West Karana

Thanks to TheRemedy for the heads-up on the Cryptic Star Trek Online trailer. The trailer jumps from fight scene to fight scene, and the game seems to go boldly where all the single player games have gone before. Some of these fights look straight out of Star Trek Armada 2, and the hand-to-hand fights look just as pointless as fights in every other MMO. I did some poking around the Cryptic web site and found a list of quest descriptions. I’m interested to hear about more STO quests if you know of any :)

QUEST #: 137
QUEST NAME: Mirror Academy
LOCATION: Starfleet Academy
OBJECTIVES: Kill [15] [Mirror Universe Cadets]
TEXT: Ah, [Player]. An engineering student coupled the phase-inhibiting core bayronic-matter enhancer with the prime cycle correlator and created a rift in space time and now the cadet mess hall is hopping with Starfleet cadets from the mirror universe. Kill [N] of them and return to me for your reward.

QUEST #: 2048
QUEST NAME: It is a good day to die…t
LOCATION: Ice moon of Alpha 3
OBJECTIVES: Harvest [50] [Alpha 3 Ice Snowballs]
TEXT: We are sorry to interrupt your training exercises, but the Balfoozian delegation will be here in two Earth days, and we’re all out of their favorite kind of ice cream. Please take a shuttle from the shuttle bay and harvest [N] [Item] from the Ice Moon of Alpha 3. Good luck, and watch out for the Alphanian Rabbits!

QUEST #: 16184
QUEST NAME: Don’t be Kahless with that!
LOCATION: Klingon Home World
Objectives: Raid
TEXT: [Player], you will have a long and glorious career here in Starfleet. But this is no time to rest upon your laurels. We have word that the evil Klingons are attempting to bring to life a fallen leader to lead them into battle against the Federation. Gather your classmates and take shuttle Copernicus to the Klingon home world. There, you will break in to the Imperial Palace, kill 100 Councilmen and 20 High Councilmen. Make your way into the inner sanctum, and kill the Warlord and the Emperor before they can use a chronosynclastic biofeedback loop to resurrect Kahless. This will be your hardest assignment. And I must impress upon you — if Kahless is brought to life, it could mean the end of the Federation, Starfleet, and your career. See that dead heroes stay dead. Your final grade depends upon it.

It was a pretty slow weekend, considering. I meant to do a first look at Pi Story to complement the one I did for Florensia, but I didn’t get to it. Nor did I play Florensia any. I did play some EverQuest; Saturday I did all sorts of running around with my ranger, soloed Hate and Sky with my cleric, and Sunday morning met up with a guildie to do The Hole more or less legit, in that I actually played Tipa the entire time :) But I’ve talked about that in a previous post.

Since last week’s patch, some of the tougher fights in Wizard 101 have been eased up. I did a lot more of the Krok fights, cleared out the Djesserit tombs and working on the Anjit ones. The Emperor’s Retreat is still a little tough; I’m going to have to find some friends to help on that one. I have been exploring Marleybone, the next world, by looking up friends who are there and teleporting to them. I’ll have a post about Wizard 101 tonight, I didn’t have time this morning. With any luck, I’ll be able to piggyback to the fourth world, Mooshoo, soon.

I logged on to Dina in EQ2 for awhile; couldn’t find a group, but I chatted with a guy who wanted me to move to Butcherblock and return to raiding. Even if all my nights were free — which they aren’t — I will NEVER sign up for a six or seven day a week raiding commitment, unless I am being paid for my time. There are no rewards for raiding that are worth giving up half my life to obtain. None. Not even one. The fact that WoW, EQ, EQ2 and their clones encourage and require this to raid is proof enough as to how out of step these games are with the time most people have to spend on something like that.

How to bring the casual player into raiding? Guaranteed reward. Every time I complete a raid, I get a master spell or another piece to my set gear. I get it, it goes right into my inventory, same for everyone else. Having to raid something dozens of times for a chance to get something you need is the way things used to be.

Honestly, the only rewards worth working for are the ones that will remain even after I hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button. Friendships, or real-world loot.

I logged into my EQ2.Najena assassin, Brightknife, and headed over to Timorous Deep to work on some more gray quests that nonetheless would improve my armor while looking for a group, but lost interest quickly and logged off.

I see Cryptic has finally officially announced they are working on Star Trek Online, which probably comes close to being just as much a surprise as the fact that Bioware is working on a Knights of the Old Republic MMO. Which is to say, no surprise at all. Cryptic has not yet proven to me that they can make an MMO worth playing. City of Heroes/Villains comes close, but its grindy, repetitive gameplay is only worth doing if you are doing it with friends. Since nearly ANY MMO is worth playing if it’s with friends, this isn’t any sort of recommendation.

Looking at the screenshots, it looks like they didn’t use any of Perpetual’s code not because Perpetual didn’t want them to have it, but because they refused to buy it. The screenshots look entirely different from that of Perpetual’s game. There’s just one thing I want out of a STO game. And that is, my character, sitting in the captain’s seat, ordering the bridge crew around and talking with aliens on the viewscreen as we jockey for the best firing position. A tactical game that requires teamwork. And I’ll stand at the science station or whatever I have to do to earn those captain’s stripes.

If it’s friggin’ WoW-in-space like Perpetual’s seemed to be — forget it. No more WoW-likes, PLEASE. We have WoW already. Even though there were battles and stuff in Star Trek, that was NOT the point of the show. Most of the time the point was to AVOID killing. If Cryptic says I have to kill a thousand Gorn soldiers to LEVEL, they will have TRAMPLED the whole meaning of Star Trek. To seek out new life and new civilizations — and BRUTALLY MURDER THEM? NO. Star Trek Online had better be a game where you AVOID killing for the best score.

Somehow I have the feeling that the people at Cryptic, as able as they are, will not be able to make a Star Trek game that isn’t loaded with senseless killing. Maybe it will be a mirror universe Star Trek game, that universe where people delighted in senseless killing, and a universe far better suited to a WoW-like.

Ya know what? Star Trek Online shouldn’t be like an MMO at all. It should be more like — some sort of social web thing, where you could work on science projects or try to heal alien creatures, or experiment, or play on the holo-deck, or attend command school, or try to tune engines up to a better efficiency, or figure out a new way to use the deflector dish, or explore the ruins of ancient civilizations, or attend a peace conference as part of an ambassador’s retinue, or… see what I’m getting at? Having to assassinate just ten more Romulan Centurions to ding before you get your next Phaser upgrade goes against EVERYTHING ST STANDS FOR. You should be able to experience the breadth and depth of the Star Trek/Starfleet universe, which CAN INCLUDE space battles and dangerous away missions, but those would be a small part of everything you can do. And not necessary to level. Why even have levels?

Anyway, I’ve ranted about STO plenty in its last incarnation. Perpetual was going to cheapen it. Cryptic might not. I hope they don’t. But I don’t think they are daring enough to make a game that isn’t a grindy murderfest. It’s what’s easiest.

The original show is almost forty years old. The whole Star Trek license is becoming less valuable — there are no shows on the air, the movie coming out this year seems more like a homage to a fading memory than a new start to the franchise, and I just have to admit that that ensign phasoring a Gorn just didn’t do it for me. Kirk spent an episode fighting a single Gorn; now they’re trash-mobs? Nuh-uh. Don’t go there.

In fact, I want you to forget all about normal MMOs. I don’t want to see Level 50 Engineers — ever. If levels weren’t in the show, I don’t want to see them in the game. If mass slaughter of harmless creatures wasn’t a normal part of the show, I don’t want to see it in the game. If grinding experience wasn’t in the show, I don’t want to see it in the game.

Hey, if I love the show that much, why don’t I marry it?

Why don’t you?

I mean it. Watch the show and try to think how to take that show — and make a MMO from it.

I think, pretty soon, you’ll pick up on the One Show is One Adventure idea. You start out on ship, and then something happens, and then even more bad somethings happen, you come up with a plan, try it, fix it until it works, and then it ends. The bad somethings may involve ship battles, or diplomacy, or exploration, or mystery, or meeting alien superbeings — WHATEVER, it’s Trek, anything can happen. Nazi lizard aliens? It’s in there. Time travel? It’s there. Wars between the gods reimagined as a Civil War battle? It’s there, it truly is.

Not to say it’s not corny.

Look at Dungeons & Dragons Online. This is basically their model. You start out at a meeting point, and then you choose an adventure and you go out and do it.

They have all that D&D baggage, though. Classes, levels, hit points, d20, THAC0… there is absolutely no reason why a Star Trek MMO has to do that.

And I know that’s — broadly — what Perpetual was planning with STO, from what we know. You start in your hub, choose a solo or group mission, go off on it, and come back. Some might have problems with that, but I don’t. The show was episodic. My problem was that it didn’t allow you to command your own, huge starship — to be on the bridge and be part of that whole bridge crew dynamic. I was still with the game, even then — where I lost hope was that screenshot of the popup window they were going to use for all character interactions, and that stupid screenshot of some crew member killing “a gorn soldier”, which seemed to go contrary to the episode in which they appeared.

In a world without loot, what incentive does someone have to play? Well, what is loot besides a marker of achievement that lets you access more content?

Imagine a future with dozens of factions — those who hate aliens, those who hate humans, those looking for power within Starfleet, those who want only to explore, those who want only to conquer, those who want to discover new technology and those who want to suppress it. It’s easy to think of many. Players start off only able to do, say, a hundred missions in and around Starfleet Academy. Each can prepare them for more difficult missions; each of them may have a positive or negative faction associated with it. Doing these missions will open more; some limited just by the number of missions you must have completed, some by faction, some by not having a separate faction.

And among these are woven many stories, so as you complete more missions, you advance your story. Many of these missions will be solo; visit an archaeological dig on a dead planet; successfully thread a wormhole at maximum warp; take a shuttlecraft and investigate a spacial anomaly. You know, Trek stuff. Others will require more help. Sometimes you may even have to get your guild to go.

Oh, of course there will be guilds. MMOs are built around guilds. And the larger your guild, the bigger the starship you get. Have a huge guild? You get a huge ship. But if too many people leave, you lose it. There’s a powerful incentive to keeping your guild large — and happy. It will require a specific series of missions to get your guild faction enough to qualify for the nice ships.

There will be a bridge on this ship — it will be able to be entirely commanded by a small crew, but more difficult missions will require sufficient people all working at their stations to complete.

Is this what Perpetual intended to do? I think they were headed in this direction, then took a different turn at some point. Nobody wants to wait several more years for a ST MMO. And if we DO have to wait, for God’s sake, don’t give us WoW in space. Missions. Ship the game with 200 and release more every couple of months. Expansions will open missions on new worlds and new factions — Klingons and the like. New ships to earn. New technologies available.

Just — something small, if possible, that gives us the flavor of the game and the TV show. And a framework that you can build on.

2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place — playing EQ2 exclusively.

There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint.

Not to say there aren’t some excellent games in the past year and coming soon. I just hope they can survive their hype machines. If you promise a carnival and bring only a pony ride, well, people are going to be disappointed, even if it’s a really good pony ride. Promise a walk in the park and it’s “Hey! They have a PONY RIDE!” Underpromise, overdeliver.

2008 will be a year of great expectations and diminished realities.

Personally, I expect to have EQ2 as my main game through the entire year. Because everyone needs a steady game to call home. You may wander, but you always come home. For a lot of people, this is WoW. For me, it’s EQ2.

It’s going to be hard for EQ2 to raise expectations, though. Out of all the games I’ll mention, it has the toughest road. The last couple of expansions have ridden on EQ1’s coattails, but I don’t know if they’ve noticed, but EQ1 no longer has such long coattails. Drawing from a subscriber base that has fond memories of EQ1 but doesn’t play that game, but want something both new and familiar to them… well, that doesn’t bring many new players in. EQ2 gets most of its new players from WoW, who appreciate EQ2 for its technical innovations but have nothing invested in EQ1 nostalgia.

Prediction #1: EQ2 will reinvent itself by the end of the year, either through some innovative new setting or a game mechanic that lets players have an impact on the world. I’m fairly confident about this one, because otherwise, the hits it will take when WoW’s next expansion and Warhammer come out will probably kill it. It has to respond strongly, and “Velious, EQ2’s Fourth Expansion!” or whatever won’t bring anyone new into the fold. Chasing EQ1 is a stupid strategy.

Prediction #2: Pirates of the Burning Sea will launch strongly, and settle into a role of being about massive clan-based fleet vs fleet battles. I don’t think people will do much solo PvPing, and the economic game will be used to fund the massive fleet battles. Ladder rankings will be an obsession with the players. I’ll try PotBS. I’m not that excited about it, but I think massive fleet battles will be the killer app for PotBS, and it seems from all signs that Flying Labs is positioning it precisely for that. Soloers and non-combatant types interested in the trading game, I think, will not be its final audience.

Prediction #3: Age of Conan will launch and sink without a trace. Come on. PvP with sex and boobies and lots of blood in an election year? The first politician who sees this game will tear it to shreds. ‘Sinking without a trace’ would be the best outcome. ‘Being used as a reason to crack down on MMOs’ would be the worst. Luckily, the teenage boys who make up its natural audience will balk at the subscription fees. Plus, who the heck even knows who Conan is? If the average player even remembers the old Schwarzenegger flick, that’d be amazing — the people who would want to play this game weren’t even born then.

Prediction #4: Warhammer: Age of Reckoning will sell two million boxes and take its place as the #2 MMO in North America. I think this is a slam dunk, being basically World of Warcraft with even more arena games. Those people who love the battlegrounds and arena battles in WoW will flock to the new shiny. This will be a relief to Blizzard, who can cede the battlegrounds market to EA-Mythic and focus more on their excellent PvE and raid experience.

Prediction #5: If WoW’s second expansion, Wrath of the Liche King. comes out this year, it will be disappointing. Given the presence of two and probably soon to be more WoW-alikes in 2008 (LotRO and WAR), almost anything Blizzard can come up with can only be thought of as ‘more of the same’.

Prediction #6: NCSoft will announce a Station Pass-like “pay one price, play all our games” payment plan. Because it’s about time they do that.

okay, those were the safe predictions. Now to get a little ‘out there’.

SOE: SOE will be bought out by a well-known games company, who will announce the development of a virtual world where players can take their characters from all SOE games and live and adventure together in a world they create. This brings hundreds of thousands of players back to SOE games as they take their Jedis and Code Jockeys and Rangers and Blood Mages out of cold storage and into an entirely new world that they create — sort of like Second Life for MMOs. This will be heralded as the birth of a new sort of MMO gaming, where your characters adventure in one world, but play in another.

Star Trek Online: After the new Star Trek movie loudly tanks, all development stops on the Star Trek Online license. EA then picks up Perpetual Entertainment (or what’s left of it) as a wholly owned division focusing on MMO middleware, its first internal customer being Bioware. Bioware in 2007 announced they were using PE’s middleware for their game, so this isn’t really all that out there. There’s a chance EA-Mythic may pick up the STO license along with the company.

MMOs and movies: At least one movie will launch day-and-date with a matching MMO. MMOs will be increasingly seen as commodities and part of the exploitation of a movie license. Tie-in figurines, pop-up picture books, props, Halloween costumes, video games… add an MMO to the list as something necessary to the launch of any new genre movie.

Guitar Hero: A MMO based on Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Memory of Whiteness” that lets musicians and musician wannabes play virtual instruments in player-created bands, quartets, symphonies — what have you — will be announced. Unlike Guitar Hero, players will be able to play both tunes available in the game, and tunes of their own composition. The MMO will usher in a revolution of musical creativity. Well, this is something I *want* to happen. And given the popularity of Rock Band and Guitar Hero, why not? I just threw in KSR because, you know, people should read his books.

Roleplaying & Machinima: An MMO that takes fan fiction and makes movies from it will be announced. Write a story and watch it acted out, or advance the plot in real time with friends. This will do for the craft of writing what the Guitar Hero MMO will do for the craft of composing: bring art to the masses at the cost of authenticity.

I want MMOs that make people SMARTER and INVITE CREATIVITY. And so I dream of a future where MMOs will open doors in your mind instead of seal them shut.

MMOs are still a young industry and there is still time to reinvent itself out of the circling spiral drain of cheap entertainment. Ten years on and they are still writing the same game. 2008 will be the year someone dares to show something truly new.

2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed.

In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered.

February: SOE released the Estate of Unrest, which was a wild success; it’s still not hard to get groups for this zone. Simply an amazing place. They also announced that their next expansion would be the Rise of Kunark. Vanguard had come out, but compared to Lord of the Rings Online, it was a distant second. I’d gotten into the LotRO Stress Test, and was very impressed.

March: SOE raised the price of their Station Pass from $25 to $30/month, which has led directly to me dropping two of the three Station Pass accounts I’d been paying for. If PotBS isn’t compelling, I’ll drop the last one as well. It was widely believed they did this to subsidize the loss they took when they took Vanguard on. My feeling was, if you played three or more of their MMOs, fine, that would save you money. I only played two, EQ1 and EQ2, and I was leaving EQ1. I spent most of March moving to my new job in Connecticut.

April: Still pretty chilly in New England in April! Lord of the Rings Online came out, and I dropped every other game I was playing (EQ1, EQ2, FF12, everything) to throw myself into this wonderful game. I found a list of upcoming 2007 SF/Fantasy movies and did a snarky preview of them all and pretty much called them all, though “Sunshine” was supposedly a better movie than it sounded. I didn’t see it.

May: A chilly April became an absolutely glorious May in Connecticut. SOE released a new starter city, Neriak; the best newbie zone to date, Darklight Woods; and a new race, the evil Fae, Arasai. So much new stuff was happening in EQ2 that I was eager to finish up Lord of the Rings Online. A billing error canceled my LotRO account on me, so I returned to EQ2, found my guild had deguilded all my alts and demoted me while I’d been on LotRO, so I jumped ship to Eternal Chaos.

June: Raiding was fun again with Eternal Chaos, but I soon found I had joined the guild on a high point. I got into Neopets, specifically the Shapeshifter game. SOE announced that they would be publishing “Pirates of the Burning Sea”. and that it would become part of the Station Pass, which improved chances I would try it out. At the end of the month, my father passed away after a long fight with cancer. I’m glad I moved back to New England so I could be with him fairly often during his final months; I wish I’d come back sooner.

July: I realized that MMOs were wasting my life, so I resolved to spend less time playing them and more time doing other things, more productive things. Or at least, to make MMOs less repetitive and more challenging. I was still a little sore that LotRO had taken a beautiful newbie experience and turned it into a very standard grind down the line. Trying to find a better MMO experience, I tried the EvE 14 day free trial.

August: Perpetual confirms that SOE would not be publishing Gods & Heroes, no big surprise. Early reviews of G&H called it a subpar game, and with Vanguard draining the lifeblood from SOE, I can’t imagine they were too eager to take on another subpar MMO. My experiences playing DAoC, EvE and on the EQ2 PvP server Nagafen convinced me that PvP makes gaming more fun, even if you don’t do PvP. I saw Blue Oyster Cult for the first time in about ten years. Man, they got old.

September: The TV Fall Season starts off with a whimper. I started watching bunches of shows but ended up only watching Heroes. I should have taken my sister’s advice and gotten into Dancing With the Stars. SOE brought us Live Update 38, which brought the god Bristlebane back to Norrath, along with the “Appearance Tab”, the ability to have one set of armor for show, and another for stats, and more rumors of Kunark. RoK beta started, but I wasn’t in it. Curses!

October: Bildo tossed me a beta invite for Mythos! Take that, SOE! Syncaine ran a couple of articles complaining about how ugly EQ2 was. So I just had to respond to that. I have never considered EQ2 ugly, because it isn’t. Guitar Hero 3 came out, I caught the third Legendary Spirit on Pokemond Diamond, and fell into a Portal. At the end of the month, I had the joy of being a guest on “Shut Up, We’re Talking #12“.

November: Shady dealings at Perpetual had people wondering about the fate of Star Trek Online, a game which does not currently sound like the game people want to play. Rock Band came out, but everything else was swept away by the launching of EQ2’s third expansion, “Rise of Kunark”. My EQ2 guild pretty much died. I got into Dungeon Runners a little, but mostly I spent my gaming time working on leveling. I had some issues with how RoK was designed, which ended with his departure from SOE. Well, maybe these events weren’t *directly* related, but who knows?

December: Finally reached the level cap with a character! Once I stopped trying to get groups and stopped trying to solo, moved my cleric to her own account and swallowed the two-boxing Kool-ade, things went better. SOE buyout rumors turned out to be just rumors after all, but opened the door to speculation about what their price and future would be if they *were* to be let go by Sony. I bought a Sony Reader to bring back my joy of reading (with failing eyesight), and it has worked wonderfully (until I thought I had lost it; then I missed it terribly). I moved to the second half of my leveling curve and had a lot more fun with it.

2008 promises to be an even busier time for MMOs, with Pirates of the Burning Sea, Warhammer, Age of Conan and Chronicles of Spellborn all due to be released, plus an unannounced (yet) fourth expansion to EQ2 (my bet: Luclin).

See you on the battlefields :)

We know very little about Star Trek Online, but what we do know doesn’t sound much like Star Trek. Very “gamey”, not very “worldy”. You form a group in a city (or starship or starbase), choose a quest (mission) and beam down, run the quest, beam back up. OR, you get in your shuttle, meet up with other shuttles, run the quest, and then go back to a shuttle port.

That’s what it sounds like, so far. Is that Star Trek or WoW in Space?

What was common to all forms of Star Trek? Let’s break it down. First, was The Ship, and then The Captain. The naval tradition. Exploration. A bridge crew. Difficult choices to make — the responsibilities of command. Tense situations and careful diplomacy. The phasers only come out when every other option has been exhausted.

Starting from the beginning. Character creation.

You’re a first-year ensign just starting at Starfleet Academy. Starfleet Academy will be your home while you dabble in professions. You can train in Engineering, Science, Communications, Diplomacy, Weapons, Medicine, Navigation, Security and Command — as much as you like. You can also meet with other players and train in simulators that bring you to the decks of some major turning points in Federation history.

This training period lasts as long as you like, and via simulators, lets you jump right into the fun, day one. Jump into Klingon or Romulan simulations and try to beat the Federation crews. Simulations are where you build Command points.

All this time you are training for specific bridge positions as well — these are mini arcade-ish games. For instance, pattern matching, circuit routing (a la Pipe Dreams for instance), trying to keep a circle in the center of a screen while various forces try to knock it out. As you get better in the games, your skill in that bridge position rises. Rank 1 gives you basic knowledge, and you can pick that up easily. Rank 2 and up are required once you actually get into your ship.

At some point of your choosing, you can graduate and be posted to a ship. There’s two kinds of ships — Starfleet ships and private ships. Private ships are difficult to get, and serving aboard one will be analagous to being in a guild — these will be the player-run ships, and they can be as big or small as they can afford to maintain and keep from blowing up.

You won’t get to choose which Starfleet ship you’re posted to, but you can apply to be reassigned if things don’t work out. You take on assignments on a Starfleet ship — either in your department, or crosstrained to another department. Each Starfleet ship will have its own missions, and you may find yourself in a bridge crew or on an away mission. Again, you can ask for another assignment but you ARE a Starfleet officer, and the only way you will gain additional ranks is to do the missions. Serving on a Starfleet ship is the only way outside of the Academy to gain Command points. Missions will be either solo or group, and you can choose which sort you’d like.

Private ships are bought from shipyards. They can be traders, explorers, science ships — as many types as there are in Star Trek. Maybe even some decommissioned alien ships. You’ll have to sign on to the crew, if they’ll have you.

Your duties there will be whatever your captain and officers decide — just like in regular guilds. The missions will be able to be selected based on the ship type.

If you have enough Command ranks and enough money, you can get your own ship. If you don’t want a crew, hire NPCs. They will only have Rank 1 skills, but they’ll be able to get you into space, and you can always take over an NPC position if you need more skills there and can provide them.

So — we have Starfleet, Federation starships AND private ones, the ability to solo AND the ability to group up with any number of people, the ability to crosstrain in various paths AND work toward command…

Some more ideas. Each starship is its own instance, but space itself is shared, as in EvE. You can of course have your own room, and its contents will follow you from posting to posting. You can request a transfer back to the Academy to work on more skills and simulations. There will be a major conflict that will ebb and flow, requiring at times Starfleet ships to go into battle, sometimes huge battles requiring dozens of ships over several weeks times. Privately owned ships will have their own emergencies and tough missions and may also be called into battle.

This is just scribbling, but it seems to me, this would be a framework for something more approximating the Star Trek we know.

And maybe this is exactly what Perpetual is writing in which case, hey, sign me up, I want to play!

Via Tobolds, more news: apparently Perpetual and STO have been on deathwatch for awhile, and last-gasp development is trying to change the direction of the game to more casual. It didn’t sound very hardcore to me anyway… Free to play? Merde… This is definitely not how I saw the game being released.

Reaction on the STO Forums and [ STO Source ] has been muted. Perhaps with months of little attention to the title, it’s slowly lost fans to keep the community alive.

F13.net has some usefully cynical commentary, as usual.

(more…)

According to this article over at Massively, Perpetual Entertainment, who recently closed down their nearly-released Gods & Heroes MMO, is about to shut down altogether. It was clear from all we’ve been hearing over the past year that they were in trouble, but who knew just how bad it was?

The dev blogs they’ve been posting have shown Star Trek Online at a somewhat early phase of development — we’ve mostly seen some level design and know little about the actual gameplay — so I doubt it would be unrealistic to think that Perpetual’s STO game hasn’t much more going for it than a design document, a demoralized development team, and the Star Trek license itself.

(more…)

The Star Trek Online devs have posted their first devlog. If you’re at all interested in the upcoming Star Trek-based MMO, you should definitely check it out. Their first devblog focuses on their world creation tools — VERY interesting, at least if you’re into that kind of thing.

I thought the moons/planets in the sky of their demo scene looked a little too close, but I guess that’s standard for the genre.

I’ll add a pointer to StarTrek-Online.net. It’s these kinds of forums from which devs typically pick those who will be first into beta, so now’s the time to get involved.

STO looks to be a combo of tactical space missions a la EvE Online, and instanced “away” missions which will likely be more standard MMO fare. Sometimes you’ll “be” a shuttlecraft, sometimes you’ll be an ill-fated redshirt. The largest capital ships (they say the Galaxy class (like Enterprise-D, the TV ST;TNG ship) and Sovereign class (like Enterprise-E, the ST:TNG movie ship) will be the “cities” of STO and not drivable by players, a move that has caused much commotion among Trekkers who want to sit in Picard’s chair and baldly boldly go and all that. We may still get ships as large as the Intrepid class (ST:Voyager’s Voyager) or the Defiant (from ST:DS9), and those don’t suck.

Getting the right background to play a Fantasy MMO is pretty easy. Read Lord of the Rings? Seen the movie? Okay, you’re in. Rangers, pick up your bows on the left.

It’s a little harder for titles that have some history to them.

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There’s a race in the Star Trek universe with a racial ability so amazing, so irresistible, that when I read a thread about racial choices in Star Trek Online, I just had to add my thoughts on the compelling qualities of this mystical race.

Theirs is the power of sexual attraction. Betazoids? Well, they’re telepathic and get married in the nude and have a tendency toward skintight cat suits with plunging necklines, but no… even Deanna Troi’s family fell prey to them. Even unemotional Vulcans. Heck, even xenophobic Romulans.

These intergalactic paramours? Humans.

They drip sex appeal. Maybe it’s their smooth foreheads, or their round ears. I think it’s pheromones of some sort. Half Vulcans, half Klingons, half Cardassians, half Romulans, three quarters this, five-eighths that with humans bringing them all together. Humans have the racial ability to sleep with anyone or anything and make babies.
Let’s be honest here. The galaxy isn’t ready for humans.

So there we were, three light years into the Neutral Zone, with two Romulan cruisers starin’ us in the face, an’ we could tell by the micro distortions in the subspace that there were probably three more we couldna see.

Usually we’d have the Captain there with us to use his Negotiate skill to even the odds summat. But he had ta leave early ta pick up his kids an’ the XO was in command, an’ the XO had a thing for the photon torpedoes.

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