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RSE or Terran Playable Faction
With the RSE still being relegated to a cliff-note, (which is illogical) and the Terrans being a momentary annoyance on some missions, why not make them an actual faction, or one you can join, (Fed can join Terrans or Rom can join RSE)??
We have the ships, the skins, the uniforms - why not have an actual faction.. These are major parts of Star Trek (Unless of course you are JJ Abrams, or Alex Kurtzman
)
It would likely be easier to do a RSE faction, (which gives us poor Romulans who are servile to the KDF or UFP) the chance to abandon cookie cutter or weak republic lines and visit a post-Hobus RSE...
"This has been said before" - I searched and found nothing, including old posts I had made 4 years ago in a now missing Romulan forum.
We have the ships, the skins, the uniforms - why not have an actual faction.. These are major parts of Star Trek (Unless of course you are JJ Abrams, or Alex Kurtzman
)It would likely be easier to do a RSE faction, (which gives us poor Romulans who are servile to the KDF or UFP) the chance to abandon cookie cutter or weak republic lines and visit a post-Hobus RSE...
"This has been said before" - I searched and found nothing, including old posts I had made 4 years ago in a now missing Romulan forum.
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Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Comments
Some of my captains think D'tan is an idealistic idiot but are willing to play the long game until he sees reason or someone else takes over, and the RRF is loose and chaotic enough that they can do whatever they please when out on deployments as long as they take the assignments they are given. Another one completely retains the RSE trappings and works with the RRF as an ally of necessity, (only refusing assignments that would attempt to pull in the few remaining RSE colonies into the Republic fold), something the RRF cannot turn down as yet, strapped for ships and crews as they are.
The RSE was fractured ever since Hobus and it is reasonable to assume that not all of the factions are fond of Hakeev so even those episodes are not too big of an obstacle.
As for the mirror Terrans, they really don't have a presence in the timeline that STO is in, they just invade or otherwise get pulled in at various times. Why would the devs make a tutorial for a parallel that the game is not even about? It would be about as useful as making an Andromeda tutorial for STO.
On the other hand, there is nothing preventing anyone from making a mirror Terran character who is either laying low and biding their time like Lorca or who was a thought-criminal or some other persona non grata in the mirror "universe" who is physically mirror Terran (or whatever) but agrees with the Federation ideals (or at least thinks they are better off living with them anyway).
I wouldn't say "always lacking", that is what the Klingons were for in the first place, but the PvP never took off like Cryptic hoped it would. Casuals tend to prefer PvE and they have been the majority for years now, especially in games like STO which are based on TV shows or whatever and have a strong space (or whatever the genre) Barbie element.
They tried and failed! Why? Lack of effort and that has never changed. PvP has always been an after thought with STO as well. It's old, broken in so many ways, and lacks any sort of popular play style of PvP. It may have team death match for up to 10 players or two player deathmatch, but both of those are bland, boring, and very poorly implemented in STO. No battle royale, no death match for larger numbers than a pair, no Capture the Flag, and so on. Cryptic literally got the result of the effort Cryptic put in.
The Klingon's also aren't truly evil compared to some other factions in the Star Trek universe. Going with something more like the Dominion, Borg, Romulan, or Terrans would have been a way better choice for an evil faction.
You are confusing lack of effort with different genre of game. STO was designed to be story driven to begin with, and in episodes you don't generally have PvP.
At the time games were usually done on custom engines (like Cryptic's) and were either story or quest driven like STO and optimized for RP and PvE with good character customization and usually higher polycount models, or they were more freeform and used quests just for leveling, had (often very) limited character customization (it was necessary for performance), and otherwise optimized for PvP. With the hardware and connection speeds back then you really couldn't have both unless the majority of the game was client-side with the absolute minimum of information transfer and that generally didn't work out well (though there were exceptions of course).
Over the years since, better hardware and better connection speeds have allowed games to bolt on extras, like PvP on PvE engine games but they will generally never have the flexibility of the cutting edge new engines and the bolt-on parts take a lot more effort to produce less result than working with the original focus of the engine.
On top of that, PvP has gotten less and less popular overall with the newer, more casual gamers that have gradually come to be the majority.
There would logically be millions of Romulans who would still adore the centuries old RSE - and the Terrans are evil based on our universe, and some people literally would just like to play as the antagonist.. I mean really... Video games are about fantasy -
As a point of reference, I would like to mention EVE Online - (aka spreadsheets in space) Faction choice matters, factions go to war and PVP is a huge part of that. I believe if STO built on what is already here, it would be immensely popular. Terrans fighting their way out of the badlands.. RSE forces retaking swaths of the old Empire - The Republic rebelling against both the Klinks and Feddys to seek true independence.. Making the game more choice and player oriented would really boost PVP, sales and literally make this the most well rounded space game in existence - which would make sense with it being STAR TREK!!
Again, there is still an enormous amount of players that would jump on this sort of scenario - EVE is massively more populated than STO, and it is because it has a living universe, and the type of PVP that would make STO phenomenal. Adding in underdog factions, or factions people normally dont like would be even more of that. You dont have to get rid of the PVE that caasuals like - not really a bad idea to keep certain specific places as PVE, and besides - when you play a mission at New Romulus for example, it is a mission map, not the live Zone map with other players there.
I remember seeing somewhere that good and bad was relative anyway... Where was that??
Even if the aspect of everyone in STO abhorring PVP - (I have ran across several who play both, one for the nostalgia and the other for the ability to blow stuff up and just do whatever) the ideas behind having the option to be a Terran, or Imperial Romulan is sound - and even if 300 people were willing to pay to play as such, Cryptic would make money off of such a storyline.. and it would offer a more rounded experience.
I mean, they gave us TRIBBLE.... So they could easily do something that actually has a basis in Trek lore.
PVP, true co-op Pve, and PvEvP are what's truly fun to me. Not sure how STO's history is, but clearly it's been abandoned. I doubt any original devs are still around to fix at the game's responsiveness, so any form of meaningful interaction with an outright broken interface that barely functions would be more maddening that playing on bad servers full of lag.
My suggestion is to only pick up games made with PVP in mind from the very start, and bail if balance and fairness aren't top priority at all times. If they expand into PvE, that's a great bonus, but never the other way around.
The Klingon faction was never truly designed with story content in mind. It had next to nothing at it's original launch and continued on that way for a long time. Then, they kicked you up to Commander at the start to make it easier. Over the years, it has gotten little bits here and there but it took over half of the games life to get some half decent missions, most of which have been retooled and edited into the crud we have now.
Cryptic's engine sucked long before it ended up with the game from Perpetual. The current team doesn't even understand how a lot of the older code even works. Whether PvP is popular not not isn't really my point. I am all for more diverse options for things to do in this game. I used to PvP quite a while back but the scene is pretty much dead now. Before my fleetmates and friends got bored of PvP, we were doing shuttle PvP and shuttles VS T3 ships and other variations just to mix it up. The Ten Forward Battle Brigades was there for casual PvP for those who just wanted to have fun, without feeling like they had to be the super elite of the game.
What I think the game needs to truly feel like there is a war between factions, is some contested space to fight over and having a side of a mission only available to the faction. The contested space wouldn't be anything important, just more like bragging rights for the faction. In there, a constant fight between both sides would be fought by players in timed instances or until I set of objectives is completed by a side, awarding points for their faction victory. Playing both sides of a mission is pretty straight forward. If there is an attack on a Fed Starbase mission, then Fed players would play a defending role. The KDF as an example, would play an attacking role. The mission would be the same, but the faction would decide what side of it you are on and play. Obviously, that would require a lot more work than PWE is willing to sink into the copy and paste and make available for all that they have been leaning more and more into over the past few years.
I misunderstood your points on PVP - my mistake. I guess you might be right about the cost of dev'ing a RSE faction, and it is a shame. To your point of post-Iconian war Romulans - I think the entire way the Romulans were essentially written out of Star Trek was terrible... They were relegated to a plot device in 2009 - and now are like vassals. Makes no sense to me.
And I know... TRIBBLE (or Disco... I guess we are not allowed to take the name of Mickey Spocks show in vain LOL) is a big draw - and makes business sense. At least the ships and tech are cool - I almost threw up in the story missions tho.. Holy High School level of script Batman.
True - one of the very few people I have ever actually met and talked to in STO and I frequently PVP one another, however it is never outside of more than DPS or Tank bragging - (on his part lol) and the problems that pop up are just dumb. Launched pets? Oh well - no one can target them! Lag? Almost as common as Ferengi greed.. STO could be so much more - but its mainly PVE, grind, and endgame DPS masses. Dont get me wrong, I have a blast, but it would be nice to have more.
That would be a great idea - could do something similar for the Terran Empire... Start out doing a few battles with Starfleet (or the Alliance if I remember DS9 right) and something happens and your stuck in the normal game universe, as a subset of the Feddies - like TRIBBLE and TOS.
There was PvP....till the Devs decided to go with massive power creep, then went even more power creepy when they claimed they would balance things and instead did the opposite.
1. RSE, just give us the uniforms! The uniforms the NPC romulans wear are nicer than the ones we get in the undercover mission. Just give us all the modern tal shiar uniforms! they're neat.
2. No way would all the conversative romulans be pro-emperess sela, she's half human! and her plan is not good and why would romulans support that? DISCO season 3 shows us that the STO vision of unification as Romulans assimilating into federation/vulcan ideology and culture isn't right.
So we could have a RSE faction who are anti-sela and intervene and end up allied with the Romulan Republic out of common foe and then end up going exactly the same as current rom faction, just with different tutorial/starting missions and getting the Tal Shiar uniforms for free.
3. For Terran Empire, a new faction like the TOS/DISCO, you start off in the Mirrorverse during DISCO or ENT or some other era, you do some tutorial missions in the Mirror, then swap over to the prime, have a massive fight with your Prime counterpart. Just after you blow them up, Daniels arrives and transports you into the future, gives you the crashcourse on STO timeline, under the impression you are the prime counterpart.
Then you choose, to just assume the situation of your prime self, you've trapped gotta go native to survive. Or Side with the KDF to fight the Federation and maybe found your own empire one day.
So If you choose to be a UFP Terran, then its the same as being any of the other federation characters but with access to a terran racial trait and terran preffixs
If you choose KDF, then story goes same as if you were KDF, but you have access to starfleet ships?
All the plotlines would converge into the main Alliance anyway so its not like you'd be doing different things past the prologue. So it'd have to be about ships/traits/cosmetics/loading screens so you know, make the story fold into the existing ones soon as possible.
Bring the Enterprise XCV-330 to STO