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What would make you question STO as a reality in Star Trek?
kirksplat
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
So, I'm brainstorming a new Foundry mission, which is kind of like a Sisko-Benny moment, where the player wakes up in a padded cell with writing all over the wall, like conversion rates for dilithium and other such things.
I'm curious if the general playerbase can help me here. Let's say that you woke up in STO in a Starfleet asylum in 2409, where a psychiatrist tries to convince you that the STO reality that you know, just doesn't fit with what you should know about your reality.
He would ask you questions like, "So, you are telling me that in your elaborate fantasy about being an Ensign instantly promoted to captain, you destroyed a Borg cube in a Miranda? Tell me, does that sound logical? Please, tell me more about your mother."
Or, it could be something like, "so you say that Q is creating winter wonderlands where your task is to kill snowmen in order to buy a jacket? Does that not seem strange to you?"
Or, "you are telling me that the Klingons are now helping the Romulans, while Federation captains fly around in... hm... let me check my notes... Tholian, Cardassian, Temporal, Ferengi, and Breen ships?"
Punchline: "Perhaps I have a better explanation for your delusions. You witnessed a lot of death and destruction when you were an Ensign aboard a ship... these fantasies that you have created in your mind... they've served to comfort you. But now it's time to ask yourself: Do any of those fantasies make sense, given what should make sense in the context of what you know about your reality prior to those traumatic events?"
If you were in this scenario, what aspects of the STO universe would convince you that you're having one of those Star Trek "This is not real" moments?
I hope the thread makes sense.
I'm curious if the general playerbase can help me here. Let's say that you woke up in STO in a Starfleet asylum in 2409, where a psychiatrist tries to convince you that the STO reality that you know, just doesn't fit with what you should know about your reality.
He would ask you questions like, "So, you are telling me that in your elaborate fantasy about being an Ensign instantly promoted to captain, you destroyed a Borg cube in a Miranda? Tell me, does that sound logical? Please, tell me more about your mother."
Or, it could be something like, "so you say that Q is creating winter wonderlands where your task is to kill snowmen in order to buy a jacket? Does that not seem strange to you?"
Or, "you are telling me that the Klingons are now helping the Romulans, while Federation captains fly around in... hm... let me check my notes... Tholian, Cardassian, Temporal, Ferengi, and Breen ships?"
Punchline: "Perhaps I have a better explanation for your delusions. You witnessed a lot of death and destruction when you were an Ensign aboard a ship... these fantasies that you have created in your mind... they've served to comfort you. But now it's time to ask yourself: Do any of those fantasies make sense, given what should make sense in the context of what you know about your reality prior to those traumatic events?"
If you were in this scenario, what aspects of the STO universe would convince you that you're having one of those Star Trek "This is not real" moments?
I hope the thread makes sense.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Post edited by kirksplat on
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Rest in Peace Brothers
I see what you're doing here.
It's all pretty ridiculous. There really isn't much of the story that fits being "Trek". I mean Vice Admirals running around tagging alien rabbit things, while half the sentient species in the Galaxy are making war with the Federation. Nothing makes sense anymore.
Oh and I'm digging your new avatar.
Like a third of the federation is assimilated after loosing at vega. Or the romulan front is out of control without t'nae's preemptive strike. Most of the eridani sector is a no mans land due to the devidians attacking at will...
The flaw in Chris's thinking is simple - Star Trek Online is in the hands of CRYPTIC studios and its writer or writers. The writer or writers that work for the studio in my opinion are not professional screenplay writers, let alone do not embrace the spirit of Star Trek.
Though I would love to see episode type story telling in a grand scale, it can never happen - simply because its a game, and writing for a game can prove to be quite the challenge.
Not only is STO plagued with bad writing or story arcs, you have to contend with its gaming mechanics that is a bit awkward. STO is more like Arcade mode than anything else.
So in short:
STO is NOT the extention of the Prime Universe, its F2P model does not allow it to bloom as a serious game - everything is monetize and its focus is solely to make a profit - Its new Chinese master will not allow the game to bloom into something that could have been an extention of the prime universe - That and the fact that canon went out the window as soon as they introduced the Jem'Hadar Attack fighter into the game, and I do dare say even before that.
There's a lot that breaks the immersion, if one is looking for a 'Prime universe' experience.
1) With the Borg and Undine threats, why are the Klinks and Feddies still fighting? Even the Klingons have been willing to end hostilities and form alliances quickly for their own good. Heck, the whole thing started because the Feds weren't willing to accept the Klingon evidence for Undine infiltration. That should have been taken care of early in the first campaign. Sure, there's B'Vat, but he was eliminated at the end of the first campaign, so that should have ended the war right there.
It doubly doesn't make sense when you consider Omega Force or whatever it's called. The Klingons don't work with their enemies. If the war was over, it would make sense that it exists - the Klingons as a whole seem to forgive almost as easily as the Federation - but while the war is still going on they wouldn't work together.
2) Why is the Klingon Empire courting the Deferi so strongly? J'mpok's MO is to work to get allies, one way or another (this, and the connection between House Duras and the Romulans, is why I don't get butthurt over the Romulan-Klingon relations in S7), but only ones that can give the Empire an advantage. The Federation wants everyone to be their friend, so that makes sense for them, but what do the Deferi have to offer the Klingons? They are pretty helpless militarily, so that's not it. They have the Preserver archives, but again, there doesn't seem to be anything that the Klingons would want (and they didn't know about it before the Breen started looking for it).
From an Ensign commanding a starship looks pretty right to me
/smashes table on psychiatrist and runs around saying "beam me up!! beam me up!!"
Might be more interesting, if more difficult to write, to pull at some truly thematic stuff instead. A galaxy full of aliens that look mostly human? Technology that can't make up its mind if its advanced or retro? All the inconsistancies of which ST-verse you're in (Prime? STO-alternate? JJ-verse? Destiny trilogy? Shatner-verse?) Maybe only TOS ever actually happened and even the WOK-era movies are delusions, let alone TNG-era and beyond? If the world isn't real, the little stuff of who's flying what is the least of it. Go big.
"so you died twenty times on the Bajor mission you described??"
All those adventures, from B'Vat to Taris to Thot Trell, all actually happened, but you didn't do them. Dozens, hundreds of heroes all throughout the Federation or the Empire did them. And then were assimilated.
To jack an idea from Voyager (of all places), as a drone participating in horrors on a daily basis, and linked to a hive mind, the shred of yourself couldn't deal with that existance. And so you filled your own head with adventures stolen from the minds of others. Their memories, their experiences, their heroism, rather than the tiny fraction of yourself seeing what you had become and couldn't stop. A heroic Admiral on the Klingon Front, now a drone. An Ensign biologist tagging Nanov on New Romulus, now a drone. A Ferengi dilithium trader captaining his own D'Kora, now a drone. A little boy with a vivid imagination playing with monster snowmen, now waiting in a maturation chamber. All the stuff in the game, all the inconsistancies and 'admirals don't do something so petty' and economics and ships from everywhere and lifetimes worth of adventures, none of it is actually yours. You stole it from so many minds and stitched it all together into a life for yourself, like your own private Unimatrix Zero, to avoid your horrific reality.
And it gets worse.
All those STFs you've run, where you remember jumping into an occupied system, destroying the invaders, liberating the people on the planet below? Those did happen. Any surviving witnesses would describe the scene differently though. You are a Cube that jumped in system and slaughtered their defenders. No matter what they threw at you, you just plowed through, destroying everything till there were no defenses left. Every 'death' merely a moment to regenerate damage. And then you beamed down and fought your way through all those desperate people, your numbers were unstoppable, endless. Each time you died there only to respawn.....how many drones board a space station? How many die before adapting? And you were linked to those killed, and got to experience their deaths over and over and over. Until you made your way to the last stronghold, a final room where the senior officers were holding out with everything they had. Until they fell too, giving you new experiences to add to your own, new 'content.'
How many thousands of people have you killed and mutilated and assimilated, unable to stop yourself, sharing the collective horrors of every drone around you? It was everything you could do just to hide.
And then somehow you were liberated from the Collective, and you find yourself in a Starfleet hospital. Are you the great hero that you remember so vividly, inconsistancies and all? Or will you let yourself remember the almost 3-years-now nightmare of your actual achievements?
thank you for a big laugh!
i find you are doing it right and i will gladly play your mission, once finished!
to all other lore issues introduced here:
- THIS is not Star Trek. the real one. of course CBS has to approve every piece of story/content cryptic is giving us, but yeah, it is an MMO, a THEMEPARK.
Imagine how HUGE this would be if they introduced missions from original CBS writers - to PLAY through.. every second week.. i WOULD pay for that sheet.
Oh yeah, that will give me the excuse to bust out with my Connie and dress my crew up with the original series out fit.
I'm onboard with that
"Gangnam OLD SCHOOL Style"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qxw0r5rAoPE
You could do a straight sequel for instance and have the aliens up their game a bit.
A lot of the stuff that doesn't "make sense" has already been listed, so not much for me to add.
WOW. Thanks for this! I may use your ideas. They are great. You should make missions!
Oh, now this would make for an excellent Foundry mission. Is your newly liberated reality real, or is someone dissecting your brain and stealing your experiences?
I happen to like the Federation and the Klingons being friends. I like to think that the Klingons have gotten over their petty dislike for "Federation softness."
But Dilithium would not be mined by anyone not a miner and Fleets would not have their own Starbase because Starfleet is a single entity.
I'll accept the rest.
EDIT: and: Actually... in the show.... color wasn't really branch. that's something new to STO.
My character Tsin'xing
I would sell my children to Orion slavers, but Cryptic just don't have the skills or creativity to create such a grand a beautiful vision of what this game should be all about.
The Star Trek approach to Sci-Fi opens up paradigm changing opportunities to produce an MMO unlike any other. But no... instead we get a poorly implemented generic MMO in space game with a star trek render and skin job.
#2311#2700#2316#2500
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.."
― John Milton, Paradise Lost