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Tales of the War #19
pwlaughingtrendy
Member Posts: 2,966 Arc User
“Nurse Ch’droth, pass me the osteogenic stimulator,” said Doctor Harza-Kull, elbow deep in microsurgery. The war had taken its toll on even the strongest of Warriors.
Read more in our latest Tales of the War.
~LaughingTrendy
Read more in our latest Tales of the War.
~LaughingTrendy
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Yet another glorious battle of the Blog War. Yawn.
You guys just don't learn, do you?
Just because you would like to see more of the stuff actually happening in game doesn't mean they need to stop making blogs like this, nor does it mean they are pointless. They still deliver on the war atmosphere, even if it is fleeting.
This entire war has been a colossal letdown. The Iconians have one legitimate victory to their name; the rest of the time we've either kicked their asses or handed them victory on a silver platter because Kagran and the Klingons are too obsessed with "glorious battle" to bloody think, and nobody else has the guts to kick them out of the alliance for dragging everyone else down with their incompetence. And then we get classic stupid Star Trek logic fail in the classic stupid Star Trek time travel episode.
I strongly suspect that doing something in a blog is lots easier than getting something in game. As desirable I think the latter would be. And the blogs are a way to also reach people that are not actively playing.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
I kinda feel for both sides of the argument here. On the one hand, I do enjoy the Tales of the War blogs and the cinematics. They do an effective job of supporting a more bleak and desperate fight than seems apparent at playthrough. However, there are a couple of difficulties with changing the existing balance of play too much. First, would we rather have the Iconian War episode repeatedly batter us as players into losing again and again? I'm afraid at least as many players would complain about being beaten up by the game. Second, would there even be room for Advanced or Elite difficulty if they made the Normal episodic content nigh unwinnable?
The other suspicion I have is that the system of pacing the episode deployment throughout weekly/semi-weekly intervals actively inhibits the impact of the story and its urgency. I bet when the entire Iconian War episode is deployed, if you go back through and play it in its entirety at an appropriate difficulty level, it'll be much more like the challenge we all think it deserves to be.
I have a solution for you if you don't like them. Don't read them. It's a simple concept, but one you don't seem to have considered. It would also save us from seeing you complain.
I think people are thinking iconian red alerts and roaming iconian enemy mobs in sector space to indicate their omnipresence. Not something new players necessarily HAVE to (or are even able to) engage in, but to show that the iconians truly are overrunning the galaxy.
You can "win"/survive a mission without actually winning anything. You can fight a losing battle, doing your best, losing heaps of ships or generally succeeding at the objective and yet the iconians still destroy/take that planet anyway even though you did everything right. You take out that herald fleet, but it cost you most of your ships and the few that remain are barely functional, then three dreadnoughts backed by a whole new fleet gate in and the flag officer orders a retreat. You won, but you lost.
However, there may be difficulties in communicating the scale of the war in game without causing immense lag to those with less capable computers. Sector space alerts and roaming mobs shouldn't be too much of an issue, but actually rendering heaps of ships and the associated FX of battles could be an issue. This could be solved with cinematics and or animated backgrounds so you can see that, while your little group is over here trying to sneakily accomplish an objective, the bulk of your fleet is getting it's aft beaten like a bongo drum trying to give you the distraction you need to make the attempt.
You could set the mission so the player is heading toward this animated background and can see the battle, see some losses on your side, etc, you go into the ground portion, and when you come out there's a cinematic where the speaking NPC of the mission does the old "Oh my gosh, they're all gone!" and pan over wreckage of ships with heaps of heralds still floating around. Perhaps showing the last few survivors warping out, some discussion about how all those lives were lost because you took so dang long to finish the mission :P lol. But yeah. I think people just want to see more epic things in this supposed epic war to end all wars and they want to feel like the war is this ever present, omnipresent event it's supposed to be.
And I think people at the very least want these blogs in game, perhaps as intercepted communique after missions, so they don't just disappear into the void once this season is passed over for the next. Which is not to say stop posting them as blogs, but post them in game too so that the blog content is preserved and tied to the appropriate content in game.
The Nebula-configured Odyssey needs to be a thing.
Remind me never to have any of my (Starfleet) crew do an exchange programme with KDF officers. I'd get half of them sent back to me in body bags after a cruel and seemingly understaffed medical team botched their medical care!
If they don't care enough to actively play, what makes you think they care enough to read the blog? If Cryptic's background literature is more interesting and immersive than the actual game, they've failed as a game company.
Well, I keep citing Mass Effect 3 as a good portrayal of a galaxy-spanning conflict in a more or less single-player game (which STO's campaign basically is, even though you can also play it in co-op). So, here's some things BioWare did for immersion that Cryptic could readily emulate.
]- Major worlds getting attacked. Now, we sort of see this in the STFs but it could readily be more extensive.
- One or more new battlezones. For example, outside of the Omega molecules event, nobody uses Andoria for anything (I don't think the Ushaan duels were ever even implemented), so change the map into a BZ where you're fighting with the Imperial Guard against a Herald ground invasion, a la the ME3 multiplayer mode where you're holding off the Reapers while Shepard's busy doing her thing.
- In ME3, the Citadel is overrun with refugees and wounded fleeing the front lines. Do the same with Earth Spacedock, New Romulus Command, and First City. And yes, Cryptic does have the tech to change maps based on mission completion: see the end of "Uneasy Allies" where the Iconia system is replaced in sector space with the Herald Sphere.
Meanwhile, some stuff that's already in-game:
But instead Cryptic seems to want to make the Iconian War what Berman and Braga tried to have happen to the Dominion War, which was to make the thing that the entire series so far had been building up to into a short, ultimately minor story arc wrapped up within five episodes. This was something that Ira Steven Behr and Ron Moore wisely ignored, which they got away with because B&B were busy running VOY into the ground at the time.
Now, one thing I will praise Cryptic for is the mission "Blood of the Ancients", because BotA really felt like (for example) the ME3 missions on Palaven and Thessia where the PC was clearly just one small part of a much larger battle that was not going particularly well. "Delta Flight" also did well in presenting a decisive but ultimately relatively minor victory (the Heralds already have an overwhelming numerical advantage so it's not like adding the Solanae would really change much). But after that they seem to have put their best writers on blog duty and it all goes way downhill, with the Klingons engaging in glory-induced stupidity (seriously, Captain Kock-up, House Pratfall, and Emperor Forgot-to-Clone-Him-a-Brain couldn't run a successful covert ops mission if Mossad and GSG-9 ran it for them), and everybody else going completely genre-blind: it's a simple fact borne out in dozens of episodes of Star Trek that nothing having anything remotely to do with time travel ever ends well.
That's a great idea, really. The Herald ground battles are some of the toughest I've had to endure so far. A new BZ would be quite a challenge, for sure.
Something else that might be interesting would be an actual unwinnable option in a mission. For example, a choice to stay and fight after the mission dialog orders a retreat. You can stay, and you can fight, but the Herald forces will just continue to overwhelm you. You'll certainly die, and you can either continue to crash against the sea of enemies or go ahead and follow the story to a retreat. Right now, we have one mission almost like this, but you're forced off the map anyway shortly after you choose to stay.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
I don't suppose there's a wallpaper-sized version of the header image? I need it for...reasons....
Yeah, same here. I'm a little disappointed that the narrative isn't paying off as well as it should, but I've honestly gotten so sick of the repeated "here's the villain for this arc, PSYCH IT'S REALLY THE ICONIANS" pattern that I'm just going to be glad it's over. It'll free up the writers/designers to finally do something new, and that's way more exciting to me than the war ever was.
But he has the unenviable task of needing to provide medical care with very little time to do so.
My character Tsin'xing
Triage is never pretty.
Member Access Denied Armada!
My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
1)
Herald Red Alerts or at least Herald Signal Contacts. This constantly signals their presence. Cryptic could probably find a way to ensure that only high level characters or characters that completed the first Iconian war mission can see this. If not, it woudn't be terrible either, I think.
2)
Showing signs of the Herald attacks. That could mean some more activity on some of the key social maps, like chatter and wounded being transported, new messages given out through com systems implying the Iconians are there.
It could go further. Actually significantly altering some maps or at least planets on the sector space map. Visible Iconian ships in orbit, or some glowing spots on inhabited planet implying recent bombardment.
3)
Actually creating a "Iconian War" version of the Quadrants that "qualified" players visit instead of the regular ones.
All this would cost resources to make, of course, but this is the culmination of a storyline that's been 5 years in the making. It should be worth doing. And maybe they can reuse some of the tech that would need to be developed for this for other story-arcs, too.
Also, from now on, I'll aslo pay extra attention not to send any DOffs on exchange programs there.
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"To boldly go to the stars on the wings of the faithful."
They have the tech already with the announcements of grand prizes of the lockboxes, the strongest during the No-Win Scenario and the maintenance messages.
There could be daily funeral missions to attend to or visiting sickbays to motivate the wounded like during the Kobali front missions.
Or you enter a Borg Alert, play it normally, then, suddenly, the unimatrix exits warp in pieces followed by a Herald fleet you have to take down. Or you enter a Tholian red alert and you get a melee à trois with the Tholians curbstomping the borg while the Heralds are curbstomping the Tholians and you arrive in the middle.
Or you go for an Hard mission the Defera invasion map and instead of the normal objective, T'Ket or L'Miren shows up and you have to make her retreat to win.
Seriously, especially now that the Iconian campaign went from "we do what M'Tara says while L'Miren restrains T'Ket's bloodlust" to "Kill'em all!", this feels even more underwhelming.
As much as I enjoy reading the blogs, I have to agree.
They're fine as supplements to the main story. But that main story should be told in game.
The fact that they're moving on from the war next season is a big disappointment.