NMS is more Star Trek than STO only if it's named "Star Trek: Your Name is Mudd." There's no fleet in NMS--it's just you, your ship, and your reputation.
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
You know, I think the Foundry is probably the most realistic and promising means to an "Exploration" end for STO. For one thing, it requires so little Cryptic developer involvement, so they don't need to spend much on it beyond Foundry support. And for another thing, the imaginations of the entire Foundry community surely exceed in sheer volume anything a more limited set of developers can match. Before that becomes the real answer for exploration, though, Foundry projects might have to get a little bit easier to develop and submit.
As a wild sort of "spit-ball" idea, suppose map edges were all automatically linked to a specific Exploration type of Foundry mission. Every time you wished, you could travel to uncharted space, and accept a completely random Foundry created exploration mission.
You're setting the Foundry to work more like Everquest Landmark, which is struggling. No Man's Sky is something a lot of people have been waiting to see if it will work to push forward the ideas and the industry. If it pans out, then you can try to evolve the concept by mixing in user customization to procedurally generated capabilities.
The possibilities could be limitless.
I agree. A exploration system based 100% on Foundry content wouldn't work.
A mix of procedurally generated content and Foundry material could be amazing (about 75% procedural/25% Foundry?)
What I've seen of No Man's Sky says "GTA in space," not Star Trek. A gorgeous environment to wreak random havok in, kill random NPCs, maybe rob something then run from cops that spawn from nowhere when you get a "wanted level." But without the plot missions that actually give the GTA games something meaningful to do.
I would not want that in STO.
Wait. STO already HAS the plot missions. So if they did the random part, where you could now ... you know ... explore ... then they'd kind of re-capture a big part of the feel of Star Trek's ideals.
You wouldn't want that?
No. I would want exploration as seen in Star Trek, with interesting people and events that you interact with. Problems to solve, people to help, worlds to save. Not an endless supply of generic planets filled with generic resources to grind and generic NPCs to buy generic stuff from and/or kill at a whim. Where the only mark you leave behind is whatever misspelled swearwords you can sneak past the name filters.
And definitely not "wanted levels" with generic robot space police that pop up from nowhere to shoot you whenever you do something halfway interesting.
You know, I think the Foundry is probably the most realistic and promising means to an "Exploration" end for STO. For one thing, it requires so little Cryptic developer involvement, so they don't need to spend much on it beyond Foundry support. And for another thing, the imaginations of the entire Foundry community surely exceed in sheer volume anything a more limited set of developers can match. Before that becomes the real answer for exploration, though, Foundry projects might have to get a little bit easier to develop and submit.
As a wild sort of "spit-ball" idea, suppose map edges were all automatically linked to a specific Exploration type of Foundry mission. Every time you wished, you could travel to uncharted space, and accept a completely random Foundry created exploration mission.
You're setting the Foundry to work more like Everquest Landmark, which is struggling. No Man's Sky is something a lot of people have been waiting to see if it will work to push forward the ideas and the industry. If it pans out, then you can try to evolve the concept by mixing in user customization to procedurally generated capabilities.
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
played it. even did a thread about this not long ago. But it was buggy and created situations that would never happen in STO (Borg doing off the wall things). So they got rid of it.
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
It really isn't the same.
It pretty much hinges on a random number generator to load a variety of different art assets and mission templates. But everything you saw in those patrols were still built by hand. The game just simply shuffled around a limited number of presets at random.
NMS as I already stated uses true Procedural Generation to dynamically generate entire worlds from scratch. STO has no such system, all maps are pre-made.
"If you can't take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It's not safe out here. It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid." - Q
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
It really isn't the same.
It pretty much hinges on a random number generator to load a variety of different art assets and mission templates. But everything you saw in those patrols were still built by hand. The game just simply shuffled around a limited number of presets at random.
NMS as I already stated uses true Procedural Generation to dynamically generate entire worlds from scratch. STO has no such system, all maps are pre-made.
yep. you can't compare the very basic foundations upon which the two systems worked. STO uses cut-and-paste. No Man's can't! It isn't designed to. No two ships are exactly alike, nor is anything else. Similar? yes, since they have a basic concept to work from, but it is so diverse that.... I can't think of a single game with anything even close to it. The character generator system of Skyrim was advanced, but this blows that away - hands down as far as generation goes.
of course, character generation or even being able to see yourself is the one thing they said you wouldn't likely be able to do.
As I mentioned the review I saw says that NMS' s procedural generator results in things that may look different but are in all other ways the same. All the buildings have the same floor plan, all the NPCs follow the same paths, all the dialog comes from the same limited selections, and so on. Sounds more boring than the exploration clusters to me.
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
The differences you are describing are on the end-user side. Literally the details of what gets used. But they are more than remotely related. Zooming back out to the concept you see that the Procedurally Generated Contente of STO's Genesis System is related to the Procedurally Generated Content that No Man's Sky took to a whole new level.
STO has a PGC system already. No need to create anything from scratch. What happened was STO felt it wasn't useful and for quite a few reasons, set it aside.
If the grand experiment that is No Man's Sky becomes a hit, then STO already has something in place to reintroduce a similar style of gameplay to its own audience.
It doesn't have to start from scratch at all. It's PGC engine is already in place. No Man's Sky simply has to work to the point where it shows Cryptic or PWE or someone in the decision making process that it's useful, popular and profitable. Then the creative talent at Cryptic will be unleashed on the project to make what is there work.
Because, they are related. What we get won't BE No Man's Sky. But it will be something.
All of this hinges on No Man's Sky actually being good and popular and capable of generating money/profits. That remains to be seen.
You know, I think the Foundry is probably the most realistic and promising means to an "Exploration" end for STO. For one thing, it requires so little Cryptic developer involvement, so they don't need to spend much on it beyond Foundry support. And for another thing, the imaginations of the entire Foundry community surely exceed in sheer volume anything a more limited set of developers can match. Before that becomes the real answer for exploration, though, Foundry projects might have to get a little bit easier to develop and submit.
As a wild sort of "spit-ball" idea, suppose map edges were all automatically linked to a specific Exploration type of Foundry mission. Every time you wished, you could travel to uncharted space, and accept a completely random Foundry created exploration mission.
You're setting the Foundry to work more like Everquest Landmark, which is struggling. No Man's Sky is something a lot of people have been waiting to see if it will work to push forward the ideas and the industry. If it pans out, then you can try to evolve the concept by mixing in user customization to procedurally generated capabilities.
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
played it. even did a thread about this not long ago. But it was buggy and created situations that would never happen in STO (Borg doing off the wall things). So they got rid of it.
The Third Dynasty of the Borg text gets massively over-hyped on these forums. That happened in a tiny handful of missions related ONLY to the B'Tran cluster (the very same cluster my main character LIVED IN for much of the first two years of this game's existence). It was goofy. But it happened not nearly as often as people make it out to be. And it was simply the problem of one text chunk being smooshed into one randomly selected villain group. No one ever gave a darn about the Third Dynasty of the Starlians or the Third Dynasty of the Vito'D, which were also on the list of villains from the same B'Tran cluster. Just when it happened with the Borg.
The fix was mentioned btw. By multiple devs. It would have required a manual fix. For "all" the maps. Thing is, that was only the maps in the B'Tran cluster, so again, it got overblown. The Betraka Nebula would never have needed the fix because no one would have cared about the text randomness in those maps.
The far more aggravating issue with the clusters was broken ground maps. Which eventually did get a lot of work and a lot of attention.
There were also the other issues, like Aid the Planets being too fast to complete, and not that engaging. But overall the system was shallow but it worked outside of individual pathing glitches with some of the ground maps.
But EVERYONE loves to snicker at and remind us of the third dynasty of the borg. When I'd bet more than few quatloos that I experienced that particular situation far more than most of the people in this thread combined since I, as stated, lived in the B'Tran cluster, mining those missions for the back story of my main character who was all about some ongoing thing I was writing up for myself revolving around the Starlians and the Strekellans.
Still, if a tiny fraction of missions involving the Borg were what was holding this all back ... just REMOVE THE BORG FROM THE PGC maps! The Borg at the time were tied into that area of the space by the storyline. We've now revised, retconned and tweaked the storyline so much that we don't need them to be there. Viola. No more third dynasty of the Borg.
Can we let that go now? Cause I seriously doubt you all are really paying that much attention to the storyline integrity of the rest of the game, now that Agent Daniels and Noye have gotten involved.
The Third Dynasty of the Borg text gets massively over-hyped on these forums. That happened in a tiny handful of missions related ONLY to the B'Tran cluster (the very same cluster my main character LIVED IN for much of the first two years of this game's existence). It was goofy. But it happened not nearly as often as people make it out to be. And it was simply the problem of one text chunk being smooshed into one randomly selected villain group. No one ever gave a darn about the Third Dynasty of the Starlians or the Third Dynasty of the Vito'D, which were also on the list of villains from the same B'Tran cluster. Just when it happened with the Borg.
The fix was mentioned btw. By multiple devs. It would have required a manual fix. For "all" the maps. Thing is, that was only the maps in the B'Tran cluster, so again, it got overblown. The Betraka Nebula would never have needed the fix because no one would have cared about the text randomness in those maps.
The far more aggravating issue with the clusters was broken ground maps. Which eventually did get a lot of work and a lot of attention.
There were also the other issues, like Aid the Planets being too fast to complete, and not that engaging. But overall the system was shallow but it worked outside of individual pathing glitches with some of the ground maps.
But EVERYONE loves to snicker at and remind us of the third dynasty of the borg. When I'd bet more than few quatloos that I experienced that particular situation far more than most of the people in this thread combined since I, as stated, lived in the B'Tran cluster, mining those missions for the back story of my main character who was all about some ongoing thing I was writing up for myself revolving around the Starlians and the Strekellans.
Still, if a tiny fraction of missions involving the Borg were what was holding this all back ... just REMOVE THE BORG FROM THE PGC maps! The Borg at the time were tied into that area of the space by the storyline. We've now revised, retconned and tweaked the storyline so much that we don't need them to be there. Viola. No more third dynasty of the Borg.
Can we let that go now? Cause I seriously doubt you all are really paying that much attention to the storyline integrity of the rest of the game, now that Agent Daniels and Noye have gotten involved.
Yes, absolutely. I always thought that a lot of the people quoting the third Borg dynasty to proof the missions sucked never even encountered it themselves. It became a running gag, almost meme like in it's use but it was severly overhyped as well. That does of course not men the clusters were without problems, there were plenty - but we mustn't forget that Cryptic stopped working on the clusters almost immedeatly after implementing them. No significant workload was associated with creating new cluster expansions, new templates, fine tuning some of the maps or rethinking some concepts.
"Aid the planet" for example was so ridiculously easy because you can simply replicate every commodity instantly. If you had to make cargo runs in different areas of the galaxy getting those commodities and then maybe having to defend (or raid) a convoy in order to get them those missions would have been much more interesting.
The clusters had a lot of potential but they were never the focus of development. And today such a system is off the table inf avor of bringing in voice actors and rehashing show episodes to get more new players on board.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
NMS? I can guarantee you 100% STO will never ever get anything remotely like that.
But it used to have something very similar to that. And that's all still there in the engine and the code and what not.
Not even remotely.
Everything in the exploration missions were completely pre-fabricated, a handful of maps and items and basic mission premises that are randomly shuffled around.
No Mans Sky uses full on Procedural Generation to generate unique planets from the ground up, resulting no planet ever being "exactly" like the other.
STO has no such system at all, it would have to be created from scratch.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
It really isn't the same.
It pretty much hinges on a random number generator to load a variety of different art assets and mission templates. But everything you saw in those patrols were still built by hand. The game just simply shuffled around a limited number of presets at random.
NMS as I already stated uses true Procedural Generation to dynamically generate entire worlds from scratch. STO has no such system, all maps are pre-made.
Now I'm thinking it's actually NMS that you aren't understanding. Procedural Generation is stilling using variables to shuffle and create randomness. There is a reason many are saying that a lot of stuff is different, but looks and feels the same in NMS. The game just simply shuffled around a large number of presets at random. Now compare sentence that to the one you used to describe STO in italics above.
Until procedurally generated stories can be created, we have to rely on a mixture of the Genesis template missions, Foundry missions, and dev missions.
Star Trek doesn't fit the pure exploration of games like NMS since as a poster put it:
To me what Trek always seen to be about was not the study of alien life but the study of mankind through the lens of creatures not quite like us but like us in so many ways. I don't think randomly created worlds and animals can give us that kind of story.
Each Star Trek episode gave some sort of story beyond scan these 5 objects or fight these 5 patrols. In NMS, it seems like you are interacting with the alien empire not the individual alien captain, but at least we don't rely on a Universal Translator in that game.
- You can name species and planets in NMS, BUT, Only you will be able to see these. As you make discoveries their names are already provided by a name generator. You then upload your discoveries to a central database, and other will see them. But if you call your planet World of TRIBBLE, you will be the only one to see it.
- Honestly, it might end up being repetitive and boring, I need to put more hours into it so I can get a better feel. I barely broke orbit last night. And think I'll stay on my homeworld until I hit 100% completion. I wont be as OCD when checking out other new worlds. But I really enjoyed my 3 hours last night on my starting world, I'm up to 65% completion.
- There is no multiplayer as we know it. Its there, but if you and a friend want to meet up its supposed to take a while to find each other, even if you're on the same world, it would be hard to locate one another because the worlds are quite vast. But they said they have plans for Multiplayer so we'll see what they cook up. I'm sure they are going to keep adding to this game. And I can foresee micro transactions or paid expansions coming down the pipe at some point. You know how these things happen.
Just wanted to clear up a few misconceptions.
Now, as far as STO, and their Exploration clusters; I'm kind of with Targ and Jeff, in that they could be vastly improved, they just need more variety in the mix.
Like I said, I did enjoy them from time to time.
I don't think exploration or at least the kind of exploration that No Man Sky does is not needed in a Star Trek game.
To me what Trek always seen to be about was not the study of alien life but the study of mankind through the lens of creatures not quite like us but like us in so many ways. I don't think randomly created worlds and animals can give us that kind of story.
Point taken, and well said. I do feel very alone playing NMS. Its a very different experience.
Trust me, I encountered those 3rd Dynasty Borg missions. I levelled an entire character entirely on the Foundry because I couldn't bear playing through the story missions again.
The 3rd Dynasty thing was the most excessive, but there were also those exploration missions where you scanned plants but they were supposed to be some device (or was it the other way around). And when you were investigating who shot those poor freighters (optionally with enemy ships around the place), you always found the exact same signatures but they pointed to different species each time.
On the KDF side the Fed officers in some of those combat missions were ridicilous - they sounded like Captain Kirk - but the MIrror version. Threatening, aggressive, completely unfitting.
But remind me - where the Widrab an actual alien Exploration Cluster species, or am I confusing things?
I think some of the dialog problems could have been "fixed" with better templates. Each NPC group could have its own artifacts it would be looking for, for example.
I think others were harder to fix - like NPCs spawning inside buildings, or on top of buildings, or whatever weird thing that happened.
I wouldn't mind Cryptic revisiting exploration clusters or redesigning it. I think I would like to see more effort being put into two things:
1) Also integrate some (hand-crafted) story line with it. Put NPC sin there and lots of generated content, but a few story missions that go along with those NPCs - an introduction, an ongoing conflict, and its resolution.
2) Provide a sense that you're actually extending the knowledge of the Federation/Klingon Empire/Romulan Republic. Idealy with a real MMO component.
The server wide event progress meter could be used for something like this. Each exploration Block (if such a thing would still exist) has one, and depending on how well the players overall progress in their explorations, it grants some rewards to players.
I would also like to see things integrated with the DOFF and Admirality system. The Captain (or the Admiral) shouldn't have to scan all those plants and artifacts and what not himself - sometimes his officers and crewmen should take care of it.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
On the KDF side the Fed officers in some of those combat missions were ridicilous - they sounded like Captain Kirk - but the MIrror version. Threatening, aggressive, completely unfitting.
KDF implementation of exploration was ...whew. Bad. Remember that took a long time to even get in game. The KDF did not have that access or that kind of content at launch. And when they did finally get it, it was odd, and had some serious problems (like no working tricorders, but missions that required working tricorders to find COLUMNS to scan, I mean plants, no columns?)
And as much as people complained about the third dynasty of the borg, the Carnivorous Plants that were completely docile and easy to scan were encountered far far far more often.
But remind me - where the Widrab an actual alien Exploration Cluster species, or am I confusing things?
I don't remember. My focus was so hyper centered on like four of the oddball aliens from the B'Tran (like here's how focused I was ... my very first character, who was alien gen, I created to look exactly like a Strekellan and his entire crew are aliens, that look like Strekellans ... they ARE Strekellans if you read my backstories and biographies). What I do remember as interesting was that those races, like Starlians, were sort of allied with the KDF in that they were the ones that would complain about a bunch of aggressive threatening aliens to my KDF character when I found "random" new alien race missions on the KDF side.
And vice versa.
So Cryptic had the barebones of like a whole new set of alien races who are at odds with each other. Starlians would be aggro on Federation. But asking KDF for help. And those tiny short guys would aggro the hell out of my KDF character but always be asking my Fed for help in the B'Tran.
I was at one time inspired to try and catalog and flesh out stories for all of the Cryptic aliens. But mostly focused on the handful in the B'Tran I liked, and then they removed it all entirely.
One of the biggest gut punches I took personally as a player and what prompted my longest "break" from the game. Because no matter how many people who visit these threads post about how they didn't like the missions, someone (namely me) did and played them every day and enjoyed them and was using them for a whole imagination sparking back story that went way beyond how shallow their actual gameplay was.
And you know what? This much time AFTER they were removed, when I still read posts about how Soandso or Suchandsuch individual never liked those missions, but then are equally seen complaining about how FAST CCA or ISA are ... my bile rises again. Because I gotta say, as shallow as that Vito'D threat was to that freighter captain I was protecting every other day ... once again killing that same old tactical cube in less than 5 minutes for the 1500th time isn't that much deeper in terms of immersive Star Trek Gameplay experience.
I've killed enough Borg that I AM the third dynasty my damn self! Their resistance is obviously futile.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
It's not you- it's me. I just need my space.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
I still don't understand this fascination with the idea that exploration is center of Star Trek and all this other stuff we do just gets in the way.
The exploration that Star Trek was designed to do, from it's very inception, was to provide socially conscious commentary(but not SJW type ranting) on events of the day in a safe environment that is far removed from our oversensitive, litigious and painfully short sighted culture.
Modern day morality tales, if you like.
Any time the Enterprise's exploratory missions are even mentioned is simply as a jumping off place for the adventure/drama to come. The reasons are twofold. One, exploration as it could be presented is boring, unless you are some kind of anal retentive headcase. (no offense to the anal retentive headcases out there) And, two, any science they actually present can't be precise, it has to be based in reality, but be vague enough that if it turns out they were wrong, it doesn't matter.
Yeah I had high hopes when it was the creator of freelancer and the Wing commander series, but that was 2 years ago.
You know the industry standard for MMOs is five years, right?
No worries, we'll take this conversation up again 'round Christmas.
Considering the fact the creator had been working on it for over a year before he even launched kickstarter means he's been working on it for 3 years.
And could of had basically the equivalent of NMS up and running by now if he didn't keep trying to tinker with and add so much more.
We could of had limited exploration instead of what's on SC now. Which is just about NOTHING.
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!
The Third Dynasty of the Borg text gets massively over-hyped on these forums. That happened in a tiny handful of missions related ONLY to the B'Tran cluster (the very same cluster my main character LIVED IN for much of the first two years of this game's existence). It was goofy. But it happened not nearly as often as people make it out to be. And it was simply the problem of one text chunk being smooshed into one randomly selected villain group. No one ever gave a darn about the Third Dynasty of the Starlians or the Third Dynasty of the Vito'D, which were also on the list of villains from the same B'Tran cluster. Just when it happened with the Borg.
The fix was mentioned btw. By multiple devs. It would have required a manual fix. For "all" the maps. Thing is, that was only the maps in the B'Tran cluster, so again, it got overblown. The Betraka Nebula would never have needed the fix because no one would have cared about the text randomness in those maps.
The far more aggravating issue with the clusters was broken ground maps. Which eventually did get a lot of work and a lot of attention.
There were also the other issues, like Aid the Planets being too fast to complete, and not that engaging. But overall the system was shallow but it worked outside of individual pathing glitches with some of the ground maps.
But EVERYONE loves to snicker at and remind us of the third dynasty of the borg. When I'd bet more than few quatloos that I experienced that particular situation far more than most of the people in this thread combined since I, as stated, lived in the B'Tran cluster, mining those missions for the back story of my main character who was all about some ongoing thing I was writing up for myself revolving around the Starlians and the Strekellans.
Still, if a tiny fraction of missions involving the Borg were what was holding this all back ... just REMOVE THE BORG FROM THE PGC maps! The Borg at the time were tied into that area of the space by the storyline. We've now revised, retconned and tweaked the storyline so much that we don't need them to be there. Viola. No more third dynasty of the Borg.
Can we let that go now? Cause I seriously doubt you all are really paying that much attention to the storyline integrity of the rest of the game, now that Agent Daniels and Noye have gotten involved.
Yes, absolutely. I always thought that a lot of the people quoting the third Borg dynasty to proof the missions sucked never even encountered it themselves. It became a running gag, almost meme like in it's use but it was severly overhyped as well. That does of course not men the clusters were without problems, there were plenty - but we mustn't forget that Cryptic stopped working on the clusters almost immedeatly after implementing them. No significant workload was associated with creating new cluster expansions, new templates, fine tuning some of the maps or rethinking some concepts.
"Aid the planet" for example was so ridiculously easy because you can simply replicate every commodity instantly. If you had to make cargo runs in different areas of the galaxy getting those commodities and then maybe having to defend (or raid) a convoy in order to get them those missions would have been much more interesting.
The clusters had a lot of potential but they were never the focus of development. And today such a system is off the table inf avor of bringing in voice actors and rehashing show episodes to get more new players on board.
The reason they junked it was that they couldn't just push a "generate more stuff" button. Every map they made needed to be fixed by hand before it was playable. Also.... the exploration clusters were bigger than the actual game in terms of the data they contained. So it's a huge amount of stuff to tweak if there are large scale issues.
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There are the Faction Fleets.
Back in the day, explorations and even patrols, which we still have, were random and while it is true that there weren't many options in the randomness, they could increase those variables and it would begin to take shape, similar to NMS.
To say they are not even remotely the same is simply not correct...perhaps you weren't playing STO back shortly after launch? Back then, there was no story line to follow. You ran patrols, which were random, both in space and on the ground. The planets were random, the mobs were random. Then there was the cluster for exploration where sometime you flew in and supplied some planet with shield generators and other times you flew another patrol or ran a ground mission. It needed a lot of work, but it was a sound base to work from and it is currently in the game.
I agree. A exploration system based 100% on Foundry content wouldn't work.
A mix of procedurally generated content and Foundry material could be amazing (about 75% procedural/25% Foundry?)
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
No. I would want exploration as seen in Star Trek, with interesting people and events that you interact with. Problems to solve, people to help, worlds to save. Not an endless supply of generic planets filled with generic resources to grind and generic NPCs to buy generic stuff from and/or kill at a whim. Where the only mark you leave behind is whatever misspelled swearwords you can sneak past the name filters.
And definitely not "wanted levels" with generic robot space police that pop up from nowhere to shoot you whenever you do something halfway interesting.
played it. even did a thread about this not long ago. But it was buggy and created situations that would never happen in STO (Borg doing off the wall things). So they got rid of it.
It really isn't the same.
It pretty much hinges on a random number generator to load a variety of different art assets and mission templates. But everything you saw in those patrols were still built by hand. The game just simply shuffled around a limited number of presets at random.
NMS as I already stated uses true Procedural Generation to dynamically generate entire worlds from scratch. STO has no such system, all maps are pre-made.
yep. you can't compare the very basic foundations upon which the two systems worked. STO uses cut-and-paste. No Man's can't! It isn't designed to. No two ships are exactly alike, nor is anything else. Similar? yes, since they have a basic concept to work from, but it is so diverse that.... I can't think of a single game with anything even close to it. The character generator system of Skyrim was advanced, but this blows that away - hands down as far as generation goes.
of course, character generation or even being able to see yourself is the one thing they said you wouldn't likely be able to do.
This is based on what I can find on Google pics, haven't played the game myself.
I'm just looking at what the game can do, not the graphics. Most companies use graphic artists, No Man's doesn't - it's all math.
maybe...
It is the first of it's kind.
The differences you are describing are on the end-user side. Literally the details of what gets used. But they are more than remotely related. Zooming back out to the concept you see that the Procedurally Generated Contente of STO's Genesis System is related to the Procedurally Generated Content that No Man's Sky took to a whole new level.
STO has a PGC system already. No need to create anything from scratch. What happened was STO felt it wasn't useful and for quite a few reasons, set it aside.
If the grand experiment that is No Man's Sky becomes a hit, then STO already has something in place to reintroduce a similar style of gameplay to its own audience.
It doesn't have to start from scratch at all. It's PGC engine is already in place. No Man's Sky simply has to work to the point where it shows Cryptic or PWE or someone in the decision making process that it's useful, popular and profitable. Then the creative talent at Cryptic will be unleashed on the project to make what is there work.
Because, they are related. What we get won't BE No Man's Sky. But it will be something.
All of this hinges on No Man's Sky actually being good and popular and capable of generating money/profits. That remains to be seen.
The Third Dynasty of the Borg text gets massively over-hyped on these forums. That happened in a tiny handful of missions related ONLY to the B'Tran cluster (the very same cluster my main character LIVED IN for much of the first two years of this game's existence). It was goofy. But it happened not nearly as often as people make it out to be. And it was simply the problem of one text chunk being smooshed into one randomly selected villain group. No one ever gave a darn about the Third Dynasty of the Starlians or the Third Dynasty of the Vito'D, which were also on the list of villains from the same B'Tran cluster. Just when it happened with the Borg.
The fix was mentioned btw. By multiple devs. It would have required a manual fix. For "all" the maps. Thing is, that was only the maps in the B'Tran cluster, so again, it got overblown. The Betraka Nebula would never have needed the fix because no one would have cared about the text randomness in those maps.
The far more aggravating issue with the clusters was broken ground maps. Which eventually did get a lot of work and a lot of attention.
There were also the other issues, like Aid the Planets being too fast to complete, and not that engaging. But overall the system was shallow but it worked outside of individual pathing glitches with some of the ground maps.
But EVERYONE loves to snicker at and remind us of the third dynasty of the borg. When I'd bet more than few quatloos that I experienced that particular situation far more than most of the people in this thread combined since I, as stated, lived in the B'Tran cluster, mining those missions for the back story of my main character who was all about some ongoing thing I was writing up for myself revolving around the Starlians and the Strekellans.
Still, if a tiny fraction of missions involving the Borg were what was holding this all back ... just REMOVE THE BORG FROM THE PGC maps! The Borg at the time were tied into that area of the space by the storyline. We've now revised, retconned and tweaked the storyline so much that we don't need them to be there. Viola. No more third dynasty of the Borg.
Can we let that go now? Cause I seriously doubt you all are really paying that much attention to the storyline integrity of the rest of the game, now that Agent Daniels and Noye have gotten involved.
Yes, absolutely. I always thought that a lot of the people quoting the third Borg dynasty to proof the missions sucked never even encountered it themselves. It became a running gag, almost meme like in it's use but it was severly overhyped as well. That does of course not men the clusters were without problems, there were plenty - but we mustn't forget that Cryptic stopped working on the clusters almost immedeatly after implementing them. No significant workload was associated with creating new cluster expansions, new templates, fine tuning some of the maps or rethinking some concepts.
"Aid the planet" for example was so ridiculously easy because you can simply replicate every commodity instantly. If you had to make cargo runs in different areas of the galaxy getting those commodities and then maybe having to defend (or raid) a convoy in order to get them those missions would have been much more interesting.
The clusters had a lot of potential but they were never the focus of development. And today such a system is off the table inf avor of bringing in voice actors and rehashing show episodes to get more new players on board.
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Now I'm thinking it's actually NMS that you aren't understanding. Procedural Generation is stilling using variables to shuffle and create randomness. There is a reason many are saying that a lot of stuff is different, but looks and feels the same in NMS. The game just simply shuffled around a large number of presets at random. Now compare sentence that to the one you used to describe STO in italics above.
Here there be monsters!
Star Trek doesn't fit the pure exploration of games like NMS since as a poster put it:
Each Star Trek episode gave some sort of story beyond scan these 5 objects or fight these 5 patrols. In NMS, it seems like you are interacting with the alien empire not the individual alien captain, but at least we don't rely on a Universal Translator in that game.
If only.
- Honestly, it might end up being repetitive and boring, I need to put more hours into it so I can get a better feel. I barely broke orbit last night. And think I'll stay on my homeworld until I hit 100% completion. I wont be as OCD when checking out other new worlds. But I really enjoyed my 3 hours last night on my starting world, I'm up to 65% completion.
- There is no multiplayer as we know it. Its there, but if you and a friend want to meet up its supposed to take a while to find each other, even if you're on the same world, it would be hard to locate one another because the worlds are quite vast. But they said they have plans for Multiplayer so we'll see what they cook up. I'm sure they are going to keep adding to this game. And I can foresee micro transactions or paid expansions coming down the pipe at some point. You know how these things happen.
Just wanted to clear up a few misconceptions.
Now, as far as STO, and their Exploration clusters; I'm kind of with Targ and Jeff, in that they could be vastly improved, they just need more variety in the mix.
Like I said, I did enjoy them from time to time.
Point taken, and well said. I do feel very alone playing NMS. Its a very different experience.
You sir, are a pioneer. lol
The 3rd Dynasty thing was the most excessive, but there were also those exploration missions where you scanned plants but they were supposed to be some device (or was it the other way around). And when you were investigating who shot those poor freighters (optionally with enemy ships around the place), you always found the exact same signatures but they pointed to different species each time.
On the KDF side the Fed officers in some of those combat missions were ridicilous - they sounded like Captain Kirk - but the MIrror version. Threatening, aggressive, completely unfitting.
But remind me - where the Widrab an actual alien Exploration Cluster species, or am I confusing things?
I think some of the dialog problems could have been "fixed" with better templates. Each NPC group could have its own artifacts it would be looking for, for example.
I think others were harder to fix - like NPCs spawning inside buildings, or on top of buildings, or whatever weird thing that happened.
I wouldn't mind Cryptic revisiting exploration clusters or redesigning it. I think I would like to see more effort being put into two things:
1) Also integrate some (hand-crafted) story line with it. Put NPC sin there and lots of generated content, but a few story missions that go along with those NPCs - an introduction, an ongoing conflict, and its resolution.
2) Provide a sense that you're actually extending the knowledge of the Federation/Klingon Empire/Romulan Republic. Idealy with a real MMO component.
The server wide event progress meter could be used for something like this. Each exploration Block (if such a thing would still exist) has one, and depending on how well the players overall progress in their explorations, it grants some rewards to players.
I would also like to see things integrated with the DOFF and Admirality system. The Captain (or the Admiral) shouldn't have to scan all those plants and artifacts and what not himself - sometimes his officers and crewmen should take care of it.
KDF implementation of exploration was ...whew. Bad. Remember that took a long time to even get in game. The KDF did not have that access or that kind of content at launch. And when they did finally get it, it was odd, and had some serious problems (like no working tricorders, but missions that required working tricorders to find COLUMNS to scan, I mean plants, no columns?)
And as much as people complained about the third dynasty of the borg, the Carnivorous Plants that were completely docile and easy to scan were encountered far far far more often.
I don't remember. My focus was so hyper centered on like four of the oddball aliens from the B'Tran (like here's how focused I was ... my very first character, who was alien gen, I created to look exactly like a Strekellan and his entire crew are aliens, that look like Strekellans ... they ARE Strekellans if you read my backstories and biographies). What I do remember as interesting was that those races, like Starlians, were sort of allied with the KDF in that they were the ones that would complain about a bunch of aggressive threatening aliens to my KDF character when I found "random" new alien race missions on the KDF side.
And vice versa.
So Cryptic had the barebones of like a whole new set of alien races who are at odds with each other. Starlians would be aggro on Federation. But asking KDF for help. And those tiny short guys would aggro the hell out of my KDF character but always be asking my Fed for help in the B'Tran.
I was at one time inspired to try and catalog and flesh out stories for all of the Cryptic aliens. But mostly focused on the handful in the B'Tran I liked, and then they removed it all entirely.
One of the biggest gut punches I took personally as a player and what prompted my longest "break" from the game. Because no matter how many people who visit these threads post about how they didn't like the missions, someone (namely me) did and played them every day and enjoyed them and was using them for a whole imagination sparking back story that went way beyond how shallow their actual gameplay was.
And you know what? This much time AFTER they were removed, when I still read posts about how Soandso or Suchandsuch individual never liked those missions, but then are equally seen complaining about how FAST CCA or ISA are ... my bile rises again. Because I gotta say, as shallow as that Vito'D threat was to that freighter captain I was protecting every other day ... once again killing that same old tactical cube in less than 5 minutes for the 1500th time isn't that much deeper in terms of immersive Star Trek Gameplay experience.
I've killed enough Borg that I AM the third dynasty my damn self! Their resistance is obviously futile.
You know the industry standard for MMOs is five years, right?
No worries, we'll take this conversation up again 'round Christmas.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue.
Being critical doesn't take skill. Being constructively critical- which is providing alternative solutions or suggestions to a demonstrated problem, however, does.
The exploration that Star Trek was designed to do, from it's very inception, was to provide socially conscious commentary(but not SJW type ranting) on events of the day in a safe environment that is far removed from our oversensitive, litigious and painfully short sighted culture.
Modern day morality tales, if you like.
Any time the Enterprise's exploratory missions are even mentioned is simply as a jumping off place for the adventure/drama to come. The reasons are twofold. One, exploration as it could be presented is boring, unless you are some kind of anal retentive headcase. (no offense to the anal retentive headcases out there) And, two, any science they actually present can't be precise, it has to be based in reality, but be vague enough that if it turns out they were wrong, it doesn't matter.
Considering the fact the creator had been working on it for over a year before he even launched kickstarter means he's been working on it for 3 years.
And could of had basically the equivalent of NMS up and running by now if he didn't keep trying to tinker with and add so much more.
We could of had limited exploration instead of what's on SC now. Which is just about NOTHING.
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
My character Tsin'xing