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Cryptic, you need new PvE mission designers

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  • lianthelialianthelia Member Posts: 7,820 Arc User
    On another note...

    How do any of these enemies even have ships and people left to throw at us? pretty sure I'm taking out 80+ ships per patrol/episode, at bare minimum, and that's gotta be in the thousands or tens of thousands of crew going down with those ships. How exactly do 'rebel' factions keep their numbers up like this?
    During the Dominion War in DS9 Starfleet had around 30,000 ships in the fleet. The Klingon Empire has just as many, if not more, due to their more military focus compared to Starfleet.

    Even taking into account half the fleet getting wiped during the Iconian War, that leaves the Klingon Empire with 15,000+ ships. And, from what we have seen in the story, about half the empire split off from J'mpok. So this rebel faction easily has around 7,500 ships, give or take.

    And don't forget, the Federation is an entity that spans 180+ member worlds, 7,000+ affiliates, and has a population of over 985 billion. The Klingon Empire is often presented as being at, or near, that same size, and the only major political entity in the Alpha/Beta Quadrants to really be a match for the Federation. This is largely peanuts to them.

    Logic could work except for J'ula....there wasn't thousands of ships with her when her fleet got flung into the 25th century...and 25th century Klingons didn't join her till well after we slaughtered many of her people.
  • telbasta7386telbasta7386 Member Posts: 761 Arc User
    lianthelia wrote: »
    Pretty much every episode that has come out within the past year is set up like this:

    - Put player in space or on ground
    - Create endless spawns of 20+ enemies at a time
    - Give all of those enemies shield penetrating weapons, annoying/frustrating mechanics (looking at you, viral impulse burst), or anything else to just add that little extra bit of "F You" to the player trying to do the mission.

    This isn't starwars, and this is not good mission design. Sure, I can wipe these things out no problem on my 520 EPG, all gold mk XV science ships, but anything else? God forbid you're in an escort, you'll get nuked before you even get a chance to fire your weapons. Any new characters trying to do these, or this without absolute min-maxxed builds, are screwed.

    These are single player episodes, not TFO's. Stop this TRIBBLE.

    That would not only take effort....but money. Neither which they're willing to do

    They sure seem to be raking it in with all of these ship sales though.
  • szerontzurszerontzur Member Posts: 2,723 Arc User
    I have to say, while playing through all the missions again on my Klingon Recruit, I think the Borg arc was probably my favorite. There wasn't a hamfisted narrative forced down the player's throat - The borg were up to borg things, and you learned what they were up to as you played through it. All the fights felt.. natural.. instead of a formula-demanded thing that 'had' to be there for metric mandates. Best of all, your character wasn't sitting there most of the missions stroking characters' Redacted like some drooling lackie that couldn't tie their shoes together, much less command a starship, without being explicitly told every movement.


    As for the exploration thing.. honestly.. I've given it up as a lost cause. I do not believe the team have the resources or the.. conceptual followthrough.. to design and implement an engaging system that doesn't revolve combat or reusing existing gimmicks(like the repainted variants of the mining minigame) that don't really fit.
  • garaffegaraffe Member Posts: 1,353 Arc User
    I thoroughly enjoyed the Romulan story missions, so much so that I fell in love with Romulans and Remans that I haven't played a Fed or KDF since LoR.
  • jagdtier44jagdtier44 Member Posts: 376 Arc User
    Yeah the new mission design has been really lack luster. When those new Patrols hit with the disc arc I couldn't believe each of them was literally go to A, blow up a few waves, go to B, blow up a few waves, go to C, annihilate entire fleets endlessly for 2 minutes. yay your done..

    Every.. single.. one. Than the missions have followed the same pattern. Space battle, ground battle, space endless waves.

    I too am also sick of seeing stuff like wave after wave of messing your CDs, or constantly making you rocket forward with the viral ability. Things like the Na'kuhl displacement shields where a mechanic that while annoying at least didnt totally hose you. Also Feedback pulse enemies need to go away, they are ok in missions like the Cardassian struggle arc where you engage ships a few at a time and they are easy to see but when there's just 1 in a pack of 8 ships that warps in? stop with that.. so tired of just destroying myself cuse WHOOPS happens to be a FBP2 ship mixed into that random batch of boats! with a power with ZERO visual ques!
  • spiritbornspiritborn Member Posts: 4,248 Arc User
    > @telbasta7386 said:
    > Plenty of other sci fi games are making exploration interesting and deep enough to hold players' attention and make it fun.
    >
    > The problem here isn't that "exploration is boring" or "diplomacy is boring", it's that cryptic fails to provide the depth to make those things interesting. It's the same reason all of our missions are basically the same thing with different skins, or as another poster mentioned objectives always come in identical tasks you repeat 2-3 times. Cryptic constantly puts out this excuse of "this takes too much time or money" so they can keep giving us shallow repetitive gameplay. It's entirely a developer problem that could be solved if they'd put the effort into doing better.

    How many of those games are MMOs, comparing STO to Mass Effect (for example) is pointless as what works in single player game might not work in a MMO
  • evilmark444evilmark444 Member Posts: 6,950 Arc User
    Every mission was warp in/beam down, and scan five things, or kill five groups. The only thing that changed was the enemy type involved.

    You forgot the ones where you warped in and someone from the planet asked you for a random commodity.
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  • faelon#8433 faelon Member Posts: 358 Arc User
    Pretty much every episode that has come out within the past year is set up like this:

    - Put player in space or on ground
    - Create endless spawns of 20+ enemies at a time
    - Give all of those enemies shield penetrating weapons, annoying/frustrating mechanics (looking at you, viral impulse burst), or anything else to just add that little extra bit of "F You" to the player trying to do the mission.

    This isn't starwars, and this is not good mission design. Sure, I can wipe these things out no problem on my 520 EPG, all gold mk XV science ships, but anything else? God forbid you're in an escort, you'll get nuked before you even get a chance to fire your weapons. Any new characters trying to do these, or this without absolute min-maxxed builds, are screwed.

    These are single player episodes, not TFO's. Stop this TRIBBLE.

    As someone who mainly plays those "god forbid Escorts" ummm... no. We mostly do just fine. Actually in single player content we probably have the map mostly cleared before the lumbering science hulks get within range to press their "kill everything" button. Explosive death is actually fairly uncommon if you are playing the ship to its strengths. Like anything else it will depend a lot on the gear you are sporting. If you've built your gear sets and synergy to your ships strengths you become quite survivable and deadly.

    Now granted a poorly built poorly flown escort is squishy as anything. But a poorly built science ship isn't much better.

  • fleetcaptain5#1134 fleetcaptain5 Member Posts: 4,754 Arc User
    Plenty of other sci fi games are making exploration interesting and deep enough to hold players' attention and make it fun.

    The problem here isn't that "exploration is boring" or "diplomacy is boring", it's that cryptic fails to provide the depth to make those things interesting. It's the same reason all of our missions are basically the same thing with different skins, or as another poster mentioned objectives always come in identical tasks you repeat 2-3 times. Cryptic constantly puts out this excuse of "this takes too much time or money" so they can keep giving us shallow repetitive gameplay. It's entirely a developer problem that could be solved if they'd put the effort into doing better.
    Here's the problem with this argument, other scifi games have exploration, but they don't have Star Trek exploration.

    Exploration in other scifi games is closer to No Man's Sky style exploration, where you fly a ship around space, find a planet to land on, look at the neat procedurally generated creatures/landscape, harvest some materials, then move onto the next planet. Interaction with alien species tends to be limited, basically as merchants, or as just generic enemy NPCs. There is rarely a substantive storyline for any of the aliens you encounter.

    Star Trek exploration is about none of that. Star Trek exploration is about meeting new alien species, and getting involved in complex diplomatic issues with them, and possibly between them and other nearby alien species. It isn't about landing on planets and harvesting resources, while looking at pretty terrain.

    No Man's Sky style space exploration is significantly easier to do, because procedural generation technology has come far enough along to make letting a computer make up landscape and creatures easy. Star Trek style exploration is much more difficult, because you can't procedurally generated good narrative. All of that has to be hand written, which limits how much of it can be made in an amount of time.

    Not only that, but the Star Trek TV shows aren't like Star Wars, or Mass Effect, where most of the experience is action based. Star Trek is a show where they mostly stood around and talked about things. While this can make for good TV, really accurate Star Trek style exploration doesn't make for good gameplay. No on like just standing around and pressing F for dialog boxes.

    Cryptic already gave us an exploration based story, with combat thrown in, during the Tzenkethi arc, and people just said that wasn't REAL exploration Star Trek style.

    What most people want out of exploration is not some pre-scripted story arc, but actually being able to get out there, find something nobody else has found before, learn what its characteristics are and then have that discovery remain persistent for others to make use of. It's the exploration/colonization/industrialization tripod intended to feed into some sort of over-arching meta game. Where there will always be a use for every single discovery made. And most important, discoveries and what may be done with them would have lasting impact that reaches beyonf just the individual player's experience,

    If exploration were just another grindfest to get the sdame junk we get already, then it would be pointless... But if we had a meta game that gave us a real reason to be out there looking for stuff, figuring out the best way to obtain it once found, and then using it to produce things that feed into and influence the meta data, then it would become compelling.

    We don't need another hamster wheel. We need a hamster fortress that spans the entire house with twist and turns and nooks and crannies to get into and delve deep... where sometimes the monster rears its ugly head because it wakes up on its own and is hungry.

    STO is just one huge status quo. I;ve said that before and I maintain my position. Ultimately, nothing we do really matters because everyone does the same thing... THAT is what bores me to tears. At least when we had the half-baked exploration system, I could jump into it and have no wy of knowing what to expect from one event to the next. It had the potential of evolving into something great, but alas... Cryptic just didn't have the available talent to do anything with it, though the stupid excuse they gave for removing it was that people were getting lost in exploration sectors... Lost... in what amounted to a big square room with one way in and out. Dry that out and you can fertilize the Sahara desert...

    Well, they also said that they didn't want the particle nodes to be that easily accessible.

    You know, the particles that are flooding most players' inventories while having no purpose for most players anymore. :)
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