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saladinbob
Member Posts: 116 Arc User
Let me quickly provide a context for the length of time here. I played the game up to the Dyson Sphere expansion and a game breaking bug in a mission forced me to quit. I came back briefly but the Delta Rising grind turned me off and I quit again. I came back about two months ago.
Before I quit the first time, I remember being able to explore certain unexplored parts of the galaxy, certain places that would automatically trigger missions similar to patrol missions but more on an exploration side, such as first contact (fetch quests). Now these seem to be for Duty Officers. Where they removed? Is there no more exploration in this game?
Before I quit the first time, I remember being able to explore certain unexplored parts of the galaxy, certain places that would automatically trigger missions similar to patrol missions but more on an exploration side, such as first contact (fetch quests). Now these seem to be for Duty Officers. Where they removed? Is there no more exploration in this game?
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I miss them.
Me too.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Maybe you thought they were bad but clearly some of us enjoyed them. I liked them as a change of pace from blowing stuff up. Star Fleet's primary mission is exploration, and now we have a Star Trek game without any exploration in it. They should get revamped and put back in.
My character Tsin'xing
A HUGE part of the game was destroyed when they took it out. Exploration is supposedly one of the reasons we ventured out into space from the beginning, after all. Now it's just chance "encounters" with other species that occur whilst performing some menial duty for a mission.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
The galaxy is much more vast than that. at the very best we've explored SMALL PARTS of the places you've mentiond.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
I dunno how long you've been playing but back when I started Cryptic used to write fairly original 25th century stories for us. Of course most of those missions were removed for "quality" reasons *snort*
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
In the mean time if you are hungry for exploration content, look to your friendly neighborhood Foundry authors (see sig). Did you know there are more than 90,000 missions available for play there? Even if 99% of them are utter garbage (which many people like to claim) that still leaves 1% of good, high quality, well written missions for the playerbase to enjoy. That's almost 1000 excellent missions to play...if you can find them (again, see sig, about a new search interface).
Heck, you can even just travel around the known galaxy and pick up good Foundry missions at every star system out there using the Top 3 system. I would suggest starting at the Archer system in the Beta Quadrant as it is currently the focus of the AEI (see banner in sig.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
Hey have not seen this response pop in......a new record!
original join date 2010
Member: Team Trekyards. Visit Trekyards today!
If you looked closely, they consisted of space missions: defeat X squadrons of Y ships; fly close to planet and deliver some commodities, and ground missions: defeat mobs; go places and press F. That was about it as far as I can remember.
The refreshing thing was that at least some missions were designed so that you could accomplish them without producing 10k dead bodies.
I did them occasionally for a change of pace but after 3 or so I was burnt out.
They were the closest thing we had to exploration, but they weren't that good, tbh.
Vauge reference and ripoff like we have now are 2 entirely different things. your opinion is your own and you obviously have made up your mind and wont change it.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
There's this little thing called 'originality'. Cryptic ought to try it now and again. If we took your attitude we'd never have visited anywhere in all subsequent series that we hadn't visited in TOS and it would be doubtful Star Trek would be as popular if that had happened as it is today. If the Alpha/Beta Quadrants had been fully explored, why was the Enterprise-D and Enterprise-E out exploring? What exactly were they exploring since to you everything had already been discovered. You've come up with probably the most ridiculous argument I've ever seen.
From a gaming perspective, no one is forcing you to engage in exploration for its own sake but for those of us who like to stay true to the spirit of the franchise and actually engage in a spot of first contact now and then, many of us would sooner do it personally rather than through the duty officer system. Like I said, revamp them, make them more interesting, and then put them back in.
My character Tsin'xing
- Cost a lot of space in the installer that affected first-time installations negatively.
- They were of low quality considerably below modern missions.
- They were full of bugs the only fix they could feasibly make for them was to remove a bugged map with no replacement.
- Players got lost in them.
You may not like or believe the reasons, but I think you can't say there weren't any given, or there none were apparent.
I thought some of the old maps were quite intersting, with fantastic alien landscapes.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
My character Tsin'xing
And yes, through story missions we've explored and slaughtered our way through most of the known galaxy:
Bill: Ladies and gentleman, we've been to the past, we've been to the future.
Ted: We've been all around the afterlife.
Bill: And you know?
Ted: The best place to be is here...
Bill:...and the best time to be is now. And all's we can say is...
Bill and Ted: ...let's rock!
And they summarily destroyed that entire bit. It was difficult for me. And many posters took a similar stance as somtaawkhar whenever I tried to offer my thoughts, feedback and criticism of the change. Which really soured me on a lot of things because at the end of the day even if 99 out of 100 players didn't use the maps, there was that one who was using them and enjoying them. But that was then, this is now.
They did offer reasons:
My absolute favorite was the idea that players got lost in them. It was a pretty weak reason.
The strongest reason for the change, and one that they never officially acknowledged was the exploration clusters were removed right as the new crafting system was implemented. Since this is an upgrade weekend, I feel it's quaint that this topic comes up again. You see, the clusters made is super easy to collect a lot of crafting resources in the OLD system. But with the crafting revamp, they wanted to change that paradigm. And removing the clusters, placing them all in the DOFFing system (they're all still there on the map mostly, you can now only do DOFF missions on them and colonization is the big draw, specifically doing mission chains for eventually purple DOFFs). But you can't get tons o' crafting mats like you could then.
Of course now it's funny since Admiralty exists. But whatever.
Another thing that was funny was the same time they removed this big Procedurally Generated Content piece of the game, and described that type of gameplay as dated and not useful ... No Man's Sky got a bunch of articles written about it - the same No Man's Sky that takes the Procedurally Generated Content idea to a level that STO wasn't even imagining.
So now there's the official rumor that exploration is being looked at and they're working on a revamp and return of the concept t the game. When donning my tin foil hat, it becomes perfectly clear to me that if No Man's Sky hits and changes the paradigm, then I have a feeling some Exploration stuff may return to this game.
FYI, No Man's Sky is getting into trouble because the formula they used for the landscape generation is patented. PWE/Cryptic might not want to pay the license fees. Also, we'll have to wait and see how well a billion procedurally-generated but story-free planets works in practice. Pretty to look at, but boring?
I'm sure we'll see the option as an Exploration Pack in the C-Store at some point, for let's say $200 a whack.
Chances are they won't incorporate something that will keep people busy for thousands of hours if they can't put some sort of price tag on it and make more money with it.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
I did enjoy being able to get crafting mats. Though I usually sold them as I didn't use the old crafting system hardly at all. This new one I do use. A lot.
If computers could write believable storylines, Hollywood would suddenly have a lot more unemployed scriptwriters.
You can make a random bumpy landscape, pick a random color for the ground and the sky, toss in some random trees/rocks/whatever and get an alien planet. That's the easy part.
The hard part is coming up with interesting things to do, that isn't just "shoot some random aliens" or "press F at some random objects."
You just reminded me of Data.
-"It looks like you hate it"
-"That is it, I hate it"
-"More?"
-"Yes, please"
Exactly, trying to generate a story won't end well. Would be easier to go for a mechanic where you observe and research life. So a random planet generates with some random creatures or sentient aliens that you have to study from a distance (too close and you fail the mission via Prime Directive - too little observation and you don't generate enough XP off it). Maybe throw in some R&D nodes.
Believable would be no problem for a computer, but impossible for a hollywood writer. Word your looking for is entertaining.
Wanna explore ?
Start in map Square A1, and go to every system in each block. Those Exploration clusters you mentioned, with the randomly generated missions, are pretty much what you get when you fly up to most of the systems on the map.
Explore that way, its really no different.
Once you've visited each and everyone of those, on each and every sector map, then you can ask again about exploration.
I believe there's even accolades for visiting each system on the sector space maps and completing their corresponding patrols.
Now if you want real exploration, like discovering new worlds, new species, flora & fauna, and documenting them, then I'd kindly point you towards No Man's Sky. Aug 9th release date, available on PC or PS4. (Not sure if it going to be on Xbone).
Because STO will never, ever, add anything even remotely close to what will be available in NMS. Or what actual Trek fans would like to see.
Their game Engine is not capable of the sophistication needed to deliver a real thrilling experience when it comes to the awe of exploring new worlds.
So any so called "Exploration" systems they add in STO, will always end up lackluster for the true explorer types.
It's a shame too, because the Trek IP would be an ideal setting for an exploration/simulation type experience.
But unfortunately STO is very dumbed down in terms of things like this.
So if you're looking for satisfying exploration content, you're looking at the wrong game unfortunately. And it will never happen here.
Exploration was supposed to be coming with DR.. they're still not done with this supposed Exploration System they've been working on (probably because it sucks, and they haven't figured out how to monetize it yet), and truth be told, will probably never be done. if it is... It wont satisfy your high standards. Because all they want to do here, is sell you ships, and power, so you can DPS.