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Few suggestions for Cryptic

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I'll give a quick introduction first then get into the meat of my post.

I played the beta and have recently bought the game a subscribed. After about a couple of weeks of occational play I have made it to LC-2. I am already hitting the point where the cookie cutter missions are getting so boring its becoming hard to really continue. The fleet actions appear to be buggy (NCR ships getting stuck in objects or being untargetable) and also reptitive. To sum up my overall opinion of the game at this point... way to buggy and very incomplete. I realise MMO's are a work in progress but this one feels like its just bare bones, the fact that death penalties, one of the basic fundamentals of gameplay is being resolved this long after the commercial launch is telling. I'd even go so far to say the players that bought the game at launch should be credited a month of gameplay back.

Now I didn't want this to be an all out negitive rant, so here are my suggestions on how to resolve some of the issues:

1. Death penalty. Dragon Age actually had one of the best systems I've ever seen for dealing with player deaths. Something similar could be implemented here. Semi-permant flags that get attached to the player or ship depending on if your in space or not. Ground based ones could be broken bones, etc. Space based ones could be ruptured EPS conduits or damaged warpcores, etc. To remove the flag all the player has to do is return any starbase and pay a small fee for repairs (make it free for lower ranked players). For the character avatars they could go to the base medical facility and pay a nominal fee to have injuries healed.

2. Player owned structures. For individual players having a ships interior that they can customize to a certain degree (at a cost) and where they can display any acheivements (medals, awards, etc) would be very helpful. For fleets some type of small starbase where they can meet, exchange gear, etc is really needed badly, these could be expensive deployables for fleets.

3. Missions. This is going to be a big one to fix. Currrent missions frankly suck, no offense. Additional voice overs and in-game cutscenes would help to make the story missions a little more immersive. Making more then one possible outcome for missions would be a good start, also making story characters more interactive and maybe even vary responses based the player past actions on other missions wouldn't hurt either. Right now they feel like a bunch of simple cookie cutter text scripts, its pretty bad. Even having proper background music to set the mood at certain key points is missing which is a basic design element for story telling in rpg's.

4. Fleets. As of yet I've found no in-game reason or system to even encourge joining other players for any type of activity other then sheer bordem. This needs to be addressed somehow. Certain types of multipart missions that force players to form fleets would be nice. For the trouble of forming fleets players could be given slightly better loot or something.

5. Ships. Right now there are no specific ships so much as tiered ship kits for each of the three ship classes. For example it would be nice if the three T2 cruisers all had slightly different stats and you could customize some parts of the ships but still always identify from the core componets which ship type it is. The way it is now is all three T2 cruisers are the same ship and their parts are just interchangable.

I'll hold off on making any suggestions on PvP as I haven't had alot of experience with it yet. But figured I'd toss those out for now. Hopefully something does get resolved because theres an extreme lack of good space based sci-fi MMO's out there. At least until next year anyway.
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