I don't think its outdated. Its better than the other MMO I was playing. Here we have better options on characters customization. Not stuck with the same few features. You can customize your ships. Not stuck with the same one like everyone else. The missions are still fun, just need some more other type missions other than kill and more kill. The last few they added was really fun with great VOs. Even the revamp Borg/8472 missions was really improved.
I say they are doing well for what they have. But all games needs some kind of improvements. And this one does have that share as well.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
TBH, it was either a good game with little to no VO's or a bad one with lots of VO's
I'm telling you, if this game had more funding, it would be like SWTOR (In character development, of course. I assume this is what the OP is suggesting. )
Kurland Here Kurland Here This is Kurland Kurland Kurland Here Kurland, Do you copy?
In addition to the fact that updating the core gameplay would essentially entail developing a whole new game, I believe the other reason for the not-so-cutting-edges graphics engine is because at the end of the day, a F2P MMO is supposed to cater for the widest possible target audience, and so will need to run decently on computers that aren't necessarily dedicated for gaming.
Wider audience with mediocre average PC specs = more potential revenue
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
This seems more like a wish to turn this in SWTOR than anything else.
I didn't say I wanted anything that has to do with Mass Effect here, I said I wanted something with the Mass Effect engine capabilities. All things that improve the STO story without changing it at all. Please... Don't troll.
Sumghai: not necessarily (I know you guys hate mass effect as an example but TRIBBLE it), Mass Effect runs great on old computers and you wouldn't have to stream extra data to the players because the game is the same, the only difference is the engine would do a lot more with the same number of resources.
I didn't say I wanted anything that has to do with Mass Effect here, I said I wanted something with the Mass Effect engine capabilities. All things that improve the STO story without changing it at all. Please... Don't troll.
Sumghai: not necessarily (I know you guys hate mass effect as an example but TRIBBLE it), Mass Effect runs great on old computers and you wouldn't have to stream extra data to the players because the game is the same, the only difference is the engine would do a lot more with the same number of resources.
Yeah well, the problem is, even if the game engine of STO is enough for STO, and certainly is a not bad engine for an mmorpg, the difference between the mass effect engine are pretty high.. lol. Instead of that, a version of the unreal engine adapted to STO will serve the purpose far better, and we will have a far better game engine that we have now. But its too late to think on all this. They better upgrade the engine for the nex expansion lol.. or we going to fly invisible ships everywhere xd.
Wtf you talking about?? are you playing the same game than us?? :eek:
We already had cases of weapons dissapearing even beofre S9, and after S9, some of you apparently forget all the time that the engine cant hold anything more, and you can be playing at instances where no weapons graphics are showing at all. I sometimes wonder why some of you play this game, because it looks like you guys doesnt care anymore for things that important. You should go to play mario bross and thats it. Nothing was done to "improve" graphics or make better animations or watever, so, no the engine hasnt proven itself time and time again, as you said. You are completely wrong lol. There is nothing to "prove" since we already saw millions of times (you apparently not) that the game engine is really badly damaged right now. STO is stucked in an old-very limited game engine. And the only way to "free" the game engine is to destroy , for example the exploration clusters xD. Yes, the engine has proven itself, yeah. :P
I dont doubt that 5 years ago this game engine was great and really served STO for a couple of years, but you cant keep releasing new content once YOU ALREADY KNOW the game engine reached its limits time ago. Or you re-vamp the engine, or you just close the servers. I wonder if people will still playing when the next thing to dissapear will be the enemy players or other players as well xDDD, people will not care at all, same as now, i suposse.
would you like cheese with your incessant whining? do you ever say anything constructive?
would you like cheese with your incessant whining? do you ever say anything constructive?
He got some points though.
I really like this game, all complaints aside.
But the engine showed that it is not up to Cryptic's current design standards. They are trying to get everything out of this engine they can, but they already overdid it with the Undine BZ.
We are at the outermost limits. Beyond them, to be honest.
This seems more like a wish to turn this in SWTOR than anything else.
shockingly in quality and i never thought i would ever write this but even eaware doing tor is of better quality now then anything the sto devs have put out recently. i mean over a year ago with brandon around, things got done, devs were working really well until LoR was finished and after that every thing fell into the toilet especially when season 8 came... which i consider the worst content update/patch on record of any game i have ran across. so now its just surviving the fall out from another epic disaster in the making according to the DOOOOOMMM!! mongers :P. and then waiting on the expansion later in the year and see how that works out. with that LV convention coming up and some details expected, it wont be long to find out what the devs have planned in dev blogs.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
shockingly in quality and i never thought i would ever write this but even eaware doing tor is of better quality now then anything the sto devs have put out recently. i mean over a year ago with brandon around, things got done, devs were working really well until LoR was finished and after that every thing fell into the toilet especially when season 8 came... which i consider the worst content update/patch on record of any game i have ran across. so now its just surviving the fall out from another epic disaster in the making according to the DOOOOOMMM!! mongers :P. and then waiting on the expansion later in the year and see how that works out. with that LV convention coming up and some details expected, it wont be long to find out what the devs have planned in dev blogs.
Expansion 2 really is our best hope for improvement.
I mean really.... I liked S8 because of the Voth BZ. I reaaallyyyy love that BZ.
I also like the new FEs (although there are not enough of them).
But overall, it's like the devs are drained off their capacities since at least S8.
I really hope all that power and skill go into Expansion 2. Seriously. It has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Somewhere? Anywhere?
Expansion 2 really is our best hope for improvement.
I mean really.... I liked S8 because of the Voth BZ. I reaaallyyyy love that BZ.
I also like the new FEs (although there are not enough of them).
But overall, it's like the devs are drained off their capacities since at least S8.
I really hope all that power and skill go into Expansion 2. Seriously. It has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Somewhere? Anywhere?
they already got the expansion 2 finished by now i would expect, its just cycling content according to the timetable and any other content on the way in between, possibly like an FE to string together the dyson sphere to delta quadrant that its expected. so yeah expansion 2 is the hope for sto. if it works as it should, it will give the devs another large chance for another year.
i found the whole dinosaur concept and then the lasers on the head one of the most silly concepts around. because the way i saw it, it had nothing to do with current voth culture despite them being evolved from these lizards back on earth. some things i just wont accept, season 8 is one of those things.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
i found the whole dinosaur concept and then the lasers on the head one of the most silly concepts around. because the way i saw it, it had nothing to do with current voth culture despite them being evolved from these lizards back on earth. some things i just wont accept, season 8 is one of those things.
Yeah, the dinosaur thing is stupid to no end. So is the explanation that "dumb things happen in Trek, look at TOS" which some Devs used.
Bad decisions are never a good justification for more bad decisions.
I was just talking about gameplay here. The Voth BZ was the first time ground combat was really enjoyable for me in this game. Rewards are great, too.
Yeah, the dinosaur thing is stupid to no end. So is the explanation that "dumb things happen in Trek, look at TOS" which some Devs used.
Bad decisions are never a good justification for more bad decisions.
I was just talking about gameplay here. The Voth BZ was the first time ground combat was really enjoyable for me in this game. Rewards are great, too.
you mean the dino tagging? potentially upwards of 350 marks per hit with bonus mark event and an additional 100 or so for capture points in total per round i would imagine and maybe more with bonus event. some grumbles going on about the dino tagging being an exploit, but anyways. thats old news.
T6 Miranda Hero Ship FTW. Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I believe someone from the Cryptic team addressed this. Said that it's so much work that they'd rather just make a new game from scratch...
That is why they should consider making STO2 - completely new and from scratch. Star Trek Online should be done the right way, the way the game was meant to be. Learn from the past mistakes from STO and create a better game, the revenue is there.
That being said though, is the talent there? I believe they may be lacking in the "good programmer" department. Granted, there may be several very talented individuals in the studio, but there may be a few that are not up to par. Voice actors from the studio are generally workers from the studio itself, and they are not necessarily very good. Take for example the Guardian Voice, Kurland voice (Jeremy Randell), the voice of Lt Kyona (Adrianne Grady) etc...
The voice of Koran (Secunda Wood), may have a bit of potential, however; the script loses that potential - basically suffering from bad writing. This is because in each new FE they constantly repeat themselves and justify the whole allegiance thing, to the point that it now sounds tacky and repetitive. The script isn't entirely horrible though, it's just need proof reading and more emotion to it.
Then there are the character animations & the visuals themselves (Remember the so call epic battle scene between the Belfast and the Jem'Hadar), in the newer FE Tuvok's animation appeared stiff, lacking fuidic movements. The game is fairly old and has been put together with mismesh of old and new. I think building a new game from the ground up with the potential they have, will bring new life to STO. I'm all for an STO2, even though I know it is a pipe dream.
That is why they should consider making STO2 - completely new and from scratch. Star Trek Online should be done the right way, the way the game was meant to be. Learn from the past mistakes from STO and create a better game, the revenue is there.
That being said though, is the talent there? I believe they may be lacking in the "good programmer" department. Granted, there may be several very talented individuals in the studio, but there may be a few that are not up to par. Voice actors from the studio are generally workers from the studio itself, and they are not necessarily very good. Take for example the Guardian Voice, Kurland voice (Jeremy Randell), the voice of Lt Kyona (Adrianne Grady) etc...
The voice of Koran (Secunda Wood), may have a bit of potential, however; the script loses that potential - basically suffering from bad writing. This is because in each new FE they constantly repeat themselves and justify the whole allegiance thing, to the point that it now sounds tacky and repetitive. The script isn't entirely horrible though, it's just need proof reading and more emotion to it.
Then there are the character animations & the visuals themselves (Remember the so call epic battle scene between the Belfast and the Jem'Hadar), in the newer FE Tuvok's animation appeared stiff, lacking fuidic movements. The game is fairly old and has been put together with mismesh of old and new. I think building a new game from the ground up with the potential they have, will bring new life to STO. I'm all for an STO2, even though I know it is a pipe dream.
THIS. This is everything I mean! The Devs always say: "it's too much work...". Well no ****, working is hard, but it's worth it if you are making something other people should see.
Well in order to do the things you suggest it would take a radical re-think of the development process for STO plus a substantial investment of finanicial resources maybe some of those lockbox profits perhaps lol.
Anyway then the time to develop them and test them on tribble before they went live, on the graphics side of things again that would take the same kind of process as prevously mentioned or buying a graphics engine then investing quite a bit of time figuring out how to get STO to use that engine effectively without say crashing every two seconds lol.
Either way these kinds of improvements won't over night or without significant investement from PWE and we don't know would they even consider that over say new ships or a level cap increase to help attract new players to game etc.
Star Trek Online has been the game that has given the producers the biggest revenue out of all their games if I am correct, however (despite their excellent graphics) their game mechanics (engine?) are so outdated it's crazy. Star Trek Online could turn into an immersive game like Mass Effect, where all the characters seem alive thanks to the excellent voice acting, where the characters change their expressions instead of being simple dummy-looking figures.
What makes games so amazing is the personality of the storyline, this game has a good storyline but it lacks personality! The developpers are putting lots of hard work into this game, but most of the time the content doesn't have any personality, it looks like the developpers are just performing their job. The best thing about videogames is that under the correct leadership they can turn into a fun job, if the developpers like their job, the game turns alive.
What do you guys think?
I think maybe you need to get a more realistic understanding of how things are made.
Here's a basic thing: anything that's made has a set amount of resources to go into making it. Those resources have to be allocated by professionals who have experience knowing how long things tend to take to be made in their field, some understanding that x amount allocated to task A will get the job done in 2 weeks, etc., etc.
IOW, a set amount of resources has to be prioritized.
With an MMO, making MMOs is just about the hardest thing in videogaming, they're monstrous tasks with a hell of a lot of stuff going on "under the hood" that's really difficult to program. Now, graphics are obviously one priority, and fairly high, but MMOs can't go hog wild with graphics usually, and very few have graphics that you could compare to a contemporary single-player game. And actually, for an MMO with an older engine, STO's graphics, cranked up to max, are slightly above average, actually not too bad.
Ditto for things like voice-acting, etc., etc. SWTOR put a lot into their voice acting, and some of it's very good indeed, but they probably regret it, because it's basically a waste of resources in an MMO, when top priorities are things like getting gameplay that's actually fun, to work across the internet on lots of different computers, etc., etc.
Newer gen MMOs will of course have better graphics. Could STO update itself with a new engine? Anything is possible, but again, someone would have to see a percentage in it so they'd put some money into it for it to happen. Changing an engine mid-stream is something very few MMOs have done (only 2 I can think of, EVE and that s-f MMO that's based on RL currency, forget its name), and I doubt anyone would see enough percentage in it, for all the difference it would make - which wouldn't be much, only in facial animations maybe.
Given how hard making MMOs is, the fact that Cryptic have been able to crank out 3 of the buggers is a testament to the quality of the engine, which started its life way back in CoH, and was very far ahead of the game in terms of the capabilities of its engine at the time (e.g. being able to fly and fight in an MMO - no other MMO could do it at that time, because tracking things in 3-d space with random player input across the internets is hard yo).
So yeah, while ideally, we'd all love to have photorealistic graphics and voice-overs for everything in our Star Trek MMO, it's unlikely to happen for a long, long time in any MMO, and certainly not in this Star Trek MMO.
Wtf you talking about?? are you playing the same game than us?? :eek:
We already had cases of weapons dissapearing even beofre S9, and after S9, some of you apparently forget all the time that the engine cant hold anything more, and you can be playing at instances where no weapons graphics are showing at all. I sometimes wonder why some of you play this game, because it looks like you guys doesnt care anymore for things that important. You should go to play mario bross and thats it. Nothing was done to "improve" graphics or make better animations or watever, so, no the engine hasnt proven itself time and time again, as you said. You are completely wrong lol. There is nothing to "prove" since we already saw millions of times (you apparently not) that the game engine is really badly damaged right now. STO is stucked in an old-very limited game engine. And the only way to "free" the game engine is to destroy , for example the exploration clusters xD. Yes, the engine has proven itself, yeah. :P
I dont doubt that 5 years ago this game engine was great and really served STO for a couple of years, but you cant keep releasing new content once YOU ALREADY KNOW the game engine reached its limits time ago. Or you re-vamp the engine, or you just close the servers. I wonder if people will still playing when the next thing to dissapear will be the enemy players or other players as well xDDD, people will not care at all, same as now, i suposse.
I'm a bit late to the thread, but this post requires a response. Your ignorance of the technology and requiements of different types of games is quite apparent. A stand alone PC/console and an MMORPG are massively different animals. Besides the obvious differences, a big difference which is relavent to my post is resource constraits in regards to graphics and sounds.
Everything displayed or heard in a game takes up resources of the PC, polygons, textures, sounds channels, etc. A big different between a PC game and an MMORPG is that the designers can afford to devote more resources into their games (i.e chaacters with higher poliygon counts, more textures, etc.) That can do this because they can control precisely how much is going to be disaplayed on teh screen: i.e. the player's avater. number of NPCs on a map, the size and complexity of a map, the sizes and numbrers of ships, etc.
And the MMORPG developers can't control precisely what is going to be displayed on the screen. It might just be the player's avatar, or players + a few NPCs, or a 100 playes and dozens of NPCs. So the designed are allocated gaphic budget of polygons, textures, etc for each aspect for any particular game environment. So players avatars get some many polygons and textures, NPCs get another smaller bugdet, maps have simular limitations, but maps designesrs have lots of tricks to work aound the budgets. Maps will have a maximum number of players and NPCs allowed on the map. The player's game client will have other limitations such as limiting the number or MOBS (Mobile Objects) which will rendered in the game camera's point of view. Limits on how many graphics effects that will be rended. Effects will can also have priorities which go into determining if it will be rendered or not.
All of these budgets and limitations can kick in when you have a lot of them inside of a players' point of view in the game client. The invisible Borg Topedo Spreads or Torp o' Doom, are caused by the rendering limits of the game client. According to one of the devs is due to the weapon effects having a high priority level. Many other graphics used by players and NPCs have high priorities as well. If you go over the limits, viola' invisible Torpedo Speads. It a very real limitation to prevent you video cards from turning into a smoking ruin or you getting seconds per frame even with a top-end multi GPU bazillion GHz video card.
And Cryptic's game engine is by no means obsolete. It's continually updated as times goes on. The game client can do ANYTHING. It just means that time and resources (i.e. programmer time which there is never enough) to implement the feature into the game engine. And another thing you don't realize if that Cryptic game engine is designed for MMORPGs. The Massive Effect engine is obsolete by your standards. It can't even handle an MMORPG. They might as well srcap it and start anew. [/sarcasm]
THIS. This is everything I mean! The Devs always say: "it's too much work...". Well no ****, working is hard, but it's worth it if you are making something other people should see.
Wrong question. It's "How much are you willing pay to have STO2 created ASAP?". That is what the devs are saying. IF they can't make a profit (short or long term) fom doing something, they aren't going to do it.
I'm a bit late to the thread, but this post requires a response. Your ignorance of the technology and requiements of different types of games is quite apparent. A stand alone PC/console and an MMORPG are massively different animals. Besides the obvious differences, a big difference which is relavent to my post is resource constraits in regards to graphics and sounds.
Everything displayed or heard in a game takes up resources of the PC, polygons, textures, sounds channels, etc. A big different between a PC game and an MMORPG is that the designers can afford to devote more resources into their games (i.e chaacters with higher poliygon counts, more textures, etc.) That can do this because they can control precisely how much is going to be disaplayed on teh screen: i.e. the player's avater. number of NPCs on a map, the size and complexity of a map, the sizes and numbrers of ships, etc.
And the MMORPG developers can't control precisely what is going to be displayed on the screen. It might just be the player's avatar, or players + a few NPCs, or a 100 playes and dozens of NPCs. So the designed are allocated gaphic budget of polygons, textures, etc for each aspect for any particular game environment. So players avatars get some many polygons and textures, NPCs get another smaller bugdet, maps have simular limitations, but maps designesrs have lots of tricks to work aound the budgets. Maps will have a maximum number of players and NPCs allowed on the map. The player's game client will have other limitations such as limiting the number or MOBS (Mobile Objects) which will rendered in the game camera's point of view. Limits on how many graphics effects that will be rended. Effects will can also have priorities which go into determining if it will be rendered or not.
All of these budgets and limitations can kick in when you have a lot of them inside of a players' point of view in the game client. The invisible Borg Topedo Spreads or Torp o' Doom, are caused by the rendering limits of the game client. According to one of the devs is due to the weapon effects having a high priority level. Many other graphics used by players and NPCs have high priorities as well. If you go over the limits, viola' invisible Torpedo Speads. It a very real limitation to prevent you video cards from turning into a smoking ruin or you getting seconds per frame even with a top-end multi GPU bazillion GHz video card.
And Cryptic's game engine is by no means obsolete. It's continually updated as times goes on. The game client can do ANYTHING. It just means that time and resources (i.e. programmer time which there is never enough) to implement the feature into the game engine. And another thing you don't realize if that Cryptic game engine is designed for MMORPGs. The Massive Effect engine is obsolete by your standards. It can't even handle an MMORPG. They might as well srcap it and start anew. [/sarcasm]
How can you state my ignorance when you don't have any idea what I'm talking about? You called the game "Massive Effect", that alone is enough to tell me that you haven't played the game and that you don't know that the Mass Effect engine is pretty old, therefore even if it was made for a regular RPG, it doesn't mean it couldn't be adapted for an MMO. I have in no way a high end computer, it's 4 years old and even back then it was a mid range pc, but even the newest Mass Effect game doesn't use half of my memory and processing ability...
re: Massive -> Mass, you know what I was talking about. Just a slip of the finger when I was brain dumping the post and bad proof reading. But my points stiil stand. It's always being upgraded. The graphic bugs you've used as proof that's Cryptic's game is outdated are just intentional limitations added to the game engine client to allow game play in edge conditions. The game engine is always being updated making it far from outdated. The engine is optimized for MMORPG based games.
I think the biggest weakness of STO is poor AI. Most of NPCs are scripted and ocurring on still same places, npcs do not use their abilities or use them very badly, pets dying very quickly because they loving an explosions, etc.
I'm a bit late to the thread, but this post requires a response. Your ignorance of the technology and requiements of different types of games is quite apparent. A stand alone PC/console and an MMORPG are massively different animals. Besides the obvious differences, a big difference which is relavent to my post is resource constraits in regards to graphics and sounds.
Everything displayed or heard in a game takes up resources of the PC, polygons, textures, sounds channels, etc. A big different between a PC game and an MMORPG is that the designers can afford to devote more resources into their games (i.e chaacters with higher poliygon counts, more textures, etc.) That can do this because they can control precisely how much is going to be disaplayed on teh screen: i.e. the player's avater. number of NPCs on a map, the size and complexity of a map, the sizes and numbrers of ships, etc.
And the MMORPG developers can't control precisely what is going to be displayed on the screen. It might just be the player's avatar, or players + a few NPCs, or a 100 playes and dozens of NPCs. So the designed are allocated gaphic budget of polygons, textures, etc for each aspect for any particular game environment. So players avatars get some many polygons and textures, NPCs get another smaller bugdet, maps have simular limitations, but maps designesrs have lots of tricks to work aound the budgets. Maps will have a maximum number of players and NPCs allowed on the map. The player's game client will have other limitations such as limiting the number or MOBS (Mobile Objects) which will rendered in the game camera's point of view. Limits on how many graphics effects that will be rended. Effects will can also have priorities which go into determining if it will be rendered or not.
All of these budgets and limitations can kick in when you have a lot of them inside of a players' point of view in the game client. The invisible Borg Topedo Spreads or Torp o' Doom, are caused by the rendering limits of the game client. According to one of the devs is due to the weapon effects having a high priority level. Many other graphics used by players and NPCs have high priorities as well. If you go over the limits, viola' invisible Torpedo Speads. It a very real limitation to prevent you video cards from turning into a smoking ruin or you getting seconds per frame even with a top-end multi GPU bazillion GHz video card.
And Cryptic's game engine is by no means obsolete. It's continually updated as times goes on. The game client can do ANYTHING. It just means that time and resources (i.e. programmer time which there is never enough) to implement the feature into the game engine. And another thing you don't realize if that Cryptic game engine is designed for MMORPGs. The Massive Effect engine is obsolete by your standards. It can't even handle an MMORPG. They might as well srcap it and start anew. [/sarcasm]
Sorry, i didnt read the whole post, but.. STO engine is far obsolet. I am not talking about the things it can do or the game being a mmorpg. I am talking about, right now everybody is aware that the game engine reached its limits time ago. And we are seeing the symptomps everywhere. THAT means a game engine being obsolete. When you keep pushing it and thigns like invisible weapons begins to appear massively. THAT means obsolete. Obsolete for the quantity of stuff we have in-game right now, obsolete for the quantity of stuff cryptic plans to add in the next expansion. Obsolete because it needs to be upgraded to hold the graphics load and bad performance that its present since months ago, specially since season 9. The STO game engine consumes too much resources of our videocards, even more than a fancy new game of the last generation.
Im far from being ignorant about this, you just are in the same bag that all the people that didnt realize the graphics in STO are vanishing and some areas are just impossible to play in. Or maybe you are one of those who thinks that "seeing our weapons graphics in the screen is just something to make it prettier but its optional..". If you are ok with this, then no, of course, the game engine is not obsolete.
And btw, who told you that the game engine is updated as times go on?? dude, seriously.. wake up.
Sorry, i didnt read the whole post, but.. STO engine is far obsolet. I am not talking about the things it can do or the game being a mmorpg. I am talking about, right now everybody is aware that the game engine reached its limits time ago. And we are seeing the symptomps everywhere. THAT means a game engine being obsolete. When you keep pushing it and thigns like invisible weapons begins to appear massively. THAT means obsolete.
Those are bugs, not engine problems.
Several people have told you that the Cryptic engine is pretty good as MMO engines go. You should listen and not just repeat something you heard someone say that sounded like a cool thing to say to make yourself sound knowledgeable. All you succeed in doing is making yourself sound stupid.
Certainly the engine has its limitations, but all engines do, they're designed to do specific things, they're not magic "do everything brilliantly" buttons, they're always compromises between various factors and what the devs want to do, the kind of gameplay they want to focus on, etc.
For instance, the Mass Effect games look cool, but they have severe limitations in terms of map size, so you couldn't possibly make an MMO out of it the way BioWare moulded the Unreal engine to their tastes, even if you tacked on a networking layer. It's impossible, at the moment, to get that level of detail in an MMO. Some MMOs made using the Unreal engine have had their problems too (e.g. Vanguard was plagued with some very severe problems, that was based on Unreal 2 in transition to Unreal 3; Mortal Online has been a bit of a mess altogether, partly because the Unreal MMO engine as sold to developers has lots of limitations and isn't terribly well supported for small development teams). In general, it's quite hard to make a good MMO out of an engine that's grounded in rendering single-player games. CryEngine MMOs have similar difficulties (which is why I worry a bit about Star Citizen). The most successful use of the Unreal engine in an MMO has been DCUO, and that's only because Sony completely stripped out the networking layer and built their own from scratch (so I gather). But even that's pretty glitchy, not very smooth in comparison to, say, Champions Online (Cryptic's second superhero game), plus the way they tweaked DCUO made it hugely exploitable, which eventually ruined what could have been a great superhero MMO with action combat.
Now, suppose a company wanted to make a Star Trek MMO that focussed on bridge life, and branched out from there into space battles, ground stuff like diplomacy, fighting, etc., then they might build an engine designed around that concept. But Cryptic got the job of making the MMO, and they had to make it with the engine they had, which was a proven engine that had carried 2 MMOs up to that point, the first one way ahead of its time in its capabilities; but which had some limitations that didn't allow the developers to work up a bridge life concept very easily in the time they had.
Now that's a shame, but they had to work with what they had, and they produced something that's pretty amazing if you understand even a little bit of how MMOs work. Even though the way they have both space combat and ground combat is a bit of a kludge, it's a brilliant kludge and enables this game to have what few s-f games have had, to this level of detail, extreme customizability and realtime player control - both ground and space combat in one game.
tl;dr your expectations are unrealistic and you don't know what you're talking about.
STO is great like it is. this game is done for all the players (high end, average computers).
for me the content is more important than only the nice stuff; we have lost clusters exploration, customization is average (i mean for the characters).
but i agree on some points; however the problem is not the engine, but the work done by the texturers/3D modellers; a good example is the Xindi ships, they haven't their place in a modern game. The models are not very good, and the textures are really poor (i don't even know if they use normal mapping).
Comments
Sentences like this makes me wonder.. are you living in the planet earth?
Except he doesn't even want a Mass Effect MMO ... he wants the regular Mass Effect ...
-> see : SW - Knights of the Old Republic vs. SW - The Old Republic (simply doesn't work that way)
I say they are doing well for what they have. But all games needs some kind of improvements. And this one does have that share as well.
USS Casinghead NCC 92047 launched 2350
Fleet Admiral Stowe - Dominion War Vet.
I'm telling you, if this game had more funding, it would be like SWTOR (In character development, of course. I assume this is what the OP is suggesting. )
Wider audience with mediocre average PC specs = more potential revenue
I didn't say I wanted anything that has to do with Mass Effect here, I said I wanted something with the Mass Effect engine capabilities. All things that improve the STO story without changing it at all. Please... Don't troll.
Sumghai: not necessarily (I know you guys hate mass effect as an example but TRIBBLE it), Mass Effect runs great on old computers and you wouldn't have to stream extra data to the players because the game is the same, the only difference is the engine would do a lot more with the same number of resources.
Yeah well, the problem is, even if the game engine of STO is enough for STO, and certainly is a not bad engine for an mmorpg, the difference between the mass effect engine are pretty high.. lol. Instead of that, a version of the unreal engine adapted to STO will serve the purpose far better, and we will have a far better game engine that we have now. But its too late to think on all this. They better upgrade the engine for the nex expansion lol.. or we going to fly invisible ships everywhere xd.
would you like cheese with your incessant whining? do you ever say anything constructive?
He got some points though.
I really like this game, all complaints aside.
But the engine showed that it is not up to Cryptic's current design standards. They are trying to get everything out of this engine they can, but they already overdid it with the Undine BZ.
We are at the outermost limits. Beyond them, to be honest.
shockingly in quality and i never thought i would ever write this but even eaware doing tor is of better quality now then anything the sto devs have put out recently. i mean over a year ago with brandon around, things got done, devs were working really well until LoR was finished and after that every thing fell into the toilet especially when season 8 came... which i consider the worst content update/patch on record of any game i have ran across. so now its just surviving the fall out from another epic disaster in the making according to the DOOOOOMMM!! mongers :P. and then waiting on the expansion later in the year and see how that works out. with that LV convention coming up and some details expected, it wont be long to find out what the devs have planned in dev blogs.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Expansion 2 really is our best hope for improvement.
I mean really.... I liked S8 because of the Voth BZ. I reaaallyyyy love that BZ.
I also like the new FEs (although there are not enough of them).
But overall, it's like the devs are drained off their capacities since at least S8.
I really hope all that power and skill go into Expansion 2. Seriously. It has to go somewhere, doesn't it? Somewhere? Anywhere?
they already got the expansion 2 finished by now i would expect, its just cycling content according to the timetable and any other content on the way in between, possibly like an FE to string together the dyson sphere to delta quadrant that its expected. so yeah expansion 2 is the hope for sto. if it works as it should, it will give the devs another large chance for another year.
i found the whole dinosaur concept and then the lasers on the head one of the most silly concepts around. because the way i saw it, it had nothing to do with current voth culture despite them being evolved from these lizards back on earth. some things i just wont accept, season 8 is one of those things.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Yeah, the dinosaur thing is stupid to no end. So is the explanation that "dumb things happen in Trek, look at TOS" which some Devs used.
Bad decisions are never a good justification for more bad decisions.
I was just talking about gameplay here. The Voth BZ was the first time ground combat was really enjoyable for me in this game. Rewards are great, too.
you mean the dino tagging? potentially upwards of 350 marks per hit with bonus mark event and an additional 100 or so for capture points in total per round i would imagine and maybe more with bonus event. some grumbles going on about the dino tagging being an exploit, but anyways. thats old news.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
That is why they should consider making STO2 - completely new and from scratch. Star Trek Online should be done the right way, the way the game was meant to be. Learn from the past mistakes from STO and create a better game, the revenue is there.
That being said though, is the talent there? I believe they may be lacking in the "good programmer" department. Granted, there may be several very talented individuals in the studio, but there may be a few that are not up to par. Voice actors from the studio are generally workers from the studio itself, and they are not necessarily very good. Take for example the Guardian Voice, Kurland voice (Jeremy Randell), the voice of Lt Kyona (Adrianne Grady) etc...
The voice of Koran (Secunda Wood), may have a bit of potential, however; the script loses that potential - basically suffering from bad writing. This is because in each new FE they constantly repeat themselves and justify the whole allegiance thing, to the point that it now sounds tacky and repetitive. The script isn't entirely horrible though, it's just need proof reading and more emotion to it.
Then there are the character animations & the visuals themselves (Remember the so call epic battle scene between the Belfast and the Jem'Hadar), in the newer FE Tuvok's animation appeared stiff, lacking fuidic movements. The game is fairly old and has been put together with mismesh of old and new. I think building a new game from the ground up with the potential they have, will bring new life to STO. I'm all for an STO2, even though I know it is a pipe dream.
THIS. This is everything I mean! The Devs always say: "it's too much work...". Well no ****, working is hard, but it's worth it if you are making something other people should see.
Anyway then the time to develop them and test them on tribble before they went live, on the graphics side of things again that would take the same kind of process as prevously mentioned or buying a graphics engine then investing quite a bit of time figuring out how to get STO to use that engine effectively without say crashing every two seconds lol.
Either way these kinds of improvements won't over night or without significant investement from PWE and we don't know would they even consider that over say new ships or a level cap increase to help attract new players to game etc.
I think maybe you need to get a more realistic understanding of how things are made.
Here's a basic thing: anything that's made has a set amount of resources to go into making it. Those resources have to be allocated by professionals who have experience knowing how long things tend to take to be made in their field, some understanding that x amount allocated to task A will get the job done in 2 weeks, etc., etc.
IOW, a set amount of resources has to be prioritized.
With an MMO, making MMOs is just about the hardest thing in videogaming, they're monstrous tasks with a hell of a lot of stuff going on "under the hood" that's really difficult to program. Now, graphics are obviously one priority, and fairly high, but MMOs can't go hog wild with graphics usually, and very few have graphics that you could compare to a contemporary single-player game. And actually, for an MMO with an older engine, STO's graphics, cranked up to max, are slightly above average, actually not too bad.
Ditto for things like voice-acting, etc., etc. SWTOR put a lot into their voice acting, and some of it's very good indeed, but they probably regret it, because it's basically a waste of resources in an MMO, when top priorities are things like getting gameplay that's actually fun, to work across the internet on lots of different computers, etc., etc.
Newer gen MMOs will of course have better graphics. Could STO update itself with a new engine? Anything is possible, but again, someone would have to see a percentage in it so they'd put some money into it for it to happen. Changing an engine mid-stream is something very few MMOs have done (only 2 I can think of, EVE and that s-f MMO that's based on RL currency, forget its name), and I doubt anyone would see enough percentage in it, for all the difference it would make - which wouldn't be much, only in facial animations maybe.
Given how hard making MMOs is, the fact that Cryptic have been able to crank out 3 of the buggers is a testament to the quality of the engine, which started its life way back in CoH, and was very far ahead of the game in terms of the capabilities of its engine at the time (e.g. being able to fly and fight in an MMO - no other MMO could do it at that time, because tracking things in 3-d space with random player input across the internets is hard yo).
So yeah, while ideally, we'd all love to have photorealistic graphics and voice-overs for everything in our Star Trek MMO, it's unlikely to happen for a long, long time in any MMO, and certainly not in this Star Trek MMO.
I'm a bit late to the thread, but this post requires a response. Your ignorance of the technology and requiements of different types of games is quite apparent. A stand alone PC/console and an MMORPG are massively different animals. Besides the obvious differences, a big difference which is relavent to my post is resource constraits in regards to graphics and sounds.
Everything displayed or heard in a game takes up resources of the PC, polygons, textures, sounds channels, etc. A big different between a PC game and an MMORPG is that the designers can afford to devote more resources into their games (i.e chaacters with higher poliygon counts, more textures, etc.) That can do this because they can control precisely how much is going to be disaplayed on teh screen: i.e. the player's avater. number of NPCs on a map, the size and complexity of a map, the sizes and numbrers of ships, etc.
And the MMORPG developers can't control precisely what is going to be displayed on the screen. It might just be the player's avatar, or players + a few NPCs, or a 100 playes and dozens of NPCs. So the designed are allocated gaphic budget of polygons, textures, etc for each aspect for any particular game environment. So players avatars get some many polygons and textures, NPCs get another smaller bugdet, maps have simular limitations, but maps designesrs have lots of tricks to work aound the budgets. Maps will have a maximum number of players and NPCs allowed on the map. The player's game client will have other limitations such as limiting the number or MOBS (Mobile Objects) which will rendered in the game camera's point of view. Limits on how many graphics effects that will be rended. Effects will can also have priorities which go into determining if it will be rendered or not.
All of these budgets and limitations can kick in when you have a lot of them inside of a players' point of view in the game client. The invisible Borg Topedo Spreads or Torp o' Doom, are caused by the rendering limits of the game client. According to one of the devs is due to the weapon effects having a high priority level. Many other graphics used by players and NPCs have high priorities as well. If you go over the limits, viola' invisible Torpedo Speads. It a very real limitation to prevent you video cards from turning into a smoking ruin or you getting seconds per frame even with a top-end multi GPU bazillion GHz video card.
And Cryptic's game engine is by no means obsolete. It's continually updated as times goes on. The game client can do ANYTHING. It just means that time and resources (i.e. programmer time which there is never enough) to implement the feature into the game engine. And another thing you don't realize if that Cryptic game engine is designed for MMORPGs. The Massive Effect engine is obsolete by your standards. It can't even handle an MMORPG. They might as well srcap it and start anew. [/sarcasm]
Wrong question. It's "How much are you willing pay to have STO2 created ASAP?". That is what the devs are saying. IF they can't make a profit (short or long term) fom doing something, they aren't going to do it.
How can you state my ignorance when you don't have any idea what I'm talking about? You called the game "Massive Effect", that alone is enough to tell me that you haven't played the game and that you don't know that the Mass Effect engine is pretty old, therefore even if it was made for a regular RPG, it doesn't mean it couldn't be adapted for an MMO. I have in no way a high end computer, it's 4 years old and even back then it was a mid range pc, but even the newest Mass Effect game doesn't use half of my memory and processing ability...
Do you play STO every day because of its great gameplay and lack of story? do you play it more than once a week?
Sorry, i didnt read the whole post, but.. STO engine is far obsolet. I am not talking about the things it can do or the game being a mmorpg. I am talking about, right now everybody is aware that the game engine reached its limits time ago. And we are seeing the symptomps everywhere. THAT means a game engine being obsolete. When you keep pushing it and thigns like invisible weapons begins to appear massively. THAT means obsolete. Obsolete for the quantity of stuff we have in-game right now, obsolete for the quantity of stuff cryptic plans to add in the next expansion. Obsolete because it needs to be upgraded to hold the graphics load and bad performance that its present since months ago, specially since season 9. The STO game engine consumes too much resources of our videocards, even more than a fancy new game of the last generation.
Im far from being ignorant about this, you just are in the same bag that all the people that didnt realize the graphics in STO are vanishing and some areas are just impossible to play in. Or maybe you are one of those who thinks that "seeing our weapons graphics in the screen is just something to make it prettier but its optional..". If you are ok with this, then no, of course, the game engine is not obsolete.
And btw, who told you that the game engine is updated as times go on?? dude, seriously.. wake up.
Those are bugs, not engine problems.
Several people have told you that the Cryptic engine is pretty good as MMO engines go. You should listen and not just repeat something you heard someone say that sounded like a cool thing to say to make yourself sound knowledgeable. All you succeed in doing is making yourself sound stupid.
Certainly the engine has its limitations, but all engines do, they're designed to do specific things, they're not magic "do everything brilliantly" buttons, they're always compromises between various factors and what the devs want to do, the kind of gameplay they want to focus on, etc.
For instance, the Mass Effect games look cool, but they have severe limitations in terms of map size, so you couldn't possibly make an MMO out of it the way BioWare moulded the Unreal engine to their tastes, even if you tacked on a networking layer. It's impossible, at the moment, to get that level of detail in an MMO. Some MMOs made using the Unreal engine have had their problems too (e.g. Vanguard was plagued with some very severe problems, that was based on Unreal 2 in transition to Unreal 3; Mortal Online has been a bit of a mess altogether, partly because the Unreal MMO engine as sold to developers has lots of limitations and isn't terribly well supported for small development teams). In general, it's quite hard to make a good MMO out of an engine that's grounded in rendering single-player games. CryEngine MMOs have similar difficulties (which is why I worry a bit about Star Citizen). The most successful use of the Unreal engine in an MMO has been DCUO, and that's only because Sony completely stripped out the networking layer and built their own from scratch (so I gather). But even that's pretty glitchy, not very smooth in comparison to, say, Champions Online (Cryptic's second superhero game), plus the way they tweaked DCUO made it hugely exploitable, which eventually ruined what could have been a great superhero MMO with action combat.
Now, suppose a company wanted to make a Star Trek MMO that focussed on bridge life, and branched out from there into space battles, ground stuff like diplomacy, fighting, etc., then they might build an engine designed around that concept. But Cryptic got the job of making the MMO, and they had to make it with the engine they had, which was a proven engine that had carried 2 MMOs up to that point, the first one way ahead of its time in its capabilities; but which had some limitations that didn't allow the developers to work up a bridge life concept very easily in the time they had.
Now that's a shame, but they had to work with what they had, and they produced something that's pretty amazing if you understand even a little bit of how MMOs work. Even though the way they have both space combat and ground combat is a bit of a kludge, it's a brilliant kludge and enables this game to have what few s-f games have had, to this level of detail, extreme customizability and realtime player control - both ground and space combat in one game.
tl;dr your expectations are unrealistic and you don't know what you're talking about.
for me the content is more important than only the nice stuff; we have lost clusters exploration, customization is average (i mean for the characters).
but i agree on some points; however the problem is not the engine, but the work done by the texturers/3D modellers; a good example is the Xindi ships, they haven't their place in a modern game. The models are not very good, and the textures are really poor (i don't even know if they use normal mapping).