For me STO is a prime example of a IP getting misunderstood.
(snip)
For me STO is first and foremost a example of a IP squeezed into the wrong format.
Trek was always about one ship, one crew. Adventures took place 75% INSIDE the ship. It was filled with sense of wonder and moral issues.
Massive fleet actions War and killing thousands and where just exception. Such a game would make much more sense with other IPs like BSG or Star Wars.
(Not to speak of a completely wrong representation of the main characters of Star Trek: the Ships.)
Eh, 100% agree - DS9 is the "Gamer's Trek" in that it dealt with combat and espionage - not to mention a full scale war - which had hitherto been the provenance of tabletop gaming. But freeform exploration of the sort dealt with by the other Trek series would be very hard, IMO, to translate into either a tabletop or online game. Tabletop RPGs can do it because they use a consistent group and can wreck the universe without affecting anyone else. I'm not sure that an MMO could ever achieve that simply due to the difficulty of reliably scheduling a group.
The first game that I don't have to rely on developers for characters, I can make my own and throw them into a setting that, if not actually well written, at least provides a framework for me to finally live out my boyhood dream of creating a Star Trek series.
It's a very personal thing, I know, but there isn't another game that I'm aware of at the moment that allows you to have control over what and who the supporting characters are (besides that game of becoming an indie dev). At best you have a pick and mix but that still leaves you at the mercy of other writers and popular convention, and at this point in my creative life I can easily do without them both.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
A perfect example of a massively wasted opportunity and potential.
Well some games do live up to the potential, some do not. Way of gaming.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
...and the telling point lies in the question: How many current Star Trek games are there?
Star Trek Elite Force (multiple titles and an arcade release)
Star Trek Starfleet Command (multiple titles)
Star Trek Legacy
Star Trek Armada (multiple titles)
There's also at least one other RTS for the PC and at least one bridge simulator (SNES I believe.) I'm not going to defer to Wikipedia since I do like making points using my own internal resources, thank you. At any rate there have been quite a few, and none have really accomplished anything besides stringing out the IP along a conventional game for the genre and time period. STO on the other hand does a few things (Foundry, depth of Customization across all aesthetic aspects of your character, ship, crew) that are remarkable for the genre. Of course you can ***** about some of its other aspects, but such is the nature of the universe and whining. So long as you have the former you can entertain the latter until the end of measurable time since you are dealing with (at least as far as we can tell) finite space. Not everything will be to your liking...
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
I'm not a big ST fan, I just like flying space ships and have played a lot of space sims in the last 20 years. My hope was that STO would be in that vein, where you do things like fill out a navmap, build diplomacy with various factions, develop trade routes, run courier missions, deal with hostiles, that kind of thing. Instead its a SP/co-op dungeon-crawler with Star Trek artwork that constantly asks for money, with almost none of the features of traditional space sims. Once I realized that, STO became something to kill time with, a space shooter with a couple of interesting game mechanics, until something else comes up. A one-night stand that I've spent way too long hanging around with.
STO to me is a game that makes me occasionally feel like I'm a character in the Star Trek universe. For one brief fraction of a second I can imagine my avatar be the one who sits in the captain's chair and make the big decisions.
Lately, those decisions seem to mainly be about hitting my daily dilithium refining cap and doffing like crazy to turn in fleet marks. The constant positive reinforcement the game gives me for accumulating purple numbers means I must be having fun, right? Right? Damn that operant conditioning!
STO to me started off as a fun diversion. I wanted to play a sci-fi game and had been thinking of playing EVE Online, but a friend persuaded me to give STO a try. Needless to say I really liked it! I liked it so much I became a lifer just to get the veteran destroyers (which I still run today on occasion).
I like the exploration missions where I dutifully ran around collecting particles so I could craft some purple and blue consoles and weapons for my Tac captain named after a WWII fighter ace.
I like fighting the Klingons (until I created one), the Borg, then the Voth, now the Undine, next the Iconians and so on. After all humans are a warlike race. Watching enemy ships pop like bugs under dual heavy cannon fire is very satisfying.
I like my fleetmates. I enjoy it when we team up to run a Khitomer Vortex and everyone knows their role. I like talking to them and discussing the game. I like PvPing them to see who has the better build at the time.
Can it be a grind (dil, ec, reputation, etc) - sure. Can it be a DPS race - sure. Can it be monotonous - sure.
But - look around with a little optimism at this game that can be so many things to so many different people. The game changes but so does life. Some changes are for good, others for bad. One thing that is nice about this game is that it can be almost anything you want it to be. If you don't like parts of it then don't do those parts.
For example - I tried console crafting at one point. Spent millions in EC getting the right DOFFS, then getting the "Strange Alien Artifacts", then the particle traces. After crafting consoles for a while I decided I didn't like the randomness of it and the rewards were too low, so what did I do - I stopped crafting consoles and went on to something else.
This isn't a rant, just an observation. The game has to change to stay alive, for both good and bad. We as players can change with it, or we can throw up our hands and move on. There is always a choice. I choose to continue to play the parts of the game I like, try the other parts and see if I like them as well. If you think about it I am sure everyone here can still come up with some aspect of the game that they still like to this day. Just give it a chance pople!
All the stupid decisions Cryptic makes that just make you go WHY!?!?! Decisions that have nothing to do with the limited abilities of the game engine or limited time/skills of the devs. Just pure 100% human decisions that seem just to make the game suck more on purpose.
"Players really want X and it makes sense and is doable. But we'll do Y instead."
Sometimes I think I play STO just to have something to complain about on the forums.
STO is a 2nd life to me. I just wish it was more time in the day for it. Grind grind grind. STO is also a 2nd job to me, LOL.
There's no other games I rather play than STO at this time. Sure I'm just waiting on another space MMO game called "____ Citizen". Yeah, STO better get real good soon. Like nuclear explosion of new stuff. That would keep me around.
The dress is gold and white. Over 70% people says so. When viewed from a certain screen angle it appears blue and black. The dress displayed on amazon is a blue and black dress, but it's not the same dress in the picture. If you're seeing blue & black you're slightly colored blind. A normal upright screen = white and gold.
Is this thread what STO is to you or what you wish it was because it reads like the latter. This game scratches my Star Trek itch. It is at its best when it is creating missions like LOR or the FE series. I am starting to tire of the grind and took my first long break from the game a few months ago. I think a big problem is aside from two fantastic feature episodes, it feels like story content is been pretty dried up with season 9. Season 9 has been all about system revamp and grind which is not at all exciting. I hope the 2nd expansion is as good as LOR because LOR was awesome. That and the Dominion Feature series are my favorite parts of the game. The grind part, including Risa, is starting to wear me down.
Very much this.
IMHO, it seems like that most Trek fans in this game want nothing short of a holodeck. And that's unrealistic and unfair. What is STO to me? A video game. Plain and simple.
It certainly follows the trend most games do these days, from mobile games to console games, and that is "the grind" combined with in-game purchases. And I certainly agree with the notion that it gets tiring... but, I started a new toon recently (a lib-Borg Rommy), and that has infused new interest in the game for me. Shoot, I haven't even reached the end of the main arc with my primary toon yet.
I don't mourn the loss of the exploration clusters one bit... they were boring, and added nothing to the game. They are no different than the grinding in STFs, to me. There are much better ways to get dilithium, and they lack any real impact on the game (true exploration should be tied into the main storyline, somehow).
And, yeah... sometimes, I just want to "pew pew pew" some Borg. And fly around in a Dominion ship. Because reasons.
STO is a place to fly pew pew lazor spaceships against one another. I guess there's some plot attached to a TV show from the 80s or something. Mostly a way to kill time.
STO to me is a game that makes me occasionally feel like I'm a character in the Star Trek universe.
LOL'd at this, because the core problem is people's expectation of what most of Starfleet gets up to. The Enterprises were always Starfleets' frontline explorers; we rarely saw what the rest of the fleet was up to, but as most broader explorations of the trek-verse noted, a lot of those ships are on fairly mundane survey / relief / security duties... or as one observer of naval life put it, six months of utter boredom punctuated by sixty seconds of screaming panic.
Really the problem is not STO's interpretation of the Trek-verse... it's that everyone wants to be Archer / Kirk / Picard.
LOL'd at this, because the core problem is people's expectation of what most of Starfleet gets up to. The Enterprises were always Starfleets' frontline explorers; we rarely saw what the rest of the fleet was up to, but as most broader explorations of the trek-verse noted, a lot of those ships are on fairly mundane survey / relief / security duties... or as one observer of naval life put it, six months of utter boredom punctuated by sixty seconds of screaming panic.
Really the problem is not STO's interpretation of the Trek-verse... it's that everyone wants to be Archer / Kirk / Picard.
some might feel this way.. others like me, just want choice.. sure.. pew pew space action is fine, but sometimes I want to actually uphold the prime directive (which im pretty sure cryptic has no idea what it is).
what I mean is I want to be able to take a less aggressive and Rambo approach to things.. don't get me wrong.. going into an stf and destroying a cube or 4 is cool. and having to fight battles in the klink war and what not..
but right now, cryptic has it so when I even warp into "most" exploration missions, its fire first, ask questions later. why am I firing on these people.. why am I not trying to resolve the issue like a Starfleet captain should.. why are there more romulan and enemy faction ships in orbit around earth than Starfleet vessels. why do missions for the most part only have pew pew in them.. don't I have sensors that I can scan with, or other equipment/abilities I can use to have a much richer, satisfying feeling that my career path means more than deal more/take more dmg?
yes, there are problems with the game and how it relates to what trek culture is.. but as a game, its pretty stale/ dry/ and really just a one hit wonder.. Christ, our main source of ingame currencies is still the stf's which are 4 years old. lol.. I want to think. I want to work with my team mates on more than just how to efficiently kill something. every 5 man or more queueable missions should not only consist of possible enemies that need to be passified, but also reasons to have a sci/eng/tac in group, and the need for them.
Asian grind fest and cash grab madquerading as a Star Trek game.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
If I want to play a "real" Star Trek game when I would play the Starfleet Command series. Too bad I don't have the original discs anymore.
That would be the same Starfleet Command which was based on Star Fleet Battles, a pure-bred wargame with a scale of conflict STO can only dream of...?
IMHO the closest thing to a "real" Star Trek game has been Birth of the Federation - one where it was actually possible to win via diplomacy and exploration, rather than just military domination.
What is STO to me. A MMO which is getting boring and annoying since there is those voth rep.
Since season Voth appeared. STO is like annoying chinese game from Decent co LTD. You know those kind of free games you can play in any internet bar.
With undine season, it's worst. Especially I hoped they would remake Terradome. But they didn't.
There is too much short PVE.
I really feel this game is boring. Farming for dil. Stupid Risa event. Annoying Undine.
STO is a MMO only for casual...
However I am a star Trek fan, so from time to time I re run episode. That's it.
I'm not a big ST fan, I just like flying space ships and have played a lot of space sims in the last 20 years. My hope was that STO would be in that vein, where you do things like fill out a navmap, build diplomacy with various factions, develop trade routes, run courier missions, deal with hostiles, that kind of thing....
Then my Friend, you are going to love the upcoming Chris Roberts game "Star Citizen."
Try playing the foundry guys, thats where most of the "Star Trek" stuff is. I mean if they removed the foundry, then i would just quit the game. The foundry has literally sucked me in for hours and hours and i have never got bored of it. Start at Starbase UGC, its a incredible website dedicated to people who make and do foundry missions. They have a tons of missions on there to scroll through to find what missions you want to play.
The FE missions just do not compare with the foundry ones. Most of my favorite missions are on the foundry. So go give it a try guys. Its a huge break from all that grind you guys complain about :P.
It offers one major thing that Star Wars The Old Republic still doesn't really offer in my opinion-Awesome ****ing ship combat. I have VASTLY more fun just going around blowing other ships up in STO then I do zipping around in dogfights on SWTOR. Plus, I can actually enjoy this game for free far more than I do with SWTOR (or at least it feels that way)
I also find, overall, the stories to be more interesting, which helps when you have the lovely thing known as the Foundry, where anyone who can figure out how to use the damned thing can make their own content, their own missions and stories and etc.
The fact we can play as Romulans, one of my favorite races ever, is a big one.
STO to me is a game I can play for free for hours on end and not get overly bored. I finally maxed one of my characters, and am starting another Feddie game with the intent of doing things a bit differently for the hell of it.
It also runs better on my computer, which is always a plus
Comments
A place to get my blood pressure rising because how dare I have fun in a game that is so obviously not other people's Star Trek.
Eh, 100% agree - DS9 is the "Gamer's Trek" in that it dealt with combat and espionage - not to mention a full scale war - which had hitherto been the provenance of tabletop gaming. But freeform exploration of the sort dealt with by the other Trek series would be very hard, IMO, to translate into either a tabletop or online game. Tabletop RPGs can do it because they use a consistent group and can wreck the universe without affecting anyone else. I'm not sure that an MMO could ever achieve that simply due to the difficulty of reliably scheduling a group.
It's a very personal thing, I know, but there isn't another game that I'm aware of at the moment that allows you to have control over what and who the supporting characters are (besides that game of becoming an indie dev). At best you have a pick and mix but that still leaves you at the mercy of other writers and popular convention, and at this point in my creative life I can easily do without them both.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Well some games do live up to the potential, some do not. Way of gaming.
Star Trek Battles member. Want to roll with a good group of people regardless of fleets and not have to worry about DPS while doing STFs? Come join the channel and join in the fun!
http://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1145998/star-trek-battles-channel-got-canon/p1
Star Trek Elite Force (multiple titles and an arcade release)
Star Trek Starfleet Command (multiple titles)
Star Trek Legacy
Star Trek Armada (multiple titles)
There's also at least one other RTS for the PC and at least one bridge simulator (SNES I believe.) I'm not going to defer to Wikipedia since I do like making points using my own internal resources, thank you. At any rate there have been quite a few, and none have really accomplished anything besides stringing out the IP along a conventional game for the genre and time period. STO on the other hand does a few things (Foundry, depth of Customization across all aesthetic aspects of your character, ship, crew) that are remarkable for the genre. Of course you can ***** about some of its other aspects, but such is the nature of the universe and whining. So long as you have the former you can entertain the latter until the end of measurable time since you are dealing with (at least as far as we can tell) finite space. Not everything will be to your liking...
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
Lately, those decisions seem to mainly be about hitting my daily dilithium refining cap and doffing like crazy to turn in fleet marks. The constant positive reinforcement the game gives me for accumulating purple numbers means I must be having fun, right? Right? Damn that operant conditioning!
...Also, this.
I'm not ready to jump onto the DOOOOM bandwagon though. I'm gonna wait and see what expansion 2 is gonna be like. Then, DOOOOM
I like the exploration missions where I dutifully ran around collecting particles so I could craft some purple and blue consoles and weapons for my Tac captain named after a WWII fighter ace.
I like fighting the Klingons (until I created one), the Borg, then the Voth, now the Undine, next the Iconians and so on. After all humans are a warlike race. Watching enemy ships pop like bugs under dual heavy cannon fire is very satisfying.
I like my fleetmates. I enjoy it when we team up to run a Khitomer Vortex and everyone knows their role. I like talking to them and discussing the game. I like PvPing them to see who has the better build at the time.
Can it be a grind (dil, ec, reputation, etc) - sure. Can it be a DPS race - sure. Can it be monotonous - sure.
But - look around with a little optimism at this game that can be so many things to so many different people. The game changes but so does life. Some changes are for good, others for bad. One thing that is nice about this game is that it can be almost anything you want it to be. If you don't like parts of it then don't do those parts.
For example - I tried console crafting at one point. Spent millions in EC getting the right DOFFS, then getting the "Strange Alien Artifacts", then the particle traces. After crafting consoles for a while I decided I didn't like the randomness of it and the rewards were too low, so what did I do - I stopped crafting consoles and went on to something else.
This isn't a rant, just an observation. The game has to change to stay alive, for both good and bad. We as players can change with it, or we can throw up our hands and move on. There is always a choice. I choose to continue to play the parts of the game I like, try the other parts and see if I like them as well. If you think about it I am sure everyone here can still come up with some aspect of the game that they still like to this day. Just give it a chance pople!
Increasingly annoying.
All the stupid decisions Cryptic makes that just make you go WHY!?!?! Decisions that have nothing to do with the limited abilities of the game engine or limited time/skills of the devs. Just pure 100% human decisions that seem just to make the game suck more on purpose.
"Players really want X and it makes sense and is doable. But we'll do Y instead."
There's no other games I rather play than STO at this time. Sure I'm just waiting on another space MMO game called "____ Citizen". Yeah, STO better get real good soon. Like nuclear explosion of new stuff. That would keep me around.
Very much this.
IMHO, it seems like that most Trek fans in this game want nothing short of a holodeck. And that's unrealistic and unfair. What is STO to me? A video game. Plain and simple.
It certainly follows the trend most games do these days, from mobile games to console games, and that is "the grind" combined with in-game purchases. And I certainly agree with the notion that it gets tiring... but, I started a new toon recently (a lib-Borg Rommy), and that has infused new interest in the game for me. Shoot, I haven't even reached the end of the main arc with my primary toon yet.
I don't mourn the loss of the exploration clusters one bit... they were boring, and added nothing to the game. They are no different than the grinding in STFs, to me. There are much better ways to get dilithium, and they lack any real impact on the game (true exploration should be tied into the main storyline, somehow).
And, yeah... sometimes, I just want to "pew pew pew" some Borg. And fly around in a Dominion ship. Because reasons.
Itch definitely scratched.
LOL'd at this, because the core problem is people's expectation of what most of Starfleet gets up to. The Enterprises were always Starfleets' frontline explorers; we rarely saw what the rest of the fleet was up to, but as most broader explorations of the trek-verse noted, a lot of those ships are on fairly mundane survey / relief / security duties... or as one observer of naval life put it, six months of utter boredom punctuated by sixty seconds of screaming panic.
Really the problem is not STO's interpretation of the Trek-verse... it's that everyone wants to be Archer / Kirk / Picard.
some might feel this way.. others like me, just want choice.. sure.. pew pew space action is fine, but sometimes I want to actually uphold the prime directive (which im pretty sure cryptic has no idea what it is).
what I mean is I want to be able to take a less aggressive and Rambo approach to things.. don't get me wrong.. going into an stf and destroying a cube or 4 is cool. and having to fight battles in the klink war and what not..
but right now, cryptic has it so when I even warp into "most" exploration missions, its fire first, ask questions later. why am I firing on these people.. why am I not trying to resolve the issue like a Starfleet captain should.. why are there more romulan and enemy faction ships in orbit around earth than Starfleet vessels. why do missions for the most part only have pew pew in them.. don't I have sensors that I can scan with, or other equipment/abilities I can use to have a much richer, satisfying feeling that my career path means more than deal more/take more dmg?
yes, there are problems with the game and how it relates to what trek culture is.. but as a game, its pretty stale/ dry/ and really just a one hit wonder.. Christ, our main source of ingame currencies is still the stf's which are 4 years old. lol.. I want to think. I want to work with my team mates on more than just how to efficiently kill something. every 5 man or more queueable missions should not only consist of possible enemies that need to be passified, but also reasons to have a sci/eng/tac in group, and the need for them.
- Judge Aaron Satie
If I want to play a "real" Star Trek game when I would play the Starfleet Command series. Too bad I don't have the original discs anymore.
If only GOG.com could acquire the series and update it to run on current systems I would buy 'em in a heart beat.
It also offers me a very nice but also very unfinished space PVP and i am still hoping for ground combat revamp and some better ground PVP.
Also, i like to try out various stupid builds
That would be the same Starfleet Command which was based on Star Fleet Battles, a pure-bred wargame with a scale of conflict STO can only dream of...?
IMHO the closest thing to a "real" Star Trek game has been Birth of the Federation - one where it was actually possible to win via diplomacy and exploration, rather than just military domination.
Since season Voth appeared. STO is like annoying chinese game from Decent co LTD. You know those kind of free games you can play in any internet bar.
With undine season, it's worst. Especially I hoped they would remake Terradome. But they didn't.
There is too much short PVE.
I really feel this game is boring. Farming for dil. Stupid Risa event. Annoying Undine.
STO is a MMO only for casual...
However I am a star Trek fan, so from time to time I re run episode. That's it.
Not because of the grind. Not because of the bugs. But, because of the players.
Then my Friend, you are going to love the upcoming Chris Roberts game "Star Citizen."
Roberts Space Industries
As always my Friends, stay thirsty.
The FE missions just do not compare with the foundry ones. Most of my favorite missions are on the foundry. So go give it a try guys. Its a huge break from all that grind you guys complain about :P.
Justin Timberlake wants to tell you something. :rolleyes:
I also find, overall, the stories to be more interesting, which helps when you have the lovely thing known as the Foundry, where anyone who can figure out how to use the damned thing can make their own content, their own missions and stories and etc.
The fact we can play as Romulans, one of my favorite races ever, is a big one.
STO to me is a game I can play for free for hours on end and not get overly bored. I finally maxed one of my characters, and am starting another Feddie game with the intent of doing things a bit differently for the hell of it.
It also runs better on my computer, which is always a plus
"You will never come up against a greater adversary than your own potential, my young friend."
-Dr. Paul Stubbs to Wesley Crusher, ST:TNG "Evolution"