There is no end game, or middle game tbh, infact the entire game is just click flashy things and kill space ships, beam down and kill anything that moves, rinse and repeat. Come back in 2 years and end game may have arrived.
In STO endgame is asking where's endagme content while waiting for episodic content. Then getting those episodes and completing them in 20 minutes or less only to find yourself asking "where is endgame content?".
Wait huh?
My point is, as long as we keep getting these missions that don't take long to complete, but do monopolize development time, we're not going to see any.:(
Expand exploration to be explorable and fun. There are several really good threads on how to do this. And also, open PvP in some form or another. Start putting the resources in more sandbox elements.
Last time I checked there were over 100 missions on the Foundry, and it will probably be closer to 175-200 by the time it goes live. The Fed side currently has around 50-55 Episodes in it - the rest of the missions being patrols and exploration. Assuming 20 minutes each mission 180 missions is about 60 hours of additional /played time. That will hopefully keep the power-gamers like myself busy for a couple of extra weeks.
In most MMO's that means Raids, item grinds, PvP, and/or faction vs. faction.
Which is you want?
I'd like to see a real faction vs. faction game myself. I also think there is great "end game" potential in exploration content if and when they get around to actually creating some.
What can we do over and over again that is fun and worth doing game wise?
Honestly, I bust out all the dailies so that I can get a ton of emblems, work on diplomatic xp, pvp, daily fleet action, and i'm almost done leveling a klingon.
STFs (raids) - when they release the borg gear these will be worth doing again
Fleet Actions - hours of pew pew for little to no reward but some are fun
PvP - kill people and talk smack
Farm - crafting has just got a good upgrade and mats and crafted items can make you good money
Roleplay - for those that are into that sort of thing
Missions - with mission replay you can redo most missions or just do daily missions. New episodes are released from time to time.
Chat - Sit in earth spacedock and complain about no endgame.
exploration, not the random mission generator in game now, but true exploration as that would be dynamic unscripted and sandboxish.
why is it that games that require tons of animation, textures, maps and content to be created by artists, like age of conan, have huge sprawling land areas to explore? and are generally bigger and FEEL bigger than space in STO?
my idea would be to create all over the alpha quadrant for us to explore, even if you procedurally generated the planets and then named them the correct names, fereginar etc etc...
open up the gamma quadrant, since the alpha quadrant is known in the movies, you could do anything with in limits in the gamma quadrant in terms of races/alliances/power blocs.
sto just feels too limiting for a space game, and a space game based on one of the best most love sci fi franchises.
we're just too limited by classes... we should just create a character, and as we gain skill points go from there.
your distribution would determine what kind of class you are, and have no distinctive separation of powers
and not be limited to what you can be/do based on scripted content.
in far off sectors there could be all kinds of events for players. sector space should have NPC trade ships and all kinds of traffic, space should come alive, and if you wanted to you could attack those, other players could defend them as well as NPC AI.
you could find all kinds of things to do with your ship.
there shouldnt be just one 'blanket' faction or two.
federation should be divided into many factions: starfleet, starfleet intel, marines
have an independent faction affiliated to no one.
everyone right now is just either a cruiser captain/ escort captain or science captain. IN starfleet.
diversity is needed, and it couldnt be hard to open up the game like this. it would retain its scripted elements and also cater to sandbox people.
Doing Molten Core day after day week after week for years and years just to get a purp.
Then after that, they will upgrade the mosters with more HP's and damage just so you can do Molten Core over and over again year after year
End game for me would be doing some thing that is exciting, STO has nothing exciting at all for me to do. I am very much an explorer, I loved doing that in another MMO I played, just riding around a huge world, seeing who is about, riding into danger etc.
I would love to be able to fly into another faction controlled space, Klingon space for example and be attacked by all the Klingon players. I would also like a neutral zone, a huge expanse of space, much larger than any space currently in the game, planets I could beam down to, random quests I could pick up by talking to the people on the planet. BUT all the time knowing that the Klingon players could also enter this neutral zone and also beam down to the same random planet and find me doing the a quest there, they could choose to either let me alone or attack me.
Please don't flame me for mentioning wow again but for me the reason I played that game for 6 yeras was because I had no idea what I would come across while I was exploring as it changed every second that you played. e.g. One day I was riding through Winterspring, a journey I had done 30 or 40 times and never ran into a single problem, however this particular day I ran right into about 30 Alliance on epic mounts, they saw me and chased me all the way through Winterspring into Felwood, then Ashenvale and into the barrens where headed to the crossroads. All the time I was typing in my guild chat organising my guildies to intercept the Alliance in the barren, a huge fight took place and lasted a good hour or so, it was totally sandbox and exciting.
A well implemented Exploration system would work wonders for the end game. What we have now is a sad excuse for a time sink and very disappointing considering all the hype cryptic played up about their Genesis system before launch. I've played through the various star clusters and even in art assets ive seen the same 20ish maps in a given star cluster not to mention the scan 5, kill 6 groups, and scan 5 while killing 6 groups mission format nearly every star cluster mission has.
I would MUCH rather see them work on something like that rather then a quasi-FPS mode for ground combat. If given more mission variety like anthropology they talked it could be a fun and engaging time sink. The only thing I've heard of lately though is the new ground combat revamp, when I think of star trek I think of exploration over phaser fights any day.
Congrats on describing the functionality of every MMO.
WOW has repetative missions in as much as kill X number of Y but this is only a small part of the game, it has so much to do that even after 6 years I never did everything. STO only really has these boring repetative missions so functionlity is one thing, end game content is another.
WOW has repetative missions in as much as kill X number of Y but this is only a small part of the game, it has so much to do that even after 6 years I never did everything.
I'm not referring to the amount of content, but to the mechanics you mentioned("go here, kill that"). How much of WoW's content ISNT combat related?
There's nothing wrong with not liking what a game has to offer. I've left dozens of games over the years for that reasons: some I've returned to much later and found that I really enjoyed them. I'm always bewildered by the concept of someone not liking something yet not willing to move on past it. Yes, good end-game content (good being entirely subjective) isn't really in place yet in STO. The game needs time to grow - just as WoW and Eve did. The people here can stay and help guide that growth or they can leave and return when they feel its grown enough. Either way complaining regularly that it's not here yet will gain no one nothing just like telling you wife she's fat every week will gain you nothing.
I'm not referring to the amount of content, but to the mechanics you mentioned("go here, kill that"). How much of WoW's content ISNT combat related?
Although it is somewhat funny that you have WoW pacifists who have gotten to max level without a single kill and that my personal endgame preferences there veered towards exploration, fishing, cooking, professions, and minigames like jousting.
The problem here is that Cryptic and STO are so small, you have to put combat on the backburner to make real progress in those kinds of things whereas a large game can devote more resources to its side features than STO can devote to everything, altogether.
I could spend a casual few weeks in Winterspring or Strathome, just grinding a mount. Or Brunhildr Village. Or roving around Storm Peaks.
Locations in STO are smaller and more story based. The closest you get to being based in an area is DS9. And before anyone says "That's Trek", half of TOS is based in the area around Starbase 7 and half of TNG is around the Romulan Neutral Zone. All of DS9 was that way.
When I reset my hearth in WoW, I think, "This is going to be home for awhile" and I inevitably have reasons to pass by locations I had an attachment to.
When you're done with a location in STO, you're done and you don't even have the option to go back without replay or UGC and there aren't random or incidental things that happen in an area to make it personal.
Kirk or Picard will fondly reflect on unexpected adventures in am area but it is a luxury we don't have yet. Nothing happens to one of us on a given planet that doesn't happen to other people.
For example, in WoW, Frostsaber rock has a special place in my heart as a player. Scarlet Monastery is where I spent over ten levels. These have attachments for me that they don't have for other people.
I think STO needs more of that, the ability to forge sentimental connections to places that belong to the player and are fairly unique to that player; if I coiuld take lead on exploration revamp, I'd come in with a master list of 20 ways to do that, using a variety of mechanics.
PvE, PvP, crafting, random encounters, branching dialogues, I can see so many ways to do that.
i dont even feel sentimental for my ship having watched it explode like 50 thousand times.
You must not be very good at combat.
My current Cmdr 5 alt is still using the T1 NX he started in and I've only died once: the Sarr Theln Warship in the first Breen mission at LC 1. I'll be taking the NX all the way to VA.
of all the diversity they claim, theres only like 6 ships people will use at end game.
I see a lot more then 6 ship types flying around Gamma Orionis. On my own Admirals, alone, I have a Fleet Escort, Galaxy Refit, Starcruiser, Recon Science, Deep Space Science, and Adv. Heavy Cruiser.
What can we do over and over again that is fun and worth doing game wise?
Currently, STO's end game is mostly PvP, with some raiding (the Special Task Forces, or STFs), and gearing up for even more PvP. Cryptic didn't learn from quite a few MMOs that also had PvP as the endgame, who are now collected in the dustbin of history.
Not going to elaborate further on that point unless asked, as it's tangenital to your question. Once people get comfortable with the Foundry, there may be more missions aimed at the VAs on up, but basically once you hit RAUH 1 or so during the Undine chan, that's it as far as the PvE endgame goes - unless you like grinding, in which case there's the Exploration stuff to do - quite repetitive, and whose main goal until now was just the Marks of Exploration to get some green/blue gear. As Diplomacy is a side effect of several Exploration missions, AFAIK it's just doing Exploration.
i think you people are getting confused. just because a game has open pvp, doesnt mean its open everywhere.
those who dont get involved in it are unaffected, and the game doesnt change for them. nothing is REMOVED to put in territory pvp game.
the territory pvp will be the next thing in sto i check out, after that its off to wait for infinity which is vaporware, excalibur or some other holy grail epic scifi.
3 major blunders for sto = craig, that other long hair guy, all talk and no substance. oh sto has exploration its so cool to meet new alien races. re: random mission generator in star clusters.
oh sto will have fleet territory in far off sectors of space......this game almost doesnt deserve an honest individual like dstahl.
i think you people are getting confused. just because a game has open pvp, doesnt mean its open everywhere.
those who dont get involved in it are unaffected, and the game doesnt change for them. nothing is REMOVED to put in territory pvp game.
the territory pvp will be the next thing in sto i check out, after that its off to wait for infinity which is vaporware, excalibur or some other holy grail epic scifi.
Almost every MMO on the market has the exact same end-game: grinding for purples, raiding for purples, and PvP for purples. The only difference between STO and some other MMOs is the number of different scenarios to do your grinding, raiding, and PvPing. WoW's had 6 years to produce a number of end-game scenarios. Eve has had 7 years to build toward its end-game. For many games if you don't PvP there's no end-game choice at all. STO's 10 months old. Given time much more end-game will get put into place. People complaining about it doesn't change the fact that it still takes time.
Comments
Farm stuff and sell it on the exchange.
Wait huh?
My point is, as long as we keep getting these missions that don't take long to complete, but do monopolize development time, we're not going to see any.:(
Expand exploration to be explorable and fun. There are several really good threads on how to do this. And also, open PvP in some form or another. Start putting the resources in more sandbox elements.
They send wild pigs after you?
In most MMO's that means Raids, item grinds, PvP, and/or faction vs. faction.
Which is you want?
I'd like to see a real faction vs. faction game myself. I also think there is great "end game" potential in exploration content if and when they get around to actually creating some.
Honestly, I bust out all the dailies so that I can get a ton of emblems, work on diplomatic xp, pvp, daily fleet action, and i'm almost done leveling a klingon.
Fleet Actions - hours of pew pew for little to no reward but some are fun
PvP - kill people and talk smack
Farm - crafting has just got a good upgrade and mats and crafted items can make you good money
Roleplay - for those that are into that sort of thing
Missions - with mission replay you can redo most missions or just do daily missions. New episodes are released from time to time.
Chat - Sit in earth spacedock and complain about no endgame.
Just about everything any MMO has at endgame.
or requiring a large group to do something.
exploration, not the random mission generator in game now, but true exploration as that would be dynamic unscripted and sandboxish.
why is it that games that require tons of animation, textures, maps and content to be created by artists, like age of conan, have huge sprawling land areas to explore? and are generally bigger and FEEL bigger than space in STO?
my idea would be to create all over the alpha quadrant for us to explore, even if you procedurally generated the planets and then named them the correct names, fereginar etc etc...
open up the gamma quadrant, since the alpha quadrant is known in the movies, you could do anything with in limits in the gamma quadrant in terms of races/alliances/power blocs.
sto just feels too limiting for a space game, and a space game based on one of the best most love sci fi franchises.
we're just too limited by classes... we should just create a character, and as we gain skill points go from there.
your distribution would determine what kind of class you are, and have no distinctive separation of powers
and not be limited to what you can be/do based on scripted content.
in far off sectors there could be all kinds of events for players. sector space should have NPC trade ships and all kinds of traffic, space should come alive, and if you wanted to you could attack those, other players could defend them as well as NPC AI.
you could find all kinds of things to do with your ship.
there shouldnt be just one 'blanket' faction or two.
federation should be divided into many factions: starfleet, starfleet intel, marines
have an independent faction affiliated to no one.
everyone right now is just either a cruiser captain/ escort captain or science captain. IN starfleet.
diversity is needed, and it couldnt be hard to open up the game like this. it would retain its scripted elements and also cater to sandbox people.
Then after that, they will upgrade the mosters with more HP's and damage just so you can do Molten Core over and over again year after year
I would love to be able to fly into another faction controlled space, Klingon space for example and be attacked by all the Klingon players. I would also like a neutral zone, a huge expanse of space, much larger than any space currently in the game, planets I could beam down to, random quests I could pick up by talking to the people on the planet. BUT all the time knowing that the Klingon players could also enter this neutral zone and also beam down to the same random planet and find me doing the a quest there, they could choose to either let me alone or attack me.
Please don't flame me for mentioning wow again but for me the reason I played that game for 6 yeras was because I had no idea what I would come across while I was exploring as it changed every second that you played. e.g. One day I was riding through Winterspring, a journey I had done 30 or 40 times and never ran into a single problem, however this particular day I ran right into about 30 Alliance on epic mounts, they saw me and chased me all the way through Winterspring into Felwood, then Ashenvale and into the barrens where headed to the crossroads. All the time I was typing in my guild chat organising my guildies to intercept the Alliance in the barren, a huge fight took place and lasted a good hour or so, it was totally sandbox and exciting.
I would MUCH rather see them work on something like that rather then a quasi-FPS mode for ground combat. If given more mission variety like anthropology they talked it could be a fun and engaging time sink. The only thing I've heard of lately though is the new ground combat revamp, when I think of star trek I think of exploration over phaser fights any day.
Congrats on describing the functionality of every MMO.
WOW has repetative missions in as much as kill X number of Y but this is only a small part of the game, it has so much to do that even after 6 years I never did everything. STO only really has these boring repetative missions so functionlity is one thing, end game content is another.
IMHO, a lower difficulty STF or a truly remastered set of Fleet Actions would fill that role.
I'm not referring to the amount of content, but to the mechanics you mentioned("go here, kill that"). How much of WoW's content ISNT combat related?
Although it is somewhat funny that you have WoW pacifists who have gotten to max level without a single kill and that my personal endgame preferences there veered towards exploration, fishing, cooking, professions, and minigames like jousting.
The problem here is that Cryptic and STO are so small, you have to put combat on the backburner to make real progress in those kinds of things whereas a large game can devote more resources to its side features than STO can devote to everything, altogether.
I could spend a casual few weeks in Winterspring or Strathome, just grinding a mount. Or Brunhildr Village. Or roving around Storm Peaks.
Locations in STO are smaller and more story based. The closest you get to being based in an area is DS9. And before anyone says "That's Trek", half of TOS is based in the area around Starbase 7 and half of TNG is around the Romulan Neutral Zone. All of DS9 was that way.
When I reset my hearth in WoW, I think, "This is going to be home for awhile" and I inevitably have reasons to pass by locations I had an attachment to.
When you're done with a location in STO, you're done and you don't even have the option to go back without replay or UGC and there aren't random or incidental things that happen in an area to make it personal.
Kirk or Picard will fondly reflect on unexpected adventures in am area but it is a luxury we don't have yet. Nothing happens to one of us on a given planet that doesn't happen to other people.
I think STO needs more of that, the ability to forge sentimental connections to places that belong to the player and are fairly unique to that player; if I coiuld take lead on exploration revamp, I'd come in with a master list of 20 ways to do that, using a variety of mechanics.
PvE, PvP, crafting, random encounters, branching dialogues, I can see so many ways to do that.
i think the more you die, you should get degraded in the ship until it becomes useless and you have to buy another one with 'prestige'
of all the diversity they claim, theres only like 6 ships people will use at end game.
its TRIBBLE.
My current Cmdr 5 alt is still using the T1 NX he started in and I've only died once: the Sarr Theln Warship in the first Breen mission at LC 1. I'll be taking the NX all the way to VA.
I see a lot more then 6 ship types flying around Gamma Orionis. On my own Admirals, alone, I have a Fleet Escort, Galaxy Refit, Starcruiser, Recon Science, Deep Space Science, and Adv. Heavy Cruiser.
Currently, STO's end game is mostly PvP, with some raiding (the Special Task Forces, or STFs), and gearing up for even more PvP. Cryptic didn't learn from quite a few MMOs that also had PvP as the endgame, who are now collected in the dustbin of history.
Not going to elaborate further on that point unless asked, as it's tangenital to your question. Once people get comfortable with the Foundry, there may be more missions aimed at the VAs on up, but basically once you hit RAUH 1 or so during the Undine chan, that's it as far as the PvE endgame goes - unless you like grinding, in which case there's the Exploration stuff to do - quite repetitive, and whose main goal until now was just the Marks of Exploration to get some green/blue gear. As Diplomacy is a side effect of several Exploration missions, AFAIK it's just doing Exploration.
i think you people are getting confused. just because a game has open pvp, doesnt mean its open everywhere.
those who dont get involved in it are unaffected, and the game doesnt change for them. nothing is REMOVED to put in territory pvp game.
the territory pvp will be the next thing in sto i check out, after that its off to wait for infinity which is vaporware, excalibur or some other holy grail epic scifi.
3 major blunders for sto = craig, that other long hair guy, all talk and no substance. oh sto has exploration its so cool to meet new alien races. re: random mission generator in star clusters.
oh sto will have fleet territory in far off sectors of space......this game almost doesnt deserve an honest individual like dstahl.
least im paying right