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StarQuest Online: Developer Diary #1
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
MMORPG.com is pleased to host the first in a series of developer diaries from the team behind StarQuest Online. In this first diary, the team talks about the new look of all things SQO including the website, Twitter feed, Facebook page and the spiffy new forums. Check it out!
StarQuest Online now shines in a new look. The publisher neXeon has been working on a complete overhaul of the old website. The new website is now linking properly to the different sections, is linked to the forums so that it shows the newest posts made in the forum. In addition the new SQO Alerts section of the website shows the latest announcements posted by the DevTeam. The newly added screenshots as well as a new, user friendly, menu bar complete the design. The new website now also integrates several other pages, such as the Galactopedia, the forums and even a newly created StarQuest Online Web Blog, maintained by neXeon and the Developers of SQO.
Read more StarQuest Online Dev Diary #1.
Comments
What they should be doing is making a new 3D engine to replace the SERIOUSLY outdated KX Engine.
They need to focus their time and energy revamping if not rewriting their game client!
I tried this game...I was ok with the graphics (or lack of thereof) but the elitistic cliques, in-game politics, constant lag and square-based zigzag movement thats terrible enough to give anyone motion sickness.
wow... i played space games that looked better than this in the 90s. O_o
Shadus
SQO has alot going for it, but it also has some crushing flaws.....
1) Bugs.... The game is very ambitious in the amount of things it impliments....however it is plagued by chronic technical glitches. I think this mostly has to do with the size of the tech staff working on it, rather then whether the Dev's care or not...I'm sure they do. Simply put, if they had the budget to afford a AAA staff.... I'm sure most of these bugs would be squashed very quickly.
2) Grind.... It's SOP for players to download and utilize auto-clicker programs while they are AFK to accomplish certain tasks (tweaking ships, increasing skills, etc). Simply put, any mechanic that encourages a player to bot is a bad one (IMO) and needs to be reworked.
3) Variety of content & things to do. SQO has an absolutely VAST universe to explore. It's also very much a sand-box style game, which is something I do like. However for Sandbox style games to work well they really need large vibrant player communities making thier own content, lots of story lines and arcs and other things happening in the Universe created and run by the Dev's/GM's, and huge variety of content and ways for the players to interact with the Universe. SQO didn't have any of those during the time I played. For example there are thousands upon thousands of planets in the Universe...many of them unexplored. On some you'll even find life.... however when you do find life...it'll be one of the same 12 creatures... on every single planet (hello flying snakes)....over and over again...with exactly the same limited ways to interact with them. Once you've scanned a flying snake on one planet...the thrill is pretty much gone...scanning them on the next 23 planets on which you've find them doesn't really do much to grab the player.
4) Player vs Victem.... PvP in SQO tends to be More player vs Victem. If you are not in a millitary faction, your ship is just an explosion waiting to happen. Millitary ships are supposed to be patroling freindly space to protect Civ's...but when you are relying on a player run millitary that maybe will have 2 or 3 players on at any given time (i.e. not enough to man a ship in combat) to protect the entire Universe...that doesn't work so well. Furthermore, your character/ship can be blown up/killed while you are offline. Pirates and sabotours rampantly abuse bugs to mess with others ships. Finally the millitary factions are hardly balanced in and off themselves. Their equipment isn't balanced....and the bad guy faction consists (or at least it did when I was playing) of a core of hand-picked hardcore regular veteran players with elite ships who delight in ganking everything in sight everywhere in space and then taunting thier victems. While thier supposed opposition consists of mostly brand new players with very little experience...... who tend to get blown up every time they try to go out and offer some opposition. Worse yet, they tend to get Court Martialed by thier own faction leaders when they do go out and loose.
With a much larger player population, this would probably even out to some degree on it's own. However, with the current dynamic I can't see how the game could ever get to that population...as if the other frustrations didn't drive players away... this nonsense surely would.
Now if the game could find a way to address some of these problems...it has a HUGE amount of potential. As it was, it was the game that I most frustratingly wanted to like....but after a couple months found myself asking "Why am I dealing with this kind of frustration from something that's supposed to be for entertainment."