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shrimphead2015
Member Posts: 535 Arc User
If I remember this right, the reason we cannot have a Iconian/Tzenkethi/Tholian playable captain was because the emotes on a normal bipedal species wouldn’t translate well to these other non-bipedal species (Iconian because they seem to float around in missions and cutscenes). Another reason was because of the clothing options would be limited.
Are these the only reasons?
The only other thing off the top of my head I could think of that for some of these species, holding a rifle or pistol would present a problem so the developers would have to make a non-bipedal version of all the hand held weapons and if you wanted to ride a surf board or use a floater they would have to make some modifications for it as well.
To be honest I would be willing to put up with some sacrifices just to be able to play these species as a captain with a bridge crew. With all the playable ships these species have I would love to be able to crew them.
Anyway I guess I would like to know if this is still an impossibility and if there was some official word over it.
Are these the only reasons?
The only other thing off the top of my head I could think of that for some of these species, holding a rifle or pistol would present a problem so the developers would have to make a non-bipedal version of all the hand held weapons and if you wanted to ride a surf board or use a floater they would have to make some modifications for it as well.
To be honest I would be willing to put up with some sacrifices just to be able to play these species as a captain with a bridge crew. With all the playable ships these species have I would love to be able to crew them.
Anyway I guess I would like to know if this is still an impossibility and if there was some official word over it.
"There is iron in your words of death for all Comanche to see, and so there is iron in your words of life. No signed paper can hold the iron. It must come from men. The words of Ten Bears carries the same iron of life and death. It is good that warriors such as we meet in the struggle of life... or death. It shall be life." - Ten Bears (Will Sampson)
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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As long as my Voth or Herald can wear either their standard uniforms or at least the most regular Federation ones, I'd be happy to forego the possibility to give them all sorts of combinations of armour or event clothing.
The most important thing, imo, is making the species unique by giving them something that is
- unique
- always active and
- not just some stat boost.
Like floating for Heralds or a third weapon slot with (fused, unremovable) Furiadon fangs for Voth. To give just some examples. It certainly shouldn't be a huge advantage, but it would need to be something unique like the Caitians have with their increased jump heigth for example.
Tzenkethi could have the option to have drones with changeable functions permanently surrounding them (basically what we have with the new Angel suit, but without the need to equip one specific type of armour). Tholians could have something similar like an automatic shield drain to any enemy that comes close (like the Recluses have) or heat damage.
PS: I've long wished they'd allow Voth, Hierarchy, and several other Bridge Officers to be allowed to change their uniforms for sure! I wish even Holograms, had a drop-down for Original Hologram, or Revised, to allow you to update just their Uniform. I never like Bashir being given a Discovery White Doctor's treatment especially when TNG, DS9, and Voyager all focused on a slightly lighter shade of Blue.
Discovery despite the claims of Picard, seems more in the Driving Seat, to write history for the Future, well at least the more Distant one; we came to know from Voyager, with 29th Temporal Alliance Fleet with Walker. So I'm really curious to know how they resolve that paradox, or if they are rewriting the future completely?
So all we can do is wait & see, as Suru implies Speaking of Season 3, that the future is Bright... Hopefully!
Well, most species don't require an unique storyline.
They could sell them as a bundle that will automatically make them level 65. That would justify why there are Iconians serving in the Alliance. They'd basically enter service after the war, since players only reached level 65 after/while completing the Gamma arc originally.
An unique storyline would be great, but even without that, more species would be very much appreciated by me.
If they're going to destroy the Federation and make it such that only a few worlds remain, nothing of STO's storyline of protecting the Federation, building the Khitomer Alliance and possibly even the Galactic Union, will have mattered much in the end.
You're assuming that STO is considered Canon. As far as I am aware, only one element was adopted, the Odyssey Class, as seen in the tie in comic as the USS Verity.
Discovery's going well beyond established events. The latest canon we know of is the 29th Century, with the USS Relativity. Easily enough time between that and the 33rd or 32nd for something major to take place.
Yea those are also my FEARs, as it currently sits I think Discovery Writers, took on a lot more off than they should have!
So one can only HOPE they have a plan, without rewriting how we view the Universe... ...while someone suggested the 31st is a long ways off from 29th, plenty of time for things to go wrong. Seems most of what influenced it, was likely something related to Control, yet cant' be so certain either cause Strange New Worlds is coming. And Picard still feels the guilt he placed upon himself not able to better help the Romulan's as Spock had earlier wanted to do.
Why I'm so eager to see how Discovery possible addresses the Paradox, or explains what changed and when, that likely ocurred between the 29th - 31st Century?
Still as I said before, I'd welcome an option playing an Iconian, especially if the World Heart help them to restore their DNA, and made steps to influencing their former culture. I really wanted to know the Iconians we saw in Midnight!
Other than that, the Delta Alliance species still have yet to be added to go along with all the random-DQ-alien bits that, back when the game first started, were just sort of there, the Hirogen bits being the only ones that made sense due to the backstory of a contract between them and Sela.
I was pointing out that the immersion of the players will likely diminish because, thus far, STO was set further away from established canon (bar a few moments in and facts From the far future that were usually alternative timelines too and generally well in line with STO anyway) than anything else.
It has nothing to do with STO being canon or not *. My comment is about the importance of the storyline as players are experiencing it. Thus far, everything mattered because there was nothing to contradict what was happening in-game, with STO being set in the future (as seen from what was established up until Nemesis and, since a few months, Picard).
That will likely change. And, because everything we do - saving the galaxy, building the Federation, protecting key worlds - could well be negated by the new season, none of it will matter in the end because there may well be another conclusion to any of these events despite all our (and those of the characters in-game's) best efforts.
* And even if this were about STO being canon or not: it is. The game carries the name Star Trek. I don't suppose you want to redo that entire debate again?
Whatever, it will still all be gone as soon as I turn on the TV and watch the latest episode there and it still remains to be seen whether everything will really be alright.
That, basically.
Your own personal canon need not be a slave to CBS' whims. It's fine to decide that in your world Discovery is really set in the Mushroom Timeline by itself.
Just as long as you don't come here and claim it's official
I was thinking that with the Tzenkethi they could just make a version of that shoulder gun (like the predator has lol) that can cycle through the different beam types or even set it for different modes of fire, whether cannon, blast radius or beams. Just suggesting it because we see it can be done as far as beam type cycles in a rifle.
That is indeed an option.
Though I avoided things like weapons, because those could easily be added as an event reward or something like that later on.
And then the species would quickly lose its uniqueness.
Tzenkethi, if they ever did them, would probably get the watch your back trait (or whatever it is called, I forget offhand) that you get from "Renegad's Regret" for instance, in the same way that Jem'Hadar get the shroud without having to use the specific shroud armor that other races have to if they want to use that ability.
Also, some of the races are probably reserved for villain use only, the Tholians would top that list if it exists I would think from the way they are presented in the game. Others, like the Iconians, are poor PC candidates for various plot and balance reasons. In the Iconians case it is both since there are less than a dozen of them in existence, and their power level is insanely high for a player character (and on top of that, they are incapable of time travel which is a very bad thing with all the time travel and alternate timeline stuff in STO).
Also both the Tholians and the Iconians would kick off a storm of protest because they would be genderlocked as female (STO already established that the Tholian queens are the only real commanders, and the only Iconians that survived the ancient war were female) and they already have enough of that trouble with the Jem'Hadar being effectively generlocked male (though technically they are neither they resemble and are treated like males).
Most of the others (or at least the more humanlike ones) would probably not be too difficult from a technical perspective, but without much airtime in the shows they probably would not draw enough players to be worth developing as a separate thing. That is especially likely considering that, like the Nova, the devs apparently don't think the Vorta would draw enough players either despite threads and livestream chat requesting them, and they have far more airtime than all the others put together, not to mention the devs have strayed quite far from canon to avoid putting them in the Dominion faction.
Most likely the only way the more humanoid ones would be added (if ever) would be as parts to the 'alien' generator most of the factions have. The game centers around the Alliance and while they should make sure all the Alliance races are doable in some form in their appropriate faction (which has not yet been achieved) the fact that you can make others from outside the Alliance is more of a bonus than anything else (for instance, just look at SWTOR with its extremely limited choice of character races, and even then most of those are locked behind paywalls).
Realistically, the nature of Space Barbie makes the less humanoid ones not at all cost effective unless they needed a specific loss-leader badly enough for some reason (and even then it would be unlikely to actually happen unless an outside agency, like CBS for instance, footed the considerable development expense something like that would take).
Oh that is cool... I didn't know about that. I just knew the Odyssey made an appearance.
From a 3D point of view most playable races are for all intents and purposes identical, only Gorn having any major differences due to their face and even with the Gorn the rigging might not be that different as their rig would still be a fairly minor alteration to the base rig.
With a Tholian or Tzenkethi you would have to make a 100% unique rig as their models are so different from the base humanoid model.
For Tzenkethi perhaps have their unique appearance but keep the basic bipedal model with the only working parts, 2 arms, head, & 2 legs, while leaving the other 2 arms & tail static. Regardless, if Cryptic ever allowed Tzenkethi BOFFs, what percentage of the player-base would have 4 BOFFs named: Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, & Raphael?
The whole floating option/problem, for any Heralds, seems to be capable by Cryptic if the Red Angel Suit is any indication.
I find the playable species enticing, but would be much okay with BOFFs as well. I want a diverse crew. Not just DOFFs which are a pain, & expensive sometimes, to seek-out.
What about the other factions?
They just get less sober.
The same applies to them. Access to the most basic faction uniform. If needed, if it's possible to make other uniforms work, even better but that's not a priority imo.
I'm only playing Fed so that was the main example.
There are many Heralds though.
And I like to think that with the return of the World Heart, they can reproduce or make new Iconians again.
It was never really explained why there were so few Iconians. Only that birth rates had been falling long before the attack on Iconia. But the 'why' wasn't really answered.
Now, that suggests that the presence of the World Heart didn't prevent the falling of birth rates - but that could simply be because it wasn't of much concern to them. From the dialogue, it simply seems they didn't care much about the falling birth rates. But that was of course before they were attacked and lost almost all of their people. So the World Heart may still hold the solution, one that simply wasn't used as they didn't see the need when they still had it.
They likely do care now and are working on a solution that's now available again.
Like Sela said: the changes (from fairly regular, humanoid aliens to floating, pure energy beings that are somehow linked to their gateway technology) are too large to be explained by natural evolution.
So it likely has something to do with either suffering from the absence of their technology / their knowledge / the World Heart. Or tampering with their bodies having gone wrong because of the absence of those things.
Either way, it should be possible for them to correct that too now.
So maybe playable Iconians could be fairly similar to most other species now. And even if they are not - are the Angel suit's movements and effects that much different from what an Iconian would move like?
They could just technobabble a solution.
Something with temporal shielding for example.
In an universe where all sorts of aliens can walk around in a wide variety of environments regardless of species' preference and where they are in space or time, I don't think the inability to travel through time naturally, should be something that cannot be overcome.
Now that I'm thinking about it: wouldn't time travel always require some sort of shielding to protect the traveler from possible changes in the timeline? We even had such a thing with Butterfly.
well actually there's a very good reason why there was no Iconian babies after the destruction of Iconia, all 12 of the survivors were female. It could explain current form of the Iconians as since they made themselves into immortal (semi-)energy beings to deal with the of genetic material (and not having any males to reproduce the traditional way).
I was thinking that myself . The Iconians although a limited number could be substituted for Heralds as far as playable captains. If applied in Borg terms having a Iconian playable captain would be like having a Borg Queen as a captain which I see now wouldn't work so well. Heralds on the other hand feels alot more believable in a captain's role.
I agree as well. It's no secret that in this game for it to story-wise work there has to be a few artistic liberties taken and I do understand that no matter how small those liberties are it can either be shrugged off by the community or the pitchforks and torches come out in the name of "canon". I do think however the time travel thing can be bypassed by having the Heralds with that ability or tech that allows them be able to do those missions that require time travel.
Ain't Daniels from the 31st century?
On a side note I have heard that Vorta are still likely to come to the game eventually for Dominion players, and some guy who was protesting the lack of Vorta said that he spoke with one of the devs and that Founders as a species are supposedly no longer "off the table" so to speak, but I don't know that guy so take it with a grain of salt.
and if star trek were actually proper sci-fi following real known science...that would not be an impediment - at all
especially for an empire depicted with that level of technology we see them with - and even AFTER losing the world heart, it still shouldn't have been an impediment
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
The only solution I could think of would be some sort of teleportation device that would have to be fired from the captain to a specific place on the map. So for example, instead of rappelling down from a cliff you could fire the device to a specific area and teleport (or site to site transport) down.
I know it's not a perfect answer but I'm just throwing it out there just to think about some obstacles that might have been voiced in the past about the difficulties of these species not being playable captains and bridge crew.
That is correct, seemed like the federation existed in Daniel's version of the 31st century and they finally perfected time travel too, season 3 of Discovery takes place in the 32nd century, I'm more curious about what happened to the federation between the 31st century and the 32nd century, I like to know how the Federation fell apart in the span of a 100 years.