Real Exploration

predator804 · April 2020

Ok, so of course I love space combat and such but there is a lot of unexplored space out there. Would be awesome to update the space map beyond the current borders. When you travel to the current borders of the sector space map it says "we dont have permission to go into unexplored space". Please do a huge expansion to where you CAN go into unexplored space and make first contact with alien races and randomly run into random ships. You can even make a first contact system so captains can keep track of species they have encountered. Each captain has the opportunity to explore and meet a species that other captains have not, and even get technology from these alien races. And have the ability to either make good first contact or have it go really bad and to where to make enemies in that region of space. It would be all determined it your ability for diplomacy. You can even run into a hostel race that you have never encountered before.
Long story short there is a TON of the delta/gamma/beta and alpha quadrants still unexplored. I love the constant fighting but star trek is not based off that alone. Its also based off of exploration and going where no man has gone. Just a suggestion.

angrytarg · April 2020

This is a topic which has been debated for years. Most likely you'll draw hostile replies pretty soon, stating that the old exploration system was "terrible" and as such, any idea that resembles what we had is also "terrible" and you should be ashamed of yourself

Though it illustrates one point fair and square: Almost everyone has a different expectation of what such a system should be about or if it should be in this game at all. I personally would love it to have some resemblance of open-ended, almost rogue-like gameplay to write our own stories. For many people, this would be less appealing, they want a strog narrative, cutscenes and voice actors. Obviously, the game can only focus on one aspect and at this point it's pretty clear what this aspect is.

snowwolf · April 2020

The thing is.. In order for exploration to be fun, you need interesting things to explore. Just walking around seeing new pretty maps gets boring quick and tiresome.

Hmm, take the Tomb Raider reboot games as an example. They have a lot of documents, relics and lore scattered around, you can explore to find these and learn vast history of the place, culture, etc etc.

Now that makes it really interesting to explore, you learn about a place. You read and hear about the lore, its presented in a very good way. Usually it combines a mission or two, a side quest if you will.

The problem is that Star Trek Online is a MMO, and in order to have more than a few places to explore it would be impossible. The exploration system in Tomb Raider is like 50% of the game..

And the Star Trek universe is a lot bigger than just a location or two.. So in order to have pure exploration interesting, it would need to be deep and diverse. Something that would require a ton of manpower, effort and would yield little to no effort.

And the few times we have gotten almost pure exploration missions in STO as part of new episodes, it's usually go here, meet them, scan thingies. Solve a puzzle.

Which again has usually resulted in people complaining how boring it is.

captkelly31 · August 2020

One possible way to improve exploration is to have the fighting portion of any such mission be a simple holodeck program, to make it feel like a "bottle episode".

jasonkirk · August 2020

They used to have the Foundry which gave people a taste for other missions to include exploration. That is long gone and yet now it's just more pew...pew...pew.

bltrrn · August 2020

One can always RP with a few others; it isn't as hot as it used to be, but it's still out there.

captkelly31 · August 2020

Another thing the devs need to do is to bring back the old scannable props from the star clusters; the New Romulus cave instance (Paehhos) could have some of them instead of just 10 stacks of "toy blocks".

trillbuffet · September 2020

One of the problematic things why many agree that games based on books, tv, and movies put limitations on the scale of how things are made within games. Then you have the unique situation where Star Trek under the Roddenberry and Braga Trek era's is gone and its never coming back. So STO was the only kind of content Star Trek related between then and now. However to keep things canon and follow licensing and that sort of thing exploration is a double edged weapon. So if say you explored uncharted in Star Trek region A for example and then Kurtzman shows that on one of these shows that it was completely destroyed by an Omega Molecule that content you then enjoyed exploring through an exploration system thus has to be removed immediately. So some parts of these sunsets they are doing are because they are dead but also for reasons that they can't talk about because it would go against future stories being told which their work would then be required to be deleted wasting hours of development time.

Then you have another aspect with the way lockboxes work and the kind of people who I will say keep the game funded but they aren't the sharpest pain stick in the drawer. So they are people you specifically have to see content made for and being that they will just throw money at Cryptic and PWE for any bright flashing light that will happen when they spam their space bar it has to be on a level they can understand and find challenging. Like for example ground with Assault on Terok Nor is based on various 80's games which also either developed from or were toddler games during that time. So the developers of this game have to be very very very particular about how they develop this game because you have mindless zombies, average Star Trek fans who happen to be gamers, Star Trek fans who have no clue on how to even play games, and people who are just mmorpg players that don't really care what they are playing as long as they are good at playing it. So these kind of threads about things like exploration you have to hand it to Cryptic because they are making content that has to be navigated through everything I've mentioned and then hope that it is well received.

Real Exploration

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