Hey I know... how about instead of waging war with every race in the galaxy we go back to being "explorers"?
Because exploration in the shows consisted of charting and analyzing space gas and such things. While it can make for entertaining TV, as we see the actors try to figure out how to do it, it translates poorly into gameplay where it would amount to doing the same handful of mini-games over and over in what would amount to a dozen missions of "Of Bajor".
Trying to do exploration of new species just brings up the same problem the old "exploration system" had. Trying to create a system with that much content almost always means relying on random generation. However, with just pure random generation we end up with things that don't make sense like "Third Borg dynasty" and incredibly simple missions that were just beam down and scan five things, or beam in and kill 5 groups of something. Trying to fix this requires setting rules for the system to follow. However, even a basic system of rules could take the 300+ missions the old system could make down to like 50, and those would still be incredibly basic "beam down and scan 5 things" missions, which aren't particularly fun. To try to make exploration missions more then that requires pre-built set pieces and scenarios to be built around. But having to make a bunch of those also greatly limits how many can be done because of how much dev time it takes to even make a basic list of rather logical scenarios a randomization system can take advantage of.
This is why exploration isn't a thing in most games, and the few games that do it(No Man's Sky) suck, and likely why it has taken Cryptic so long to work on a new exploration system. Trying to find the balance between pre-made set pieces, and randomly generated enemies/scenarios, while making it still make sense, is a daunting task no developer has ever really acomplished.
And here's another radical thought, how about an expansion focused on life aboard starships? I.E a complete overhaul of how starship interiors are set up in order to actually make them functional and able to be integrated into missions and serve a purpose to some extent. That alone is worthy of an entire expansion. And its something that has been requested since before STO even launched over 8 years ago.
In the TV shows, starship interiors served the purpose of giving the actors a place to stand around and talk in, be it to other members of the crew, or other ships via view screens, and to do basic things like eat in the cafeteria, have bedrooms to sleep in, etc. etc. These thing's aren't really relevant in terms of gameplay in a video game. STO is not a life simulator, you don't have to eat, sleep, use the toilet, etc. etc. as part of maintaining your character, and contact between your crew, and other alien species, and doing thing like directing them to make modifications to X system to get past the Y barrier, can all be handled via the dialog popup box, or the little boff boxes on the side of the screen.
This is only further complicated by the fact there are multiple playable factions, so having your ship interior be useful in a mission would require them making multiple versions of all the missions this happened in to give you a Fed/KDf/Rom/Jem'Hadar interior. And this is only made worse by the fact there are so many non standard ships in the game, from alien races that lack the full number of pieces needed for ship interiors, making doing them impossible.
There is no real logical gameplay purpose for ship interiors. The interior of a ship is beds, cafeterias, gyms, holodecks, engineering, and other basic systems that really only exist to maintain the crew(a mechanic that doesn't even really exist in STO). What little there is that would actually affect gameplay is handled via things like the doff missions where you can have them do some upgrades on the warp core to get a temporary boost or w/e.
Or how about some story arcs focusing on some of the various worlds around the galaxy such as Trill or Ferenginar? Can't go wrong with more ferengi content! And Trill is ripe for a story arc given the controversies and Taboo's in Trill society that was depicted in DS9.
And how about a proper Cardassian story arc? Seeing as the original story arc was reduced to little more than a footnote that had more to do with the Mirror Universe and the Dominion than it did with Cardassia and Cardassian politics.
Because most of those planets don't have logical "ins" for a 6-8 mission long storyline. For instance, the Cardassians(unlike the Romulans) openly accepted the Federation's aid after the end of the Dominion War, and the Federation has spent the last 30 years since then and the start of STO rebuilding Cardassian cities, and agriculture, and medicine. The Cardassians aren't in the same sort of trouble that the Romulans are in. Their biggest issue is the hardliners trying to push it back into the military state, and those hardliners are all part of the True Way, the same organization we fairly heavily crush during the Cardassian arc. The Cardassians aren't suffering any real economic problems, and we already took care of their political ones when we removed the biggest instigator of the True Way's actions, aka Laas and his New Link.
This is also true of the Ferengi. Rom spent the 30 years between the end of Voyager and the beginning of STO implementing a wide array of reforms to make Ferengi society not terrible, and the Ferengi have lived with those for over a decade at this point. This is why there are Ferengi in Starfleet. Rom's reforms, Nog's posting to the Enterprise, and then being given his own ship, showed Ferengi society they don't need to be all focused on making profit. There's not much going on in Feregenar, nor is there much reason for there TO be anything going on there, for us to have a need to go there.
While I agree with most of that analysis I have to point out that scenarios that use the ship's interior are not such a crazy idea plotwise (though I strongly suspect that the game engine is not up to handling it in a general enough way to make it practical, they would have to manually recreate the scenario in every possible interior). Each series (with the possible exception of Discovery) had what the industry calls "bottle episodes" which happen entirely on the home sets (in this case the ship) which have the advantage of lower setting costs which makes up for the blowout episodes which go over the average episode budget.
Unfortunately the limitations of the game engine regarding ship interiors discourages roleplaying as well, which could have been a big draw (in fact, Star Trek and Star Wars roleplay is still hanging on in 3D social environments like Second Life and other various Opensim grids). I came back to STO with such a roleplay group in fact, though I am one of only a few who stayed after the roleplay problems became apparent.
Sadly, fixing the engine to make "sets" able to assemble themselves around a generic framework is not at all trivial and so it will probably never happen.
Hey I know... how about instead of waging war with every race in the galaxy we go back to being "explorers"?
Because exploration in the shows consisted of charting and analyzing space gas and such things. While it can make for entertaining TV, as we see the actors try to figure out how to do it, it translates poorly into gameplay where it would amount to doing the same handful of mini-games over and over in what would amount to a dozen missions of "Of Bajor".
Trying to do exploration of new species just brings up the same problem the old "exploration system" had. Trying to create a system with that much content almost always means relying on random generation. However, with just pure random generation we end up with things that don't make sense like "Third Borg dynasty" and incredibly simple missions that were just beam down and scan five things, or beam in and kill 5 groups of something. Trying to fix this requires setting rules for the system to follow. However, even a basic system of rules could take the 300+ missions the old system could make down to like 50, and those would still be incredibly basic "beam down and scan 5 things" missions, which aren't particularly fun. To try to make exploration missions more then that requires pre-built set pieces and scenarios to be built around. But having to make a bunch of those also greatly limits how many can be done because of how much dev time it takes to even make a basic list of rather logical scenarios a randomization system can take advantage of.
This is why exploration isn't a thing in most games, and the few games that do it(No Man's Sky) suck, and likely why it has taken Cryptic so long to work on a new exploration system. Trying to find the balance between pre-made set pieces, and randomly generated enemies/scenarios, while making it still make sense, is a daunting task no developer has ever really acomplished.
I don't know, I've played a few exploration games and in my experience their problems haven't been in the exploration itself. I think the main problem with them is that you can't do a game with JUST exploration. Finding pretty/cool/useful/weird things is all fine and good for a while but eventually the you'll want to actually accomplish something. Something more than just naming all the planets you discover after bodily functions.
Exploration games I've played have often sucked because they had no plot, or a stupid excuse plot made by googling a list of science fiction cliches, and thus couldn't keep me interested long enough to finish them. The ones that do stay interesting, are usually more about building things, with exploration just a way of collecting resources or looking for nice building sites.
With STO's exploration clusters on the other hand, the problem was they weren't exploration at all. It wasn't the simple scanning of things that was wrong, much less trivial bloopers like Borg Dynasties. It was that they put you in a small isolated area devoid of anything but the objectives the game marked down for you, instead of actually having you explore on your own. Going into a foreign place with a map and a list of sights to see makes you a tourist, not an explorer.
They could do real exploration in STO (and STO having good story and other engaging systems, exploration could have potential to be more meaningful than in games built around nothing but exploration), but it would be an entirely new playstyle to develop. Other than a few accolades, the game currently leaves absolutely nothing up to the player to discover on their own.
This might be a spoiler if you haven't done the patrol.
There are still the odd loose threads though. The Borg are known to have never really reached the Alpha quadrant, but there is that one assigned patrol mission where you go to an alpha quad world to investigate and discover Borg wreckage and evidence of chronitons, suggesting the Borg slipped some ships into the Alpha quadrant on some sort of time related shenanigans again.
Perhaps they go back in time in a relatively unpopulated area and have begun assimilating an area that had little alliance presence in the south east of the Alpha quad. They build up a whole new collective and begin moving again. Because they're careful to avoid making overt moves and assimilate slowly in a distant area the temporal ops don't notice changes to the time stream.
Now they have an extended time to begin rebuilding and however many years of assimilating and studying alliance tech they bring with them and so are more powerful on their return.
This would allow for a whole series of episodes starting with you investigating the odd missing cargo vessel up to the odd starship...easily recreating that original horror feel of the first meetings with the Borg as we find them where they shouldn't be.
Then you start with incursions across the south of the Alpha quad which grows into a war as the alliance battles a renewed Borg threat across the quadrant while temporal ops tries to find how they did it. It could become an ongoing war that eventually stalemates with flare ups (for ongoing episodes in between other events and episodes) or you could eventually help Daniels track down the original incursion and go back to fight the fleet and try to stop it. Heck, it could be a major operation just trying to keep these Borg contained and unable to connect to the other Borg and pass on their more advanced tech. That could create all kinds of deep space patrols hunting rougue Borg trying to make the trip across alliance space.
There's a season and tons of episodes from a single patrol that had no combat, just a stray story line.
There are tons of storylines out there if you look, no shortage of seasons and missions with just a little bit of thought.
Personally I'd love to see a storyline involving the Orion Syndicate, there is so much untapped potential there. Our only story run in with the orions is through Hassan, but that's more of a footnote in the Romulan story arc.
The backstory in the path to 2409 is rather compelling with Melani D'ian, the Emerald Empress, being an intriguing figure to meet. And the whole shakeup and purge of the syndicate. Not to mention that the lore implies she has spies in all the great houses of the Klingon Empire.
Seeing as how Starfleet is cracking down hard on Syndicate activity and the Klingons have an alliance with the Syndicate, one could easily see how that could become a source of friction within "The Alliance".
"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
It is true that pure exploration in a game with a small finite map and little or no ingame resource based economy like STO has (it is essentially a combat game rather than a largely crafting one) tends to be dull, but that would be true in the shows if that is what they really did. All of the exploration in the shows is either backdrop for something else happening or the plot arises from unforeseen complications from the research itself, not just the scanning and walking around part.
I suspect that one of the reasons they are not done much in STO is that episodes like that tend to be bottle episodes that happen on the hero ship, and the game engine apparently cannot handle those in a way that allows one "set" to be re-dressed easily (or better yet, automatically) which means they would have to do separate versions for each interior type.
On the other hand, they could have "hidden" mini scenarios that are triggered at random while on random explorations on the ground or space. Those could be the usual thing of getting jumped by some hostile faction or criminal element doing something in the same area (possibly even causing the phenomenon you stopped to investigate in the first place) or some kind of mystery thing (though mysteries have no replay value which could be a problem). Or they could even take it further and use a prompted "exploration" to trigger off a whole episode similar to what ucgsquawk suggests a few posts ago for patrols.
While it would all be easier if they had generic notation for scenario scripting that adapts automatically for each interior style and an AI engine that handles emergent behavior instead of just static patrols and "beam ins", it is still possible to give at least the illusion of exploration with clever writing, a variant of the random stuff that is already present, and perhaps alternate lead-ins depending on whether the character is in a war footing or peacetime footing at the time they do the "hail" for each mission.
Personally I'd love to see a storyline involving the Orion Syndicate, there is so much untapped potential there. Our only story run in with the orions is through Hassan, but that's more of a footnote in the Romulan story arc.
The backstory in the path to 2409 is rather compelling with Melani D'ian, the Emerald Empress, being an intriguing figure to meet. And the whole shakeup and purge of the syndicate. Not to mention that the lore implies she has spies in all the great houses of the Klingon Empire.
Seeing as how Starfleet is cracking down hard on Syndicate activity and the Klingons have an alliance with the Syndicate, one could easily see how that could become a source of friction within "The Alliance".
True, the Orions seem to be rather popular, often there are more Orion PCs than Klingons in the Quo'noS areas in fact so having more material that deals with them would probably be welcomed. Also, the syndicate is not just a Klingon internal matter so it can be easily used as the antagonist in cross-faction scenarios. In fact, there are also Orions in the Federation (and Starfleet itself if you count Kelvin, which STO does in a way) so with the right faction-specific lead-ins and lead-outs even some "internal matter" style scenarios would work for both main factions.
The game already has a rather expansive system to break free from the proscribed story arc. It's called the Foundry and is full of some pretty great user created stories, many of which fit into the exploration theme. With the somewhat recent addition of having the foundry missions available for discovery by flying around the space map and locating them at various system, it really does have the feel of exploring on your own. If you aren't taking advantage of it you are missing out on one of the best things STO has to offer.
Comments
While I agree with most of that analysis I have to point out that scenarios that use the ship's interior are not such a crazy idea plotwise (though I strongly suspect that the game engine is not up to handling it in a general enough way to make it practical, they would have to manually recreate the scenario in every possible interior). Each series (with the possible exception of Discovery) had what the industry calls "bottle episodes" which happen entirely on the home sets (in this case the ship) which have the advantage of lower setting costs which makes up for the blowout episodes which go over the average episode budget.
Unfortunately the limitations of the game engine regarding ship interiors discourages roleplaying as well, which could have been a big draw (in fact, Star Trek and Star Wars roleplay is still hanging on in 3D social environments like Second Life and other various Opensim grids). I came back to STO with such a roleplay group in fact, though I am one of only a few who stayed after the roleplay problems became apparent.
Sadly, fixing the engine to make "sets" able to assemble themselves around a generic framework is not at all trivial and so it will probably never happen.
Exploration games I've played have often sucked because they had no plot, or a stupid excuse plot made by googling a list of science fiction cliches, and thus couldn't keep me interested long enough to finish them. The ones that do stay interesting, are usually more about building things, with exploration just a way of collecting resources or looking for nice building sites.
With STO's exploration clusters on the other hand, the problem was they weren't exploration at all. It wasn't the simple scanning of things that was wrong, much less trivial bloopers like Borg Dynasties. It was that they put you in a small isolated area devoid of anything but the objectives the game marked down for you, instead of actually having you explore on your own. Going into a foreign place with a map and a list of sights to see makes you a tourist, not an explorer.
They could do real exploration in STO (and STO having good story and other engaging systems, exploration could have potential to be more meaningful than in games built around nothing but exploration), but it would be an entirely new playstyle to develop. Other than a few accolades, the game currently leaves absolutely nothing up to the player to discover on their own.
There are still the odd loose threads though.
The Borg are known to have never really reached the Alpha quadrant, but there is that one assigned patrol mission where you go to an alpha quad world to investigate and discover Borg wreckage and evidence of chronitons, suggesting the Borg slipped some ships into the Alpha quadrant on some sort of time related shenanigans again.
Perhaps they go back in time in a relatively unpopulated area and have begun assimilating an area that had little alliance presence in the south east of the Alpha quad. They build up a whole new collective and begin moving again. Because they're careful to avoid making overt moves and assimilate slowly in a distant area the temporal ops don't notice changes to the time stream.
Now they have an extended time to begin rebuilding and however many years of assimilating and studying alliance tech they bring with them and so are more powerful on their return.
This would allow for a whole series of episodes starting with you investigating the odd missing cargo vessel up to the odd starship...easily recreating that original horror feel of the first meetings with the Borg as we find them where they shouldn't be.
Then you start with incursions across the south of the Alpha quad which grows into a war as the alliance battles a renewed Borg threat across the quadrant while temporal ops tries to find how they did it. It could become an ongoing war that eventually stalemates with flare ups (for ongoing episodes in between other events and episodes) or you could eventually help Daniels track down the original incursion and go back to fight the fleet and try to stop it. Heck, it could be a major operation just trying to keep these Borg contained and unable to connect to the other Borg and pass on their more advanced tech. That could create all kinds of deep space patrols hunting rougue Borg trying to make the trip across alliance space.
There's a season and tons of episodes from a single patrol that had no combat, just a stray story line.
There are tons of storylines out there if you look, no shortage of seasons and missions with just a little bit of thought.
Sorry, another overly long page for my two cents.
The backstory in the path to 2409 is rather compelling with Melani D'ian, the Emerald Empress, being an intriguing figure to meet. And the whole shakeup and purge of the syndicate. Not to mention that the lore implies she has spies in all the great houses of the Klingon Empire.
Seeing as how Starfleet is cracking down hard on Syndicate activity and the Klingons have an alliance with the Syndicate, one could easily see how that could become a source of friction within "The Alliance".
I suspect that one of the reasons they are not done much in STO is that episodes like that tend to be bottle episodes that happen on the hero ship, and the game engine apparently cannot handle those in a way that allows one "set" to be re-dressed easily (or better yet, automatically) which means they would have to do separate versions for each interior type.
On the other hand, they could have "hidden" mini scenarios that are triggered at random while on random explorations on the ground or space. Those could be the usual thing of getting jumped by some hostile faction or criminal element doing something in the same area (possibly even causing the phenomenon you stopped to investigate in the first place) or some kind of mystery thing (though mysteries have no replay value which could be a problem). Or they could even take it further and use a prompted "exploration" to trigger off a whole episode similar to what ucgsquawk suggests a few posts ago for patrols.
While it would all be easier if they had generic notation for scenario scripting that adapts automatically for each interior style and an AI engine that handles emergent behavior instead of just static patrols and "beam ins", it is still possible to give at least the illusion of exploration with clever writing, a variant of the random stuff that is already present, and perhaps alternate lead-ins depending on whether the character is in a war footing or peacetime footing at the time they do the "hail" for each mission.
True, the Orions seem to be rather popular, often there are more Orion PCs than Klingons in the Quo'noS areas in fact so having more material that deals with them would probably be welcomed. Also, the syndicate is not just a Klingon internal matter so it can be easily used as the antagonist in cross-faction scenarios. In fact, there are also Orions in the Federation (and Starfleet itself if you count Kelvin, which STO does in a way) so with the right faction-specific lead-ins and lead-outs even some "internal matter" style scenarios would work for both main factions.