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A criticism of the 'Terran Gambit' episode arc
dewolf13
Member Posts: 67 Arc User
I finally bit the bullet and played the latest installment of the You're-Not-Allowed-To-Play-As-Your-Own-Character episode arc, 'Eye of the Storm'. (I had been putting it off due to the bad taste left in my mouth from slogging through the previous ones some months ago.) Somehow, it was even more disappointing than I thought possible -- and my expectations were rock bottom already going into it, so I'm impressed in a way.
First, as I alluded to already, having essentially an entire arc in an RPG where the player is locked out of their own character and teammates is an odd creative decision. Doing it sparingly can be a powerful story-telling style -- for example, the mission in the eleventh hour of the Hur'q arc (?) where you play as that Tzenkethi officer and find out that she's actually a not-so-dishonourable person, contrary to what you've been led to perceive until then from your own perspective; or when you play as J'Ula (I believe) in the temple on Boreth. These were both quite fun (partly because they didn't last that long, ultimately) and revealed things about these characters in a much more intimate way than just hearing about the events second-hand. But when mission after (long) mission, the player is forced into this generic other-guy...yikes. And to add insult to injury, that other character is not even fun to play as. I mean, is it a big ask to allow the player to at least enable auto-firing for the basic weapon attacks, as we can for our actual characters, so we don't have to mash the same two keys constantly for 30 minutes? And maybe add a few more special abilities for some variety?
Second, while the mission wasn't tremendously challenging, it was annoyingly tedious. Indeed, 'annoying' would be how I would summarize the mission if I had to choose a single word. Instead of requiring the player to strategize or at least think about the best way to gain an advantage, the entire mission was just, 'here, I'll throw dozens and dozens of enemies at you, until you've mashed the fire button enough times to kill them all'. I mean, even Tilly at one point seems to make a self-aware commentary on the part of the developers, where she says something like 'oh great, it wouldn't be a party without more drones...' Indeed. That's pretty lazy level design.
Third, the entire plot was kind of hard to follow. Part of that might simply be this new (?) format of 'we'll release each new episode of an arc once every few months'. It's kind of like when a Netflix show comes out with a new season three years after the previous one, by which point I don't even remember what's happening with the plot. At least with such productions, they are cognizant of this extended lapse and include a refresher leading into the new content.
Finally, not only did it not feel like Star Trek Online, but it didn't even really feel like Star Trek. It really just felt like a sub-par, generic sci-fi shooter. I've played through all the story arcs multiple times over, and they are always fun (after a sufficient break to renew the novelty) but I can safely say I will never revisit these latest missions, which is an ironic shame considering the production budget seems to be so much higher than the old 'read some text' missions, which despite their low-budget feel, were tremendously engaging, immersive, and Star-Trekky -- and most of all, FUN.
First, as I alluded to already, having essentially an entire arc in an RPG where the player is locked out of their own character and teammates is an odd creative decision. Doing it sparingly can be a powerful story-telling style -- for example, the mission in the eleventh hour of the Hur'q arc (?) where you play as that Tzenkethi officer and find out that she's actually a not-so-dishonourable person, contrary to what you've been led to perceive until then from your own perspective; or when you play as J'Ula (I believe) in the temple on Boreth. These were both quite fun (partly because they didn't last that long, ultimately) and revealed things about these characters in a much more intimate way than just hearing about the events second-hand. But when mission after (long) mission, the player is forced into this generic other-guy...yikes. And to add insult to injury, that other character is not even fun to play as. I mean, is it a big ask to allow the player to at least enable auto-firing for the basic weapon attacks, as we can for our actual characters, so we don't have to mash the same two keys constantly for 30 minutes? And maybe add a few more special abilities for some variety?
Second, while the mission wasn't tremendously challenging, it was annoyingly tedious. Indeed, 'annoying' would be how I would summarize the mission if I had to choose a single word. Instead of requiring the player to strategize or at least think about the best way to gain an advantage, the entire mission was just, 'here, I'll throw dozens and dozens of enemies at you, until you've mashed the fire button enough times to kill them all'. I mean, even Tilly at one point seems to make a self-aware commentary on the part of the developers, where she says something like 'oh great, it wouldn't be a party without more drones...' Indeed. That's pretty lazy level design.
Third, the entire plot was kind of hard to follow. Part of that might simply be this new (?) format of 'we'll release each new episode of an arc once every few months'. It's kind of like when a Netflix show comes out with a new season three years after the previous one, by which point I don't even remember what's happening with the plot. At least with such productions, they are cognizant of this extended lapse and include a refresher leading into the new content.
Finally, not only did it not feel like Star Trek Online, but it didn't even really feel like Star Trek. It really just felt like a sub-par, generic sci-fi shooter. I've played through all the story arcs multiple times over, and they are always fun (after a sufficient break to renew the novelty) but I can safely say I will never revisit these latest missions, which is an ironic shame considering the production budget seems to be so much higher than the old 'read some text' missions, which despite their low-budget feel, were tremendously engaging, immersive, and Star-Trekky -- and most of all, FUN.
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Players "We want to play evil bad guys"
Cryptic "Here you go"
Players "Yay! Hold-on, why can't I use my own character's extremely over-powered stuff?"
Cryptic (and common sense) "You're playing the mirror version of you; why would you have the same stuff?"
This arc has been supreme fun. Players asked for playing a bad guy, and a few, like you, complain about it. This has been one of the most 'Star Trek' arcs I've ever played. I'm still waiting for an explainer about the planet that was made to disappear at the beginning of the arc.
The plot is easy to follow; evil Wesley wants 'alternate' v-ger's (The Other) power, gets it, and has become a God (to spite all the folk who hate the character), so he can rule, and destroy universes, whilst evil you has reservations about the whole matter.
As for the 'lazy design'....pretty much every combat-based game does this. It's insulting to the Dev's when folk claim 'lazy design' because they don't like how games play. Yes, the powering-up was a tad tedious, but so what!? There still was nothing wrong with it. As for not being able to auto-fire.....that's a GOOD thing. Why should things be handed on a platter for folk, relegating rewards to the same low-standard as participation medals??
Not only that, we're so used to seeing events from the POV of our characters. We're getting both sides in this arc through the eyes of our mirror counterparts.
I also want to point out something. Some players did want to play evil. But when Renegade's Regret came out, and we saw what happened to Captain Parr, who started as a loyal, rookie captain for the Tzenkethi but defected because of the horrible things the Admiral was ordering, we saw some of the darkest things in Star Trek (essentially genocide via Protomatter weapons). And those people who wanted evil... hated it because apparently it was TOO evil.
But that was the point. We were seeing Captain Parr realizing that the Coalition was wrong in its approach of "the ends justify the means".
But still some people hated it because it was TOO evil. Yet... they want to have playable Terrans? Who would do that and MORE without even batting an eye? And then we not only get a Terran themed arc, that allows us to see things from the Terran side, but we get our Mirror Counterpart, who many have been wanting an encounter with... and... its not what they want. So complain.
Ultimately... the saying "you can't please everyone" applies yet again.
Overall though, it was not much worse than some of the early Klingon missions, so while it was not a particularly good mission it was not as bad as it could have been, and since the missions are part of an arc you have to expect something like that because the shape of the story is arc-wide, not single-mission and so some episodes end up on an unfavorable part of that shape.
The only disappointing part of 'Eye of the Storm' for me was we didn't get a cool scene of the ISS Acheron doing a flyby over The Other.
Well much of that simply ignores what I said and invents something else to criticize -- i.e. a straw man.
I never said we should have 'my own character's' stuff. I simply said more variety in their 'stuff'. Of course it will be different. Furthermore, the fact that I explicitly praised the implementation of other missions where you play as another character is at odds with your portrayal of the point I was making.
Then, "the plot is easy to follow; <insert plot summary>". Great. One can do that with literally any plot ever devised, even the ones unanimously seen has convoluted. The specific point I added was that when you release a continuation of a story once every few months, plot elements can become forgotten. This is the entire reason, as I already pointed out, that e.g. television productions tend to give refreshers if there has been an extended lapse between installments. Indeed, even Star Trek Online has done that in at least one previous story arc, but they for some reason chose not to do it here.
And no, not 'pretty much every combat-based game' simply throws enemies at you in mindless repetition. Indeed, even looking ONLY at Star Trek Online, other missions allow you to approach 'the fight' in a multitude of ways. Even missions where you both 1) play as an alternate character, and 2) alone, without a player-commanded away team (i.e. J'Ula at the temple on Boreth) had a lot of variety throughout the mission. In fact, it is those combat games that just resort to throwing enemies at you mindlessly that tend to be flops (in the modern era), and worthy of criticism indeed. In fact, one of the popular criticisms of combat in e.g. 'Dragon Age II' vs 'Dragon Age: Origins' was just that. So you're free to hold up such design as a standard, but it's a pretty low bar.
And come on...auto-fire being equivalent to participation medals? You are aware of the difference between tedium and challenge, or no? It's not at all challenging to spam '1' and '2', interspersed with '3', '4', '5' and '6' when necessary. That's simply tedium. And that's the reason why virtually all RPGs like this, where you target an enemy and select abilities to use on them, tend to have an 'auto-attack' that applies so long as they are engaged, where you only select your 'special' abilities on demand, because otherwise it's just mind-numbingly tedious, without even being a challenge. Alternatively, a game could be designed as a first-person shooter instead -- but as has been discussed at length elsewhere, STO's attempt at being an FPS with 'shooter mode' is dreadful, which is why auto-fire is a very welcome quality-of-life feature in 'RPG mode' (not a cheat). Analogously, it also wouldn't be particularly challenging, albeit tedious, to force the player to hold the 'move forward' key even for traveling long distances -- but developers often include an 'auto move forward' simply because it avoids an unnecessarily tedious control feature that doesn't even add to the challenge.
Indeed, you seem to simply conflate tedium with challenge. But I'm happy that you are proud of your achievement in surmounting this tedium, and did not have your sense of reward cheapened by such reasonable features.
But hey, the one thing you said that is purely subjective so you are welcome to it is: 'this has been one of the most "Star Trek" arcs'. My perspective is different, but to each their own on this one point.
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Please....reread the very first sentence of my reply. You obviously have made your reply overly serious, but ignored completely the 'jovial' generalisation of what I have said. NOTHING of what I said was invented, nor straw-man, and I have a right to a put forward a reasonable viewpoint as well.
Of course, both FPS and TPS are badly impacted by all the VFX vomit that makes just seeing the target almost impossible, let along actually aiming at it, all too often.
That said, I am not sure what aiming modes has to do with the subject of this thread, but whatever. STO is more of a story-driven game rather than a shooter anyway, it is only the TFOs and similar ancillary stuff that makes it seem like a shooter sometimes.
Plot-wise the current story arc is good, better than a lot of the DSC show plots I would say (and no, I am not a "DSC hater", I just prefer a TV show that has more depth than its shallow action-oriented format, which SNW (and even Prodigy) does much better at than DSC so far).
As I said before, this newest scenario is a bit annoying and a touch weak, but its purpose seems to be mainly housekeeping part of the plot where they introduce the main villain and let the viewers (players in this case) see for themselves what a nasty piece of work he is in preparation to taking him down later in the story, and that part tends to be that way in a story.
The shifting back-and-forth between main and mirror captain does make sense at this part of the story graph in this type of story too, and also it is a nice change of pace to run through a story in third-person-limited/multiple (or first person multiple if you look at it that way) point of view as long as they don't make too much of a habit of it.
After playing both Renegade's Regret and the Terran Arc, I still want to play evil characters, besides I love Mirror me, the only people complaining about the Terran Arc are mostly people with OP builds,
Honesty Starfleet would be like playing Paragon in Mass Effect, what we do in STO is a lot closer to what Renegade Shapard does, what we do in game is barely considered heroic anyways, we tend to collect the most OP WMDs we can get our hands on, we shoot first with no diplomacy being required, We're already playing evil characters, however it would be better to at least acknowledge it.
Hast thou not felt ashamed of thy words and deeds
Hast thou not lacked vigor
Hast thou exerted all possible efforts
Hast thou not become slothful
That's an (incorrect) assumption. People may simply care about using the character they customized in minute detail, in terms of strategies (abilities), cosmetics, and role-play elements like their imagined backstory, etc. It may -- and probably doesn't -- have anything at all to do with power. For example, I am currently leveling up a new character, and they are woefully underpowered, where I'm picking up injury after injury during ground missions in particular. But it's still loads of fun because I've given them (and their bridge officers) specific abilities to follow certain strategies in ground combat, and I have imagined a somewhat detailed backstory for them and wrote it into their biography. And as such, I much prefer to play as this character with their shipmates.
Mind you, as I said in the original post, I don't mind the OCCASIONAL 'play through a different perspective' (I gave examples of previous instances that I actually loved, the Tzenkethi officer, and J'Ula), as it can be a powerful story-telling metho. But if it's going to be a repeat thing (which is already a let-down in that now I'm spending multiple missions without my customized -- not overpowered -- character), at least, as I said above, include more than two offensive abilities (again, not OP abilities, just VARIETY), allow auto-fire as has always been the case for your basic attack, etc. (And of course this is just regarding having to play as another character, but my other problems with this arc, particularly the mission I discussed, includes the simplistically tedious level design.)
Also, I don't think there is anything wrong with playing as an 'evil' character at all, so that's a moot point I think.
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If you had watched Discovery. you'd know it is nearly a thousand years in the future now, and is a fusion of 23rd Century and 32nd Century technology, however, to say they shouldn't know how anything works is quite ignorant. That's like saying IRL we shouldn't know how fusion (which powers impulse drives in ST) works, but we've been researching it for nigh on 50 years, and achieved net-gain power only the other week, but it'll be at least 10 years before it becomes truly viable. Very little tech in ST, bar the spore drive, is an unknown to us right now. Particle weaponary, warp drive, even transporter technology is talked about alot in science in our time; we have even 'transported' photons of light. Humans of the 23rd Century didn't get dumber. 'Quantum leaps' of technology diminsh as a society progresses, so you are wrong in what you say. If they were in the NX class, then yes, you'd have a point, but the 23rd Century is indicative of high advancement, even compared to the TNG era.
'The Other' is not programmed like V'Ger, so why are you expecting it to act like V'Ger? Terrans set out to conquer not explore. As for letting us in......he had the codes; there was no need for a 2 hour picturesque drive through it's innards.
Please do not take offense, because I mean none, but it's clear, from your own words, you had prejudged the episode before playing it.
I'd so wanna see that.
Killy is one of the smarter Terrans of the 23rd century, Mirror Kirk immediately outed himself as a Terran, if he was anything like his prime counterpart he would've at least blended in longer and waited for the perfect opportunity to strike.
So it's not that far a leap for Tilly (if she's anything like her prime universe counter-part is genius when it comes to engineering) to figure out the different UI and other minor changes since unlike Scotty she would be expecting those.
The gap in knowledge and understanding between Newton and Issac and today is hugely vast compared to Tilly and the 25th Century. If we can go from unpowered flight to the quantum leap of landing on the moon in just 50 years, it's an even smaller technological leap in understanding for 23rd and 25th Century, despite being a longer period. Understanding plateaus somewhat once a civilisation gains a certain level of understanding.
If you look at the later Discovery series, there's very few differences between the 25th and 32nd Centurys. The only things that are 'new' are personal transporters (but first seen in Star Trek Into Darkness in the 23rd Century), programmable matter, transforming ships, and proper planetary and cloaking shielding. Again, your thinking is in the wrong era. Enterprise is more suited to your analogy, because it's mostly a 'human' point of view. By the time we hit Discovery, we've already inherited the knowledge of the older races of the UFP.
Illogical decisions are endemic in the Mirror Universe, and that's seen in every episode produced in the history of Star Trek....it is not a Cryptic thing.
Another irritating thing is, those deaths were carried over to our prime universe character, when I finished the game I had about 10 injuries, WTF?
That is because it almost certainly is the same character mechanically (it could be done with 'taking over' an NPC built to look like your character but that is unnecessarily complicated with the way they are usually done in games like this), just with a really extreme (and involuntary) loadout change. It sounds like either someone forgot to purge the injuries when switching back, or the purge routine is not working correctly.
Of course, in this case it does not necessarily detract from the immersion/suspension of disbelief because it could reasonably be attributed to some quantum weirdness where the characters are in some way connected when they are both on the same side of the mirror or whatever.
That lack of progress is still sloppy writing, which is not surprising since it is one of the things that differentiate a space opera like Discovery from a soft-scifi series like TOS. Space operas tend to be romps (and yes, there is a such thing as a dark romp) where science, continuity, and clever, intricate, writing tend to take a back seat to flow, action, and eyecandy.
Personally, I like them both, but for different reasons and still would like to see something that no one has been able to do so far: a version of the original Star Trek universe (does not even have to be centered on the Enterprise itself, another ship with an unusual crew and circumstances would do) without trying to shoehorn in the heavy Star Wars influence of the movie era and later shows, done to modern standards, taking advantage of all the latest advances in production tech to do some of the things that Roddenberry and Jefferies wanted to do but could not with the '60s production tech.
Anyway, the reason things were so much the same in the Berman era shows was that it was literally supposed to be the next generation with only about a twenty-to-thirty-year gap between TOS and TNG, then (for various reasons) at the last minute they got that Monk-like fussiness with numbers and decided to make it exactly an even century between.
Discovery's far future jump gets away with a much, much worse case of tech-constipation because it is a space opera (again, this is not "DSC hate", it is just a property of the genre) and using only slight variants of the familiar stuff is how they tie DSC and traditional Trek together despite the very different genres. As a touchstone like that ignoring the advancement they should have had is necessary to make it even recognizable as Trek.
Sloppy writing??? Are you forgetting that it took over a thousand years from the first developed calculator to become mainstream? Or that if it wasn't for the Dark Ages, which held us back for 400 years, we'd be actually be colonising space by now. It's not sloppy writing, it's what happens.
It was just under 80 years btw, and you're taking a generation way too literally.
And your nostalgia is distorting your own views. Discovery is, whether your like it or not, 'traditional', it's canon, and Discovery/SNW is precisely what TOS would have looked with today's tech. As for the 32nd century, everything, I mean EVERYTHING makes sense in regards to it's advancement in tech. Tech leaps will get smaller and smaller, and quantum leaps will be virtually rare.
And more importantly technological advancement isn't linear and never has been, there's periods where technologies barely advance at all and others where it advances very rapidly.
Exactly! One of the first complaints about DSC was the way it looked, and folked judged it by the TOS's 60's tech, completely ignoring that things such as holograms were a thing in TOS! It did not make sense, to me, to keep the '60's' aesthetics of flip switches and push buttons.....especially as Enterprise had both touchscreen and buttons.
True, I oversimplified the TNG timing stuff a bit, the gap between the movie era and TNG actually was supposed to be twenty or thirty years when they came up with the series, then in late runup it was pushed back to about 80 because they wanted to head off demands to have the TOS crew make guest appearances, then they went for the century difference not too long after that.
Your premise is based on the wrong assumptions. What made technology advance so slowly in realworld history in ancient times was the lack of efficient communication and the fact that only a very small subset of the population (the aristocracy and religious orders usually) could engage in any meaningful research until just a few centuries ago.
Discoveries were often lost, delayed by having to duplicate the work because two or more inventors did not know anyone else was working on the same thing or had outdated information about the others, etc. There were other reasons as well, like dogmatic decrees riding roughshod over scientific discoveries and whatnot, but the main problem was the communication.
In Star Trek there would not be that communication problem in the core worlds where they had a lot of subspace relays, though out of the frontier it would get a bit slow (in TOS a message could take hours or days to reach a command center if the ship was too far away from a relay string for instance).
And yes, the writing on DSC is sloppy and rather derivative compared to TOS and most of the Berman era stuff. It is to be expected though since the shows are not the same subgenre at all. A space opera makes heavy use of familiar tropes and easter eggs and the like to give the impression that they are like the original show and examining the kind of questions and issues that soft (or hard too for that matter) sci-fi stories do while actually focusing on the pure entertainment part instead.
It has been rightly called the "Errol Flynn" school of science fiction, and in space opera often the SFX gags are the first things written with the rest of the story written around them the same way Flynn's movies were written around the stunts and antics, or the way 1940's musicals were written around the songs that were already written before the plot was more than just a vague idea.
Also, Kurtzman and company could have done their research better and actually tried to get first season DSC to integrate better with the technology and overall background of the shows set in the same era as it (Cage, TOS, TAS), but Moonves absolutely hated Star Trek, especially TOS, and so they coattailed the Kelvin stuff as closely as possible without getting into legal problems over it.
If you think that TOS would have looked like first season DSC if they had today's production tech back then, you obviously have not read what Roddenberry and Jefferies and other behind-the-scenes people on the show said about it.
They were actually going for a smooth techno-organic minimalist style but had to settle for what they could build with a tight budget out of office-building materials because Desilu was geared mainly towards cop shows and comedies and not science fiction, so they did not have the resources for all the fiberglass and metal it would have taken to get the look the way the really wanted. DSC is way too busy and industrial looking for that and in fact is exactly the kind of look they were specifically trying to avoid.
The original bridge design was round, not octagonal for instance, and the chairs were supposed to be motorized and also rise up out of the deck when needed, the controls were supposed to be very minimal and reconfigure themselves depending on the preferences of the person who was sitting there (they actually built the controls into modules that they could quickly change between takes to do that, but it turned out to be too much extra work that few would have even noticed at the very poor resolution of those old TV broadcasts so they quickly stopped doing it).
It was not just the look either, it was also the technology was different in some ways. For instance, DSC doubled down on the "jump to hyperspace" Star Wars style of going to FTL and using sublight engines a lot, whereas in TOS they only used the impulse drive during emergencies when warp was down (with one exception to give them time to housetrain a certain misbehaving princess, and in that episode they definitively state in onscreen dialog that the impulse drive is almost never used).
Using warp all the time like that is more realistic because it avoids the Einsteinian physics problems of trying to cruise around at relativistic speeds using a gravity drive without using impossibly high amounts of energy to do it. It also neatly explains why the ships turn like they are in atmosphere instead of vectoring like the ships in The Expanse by making turning a function of how fast the warp field can be adjusted instead of mass and inertia.
One important thing Roddenberry stressed to writers was that a ship out on the frontier put a lot of responsibility on the captain's shoulders because the subspace radio relay network was so sparce out there that messages could vary from real-time if they were close enough to a string of them to taking up to a day or two if they had to beam the signal a long way without them. In DSC that relay network seems to be exactly as dense and robust as it was in TNG, set a century later and they could always get extremely high bandwidth communications (like holograms) wherever they went.
Anyway, a whole book could be written about that subject, and this is getting way too long already so I will break it off here.
> Or that if it wasn't for the Dark Ages, which held us back for 400 years, we'd be actually be colonising space by now.
That’s Petrarch‘s argument, maybe. Set back 400 years? You are uncritically regurgitating 700-year-old propaganda. No contemporary historian would argue that.
>
> If you look at the later Discovery series, there's very few differences between the 25th and 32nd Centurys. The only things that are 'new' are personal transporters (but first seen in Star Trek Into Darkness in the 23rd Century), programmable matter, transforming ships, and proper planetary and cloaking shielding.
When the powers of old set out to create Enterprise, they initially intended to stay closer to the “canonical” precedents of former trek. There were interest in Daedalus and getting away from technology and tropes that have represented Trek up until that point.
But as production commenced it became more economical to just replace typical Trek technobabble with variants. “Phasers” became “phase canons,” the design for the NX-class mirrored the “Trek” aesthetic complete with the contemporary movie Aztec hill material.
And the often cited reason is that there was a fear they would alienate audiences if they strayed too far from the formula. Audiences were used to Trek technobabble a new trek language would make it difficult to follow. It is the same reason Picard uses the explanation of mindmelds, when Vulcan are not involved. Trek audiences get that.
But there are other reasons, right? It is cheaper to reuse assets that they have from previous series. It saves time if they can explain something quickly. Star Trek, more than an IP is a brand. If you are flipping channels you want the audience to quickly realize it is Star Trek. If it looks too different it is hard to identify.
So I think what TheSajuukKhar would explain as technological stagnation in Trek over time is due to a lot of real world shortcoming of making a tv show on budget with a number of predetermined sets and assets. I think it is a result of intentional writing and production decisions to dumb the material down to appease a general audience as well as a fickle fanbase.