So…

People who enjoyed Star Trek for plots and story aren’t normal?

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Then go back to your internet spaceships, boy.

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Personally kind of skeptica about this. Had a lot of experience with Cryptic in the past. Came into City of Heroes at the tail end of the ‘Cryptic Age’ and can definitely say that after NCsoft bought out the IP wholesale that the game has done nothing but get better.

Although the Mission Architect was/is a bit of an albatross around their neck (a lot of dev time dedicated to it which could have been spent better doing something else instead of making an XP-farm machine and then having to spend a lot of time correcting that mistake) in my opinion however the expansion pack (Going Rogue) coming out in Quarter 2 next year is looking to be awesome.

Cryptic was responsible for putting City of Heroes on life support (the large team of people working on it was reduced to just 15) while they went and tried to make Marvel Universe Online. Jack Emmert is known for being “I know what’s fun, doesn’t matter if the entire playerbase is saying otherwise, it’s fun” and has a pretty bad press on the CoH forums.

Cryptic promised everything City of Heroes didn’t have with Champions Online (which was basically a new IP replacement for Marvel Universe Online after Microsoft and Marvel got told that WoW is an abberation and that expecting to match their numbers just isn’t possible and thus the pair of them pulled out) to the point where the list read like every common suggestion from the CoH forums was being implemented. However when it hit Open Beta the actual promises it had made weren’t quite as good as they had been shilled out to be. The Incredibles style art direction was a bit ‘ech’ in my tastes (the player characters were definitely in the ‘Uncanny valley’ and took a lot of tweaking to look more human or just go the non-human route) but the costume creator was good and CoH could definitely do with stealing some of the stuff it had implemented.

I had high hopes for Champions Online, I honestly did. That was the worst thing, wanting to like a game really badly but annoying issues just pile up enough to make you go ‘eh…’ (among my group of friends it’s called the STALKER syndrome after S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear sky but that’s just our opinion on that game).

Played from Open Beta until about 5 days left of the freebie month. The old Cryptic problems reared their heads again…they didn’t listen to the more intelligent sections of the playerbase which detailed what was wrong and instead went with the screaming section of the playerbase to listen to. Bill Roper made the frankly idiotic sailing analogy and said their stratergy was to overnerf and then buff a power instead of testing to find the sweet spot. This would lead to overnerf, overbuff, overnerf, buff type situation with powers. Personally I think bringing Bill ‘Hellgate:London’ Roper onto the project did more harm than good (and I think it actually hase…Bill is great at things like Diablo and Diablo 2 but he’s bloody awful at developing an MMO if the way he handled Hellgate and is currently handling CO are anything to go by)

The last straw was when they seemingly nerfed a power purely because it had a similar name to an overpowered one (Particle mine was actually quite crap but it shared the word ‘Mine’ in the title with the actually overpowered Mini-mines) and nobody could honestly see why an already crap power had been nerfed and no justification for it came along. I just gave up at that point.

There are rumour circulating that Champions Online has been shifted to a life support team (anybody noticing any similarities) and all focus shifting onto ST:O. CO could have been used by Atari (who now own Cryptic) to make some quick money while Cryptic developed their real heavy hitter.

That’s the thing…if they pull out all the stops and actually work their asses off to make Star Trek : Online good, it’ll be awesome and obviously their heavy hitter (most people have heard of Star Trek whereas nobody outside of the Tabletop RPG fans had heard of Champions) but I’m worried they’ll completely fluff it the same way SOE did Star Wars: Galaxies (the infamous NGE incident…).

As for spaceship combat, I’m waiting on Black Prophercy (I couldn’t ge into EVE, was just that bit too complicated for me and I’m not a Trek fan in the slightest) to be released.

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Same old, same old. No wonder i almost only play indy games nowadays.

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OK – first off I played the exact same demo as Keiron played here. So you can use that to outline what happens. It’s very much a single player experience. The chat window is there but inactive, and the whole thing feels like a demo of a single player party-rpg.

The inital space-combat is well, awkward. Playing the game proper would probably eliminate my confusion with the controls, but I can say I am glad those Birds of Prey went down easily. Oddest thing was I couldn’t work out how to fire the weapons with the keyboard, having to click GUI bits instead. The ships handle pretty sluggishly as one would expect. The pseudo-3d nature is a bit dissapointing. You can pitch down and up, but only to a limit (45 degrees maybe) and there seems to be a ceiling on how high/low you can go from the intital plane. According to the tips there is some degree of power management too, presumably shields/weapons/drives but I didn’t really have the time or a clear idea of how to fiddle with these in combat. Shields themselves manifest as 4 quarter circles arranged around the ships that get thinner as they are weakened.

Into the away-team stage. Combat is classic Cryptic going back to CoH days. Click on an enemy, then press a number key for each power every time you want to attack. Cue the next 10 minutes spent smashing 1 with the occasional 2 or 3. Also for greedily hogging the powerup items you are carrying once I realised you had more than enough to last you the mission. You are accompanied by a gang of AI teammates who follow along behind you bumping into each other. They didn’t make complete fools of themselves in combat however, so no real complaints. Both your guys and the klingons have an excess of health and shields, so it bears little resemblence to any ST TV or movie combat at this stage, unlike the space section and more traditional RPG girnd down the health.

One of the cryptic guys there was enthusing about how so many of the writers were real trekkies, much as Keiron observed. The writing itself was certainly quite reasonable and the final conversation had many options, although didn’t explain itself wonderfully about the reset. However the game still suffers from CoH storytelling methods failings – all done through big text box popups, that only occur at the start and end of missions (and before each transport, but all that says is “klingons have gone here. Follow y/n?)

Overall – not a game for me, I can’t stand that combat style. I don’t like the heavy, heavy use of instancing in a supposed MMO. If you like other Cyrptic stuff though, it looks like this could be a much more solid (if not very multiplayer) offering than Champions. The cryptic guys there were saying as much – that they were getting on much quicker and were much happier with STO than with Champions.

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KG

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Not enought time for a mission, dont worry jump to warp and go explore, or jump the theneutural zone and shoot soem ridgeheads, or weakling humans if you prefer. and if you have time quest. they average 30 min to to 1 hour. hence why they call them episodes. now not all are combat, some are couier, or retreval or maybee even needing to cure soem kind of diseese. what ever you do you can still progress your charicter without doing one or two of these. so you can soly PVP, quest, or explore. you will still progress.

now preogression is diffretn to any other MMo save EVE. in the star trek universe there is no lvl1-99. it is a military wiht ranks. so that is how you “LVL” and you progress through these “lvls” by obtaining skukk points. you get these form completeing mission and exploring and PVPing. now. skill trees are not limited to what class you are, so I can be an engineer and put all my points into tactical, or science.

now combat in immersive, there are diffrent tactics per class of ship. Sci ships have aces up there sleves, escorts hit hard, and cruisers are in a class of their own. each have their bonuses and weaknesses. Sci ships, got little D or O, but they can drop your sheids and launch a torpeedo up your deflector dish. target subsystems or help boost someone elsees sheilds. yotr tac vessils have generally smaller crews and not as much power output from their cores but they have the biggest guns. and your crusiers are ships like the USS enterprize. they have extra power extra room extra crew and have good D and O.

so ground combat is something similar to star trek away team is you have ever played it. you pick your team and then you go down, you got mele weapons or ranged. you can hide behind structures or revive a fallen comerade. and you have abilities based on skill point use or profession.

in a episode you verry between space and ground to give a feel or being immersed in the star trek universe.

now what I think sets startrek online from anyhting is its customization. from ship name designation to bridge officers names, to uniforms bdges and race. in all this you can also customize the skills and equipment of everyone in your pool of officers. you can have multiple types of officers baes upon how many of each type of station you have. there are also upgraded weapons along with other upgrades.

now you never actually loose ships, but what is there to stop you from going kamakazie left and right. crew. crew costs, what I dont know but it costs to replace a crew of anywhere between 50 to 1000.

some misc things I liek are that just becasue you have a T5 ship dosent mean you are untouchable. it will be hard to kill you but it comes down mroe to skill and skills than just all out firepower.

my last statement is this. blizzard gets it following becasue of its previous games. Strek will live and thrive becasue of thsoe ppl who will play for the love of star trek allowing the game to expand and grow and live.

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