I wish there was some way to connect "No Man's Sky" to STO.
Would love to be able to fly my STO ship off the edge of our current Trek map and into that universe.
Keep all the stuff we have, but use that game for exploration.
Ah to dream...
Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, Star Citizen... All were stated by STO players to kill off Star Trek Online because they would allow genuine exploration in giant, procedurally generated worlds. Elite Dangerous is out already, No Man Sky I am not quite sure, Star Citizen maybe perhaps one day (I "backed" that one.)
But they won't kill STO. Some STO players might leave STO for one of these games, but I suspect many won't, because the gameplay is somethnig completely different, the setting is different, the story-telling is different.
Star Citizen specifically... I think it will (and has already) attract a lot of people, but even though I backed it, I am so far pretty disappointed in the gameplay. It turns out I am too old or have too little time for the complex controls it has. I hope things improve and I will manage to beat more than 3 waves tops in a Vanduul Swarm mode, but I am very, very pessimistic for now. I hope that I'll at least manage to play through Squadron 42.
Sure, Star Trek's "theme" is exploration. But a lot of that is just background noise. Countless of times does the Enterprise actually encounter people they already know (like Romulans, Klingons, Cardassian, Ferengi, colonies, Federation member worlds) and the plot revolves around them. And since Star Trek is a TV show primarily, of course every "exploration" has a plot - there isn't an episode that just consists of cataloguing biosamples and making tricorder scans or long and short range sensor scans of stellar phenomena. There is always something else going on.
And the "something else" is something that is missing (so far) from Elite Dangerous and probably the other "exploration" games mentioned above.
And the "something else" is what Cryptic has been focused on delivering since the release of the game (and seemingly has intensified even since Delta Rising).
I am certainly eager to see what the developers are cooking up in terms of the "new" exploration system. But for now I won't get my hopes up too much. Regardless of whether you're a fan of exploration as background (with the focus on the "smoething else") or exploration as focus (with meeting new things and going where no one has gone before, even if it's just another uninhabitated star system).
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
(...)
That was so nice about the Genesis engine - randomly generated story missions. In principle, that could be a marvellous way for STO to keep delivering fresh content. If enough elements of the mission templates (which should have been a lot more complex than what they were) are randomized in intelligent ways. Which the original Genesis engine sadly did not deliver. But it could have.
Let's wait and see.
Exactly! People always say the missions were boring (as does Cryptic), but what is to expect when they didn't put a lot of effort into it in the first place? We were told that it was too cost-intensive to have people work on it. But isn't that the point, working on it? Making it better? The system is, if I take a look at my boxed copy, a major selling point for this game. You'd expect this is what they were going for.
Sure, it was nothing procedually generated. Genesis simply created maps that the devs/designers then had to manually fine tune to be working maps. We then had a bunch of mission templates chosen supposedly at random for any given map. This can still work. Do this, increase the variety of missions, use your aliengen to create strange new species. Being able to do these random missions alone or together would do a lot to make STO replayable over the same stock missions we have now.
Everything else, a system that keeps track of your exploration, people you meet, colonies you support, that's something else and while it would be awesome is a huge piece of work. But the cluster missions we had were already good, they just have to be fine tuned.
^ 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
Even the map generation could have been fully automated - if the automation process was set up properly and experts for map generation were tasked to define proper combinations of map elements and provide those elements in combineable ways, possibly by having the engine select a "theme" for the map (such as urban, desert, arctic, tundra, mountains, space station... or planetary orbit, asteroids at a Lagrange point, inside the nebula, near the sun's corona, etc. for space).
Sure, that would have been a lot of work and effort. But it would have been worth it, and it would potentially even have increased the team's productivity for the story missions on the long run. "Need a map? Auto-generate and then edit it."
I can't say anything about that. I know games that completely autogenerated maps on the fly like Diablo (2), UFO Defense and most 4X games in existence, but those are 2D maps with combined tiles. A environment like STOs planets have surely is more complicated than this and writing a new procedually generating engine is a task comparable to writing a new game.
But what they already were maps that needed to be edited. And in my naïveté I'm assuming that's what map designers and developers of a game like this do.
^ 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 know games that completely autogenerated maps on the fly like Diablo (2), UFO Defense and most 4X games in existence, but those are 2D maps with combined tiles. A environment like STOs planets have surely is more complicated than this and writing a new procedually generating engine is a task comparable to writing a new game.
[...]
It is just adding a third dimension. Not that complicated.
Absolutely, that's a lot more complicated. There are a lot of challenges that don't come up with 2D. You don't want a tree to collide with a roof, hillside or another tree crown, but yet you probably wouldn't mind a rock or bush next to the tree trunk under its crown. You might be okay with a bunch of NPCs standing on a evelated area if it's 1m high, but not if it's 10m high and unclimable. You might want someone below a roof, but not inside a block. That are problems you can easily avoid with 2D or don't even exist.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
Those are not challenges, but "if"-clauses in the code.
Exactly, a challenge, because how do you determine what belongs into the if and how you react correctly in the then and else cases? And how do you do that in a manner that if you ever made a mistake somewhere, you can find it?
I dunno, I think too many people just think they know something about programming. If you have never worked in a code-base developed by a dozen developers consisting, consisting something like a few million lines of code...
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
I would be happy if they would bring back the old exploration with just more content.
For example they could add some random things like more enemy groups, or a additional encounter like a thrid party getting involved, or different things. (just look at the occasionally Enterprise -F appearance in some romulan patrol missions to see what i mean.)
Exploration could be a source for non combat game content too. Just catch a strange anomaly or deal with a disease on board your ship. Heck just watch some Star Trek to get inspiration, lol.
I still think they COULD have made old Exploration really great if they had any interest in doing so.
Just add some content and some minor things here and there and over time it could have been a great part of the Star Trek Online experience.
They could use a modular system to create random ground and Space maps. No need to try creating 100% different maps all the time. Just add more types of missions and add a twist or random element.
For example scanning a anomaly of the week (which could be a huge source of ideas itself) could have several different random outcomes. Heck, they could even include a third party starting firing at the anomaly (which could be helpful or not for the situation.), for all the kids which are bored to fast.
There are literary TONS of ideas to make a simple system like exploration become interesting and fun AND more Trek than 99% of cryptics shoot everyone dead -type of mission/STF we are doing countless times over the years.
Funny people who where criticizing Exploration didn't mention that 100% of all other missions where all the same every time they play them, including 1000s of STFs.
Back in the days, Exploration was THE reason to play STO, at least for me.
In the first few years of STO i didn't care for STFs at all, especially since everyone expected you to use voice chat.
Doing Exploration was a much more diversified than doing STFs (which is always exactly the same thing), although Exploration where just 5 or 6 missions in different combinations.
Aside from story misisons, it was the only time in STO where you (or better said "i") felt like a Starship captain and not like a DPS competitior against other people in a online sports game.
"...'With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied--chains us all irrevocably.' ... The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. I fear that today--"
- (TNG) Picard, quoting Judge Aaron Satie
(...)
Exploration could be a source for non combat game content too. Just catch a strange anomaly or deal with a disease on board your ship. Heck just watch some Star Trek to get inspiration, lol.
(...)
Look at the various DOFF/Admirality missions that are available - just let us do some of those ourselves. Chase a escaped criminal (through a semi randomized map, asteroid cluster until you can lock a trctor beam on the shuttle. Oh, it's using polarize hull, quick use a disable!). Aid a stranded starship (by finding it in a nebula, beaming over commodoties to help. Oh an ambush! Quick, get it's engine online and hold them off until it can escape.), analyze a space phenomenon (it suddenly emits a energy pulse, disabling your engines. Remember the starship you aided at one point? It's back and helping you out - or it attacks you because you have been a jerk back then ).
There are a huge number of mission templates that could work, and even if the basic missions stay the same and just enemies and map position change it's still something different every time and certainly different from the same queus all the time.
^ 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
(...)
Exploration could be a source for non combat game content too. Just catch a strange anomaly or deal with a disease on board your ship. Heck just watch some Star Trek to get inspiration, lol.
(...)
Look at the various DOFF/Admirality missions that are available - just let us do some of those ourselves. Chase a escaped criminal (through a semi randomized map, asteroid cluster until you can lock a trctor beam on the shuttle. Oh, it's using polarize hull, quick use a disable!). Aid a stranded starship (by finding it in a nebula, beaming over commodoties to help. Oh an ambush! Quick, get it's engine online and hold them off until it can escape.), analyze a space phenomenon (it suddenly emits a energy pulse, disabling your engines. Remember the starship you aided at one point? It's back and helping you out - or it attacks you because you have been a jerk back then ).
There are a huge number of mission templates that could work, and even if the basic missions stay the same and just enemies and map position change it's still something different every time and certainly different from the same queus all the time.
This could be so much fun. Really wish they'd do something like this.
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!
Now wait a minute. Are you folks saying that you'd enjoy challenges that affect only you and your ship and maybe 1-2 other ships without spelling doom for the entire galaxy?
Heresy!!
Or as I like to think of it: too many two-part season finales and not enough regular episodes.
I'd say the closest thing to a STO gameplay is a Starpoint Gemini 2. First SG was much more like ST: Starfleet Command if you remember that one. It have some degree of "exploration" but without story it is way less attractive. As mentioned above, to avoid making boring and unnecessary content you can't just use procedural generation, or ppl will just ignore this entirely, like some ignore foundry missions.
Foundry may be a much more promising aspect if there will be more motivation for those who create stuff, and for those who play created missions. Dilithium/cred farm won't be enough. And it's not a farm to be honest.
Also, it would be awesome to be able to make a custom ships for custom alien races. It doesn't have to be a much different from current ship customization, just with more parts to combine and more material/coloring options. I suggest to make a ship designer just like outfit designer - you unlock parts and visuals is separate from ship stats and abilities. Yes, ship class respective and some parts may be not interchangeable but it can be done even now.
I know I'm not the only player who rolled their eyes and said "There's our 'exploration revamp'. Joy." when foundry missions were added onto star systems and such. Yeah it's nice to be able to start missions without having to navigate through the menu to select them, but it's definitely not what people were looking forward to.
Although what I'm really ticked off about being removed were the first contact scenarios. Those were fun and you had to actually THINK to get the proper responses, especially since the game didn't tell you if you got it right or only half right and the only thing you had to go on was the NPC response.
Now if only we didn't live in a broader market where other games (plural) are doing that exact work and are going to capture that market share and gamer dollars.
Sometimes the RoI isn't just direct use - sometimes it's the impression of relevance it lends to the whole. STO is not a big game and it's not winning a lot of points except on the power of its IP. It's also rapidly gaining company/competitors in the sci-fi category (Praise the Nine, because I am BORED TO TEARS with fantasy worlds).
I'm not saying any of those games are going to kill STO. I'm saying they will sap a certain part of its base/income stream and its would be amazing if the Cryptic execs can go to their financier masters and say "Look: open, procedural exploration. It's being done. Hell, we had a hand in pioneering it 6 years ago. We need you to reinvest so we can make some splashier features and bulk up our sales pitch with some new bullet points so we can keep cutting you a check every month. Because nobody should be out-boldly-going Star Trek. That's our value proposition, our core player fantasy. Dead center. Bull's-eye. We need some additional funds to hold that ground or we are going to lose it."
(...)
There is a saying in German: "He who does not want something will find reasons. He who does want something will find ways."
That's a saying?
^ 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
Comments
But they won't kill STO. Some STO players might leave STO for one of these games, but I suspect many won't, because the gameplay is somethnig completely different, the setting is different, the story-telling is different.
Star Citizen specifically... I think it will (and has already) attract a lot of people, but even though I backed it, I am so far pretty disappointed in the gameplay. It turns out I am too old or have too little time for the complex controls it has. I hope things improve and I will manage to beat more than 3 waves tops in a Vanduul Swarm mode, but I am very, very pessimistic for now. I hope that I'll at least manage to play through Squadron 42.
Sure, Star Trek's "theme" is exploration. But a lot of that is just background noise. Countless of times does the Enterprise actually encounter people they already know (like Romulans, Klingons, Cardassian, Ferengi, colonies, Federation member worlds) and the plot revolves around them. And since Star Trek is a TV show primarily, of course every "exploration" has a plot - there isn't an episode that just consists of cataloguing biosamples and making tricorder scans or long and short range sensor scans of stellar phenomena. There is always something else going on.
And the "something else" is something that is missing (so far) from Elite Dangerous and probably the other "exploration" games mentioned above.
And the "something else" is what Cryptic has been focused on delivering since the release of the game (and seemingly has intensified even since Delta Rising).
I am certainly eager to see what the developers are cooking up in terms of the "new" exploration system. But for now I won't get my hopes up too much. Regardless of whether you're a fan of exploration as background (with the focus on the "smoething else") or exploration as focus (with meeting new things and going where no one has gone before, even if it's just another uninhabitated star system).
Exactly! People always say the missions were boring (as does Cryptic), but what is to expect when they didn't put a lot of effort into it in the first place? We were told that it was too cost-intensive to have people work on it. But isn't that the point, working on it? Making it better? The system is, if I take a look at my boxed copy, a major selling point for this game. You'd expect this is what they were going for.
Sure, it was nothing procedually generated. Genesis simply created maps that the devs/designers then had to manually fine tune to be working maps. We then had a bunch of mission templates chosen supposedly at random for any given map. This can still work. Do this, increase the variety of missions, use your aliengen to create strange new species. Being able to do these random missions alone or together would do a lot to make STO replayable over the same stock missions we have now.
Everything else, a system that keeps track of your exploration, people you meet, colonies you support, that's something else and while it would be awesome is a huge piece of work. But the cluster missions we had were already good, they just have to be fine tuned.
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I can't say anything about that. I know games that completely autogenerated maps on the fly like Diablo (2), UFO Defense and most 4X games in existence, but those are 2D maps with combined tiles. A environment like STOs planets have surely is more complicated than this and writing a new procedually generating engine is a task comparable to writing a new game.
But what they already were maps that needed to be edited. And in my naïveté I'm assuming that's what map designers and developers of a game like this do.
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I dunno, I think too many people just think they know something about programming. If you have never worked in a code-base developed by a dozen developers consisting, consisting something like a few million lines of code...
you can explore opening boxes ......
.....
join date is Feb 2010
31
its all a matter of perspective really if you think on it.
or how you see Star Trek
join date is Feb 2010
31
For example they could add some random things like more enemy groups, or a additional encounter like a thrid party getting involved, or different things. (just look at the occasionally Enterprise -F appearance in some romulan patrol missions to see what i mean.)
Exploration could be a source for non combat game content too. Just catch a strange anomaly or deal with a disease on board your ship. Heck just watch some Star Trek to get inspiration, lol.
I still think they COULD have made old Exploration really great if they had any interest in doing so.
Just add some content and some minor things here and there and over time it could have been a great part of the Star Trek Online experience.
They could use a modular system to create random ground and Space maps. No need to try creating 100% different maps all the time. Just add more types of missions and add a twist or random element.
For example scanning a anomaly of the week (which could be a huge source of ideas itself) could have several different random outcomes. Heck, they could even include a third party starting firing at the anomaly (which could be helpful or not for the situation.), for all the kids which are bored to fast.
There are literary TONS of ideas to make a simple system like exploration become interesting and fun AND more Trek than 99% of cryptics shoot everyone dead -type of mission/STF we are doing countless times over the years.
Funny people who where criticizing Exploration didn't mention that 100% of all other missions where all the same every time they play them, including 1000s of STFs.
Back in the days, Exploration was THE reason to play STO, at least for me.
In the first few years of STO i didn't care for STFs at all, especially since everyone expected you to use voice chat.
Doing Exploration was a much more diversified than doing STFs (which is always exactly the same thing), although Exploration where just 5 or 6 missions in different combinations.
Aside from story misisons, it was the only time in STO where you (or better said "i") felt like a Starship captain and not like a DPS competitior against other people in a online sports game.
Look at the various DOFF/Admirality missions that are available - just let us do some of those ourselves. Chase a escaped criminal (through a semi randomized map, asteroid cluster until you can lock a trctor beam on the shuttle. Oh, it's using polarize hull, quick use a disable!). Aid a stranded starship (by finding it in a nebula, beaming over commodoties to help. Oh an ambush! Quick, get it's engine online and hold them off until it can escape.), analyze a space phenomenon (it suddenly emits a energy pulse, disabling your engines. Remember the starship you aided at one point? It's back and helping you out - or it attacks you because you have been a jerk back then
There are a huge number of mission templates that could work, and even if the basic missions stay the same and just enemies and map position change it's still something different every time and certainly different from the same queus all the time.
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This could be so much fun. Really wish they'd do something like this.
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!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
If only it was available as a mobile game or web app...
Heresy!!
Or as I like to think of it: too many two-part season finales and not enough regular episodes.
Foundry may be a much more promising aspect if there will be more motivation for those who create stuff, and for those who play created missions. Dilithium/cred farm won't be enough. And it's not a farm to be honest.
Also, it would be awesome to be able to make a custom ships for custom alien races. It doesn't have to be a much different from current ship customization, just with more parts to combine and more material/coloring options. I suggest to make a ship designer just like outfit designer - you unlock parts and visuals is separate from ship stats and abilities. Yes, ship class respective and some parts may be not interchangeable but it can be done even now.
Although what I'm really ticked off about being removed were the first contact scenarios. Those were fun and you had to actually THINK to get the proper responses, especially since the game didn't tell you if you got it right or only half right and the only thing you had to go on was the NPC response.
Sometimes the RoI isn't just direct use - sometimes it's the impression of relevance it lends to the whole. STO is not a big game and it's not winning a lot of points except on the power of its IP. It's also rapidly gaining company/competitors in the sci-fi category (Praise the Nine, because I am BORED TO TEARS with fantasy worlds).
I'm not saying any of those games are going to kill STO. I'm saying they will sap a certain part of its base/income stream and its would be amazing if the Cryptic execs can go to their financier masters and say "Look: open, procedural exploration. It's being done. Hell, we had a hand in pioneering it 6 years ago. We need you to reinvest so we can make some splashier features and bulk up our sales pitch with some new bullet points so we can keep cutting you a check every month. Because nobody should be out-boldly-going Star Trek. That's our value proposition, our core player fantasy. Dead center. Bull's-eye. We need some additional funds to hold that ground or we are going to lose it."
That's a saying?
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