There's one where you're helping a Talaxian colony evacuate, all while being pelted by some kinda bombs from who knows where... I almost put my fist through my monitor on that one.
There's one where you're helping a Talaxian colony evacuate, all while being pelted by some kinda bombs from who knows where... I almost put my fist through my monitor on that one.
Those were actually liberated Borg.... although some of them might have been Talaxians at some point... :P
I like the patrol missions. I find them interesting, but also quick and easy.
Yes, that's why everyone is currently grinding them.... oh wait, we are not, we are grinding the tau Dewa patrol instead !
Also, they are supposed to be "story" mission, so they should be compared to others story mission, like the Dyson arc, or dominion arc. Which are so much better, in every way.
They were Talaxians when I did it. I've noticed that a few of the patrol missions change who you're fighting/rescuing each time you play them.
But yes, towing the hospital ships was rage inducing.
Seemed kind of buggy to me ... afaik they're Talaxians hailing from Cooperative Ships ... not that it mattered ... that's how good these Patrols are ...
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
I actually liked the idea behind it -- I think the writing for the patrol missions was far better than the DR storyline missions. The ferengi trading in illegal goods in one sector sets up an innocent trader to take the fall. You run into the benthans trying to detain said ferengi in another sector. In yet another sector, you get the would-be-trap from the corporation trying to get you for scrap/salvage.
The WRITING of the ideas was good. I really enjoyed that.
Everything esle about it sucked. They took that good idea and made it into a 5/5. They made that 5/5 full of retardedly-high-HP ships that take 10 minutes to slog through. They made those AI spam so much scramble sensors and other things at you you LITERALLY cannot clear it off because they're firing 3x as much as you can clear while your "clears" are on cooldown. Then there's the nonsense where you get placated for minutes at a time while they kill your hull. Then there's the idiocy where they randomly make you switch targets or go untargetable "because.... reasons."
I like the ideas behind the patrols. They are smart, they are in tune with the Voyager story, adn they mesh well with the surrounding characters and the overall feel of Trek. Not something you can say about the Rom patrols.
It's just they took these good ideas and gave them to a fool with no imagination to port into actual combat. That's where it fails horribly.
EDIT: Oh, and putting "patrol x systems" as part of the storyline progression? LAME. WEAKSAUCE. GET A GRIP, CRYPTIC. Alternating a patrol mission then a story mission, then another patrol mission EVERY OTHER MISSION?
W
T
F
????
Don't TRIBBLE on my back and tell me it's raining. If you don't have content, don't pad it with BS. You've had shorter storyline missions before, and they worked out just fine.
The problem is that DR is short on content and full on BS (in all areas, balancing, bugs, plots, etc). So they pad the storyline by 25% to make it seem longer and more fleshed out. They're blowing smoke up our thruster ports in the hopes we don't see how badly this was all put together.
Aaaaaand don't get me wrong. I know SOME folks at the company must be working very hard on the content. It's the folks in charge and the ones making the decisions that need to go. They're the ones making decisions which ruin this game in so many ways.
The last few days i've been complaining how lame the patrol episodes are and also how i dont like breaks in a chapter. I actually find the breaks and episode flow to be pretty funny the further into DR you progress.
Early on you have mostly story and then they stick a patrol episode in there then you have that break where you dont have enough xp to get the next mission so you might have to grind for a bit. Then you get enough xp, you do the next episode and its a story mission again. But then i started noticing it would be story episode > break/grind > patrol episode > story episode > break/grind. Right as you come back from the break/grind you go back into the stories BUT its a patrol mission! then i noticed they did this twice. And by level 57-58 you have a story > break/grind > and you only have one mission at level 58 and guess what? its a patrol episode. Once you are done with that then you have another break and you grind for xp and then once you hit 59 you do the last episode.
DR was free which is cool, i havent had to pay for anything in a long time which is also pretty cool. And i wont bother trying to appeal directly to the devs (not that it would matter if i did) since i dont pay and it was free anyways. But the new storyline is just bad...too many patrol episodes, the interval between actual storyline episodes cause me to loose focus/interest on the story, and there is too much focus on the Vaadwuar it seems.
There are probably a lot of people out there that would go all Captain Obvious on me and tell me if i dont like it that i should stop playing. But its not as if i can stop playing and go play that other popular Star Trek MMO...
Add one more to the pile. Whomever thought - "Lets just throw wave after wave of enemy ships at the player at each objective; and then when they think they've completed they've completed the Patrol and are just getting a final 'thanks' window; we'll throw ANOTHER final wave of powerful NPC ships..." should be shot.
[I do like the choices we're offered as to 'how to repair/beam crew off' a damaged or exploding ship; but even in previous patrol designs, you had the occasional 'scan/repair/save' point where AFTER 'scanning/repairing/saving' you DIDN'T get 6 JNPC ships blasting you<--- Not the case with the DR patrols, it's all - "if there's something to click, and enemy will appear and initiate combat at all points, all the time.
It's tedious to the extreme - and if that's the new design paradigm; the patrols NEED to award more than 5 Delta Marks too.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Mundane sure. But I wouldnt compare them to mundane missions the Captains had to go through.
Mundane in the Series was [Go To Nebula X: Study Nebula for 2 Months], [Patrol System G: Smugglers Using Asteroid Belt as Staging Point], [Escort Scientist Y: Rare Star Event To Occur], [Go to Sector P: Update Star Charts]. These were the typical not worthy of an episode unless something out of place happened type of missions youd expect. And even heard mention of. Most wouldnt have required the Starship to even fire one single shot, let alone kill people. The most theyd have had to do was disable a Smugglers ship and arrest them.
And honestly. To break up the monotony it would of been nice to have had some of these in the game. They would of served well as Exploration missions and would have actually made sense. Compared to the Collect 5 Data Samples/Scan 5 X,Y,Z which we were supposed to believe was the best Scientificesque missions Cryptic could give us. Of course Studying a Nebula for 2 months would be out of the question. But theres ways of implying time has passed. Games do it all the time. But the fact that no one at Cryptic thought these would of been interesting and immersive is a reflection of why the Exploration Clusters failed. Why Patrol Missions have always been on the long list of things players dont enjoy.
Cryptic is just too short sighted to see that theres more to Star Trek then blowing ships up. And their game is more then capable of supporting the sort of missions/quests that would of been different, interesting merely for the immersive side of things and broken up the mundane.
Yes, I'm with you on the non-combnat missions too. It would be great to have, heck, some of the Alpha Quadrant patrol missions actually were non-combat. I wouldn't mind them being part of the game, as it would give more illusion of Trek, but... it just seems these are not popular at all...
I liked those DR patrol missions, for they kind of were small episodes of story, but, there was a lot of shooting involved. the game could make alterations between that, to make those truly enjoyable and Trek-feeling. Still, I felt they were a nice break from 'let's try to be epic' story missions. The mix-up is needed, both with non-combat ones, ground ones, diplomacy ones.
There are ways to make that, and I'd too enjoy those a lot.
[10:20] Your Lunge deals 4798 (2580) Physical Damage(Critical) to Tosk of Borg.
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I like the patrol missions. I find them interesting, but also quick and easy.
Uhm... did you do them in team of scimitars? The patrol missions are painful to do, I had to help many friends of mine complete them, doing them on elite is for the insane. Also ALL of them involve combat which is most disappointing and very untrek, and none of them involved ground. Also half of them seemed to be incomplete, one of the later ones had the word 'test' as the objective.
Everything esle about it sucked. They took that good idea and made it into a 5/5. They made that 5/5 full of retardedly-high-HP ships that take 10 minutes to slog through. They made those AI spam so much scramble sensors and other things at you you LITERALLY cannot clear it off because they're firing 3x as much as you can clear while your "clears" are on cooldown. Then there's the nonsense where you get placated for minutes at a time while they kill your hull. Then there's the idiocy where they randomly make you switch targets or go untargetable "because.... reasons."
..
Oh how i hate those parts, it is even worse if you play them in a group, costantly scrambled, Held and/or whatever OP stuff the NPCs throw around. And just like most of the older Mission a cloak is largerly useless too.
I guess they had less missions to fill out 10 levels due to the skill point award nerfs and needed fillers. I don't mind those "patrol missions" since they are not really patrols. Just poor gap fillers.
these patrols are ok , but i feel they shouldnt be included in the episode list , should be similar to how the Dewa patrols are picked up . on a side note some are really frustrating uplayable due to the drop in FPS due to the backdrop causing MAJOR lag in some of the systems . you dont get this with the Dewa ones.
i wish the devs wouldnt try to use these backdrop elements unless the give a option to TURN THEM OFF . for patrols i would find these much more enjoyable then .
I guess they had less missions to fill out 10 levels due to the skill point award nerfs and needed fillers. I don't mind those "patrol missions" since they are not really patrols. Just poor gap fillers.
But they don't fill any gap whatsoever..... It's grind time to get the xp you need to be able to play the next mission...
Yeah, exploration missions were taken out and replaced by exploration missions. I like the fact this stuff should be less buggy, but I had a mission where the Hierarchy were complaining about the Hierarchy because the Hierarchy were forcing them to attack the Hierarchy, because there seems to be a degree of random generation to them.
But they don't fill any gap whatsoever..... It's grind time to get the xp you need to be able to play the next mission...
Um, that's the 'gap' they fill - the EXP gap between one group of the DQ story episode missions and the next. They allow you to get the EXP in the new DQ zones without having to go back to the older zones to do leveling content.
Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Um, that's the 'gap' they fill - the EXP gap between one group of the DQ story episode missions and the next. They allow you to get the EXP in the new DQ zones without having to go back to the older zones to do leveling content.
Except they don't ...
Patch Notes : Resolved an Issue, where people would accidently experience Fun.
I'm not usually the type to agree with the negative threads, but I do this time; the first one was mixxed, but the second set of patrols was so lousy I'm skipping all the rest and leveling on ques and adventure/rep zones. We must have slipped up somewhere between the tutorial and saving Qo'noS.
Uhm... did you do them in team of scimitars? The patrol missions are painful to do, I had to help many friends of mine complete them, doing them on elite is for the insane. Also ALL of them involve combat which is most disappointing and very untrek, and none of them involved ground. Also half of them seemed to be incomplete, one of the later ones had the word 'test' as the objective.
You know you could also turn down the difficulty if you're having a painful time but that may be a bit too sensible for these circles. :P
Also, just about all STO content involves combat. Hell most ST episodes involve combat of some kind or another. Remember when kirk went on trial for loosing an officer? That ended in a fist fight. Trouble with Tribbles (the nicest episode of TOS) had a bar fight. And how do we reconcile ourselves with the Malon using a populated region of "empty" space for waste disposal? We kill them! Traitor on board selling info to the Kazons? Throw him into a plasma fire!
Space is the final frontier but it was also presented in the style of an entertaining TV show. Don't mistake the stated idealism for how it was actually presented throughout most of its run.
Anyway the new patrols require an effort but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The worst thing that can happen to a game is that it becomes automatic to play and having to now think a bit more carefully about how you approach ship builds, powers, and combat is by no means a BAD thing even if its a bit of a shock at first (I've found with time and a different approach things quickly settle back down). Neither is the abundance of combat. Its the core mechanic of STO, its by no means unusual for the kind of game, but it must also be said that there is a lot more story telling done through these DQ patrols than through any other patrol, PVE, or "grindable" content in STO. Its a stylistic improvement even if there's still some room to go to find that happy optimum between Kirk and Picard.
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Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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There should be no exp gap. Period. Why do I have to pause and stop until I hit lvl57 to continue the asinine kobali ground bz missions? Because that's what it told me at one point.
That shouldn't happen, ever. Either the enemy scale or they don't, Cryptic. If it's so broken you decide to limit this to lvl57 and above, what changed between that and the previous 5 kobali bz missions I ran? Fix the bug, don't hard-code limits to rank to make sure players can DEAL with the buf.
Further, almost no other missions that I can think of in all of the storyline missions as you level up require you to stop and level up. There are only one or two that might need it. Half of DR is delays to force you to level up.
It really is poorly designed, from the entire structure on upward.
I have to agree with most of the above, except hatred, grudge etc. While I didn't have a big grudge hatred case as many here I was just surprised to see patrol missions in delta rising story arc. That's about it. There was a little bug first, but after I've done 3 patrols the fourth opened properly. and I agree with someone who said that Cryptic probably think that we all love patrols because you people level your alts and doing patrols every day like obsessed, that's why they are part of story line now. Muahahahahaaaa.... :eek:
OK, so we get to patrol around and help out races we're trying to form alliances with. OK. I get it. BUT IT'S SO BLOODY BORING. It's the SAME mission time after time after time....
Why not some CREATIVITY? Ground patrols, Diplo patrols? PROBLEM SOLVING? Anything but the SAME MISSION with different races in different ships? My 4 year old nephew could dream up better stuff than this. I can only hope that this isn't really Cryptic's fault. They weren't done, and would have liked to given us meaningful content, but getting pressured by PW to get this thing live. Face it, some of the DQ storyline is some of the best stuff Cryptic has done. Then the rest feels like "sorry guys, you're out of time, get it live".
I'm not usually the type to agree with the negative threads, but I do this time; the first one was mixxed, but the second set of patrols was so lousy I'm skipping all the rest and leveling on ques and adventure/rep zones. We must have slipped up somewhere between the tutorial and saving Qo'noS.
This. I'm skipping all patrols from this time forward. I'm skipping the shuttle mission which I've heard is ahead of me. I'm skipping anything that doesn't sound plausible to the storyline. I presume I've only got 5 missions left because of this.
Yikes.. I actually enjoy them for what they are - a repeatable space combat scenario with an amusing amount of variance.
I think it's dumb that they were added as 'part of the story', but I do think they can be enjoyed when you take them at face value(rather than a means to obtain something else - like levels).
Then again, I'm someone who enjoyed just running Tau Dewa Patrols and making up my own story for why I was patrolling that system(or just to see how new experimental builds perform).. Kind of reminded me of all the skirmishes I used to play in Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command back in the day.
I find them to be irksome, but for no other reason than most of them seem to be dragged out pointlessly.
The missions themselves are better split up than old patrols where your five targets you had to hit were pretty much all in a line with no intervening content. These have dialog, things that happen between minor characters, other fluff tidbits that make them worth doing once. The shuttle track was a particularly nice surprise.
But then you get parts where two or three groups warp in to fight you for seemingly no other reason than to pad out playtime, which we've already seen Cryptic skim out on older story missions once before. In addition, there's pretty much no ground portions that I've happened across. Ground may not be as popular as space but a fair bit of interesting stuff, both combat and non, can be done this way. Imagine, a ground patrol that utilizes floater tech, or EV suits. Or what about another shuttle patrol set in a planet's atmosphere? Lots of possibilities for variety, missed.
If I had to pick I'd rather play DR's patrols over old Exploration and old patrols any day but they're still mostly underwhelming and even frustrating sometimes.
The patrols are horrid and really lazy compared to the other missions quality. I'll never play them again. Not that I even can now. Playtesting at its finest when half the missions background drive my computer so wild that the FPS drop to a crawl and make them all but impossible. And I know this is a common complaint from dozens of players.
The patrols are horrid and really lazy compared to the other missions quality.
In fairness, patrols aren't supposed to be high-budget affairs. They're quick, simple missions you do to gain some XP and maybe get some gear. Comparing them to story missions and STFs isn't really fair.
Comments
Those were actually liberated Borg.... although some of them might have been Talaxians at some point... :P
But yes, towing the hospital ships was rage inducing.
Also, they are supposed to be "story" mission, so they should be compared to others story mission, like the Dyson arc, or dominion arc. Which are so much better, in every way.
Seemed kind of buggy to me ... afaik they're Talaxians hailing from Cooperative Ships ... not that it mattered ... that's how good these Patrols are ...
The WRITING of the ideas was good. I really enjoyed that.
Everything esle about it sucked. They took that good idea and made it into a 5/5. They made that 5/5 full of retardedly-high-HP ships that take 10 minutes to slog through. They made those AI spam so much scramble sensors and other things at you you LITERALLY cannot clear it off because they're firing 3x as much as you can clear while your "clears" are on cooldown. Then there's the nonsense where you get placated for minutes at a time while they kill your hull. Then there's the idiocy where they randomly make you switch targets or go untargetable "because.... reasons."
I like the ideas behind the patrols. They are smart, they are in tune with the Voyager story, adn they mesh well with the surrounding characters and the overall feel of Trek. Not something you can say about the Rom patrols.
It's just they took these good ideas and gave them to a fool with no imagination to port into actual combat. That's where it fails horribly.
EDIT: Oh, and putting "patrol x systems" as part of the storyline progression? LAME. WEAKSAUCE. GET A GRIP, CRYPTIC. Alternating a patrol mission then a story mission, then another patrol mission EVERY OTHER MISSION?
W
T
F
????
Don't TRIBBLE on my back and tell me it's raining. If you don't have content, don't pad it with BS. You've had shorter storyline missions before, and they worked out just fine.
The problem is that DR is short on content and full on BS (in all areas, balancing, bugs, plots, etc). So they pad the storyline by 25% to make it seem longer and more fleshed out. They're blowing smoke up our thruster ports in the hopes we don't see how badly this was all put together.
Aaaaaand don't get me wrong. I know SOME folks at the company must be working very hard on the content. It's the folks in charge and the ones making the decisions that need to go. They're the ones making decisions which ruin this game in so many ways.
Early on you have mostly story and then they stick a patrol episode in there then you have that break where you dont have enough xp to get the next mission so you might have to grind for a bit. Then you get enough xp, you do the next episode and its a story mission again. But then i started noticing it would be story episode > break/grind > patrol episode > story episode > break/grind. Right as you come back from the break/grind you go back into the stories BUT its a patrol mission! then i noticed they did this twice. And by level 57-58 you have a story > break/grind > and you only have one mission at level 58 and guess what? its a patrol episode. Once you are done with that then you have another break and you grind for xp and then once you hit 59 you do the last episode.
DR was free which is cool, i havent had to pay for anything in a long time which is also pretty cool. And i wont bother trying to appeal directly to the devs (not that it would matter if i did) since i dont pay and it was free anyways. But the new storyline is just bad...too many patrol episodes, the interval between actual storyline episodes cause me to loose focus/interest on the story, and there is too much focus on the Vaadwuar it seems.
There are probably a lot of people out there that would go all Captain Obvious on me and tell me if i dont like it that i should stop playing. But its not as if i can stop playing and go play that other popular Star Trek MMO...
[I do like the choices we're offered as to 'how to repair/beam crew off' a damaged or exploding ship; but even in previous patrol designs, you had the occasional 'scan/repair/save' point where AFTER 'scanning/repairing/saving' you DIDN'T get 6 JNPC ships blasting you<--- Not the case with the DR patrols, it's all - "if there's something to click, and enemy will appear and initiate combat at all points, all the time.
It's tedious to the extreme - and if that's the new design paradigm; the patrols NEED to award more than 5 Delta Marks too.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
I liked those DR patrol missions, for they kind of were small episodes of story, but, there was a lot of shooting involved. the game could make alterations between that, to make those truly enjoyable and Trek-feeling. Still, I felt they were a nice break from 'let's try to be epic' story missions. The mix-up is needed, both with non-combat ones, ground ones, diplomacy ones.
There are ways to make that, and I'd too enjoy those a lot.
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Uhm... did you do them in team of scimitars? The patrol missions are painful to do, I had to help many friends of mine complete them, doing them on elite is for the insane. Also ALL of them involve combat which is most disappointing and very untrek, and none of them involved ground. Also half of them seemed to be incomplete, one of the later ones had the word 'test' as the objective.
Oh how i hate those parts, it is even worse if you play them in a group, costantly scrambled, Held and/or whatever OP stuff the NPCs throw around. And just like most of the older Mission a cloak is largerly useless too.
i wish the devs wouldnt try to use these backdrop elements unless the give a option to TURN THEM OFF . for patrols i would find these much more enjoyable then .
But they don't fill any gap whatsoever..... It's grind time to get the xp you need to be able to play the next mission...
Um, that's the 'gap' they fill - the EXP gap between one group of the DQ story episode missions and the next. They allow you to get the EXP in the new DQ zones without having to go back to the older zones to do leveling content.
PWE ARC Drone says: "Your STO forum community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."
Except they don't ...
And by "leveling content", we mean "grinding Tau Dewa patrols with elite murder teams." :rolleyes:
You know you could also turn down the difficulty if you're having a painful time but that may be a bit too sensible for these circles. :P
Also, just about all STO content involves combat. Hell most ST episodes involve combat of some kind or another. Remember when kirk went on trial for loosing an officer? That ended in a fist fight. Trouble with Tribbles (the nicest episode of TOS) had a bar fight. And how do we reconcile ourselves with the Malon using a populated region of "empty" space for waste disposal? We kill them! Traitor on board selling info to the Kazons? Throw him into a plasma fire!
Space is the final frontier but it was also presented in the style of an entertaining TV show. Don't mistake the stated idealism for how it was actually presented throughout most of its run.
Anyway the new patrols require an effort but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. The worst thing that can happen to a game is that it becomes automatic to play and having to now think a bit more carefully about how you approach ship builds, powers, and combat is by no means a BAD thing even if its a bit of a shock at first (I've found with time and a different approach things quickly settle back down). Neither is the abundance of combat. Its the core mechanic of STO, its by no means unusual for the kind of game, but it must also be said that there is a lot more story telling done through these DQ patrols than through any other patrol, PVE, or "grindable" content in STO. Its a stylistic improvement even if there's still some room to go to find that happy optimum between Kirk and Picard.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
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These must be amongst the worst patrol missions in the game.
Very tedious.
Normal : Painful
Elite : Insane
Reading comprehension : ftw ...
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What Is a Subordinate Clause?
A subordinate clause (or dependent clause) is a clause that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence because it does not express a complete thought. => sorry, doesn't matter if it's yellow ...
That shouldn't happen, ever. Either the enemy scale or they don't, Cryptic. If it's so broken you decide to limit this to lvl57 and above, what changed between that and the previous 5 kobali bz missions I ran? Fix the bug, don't hard-code limits to rank to make sure players can DEAL with the buf.
Further, almost no other missions that I can think of in all of the storyline missions as you level up require you to stop and level up. There are only one or two that might need it. Half of DR is delays to force you to level up.
It really is poorly designed, from the entire structure on upward.
Why not some CREATIVITY? Ground patrols, Diplo patrols? PROBLEM SOLVING? Anything but the SAME MISSION with different races in different ships? My 4 year old nephew could dream up better stuff than this. I can only hope that this isn't really Cryptic's fault. They weren't done, and would have liked to given us meaningful content, but getting pressured by PW to get this thing live. Face it, some of the DQ storyline is some of the best stuff Cryptic has done. Then the rest feels like "sorry guys, you're out of time, get it live".
This. I'm skipping all patrols from this time forward. I'm skipping the shuttle mission which I've heard is ahead of me. I'm skipping anything that doesn't sound plausible to the storyline. I presume I've only got 5 missions left because of this.
I think it's dumb that they were added as 'part of the story', but I do think they can be enjoyed when you take them at face value(rather than a means to obtain something else - like levels).
Then again, I'm someone who enjoyed just running Tau Dewa Patrols and making up my own story for why I was patrolling that system(or just to see how new experimental builds perform).. Kind of reminded me of all the skirmishes I used to play in Bridge Commander and Starfleet Command back in the day.
The missions themselves are better split up than old patrols where your five targets you had to hit were pretty much all in a line with no intervening content. These have dialog, things that happen between minor characters, other fluff tidbits that make them worth doing once. The shuttle track was a particularly nice surprise.
But then you get parts where two or three groups warp in to fight you for seemingly no other reason than to pad out playtime, which we've already seen Cryptic skim out on older story missions once before. In addition, there's pretty much no ground portions that I've happened across. Ground may not be as popular as space but a fair bit of interesting stuff, both combat and non, can be done this way. Imagine, a ground patrol that utilizes floater tech, or EV suits. Or what about another shuttle patrol set in a planet's atmosphere? Lots of possibilities for variety, missed.
If I had to pick I'd rather play DR's patrols over old Exploration and old patrols any day but they're still mostly underwhelming and even frustrating sometimes.
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In fairness, patrols aren't supposed to be high-budget affairs. They're quick, simple missions you do to gain some XP and maybe get some gear. Comparing them to story missions and STFs isn't really fair.
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