modern gamers", all gamers play games for the violence and combat, 90% of the gaming industry is based on combat.
But that is what you are supposed to feel. You should feel manipulated and upset by the end of the mission. It is supposed to feel wrong. That is why I wish they had not removed it. It is one of the few missions in the game where you can feel bad for all the people you killed - rather then just killing them by the hundreds and shouting out "cool" when they disintegrate from your phaser blast. It is one of the few missions that had a sense of morality.
I mean. I understand what the mission was trying to do. And I'm all in favor of stories that complicate and challenge the usual "good guy kill bad guy, yay" narrative of video games. The problem wasn't so much that; it was that STO just wasn't (and still arguably isn't, but back then especially wasn't) sophisticated enough to pull that kind of story off. If there had been some kind of choice available, if there had been a way to change your approach to the mission so that you rescued the civilians and to hell with what your superiors said, then it likely wouldn't have been criticized so harshly; in fact, it likely would have been remembered as one of the highlights of the game. But nope -- launch STO was strictly linear and shooty-shooty all the time, meaning that you had to slaughter innocent civilians or else you couldn't progress. Which meant that your captain was, necessarily, either a monster or a bumbling incompetent. And in so doing, it destroyed what little semblance of role-playing STO's story allowed for. That's what bothers people about it, I think; it's certainly what bothers me.
Let's not lay this at the feet of "average gamers" or modern gamers or JJTrek. There have been combat-based Star Trek games for a long long time. Star Fleet Battles (1979+), for instance. Oh, or how about Star Trek:Strategic Operations Simulator on the Atari 2600? :P
(Hmm, actually, looks like there's been millions of Trek games made over the decades. A good fraction of which sound combat-oriented.)
I actually prefer games like those which i used to play back in the day. Mostly puzzle solving stuff but you also had a few fights. But the fights were one on one iirc not you vs a whole Armada (where you outmatch everybody). The second link was a text based one but 25th Anniversary was not. In fact some of the puzzle missions in 25th Anniversary remind me of the STO mission i think its Colosseum where you approach a sattelite in orbit, and when you go to scan it you are put in a tractor. Then you have to beam over and do all the stuff with the consoles.
All deaths are the same? So it's okay if we, say, bomb hospitals during a war, because we've already been shooting soldiers on the battlefield?
The ships I destroyed on the way to that mission were warships, and it was a case of us or them - Klingons aren't well known for their desire to talk things out. But despite what the "Deltan" was telling us in Divide et Impera, that starbase was clearly exactly what it said on the tin - a medical research station. And our actions were war crimes. And the reason that mission pissed me off was because I was given no opportunity to object to the rather extreme orders we were given, nor to point out that these hardly seemed like the sort of orders a Deltan would give. And there was never any hint that we were being mind-controlled by the Undine - no, we were just happily going along with whatever bloodthirsty slaughter was proposed.
The episode was plainly written by someone with absolutely no knowledge of how a modern military organization operates. When I was in Basic, we were taught, repeatedly, that we were not merely permitted to ignore an illegal order - we were required to. "I was just following orders" didn't serve as a defense at Nuremberg, and it won't fly today; I'd like to think Starfleet is at least as enlightened as the United States armed forces.
Edit: Ninja'd multiple times, I see. Let me just wipe up this froth...
I actually prefer games like those which i used to play back in the day. Mostly puzzle solving stuff but you also had a few fights. But the fights were one on one iirc not you vs a whole Armada (where you outmatch everybody). The second link was a text based one but 25th Anniversary was not. In fact some of the puzzle missions in 25th Anniversary remind me of the STO mission i think its Colosseum where you approach a sattelite in orbit, and when you go to scan it you are put in a tractor. Then you have to beam over and do all the stuff with the consoles.
25th Anniversary was awesome, as was Judgment Rites. Totally awesome games that weren't (as) combat-oriented.
Have you played TNG: A Final Unity? It's in the same vein as 25th Anniversary, except (of course) with the Ent-D. I don't think it's quite as good, but it's still a quality adventure game that's worth checking out.
Your point is wrong. Even at war, there's a difference morally, ethically, and even legally between killing enemy combatants in action (acceptable so long as certain rules are adhered to), collateral damage in the course of destroying legitimate military targets (unpunished if unintentional but frowned on and to be avoided to the greatest degree possible) and attacking and killing civilians or medical personnel in a preemptive sneak attack (a war crime, period).
The moment you figured out they were doctors / scientists not working on illegal weapons you had a moral and legal obligation to refuse orders and abort the mission.
STO is a game, not real life. STO is not a Trek simulator. It is a combat-based MMO.
STO is about my Liberated Borg Federation Captain with his Breen 1st Officer, Jem'Hadar Tactical Officer, Liberated Borg Engineering Officer, Android Ops Officer, Photonic Science Officer, Gorn Science Officer, and Reman Medical Officer jumping into their Jem'Hadar Carrier and flying off to do missions for the new Romulan Empire. But for some players allowing a T5 Connie to be used breaks the canon in the game.
All deaths are the same? So it's okay if we, say, bomb hospitals during a war, because we've already been shooting soldiers on the battlefield?
Personally if the mission wouldve closed with a possible internal investigation into you characters actions during the mission as in investigate whether your toon as either coerced into those deaths.
Or whether you knew they were innocent and fully went along with killing them instread of the hush hush it never happened now go about life pretend it never happened etc etc BSfest we got.
As i said before the body count is irrelevant compared to how badly written divide at imerpa was they couldve easily closed the mission with quinn be apprised of what happend and an internal investigation into your actions being launched.
25th Anniversary was awesome, as was Judgment Rites. Totally awesome games that weren't (as) combat-oriented.
Have you played TNG: A Final Unity? It's in the same vein as 25th Anniversary, except (of course) with the Ent-D. I don't think it's quite as good, but it's still a quality adventure game that's worth checking out.
No havent tried TNG final unity but i'll be sure to check it out now =D ty for mentioning it.
I didn't think the problem was the killing, it was that it was really obvious the admiral was lying to you, but you had to keep going through with the mission because there was never any option to call her out on it.
first time I played this game, i was totally shocked it's all about killing and fighting. The contrary what Star Trek was about.
Then I understood, they simply took a ordinary MMO engine and repainted/renamed it.
It didn't shock me because I'd played many Star Trek games before this. In Bridge Commander, you likely kill a few thousand. In Birth of the Federation, even playing nice through diplomacy, you probably kill tens of thousands. In the Armada series, your body count probably stacks up to a million or more killed or assimilated. In the Starfleet Command series, it's probably at least as high as Armada. This is all single-player story campaigns, well, except for Birth of the Federation, which has no story to it.
This is an MMO, not a Star Trek episode simulator. That would make for a terrible game.
That old mission was a gold mine of hilarity and really made the Federation look like a bunch of buffoons. I also loved how the Federation just didn't do a damn thing after it became apparent that a damn Starfleet Admiral was a Species 8472 infiltrator for goodness knows how long. And they just go on, "Well damn, that sucks. Oh well, hey, go kill some Romulans again."
The old mission was so bad that it was good! In a Showgirls kind of way!
So to sum up the thread, some people are upset with the old Divide et Impera mission because it resembles Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 5, Episode 14 "Conundrum", where an alien "Commander MacDuff " tricks the crew into attacking and murdering his races enemies the Lysian's.
Damn Cryptic for making a mission that resembles a canon plot from TNG. Grrrrr!!! :mad:
You're missing the point. It's one thing the player character and his goons were deceived at first. But it became very apparent that things weren't right. Doubts start to occur. More and more evidence stacks as you do searches after killing researchers and doctors, that what you're doing isn't right. But what do you do?
YOU KEEP ON KILLING EVERYTHING!
You keep on killing despite knowing full well that it's all screwed up, despite the Romulan doctors begging for you to stop. You just keep on killing. And even when the mission ends and Species 8472 makes the Federation look like a bunch of fools (AGAIN), everyone shrugs their shoulders and you go off on the next mission and ignore the threat of infiltration altogether.
It's a freakin' gold mine of comedy!
Edit: There's research you come across and discover that the Romulans were developing a chemical to detect Species 8472 infiltrators. Guess what you do to that? LOLOLOL!
So to sum up the thread, some people are upset with the old Divide et Impera mission because it resembles Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 5, Episode 14 "Conundrum", where an alien "Commander MacDuff " tricks the crew into attacking and murdering his races enemies the Lysian's.
Damn Cryptic for making a mission that resembles a canon plot from TNG. Grrrrr!!! :mad:
There's a massive gulf of difference between "killing civilians and not knowing it, then feeling horrible when you find out and therefore questioning your orders" and "killing civilians, finding out that's what you're doing, and then thoughtlessly continuing anyway because apparently you're either evil or stupid".
Besides, there was actually a plot explanation for the TNG crew doing what they did (that being, they had all their memories wiped and thus had only falsified computer records and MacDuff's word to go on). Divide et Impera offered no such explanation; it was just "kill these people because you're told to, and then keep killing them even when you know better".
Like I said earlier, it could have made for a good, morally weighty episode, if STO was not designed as just a linear shooty game with no room for plot choices. It's really the lack of imagination that's at fault here, not merely the fact that there's disturbing content.
ETA: Like, what made the TNG episode compelling was the ongoing moral dilemma, and finding out whether or not these characters would be true to themselves even without their memories. It's a good bit of drama. And Divide et Impera did not have even a hint of that.
So to sum up the thread, some people are upset with the old Divide et Impera mission because it resembles Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 5, Episode 14 "Conundrum", where an alien "Commander MacDuff " tricks the crew into attacking and murdering his races enemies the Lysian's.
Damn Cryptic for making a mission that resembles a canon plot from TNG. Grrrrr!!! :mad:
Yah but how do you think TNG writers would have resolved that issue? i dont remember the end just that Troi and Ro had a little sit down over some banana sundaes or something. I cant remember if there was an official report that Picard made to Starfleet but if the TNG writers had to write it in that is probably what would have happened.
BUT i can make a guess as to how Conundrum would have ended if STO writers had finished it. Lysian central command would have been blown up. Commander McDuffie would have been promoted Captain...and then he would have blown up. All the shuttles in the shuttlebay would have launched and then been blown up. Starfleet command would have hailed the Enterprise and promoted Picard to Fleet Admiral, Riker to Captain, Troi to Captain, Data to Captain, Laforge to Captain, Ro to Captain, Worf to Captain, Dr Crusher to Captain, and Wesley would probably have been court martialed and busted down to crewman, then busted again to civilian, then busted to a 10 year old then an embryo...and then he would have blown up.
People say that a game cannot be written the same way a TV show is written.
Why the hell not?
Well, part of the problem is that, whenever Cryptic does try to give us more peaceful talky stuff, players complain that it's "boring" because they don't have enough things to shoot, because what's the point of putting all that effort into their builds if they can't shoot things?
(Which, again, comes back to the original design of STO being a game where you shoot things and very little else. Can you imagine how different the game would have been if they had included non-combat skills/classes/roles/whatever from the start?)
Of course you keep killing everything. They're ROMULANS!!! They are NOT going to believe you were tricked into attacking them by a shape shifting alien, even if they were researching stuff to combat Species 8472.
Killing them all and leaving no hard proof as to who wiped them out is the only way to keep the Romulans confused as to who was actually behind the attack.
Was it the Feds?
Was it the KDF trying to blame the Feds?
Was it Species 8472?
Was it some as yet unknown party?
Romulan paranoia will keep them from retaliating until they get hard evidence.
This is good. You should send your rebuttal to the guys and gals at Cracked, I'm sure they'd appreciate it and have feedback for you.
Comments
Yup yup.
But, I still have to admit.. the first time I played Divide et Impera I was really shocked at the outcome. And every time I played through it afterward I felt really uncomfortable knowing exactly what I was doing.
Hypocrisy, definitely.. but I still felt a horrible sence of wrong ._.
I did feel incredibly manipulated, and naive... like will this happen again? When will this happen again? Will I be allowed to stop it? I was literally paranoid all the way to to lv50 /cry
Tbh if the writing had been handled better i think divide wouldve been far better then what it was as for the topic of the body count thats irrelevant compared to bad writing.
I now point you to ENTS4EP22 and/or the adventures of Lt. Reginald "lamer" Barclay on the holodeck.
Some of their authors are pretty juvenile. I'm not even sure they have professional writers. Just people who show up and refuse to leave.
There is nothing Trek about this tho.
USS WARRIOR NCC 1720 Commanding Officer
Star Trek Gamers
Of course Star Trek games are combat oriented, that's what I said in the first place. :P
Like I said, games about Peaceful exploration don't sell well, hence why there are no such games.
And I'm not placing this at the feet of "modern gamers", all gamers play games for the violence and combat, 90% of the gaming industry is based on combat.
I mean. I understand what the mission was trying to do. And I'm all in favor of stories that complicate and challenge the usual "good guy kill bad guy, yay" narrative of video games. The problem wasn't so much that; it was that STO just wasn't (and still arguably isn't, but back then especially wasn't) sophisticated enough to pull that kind of story off. If there had been some kind of choice available, if there had been a way to change your approach to the mission so that you rescued the civilians and to hell with what your superiors said, then it likely wouldn't have been criticized so harshly; in fact, it likely would have been remembered as one of the highlights of the game. But nope -- launch STO was strictly linear and shooty-shooty all the time, meaning that you had to slaughter innocent civilians or else you couldn't progress. Which meant that your captain was, necessarily, either a monster or a bumbling incompetent. And in so doing, it destroyed what little semblance of role-playing STO's story allowed for. That's what bothers people about it, I think; it's certainly what bothers me.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_%28computer_game%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Promethean_Prophecy
I actually prefer games like those which i used to play back in the day. Mostly puzzle solving stuff but you also had a few fights. But the fights were one on one iirc not you vs a whole Armada (where you outmatch everybody). The second link was a text based one but 25th Anniversary was not. In fact some of the puzzle missions in 25th Anniversary remind me of the STO mission i think its Colosseum where you approach a sattelite in orbit, and when you go to scan it you are put in a tractor. Then you have to beam over and do all the stuff with the consoles.
The ships I destroyed on the way to that mission were warships, and it was a case of us or them - Klingons aren't well known for their desire to talk things out. But despite what the "Deltan" was telling us in Divide et Impera, that starbase was clearly exactly what it said on the tin - a medical research station. And our actions were war crimes. And the reason that mission pissed me off was because I was given no opportunity to object to the rather extreme orders we were given, nor to point out that these hardly seemed like the sort of orders a Deltan would give. And there was never any hint that we were being mind-controlled by the Undine - no, we were just happily going along with whatever bloodthirsty slaughter was proposed.
The episode was plainly written by someone with absolutely no knowledge of how a modern military organization operates. When I was in Basic, we were taught, repeatedly, that we were not merely permitted to ignore an illegal order - we were required to. "I was just following orders" didn't serve as a defense at Nuremberg, and it won't fly today; I'd like to think Starfleet is at least as enlightened as the United States armed forces.
Edit: Ninja'd multiple times, I see. Let me just wipe up this froth...
25th Anniversary was awesome, as was Judgment Rites. Totally awesome games that weren't (as) combat-oriented.
Have you played TNG: A Final Unity? It's in the same vein as 25th Anniversary, except (of course) with the Ent-D. I don't think it's quite as good, but it's still a quality adventure game that's worth checking out.
Personally if the mission wouldve closed with a possible internal investigation into you characters actions during the mission as in investigate whether your toon as either coerced into those deaths.
Or whether you knew they were innocent and fully went along with killing them instread of the hush hush it never happened now go about life pretend it never happened etc etc BSfest we got.
As i said before the body count is irrelevant compared to how badly written divide at imerpa was they couldve easily closed the mission with quinn be apprised of what happend and an internal investigation into your actions being launched.
Mine Trap Supporter
No havent tried TNG final unity but i'll be sure to check it out now =D ty for mentioning it.
STO is not a game, its a job. STO is not a Trek game. It is a gambling-based MMO.
It didn't shock me because I'd played many Star Trek games before this. In Bridge Commander, you likely kill a few thousand. In Birth of the Federation, even playing nice through diplomacy, you probably kill tens of thousands. In the Armada series, your body count probably stacks up to a million or more killed or assimilated. In the Starfleet Command series, it's probably at least as high as Armada. This is all single-player story campaigns, well, except for Birth of the Federation, which has no story to it.
You shouldn't insult the Cracked.com writers like that.
The old mission was so bad that it was good! In a Showgirls kind of way!
You're missing the point. It's one thing the player character and his goons were deceived at first. But it became very apparent that things weren't right. Doubts start to occur. More and more evidence stacks as you do searches after killing researchers and doctors, that what you're doing isn't right. But what do you do?
YOU KEEP ON KILLING EVERYTHING!
You keep on killing despite knowing full well that it's all screwed up, despite the Romulan doctors begging for you to stop. You just keep on killing. And even when the mission ends and Species 8472 makes the Federation look like a bunch of fools (AGAIN), everyone shrugs their shoulders and you go off on the next mission and ignore the threat of infiltration altogether.
It's a freakin' gold mine of comedy!
Edit: There's research you come across and discover that the Romulans were developing a chemical to detect Species 8472 infiltrators. Guess what you do to that? LOLOLOL!
There's a massive gulf of difference between "killing civilians and not knowing it, then feeling horrible when you find out and therefore questioning your orders" and "killing civilians, finding out that's what you're doing, and then thoughtlessly continuing anyway because apparently you're either evil or stupid".
Besides, there was actually a plot explanation for the TNG crew doing what they did (that being, they had all their memories wiped and thus had only falsified computer records and MacDuff's word to go on). Divide et Impera offered no such explanation; it was just "kill these people because you're told to, and then keep killing them even when you know better".
Like I said earlier, it could have made for a good, morally weighty episode, if STO was not designed as just a linear shooty game with no room for plot choices. It's really the lack of imagination that's at fault here, not merely the fact that there's disturbing content.
ETA: Like, what made the TNG episode compelling was the ongoing moral dilemma, and finding out whether or not these characters would be true to themselves even without their memories. It's a good bit of drama. And Divide et Impera did not have even a hint of that.
Exactly. Darn Career Officers! :rolleyes:
Yah but how do you think TNG writers would have resolved that issue? i dont remember the end just that Troi and Ro had a little sit down over some banana sundaes or something. I cant remember if there was an official report that Picard made to Starfleet but if the TNG writers had to write it in that is probably what would have happened.
BUT i can make a guess as to how Conundrum would have ended if STO writers had finished it. Lysian central command would have been blown up. Commander McDuffie would have been promoted Captain...and then he would have blown up. All the shuttles in the shuttlebay would have launched and then been blown up. Starfleet command would have hailed the Enterprise and promoted Picard to Fleet Admiral, Riker to Captain, Troi to Captain, Data to Captain, Laforge to Captain, Ro to Captain, Worf to Captain, Dr Crusher to Captain, and Wesley would probably have been court martialed and busted down to crewman, then busted again to civilian, then busted to a 10 year old then an embryo...and then he would have blown up.
Well, part of the problem is that, whenever Cryptic does try to give us more peaceful talky stuff, players complain that it's "boring" because they don't have enough things to shoot, because what's the point of putting all that effort into their builds if they can't shoot things?
(Which, again, comes back to the original design of STO being a game where you shoot things and very little else. Can you imagine how different the game would have been if they had included non-combat skills/classes/roles/whatever from the start?)
This is good. You should send your rebuttal to the guys and gals at Cracked, I'm sure they'd appreciate it and have feedback for you.