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Without exploration clusters, what do people do to explore new worlds?
apollinarius
Member Posts: 7 Arc User
One of my favorite things about STO was exploring the Delta Vulcanis Cluster and other star clusters, searching for anomalies. It was fun to feel like an explorer, discovering new worlds, never knowing where my next adventure will take me. I found the story missions pretty boring, so I only did 2 or 3 before focusing only on exploration missons.
I recently returned from a few month break only to find that those clusters I loved exploring don't exist anymore. All that's left is Duty Officer assignments and while I'm sure the Duty Officers are having lots of fun doing them, it's not exactly exciting for me to stand outside a glowy area of the map and fill out assignment forms.
Are there any places left in the STO world where we're able to explore star systems on our own, with random missions waiting for us when we arrive, or is now our only option to follow the linear quest chain and do Alert missions?
Thanks for any guidance in this matter. I never wanted to play STO for the powerful ships and weapons. I was only interested in the feel of roaming the galaxy in a cool spaceship, doing fun random encounter missions in episodic form. Kind of like how the TV show worked...
I recently returned from a few month break only to find that those clusters I loved exploring don't exist anymore. All that's left is Duty Officer assignments and while I'm sure the Duty Officers are having lots of fun doing them, it's not exactly exciting for me to stand outside a glowy area of the map and fill out assignment forms.
Are there any places left in the STO world where we're able to explore star systems on our own, with random missions waiting for us when we arrive, or is now our only option to follow the linear quest chain and do Alert missions?
Thanks for any guidance in this matter. I never wanted to play STO for the powerful ships and weapons. I was only interested in the feel of roaming the galaxy in a cool spaceship, doing fun random encounter missions in episodic form. Kind of like how the TV show worked...
Post edited by apollinarius on
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Quite frankly, an entire season MUST be dedicated to just that in the near future, as exploration is what Star Trek is all about at its heart.
No Exploration = No Star Trek
But yes, the short answer is the Foundry. Since the demise of exploration missions many authors have added some high quality and fun exploration missions. They are worth a look.
And they reward dil, so be sure to add the Investigate Office Reports daily which provides extra dil rewards. Something the old exploration cluster missions didn't do.
^ This because it's true
No. Exploration will come back. Maybe some time later next year. And we're all gonna hate it because it'll somehow tie too deeply with revenue generation. "Want to explore? Pay X amount of resources to continue! Buy said resources with zen or dilithium!"
Believe me, that's exactly how it'll be. Fortunately, if you need your space exploration fix, alternatives currently exist. Elite: Dangerous is right around the corner.
The story might be scripted and mostly linear, but it does the Trek feel so much better. Plenty of misses in the older (and even some of the newer) content, but no where near the level of bad the randomly generated stuff was. When you finish that up, there's tons of quality work in the Foundry to play. So much that you'll never get around to all of it.
One word: This.
oh; thx; i'm going to try your mission.
btw, someone could do a list of really good foundry missions?
Pretty much. The only way new systems are added these days are either if they make money or control what the players can(not) do to feed the metrics that are shown to management.
Silly wabbit, there aren't any new worlds in STO, only new currencies.
Awoken Dead
Now shaddup about the queues, it's a BUG
Heck, I felt even the "scan 5 anomalies" was immersive. After all, isn't that what most exploration is about? Go there, sift some sand, come back with samples. You're going there with your crew of carefully chosen officers on your amazing spaceship. What more could anyone ask for?
For my part, I discovered that I can just enter every single system I come across and do things there because at least some of the content scales. Some is just silly though. Running through an area at full speed in my carrier while my fighters clean the map of super-low level enemies is kinda boring.
I would argue that no other game has any exploration remotely comparable to STO (or what it had), let alone the Trek IP.
In other games, exploration means wandering around the map aimlessly when you should be doing something useful with your time. In STO, going to new places had/has a purpose (other than getting screenshots.)
The main reason I even play STO is because it has exactly what other small-world hills and valley quest hub based games lack.
Space Engine - http://en.spaceengine.org/
Every observable planet, star, and galaxy is accurately generated in scale and are all visitable, as well as an incountable amount of procedural ones beyond them as well. Deeply photo-realistic sights for each object, and NO instancing (it is all seamless, and 100% open... you'll never explore the same place twice unless you save the location in your journal and go back intentionally).
Space Engine is still in beta development and more features are regularly added to up-coming new release versions. A truly open MMO game will be developed from this engine that will include TRUE exploration, trade, resource mining, settlement creation, and more.
Space Engine is 100% free. But donations are submitted for the support of continuing development.
Nowhere in the name does it say "Star Trek"... yet it is known to be more faithful to it than STO. How do you like them apples?
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
Ehh, I think that's an unfair way of putting it. They just dumped a ton of new story content on us, really good story. No amount of randomly generated content will ever been as good as it.
Even if they had left the lousy exploration content in place, I'd be turning to the foundry for new missions.
If all you want to do s fly around and look at planets, that's wonderful. If you want something resembling Star Trek, that's not it. Not by a long shot.
Even more sad when PWE/Cryptic wants and expects foundry authors to pick up the slack for them.
This seems like a dramatic overstatement. WoW has more exploration than STO's exploration system had.
Ha ha ha.
But seriously the huge omission of the clusters needs to be addressed. With the xp nerfs I don't see how they could be exploited by peeps trying to get all the specialism points, some of us just like to play for fun and the clusters used to be the best way of doing that.
Problem is with exploration, they are taking the full metal jacket route of it. Ya know meeting new and interesting civilizations and killing them. They seem to think we want to be the first kid on our block to get confirmed kills.
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
And of course, the missions were really primitive story-wise.
I think the "moral plays" that Star Trek had are coming short in Startrek Online. There is almost none of it, to be honest. But you can't do this with randomly generated content. You need an actual human writer for that.
Oh, I totally agree with that assessment. We need more non-combat and diplomacy options -- I love those for my Federation characters in the few missions they're available in. There's are some nice moral choices in the new missions and even at least one diplomacy-based option, amusingly enough in the patrols everyone loves to complain about (and that I'm not a huge fan of myself). Kobali and the main story missions get some options but they're meaningless due to the linear, unchanging nature of the story.
But on the other hand, a few missions have too many forced "nice" options for Klingons and the Romulans (though the Republic is an odd wildcard now). Sometimes a warrior just wants to cut comms and charge disruptors
I would like to see a list as well especially for those of us who enjoy the explores.
I would personally prefer some sort of explore questionaire system that would generate the types of missions we'd like to see from places like the Academy or ESD. Firefall has a random mission generator that I think would work very well for those of us who would like to see explorations returned to the game. Even if the devs did something like that it would be a vast improvement over simply using the foundry like they are doing right now.