I posted a review for this game right before it went Gold from Open Beta.
And I'd like to revisit it since it's been a few weeks since release and there's been some changes made to the game. I'm not going to into the same depth that I did before but I would like to make a list of things that I think have changed for better or for worse.
As a disclaimer my "gamer cred" is in the realm of World of Warcraft, FFXI, Everquest, and Guild Wars.
And I'm NOT a Trekkie by any means. So screams of "Fanboi" are going to go rightly ignored.
General Gameplay
Quite a few things got spruced up like elements to the Map UI and the fact that we have functional tooltips. There's still some small bugs floating around here and there with tooltips but overall it isn't bad. It's not great either, but it something that still needs to be addressed. Another thing that's still annoying (not sure if there's a function in the options list to change it) but the NPC dialogue screen still pops up in the middle of your UI at the most inconvenient of times, usually during the middle of a pitched space battle. When grouped players will still get stuck with an infinite loop of dialogue that sometimes results in some players not getting credit for episodes. This really needs to be addressed.
The exchange and fleet banks are nice and it's good that your personal bank scales up with you as you level giving you more room to stash goodies for later and sharing with other Capt's from your fleet. The exchange, however, needs more options to sort through the thousands of items posted. Sometimes you don't know exactly what you are looking for and it would be nice to sort them simply by what "Mark" they are without having to type in the whole text line to find one. Sorting by price range would also be nice, as someone posting a Mark one set of Phaser Beam Banks for 25K is obviously extorting the playerbase and deserves to be filtered out of my search query.
Ships have been scaled up in size! This is awesome as before it was somewhat embarrassing that a Galaxy Class cruiser didn't look much bigger than the Constitution class cruisers. Very nice improvement there.
Crafting is still pretty much a mystery as to how much you need to go up a tier or when it allows you access to the better vendors. I think that the community has come up with some good solutions to this already in a number of threads already posted and I think it would do well for Cryptic to take a look at those.
The voice acting from Leonard Nimoy is awesome and I hope that you can get more actors from the films and TV shows to lend their talent to the game as it really really adds to the immersion factor.
Some players have been getting a bug with their Bridge Officers when they Rank them up. The Officer will get two Ensign rank skills and not allow you to use higher tier abilities. I've filed a couple of tickets on this with not response yet from GM's or the bug reporting system.
I previously made mention that some of the content in this game was at risk of being exploited by RMT agencies to make lots of currency very quickly in beta. Unfortunately NOTHING has been done to address this and as of right now, they are out there inflating the currency markets to oblivion. This is bad, and will be epidemic in another couple of weeks. Fleet Actions are the source of most of these problems. In particular the Crystalline Entity. There's numerous work-arounds for this. Some of which I'd like to mention are lockouts on how many Fleet Actions you can collect HQ loot from, time based or participation based. I personally think that this will make or break this game's future on how well Cryptic responds to this mounting problem.
PvE Content for Klingons is scant. And that's somewhat of an understatement. I really feel for the folks that wanted to be PvE Klingon players. This is not good. Big disappointment here.
I still think that there needs to be some kind of micro-game for exploration missions for collecting anomalous data. I'd leave it as is for people that just want to grab and run, but adding an option to do a little tricorder/science station minigame where they better you do at it the more or better data you can collect from the anomalies would be really fun and add more to the immersion factor of the game.
Also I'd like to mention that weapons should all have a "stun" or "incapacitate" option on them because I think that this could add to the diversity of missions you could offer. Sometimes there could be situations where you don't want to make a bad impression on a new species by vaporizing twenty or thirty people of a newfound civilisation.
On that tone. "Aid the Planet" missions are terrible. As it is there is no, and I mean absolutely no, reason to do these. Period. They're expensive and in the thematic tone of playing a Federation character, there's at LEAST several space plagues that have gone unaddressed by my crew as I'm not going to spend what little of my meager energy credits on expensive Antigens. My suggested improvements are to vary the amount and quantities of what the people want on the planet. Always knowing that "Aid the Planet" means bring me "10 of these" is pretty boring. Not only should they cost less to do, but you should have to beam down to help deliver and set up these devices and engage in microgames to complete the mission, as well as get a bonus reward from doing them. Bad design on these missions.
That's all I have for now. I'm sure I'll think up more later and put an addendum in.
A dev posted there and said he finds it handy and well organized. Your suggestions wouldn't go unnoticed. I especially like your idea about a "real" stun setting and I'd like to see more players asking for it
TL: DR WoW players QQing over the well known issues of the game.
What's wrong with the OP's desire to update information he provided at launch with new information? He is actually stating some good things that have changed about STO while mentioning that some things are still needing some work. Maybe your fanboi glasses filtered those parts out? :cool:
You are comparing two entirely different games and trying to find fault? If we want to play wow, we would play it. We dont, we choose to play STO.
We know the game has issues, and the vast majoirty of players are more than willing to give the devs a month or two leeway to get things on track.
It's just the very small handful of immature trolls who think they know it all, that ruin the game.
A dev posted there and said he finds it handy and well organized. Your suggestions wouldn't go unnoticed. I especially like your idea about a "real" stun setting and I'd like to see more players asking for it
Excellent I'll have to put in a post on that thread when I can collate some more info.
@ everyone else.
Overall ST:O is very playable and still very enjoyable. It's not all sour grapes and vinegar.
Still a 7 1/2 out of 10 in my book, but there's a lot of time left to iron out details.
On that tone. "Aid the Planet" missions are terrible. As it is there is no, and I mean absolutely no, reason to do these. Period. They're expensive and in the thematic tone of playing a Federation character, there's at LEAST several space plagues that have gone unaddressed by my crew as I'm not going to spend what little of my meager energy credits on expensive Antigens. My suggested improvements are to vary the amount and quantities of what the people want on the planet. Always knowing that "Aid the Planet" means bring me "10 of these" is pretty boring. Not only should they cost less to do, but you should have to beam down to help deliver and set up these devices and engage in microgames to complete the mission, as well as get a bonus reward from doing them. Bad design on these missions.
Comments
Fixed it for you.
Interesting post, thanks. I agree with a lot of your comments. Maybe you should post your suggestions in this thread :
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=102017
A dev posted there and said he finds it handy and well organized. Your suggestions wouldn't go unnoticed. I especially like your idea about a "real" stun setting and I'd like to see more players asking for it
when you get both EVE and WoW players agreeing on something you know you have a problem;)
What's wrong with the OP's desire to update information he provided at launch with new information? He is actually stating some good things that have changed about STO while mentioning that some things are still needing some work. Maybe your fanboi glasses filtered those parts out? :cool:
Oh my, I loled...
me: "I spent 2 hours doing a quest and it didnt complete"
you: "QQ"
me: "I reached max level then server crashed now i am level 1"
you "QQ"
me: "cryptic billed me in error for $450"
you: "QQ"
me: "ceo of cryptic shot me in the chest and i may not survive"
you: "QQ"
get my point?
wait....
QQ
We know the game has issues, and the vast majoirty of players are more than willing to give the devs a month or two leeway to get things on track.
It's just the very small handful of immature trolls who think they know it all, that ruin the game.
This is WOW
Ok good, I was afraid of Darnassus being hit, but looks like we are still good there.
Excellent I'll have to put in a post on that thread when I can collate some more info.
@ everyone else.
Overall ST:O is very playable and still very enjoyable. It's not all sour grapes and vinegar.
Still a 7 1/2 out of 10 in my book, but there's a lot of time left to iron out details.
You speak much much truth!