Looks like they went with the combat route.

While there were a lot of very detailed questions, there were also a number of them asking more or less what you are highlighting here.

I think we will not see a game with non-combat focus until someone takes the essence of the combat gameplay and applies that to some other activity.

Forget all that. Forget it to death. WoW and Star Trek have NOTHING to do with each other.

The IP itself is screaming the correct way to proceed.

You don’t have quests. You have EPISODES. Each episode has a wide variety of ways to approach it — via diplomacy, guns-a-blazing, sneakiness, a combination — everything you remember from the shows. How you do an episode — and they will be a combination of more difficult set pieces and randomly generated adventures — affects how the Federation and Starfleet see you and affect the missions you can command in the future — though you can be in someone else’s episode. When you are commanding an episode, you can fill out your crew with any combination of NPCs and PCs.

Not going to get into too much detail, I did in a previous post. People are so mired in WoW-think that every new game is seen through that murk. But Star Trek is ALL ABOUT the densely plotted episodes, the difficult decisions, the discussions on how to proceed.

If Cryptic is coming out with a WoW-like, the IP should be taken from them.

I guess since Star Trek is a mixture of action, techno-bable, and diplomancy that it would need a lot of different game mechanics to represent the franchise. DIKU type gameplay and combat would fit for the action part, but it would only be a small portion of what makes up Star Trek. I think a complex crafting system like a combination of EVE Online and EQ2 might produce something on par with the techno-bable found in Star Trek. Diplomancy would be a lot harder since you would have to be careful not to make it a requirement that some players would find boring. I like the guild system from EVE Online but it doesn’t quite fit with Star Trek. Perhaps something that uses all the major empires in Star Trek as actual factions and requires players to negotiate to gain access to planets/missions not in their territory.

That said, it would be nice to see a few mainstream games pop out that shake up the mainstream conception of MMO a little bit more.

Maybe the industry isn’t ready to move on, but sooner or later it needs to or everyone is just going to get bored and leave.

As for STO, bottom line: I just don’t see that the industry or its players is ready enough to move on from the Diku-based format. STO will, literally, be WoW in space. It’s going to have leveling, crafting (in a world with replicators there is no need for this but it will be there anyway), gear upgrades, and Kill Ten Tribbles quests. For all the lengths our AAA MMO’s go to disguise the grind and add new activities, video games in general haven’t evolved beyond the point of players being mass murderers. (By the time we’re level 2 or 3 in WoW we’ve killed more than most real-life serial killers.) Violence is the solution to nearly every problem in a video game.

Don’t believe me? How many times have we heard A Tale in the Desert mentioned as anything more than a novelty? How many ATID blogs have we heard of?

One word: Borg.

HEE HEE HEE HEE HEEE!