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The Game You Hoped STO Would Be
warrior41
Member Posts: 65
In my opinion, Cryptic's version of STO is a rushed, shallow, simplistic, highly instanced, single-player, arcarde, and disappointing shoot-em-up. The Star Trek IP had so much potential for an MMORPG, and fans waited for over half a decade to see it finally reach fruition. But it is a epic failure. Hailing Frequency reports as of April that STO has only 100K subscribers. This is much lower than what even Age of Conan has now. STO is headed for a steep fall, very soon.
The game is all about combat. There is little to no social interaction. The ground envrionments are small and barren. The landscapes are empty. To Cryptic's credit, some of the space scenery is beauttiful and many of the iconic ships look nice.
However, the game I had hoped STO would become is far, far different than what we have received.
I would have preferred a game more driven towards RP experiences. I would have liked the game to be geared toward social experiences like meeting halls and space stations and ground envioronments. I would have liked the game to be fluid, meaing much less instances. More people should be in space stations and ground environments for social interaction. Ship interiors in my hopes would have played a much larger role. I would have liked ship interiors similar to what we saw in SWG: JTL. Seamless entering and exiting of ship interiors from space. No instances. Bridge, quarters, mess hall, engineering, holodeck. The whole works.
Housing and fleet-owned space stations. a Earth location like Starfleet Academy. Housing on space stations and planets.
Combat would have been there but would have been more dramatic and added to the storyline.
Comments
I just wanted it to be an MMORPG based on, and steeped in Star Trek lore.
Not a single player severly instanced shoot 'em up with a ST skin slapped on.
The whole genocide, murder, zero diplomacy "gameplay" hardly smacks of any ST show or movie I ever saw either.
Astoundingly, fans on their forums think the game represents the IP well, so good for them.
I would have liked to have seen far more diplomatic missions, with multiple choice actions that take characters in different direction and far more RP orientated missions. There are just too many shoot this, scan that missions with very little interaction with NPCs at all (in fact i can probably count on one hand the number of times i've spoken to an NPC who wasn't a vendor or a Starfleet contact).
I gather you didn't see the new Star Trek film.
I hoped for a game that was actually ready to be released, supported by a company that were capable of showing a shred of respect towards their customers. Sadly i got neither.
Your friendly neighbourhood Spider-pope.
The Star Trek IP had so many elements that could have meant throwing away the MMO rulebook and doing something new. Cryptic just either couldn't be bothered to re-think the formula or it never even occured to them.
Replicatiors - The ability to create items purely from energy by telling a computer what you wanted could have set up amazing crafting. Actual crafting even, not just receipe + mats = Item. (see also crew)
Transporters - The end of "run from A to B" quests (at least on planets) surely! Nope. "Just beam me 2 miles away from where I want to be ensign... I like the exercise".
Crew - ... and no not player crews. Someone else can argue about that, I can't see that it would ever have worked (happy to be proved wrong). However your crew are nothing. Why aren't my engineers researching new and funky things for my ship. Why does my navigator not know intrinsically where a particullar planet is. Why isn't my Doctor providing me with cool buffs for away missions?
I could go on .I'm sure you all could too. STO just feels like a missed opportunity to have been so much more.Ascension - EU Mature, Friendly, Laid Back SW:TOR Guild now recruiting.
No player crews = dealbreaker.
EVERY series was about a crew of skilled individuals working together to solve problems and fufil mission objectives. If you don't have that (and yes, it is doable) then you don't have Trek.
"" Voice acting isn't an RPG element....it's just a production value." - grumpymel2
If any IP deserved a 5 year dev cycle it was Star Trek, I hate to admit it but I am very disappointed in how STO turned out.
STO should have been massive.
That said, minus the over use of instancing, space was very well done, as was the ships and ship to ship combat, the latter may be the best combat of any MMo in my opinion, but sadly thats all there is and it becomes far to repedative since every mission from start to end is virtually the same with only a few exceptions.
I will watch how STO evolves and if Cryptic takes it in the right direction...i.e..more open ended exploration and some other stuff...I will resub, but until then, I have found Fallen Earth to be a pretty decent alternative that mixes mission/quest play with sandbox exploration fairly well.
Godz of War I call Thee
One word....
Exploration
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I wanted a full-featured MMORPG, not a mostly single-player console shoot-em up with multi-player capability.
To me, MMORPG's are about immersion in a virtual world, and an exciting role to play and develop. The Star Trek IP would have been great!
STO is the comic book shooter version of Star Trek, not a real MMORPG based on Star Trek.
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2024: 47 years on the Net.
The biggest problem I have, and others have said it as well, is the bloody engine Craptic uses.. The game engine can ONLY do instances, which removes any sense of a persistant world. It's mostly arcade action then anything.. One big "LFG" game, that leaves little for the imagination and exploration.. Until Cryptic dumps the engine and does something better, there is no hope for STO or any MMORPG made by Cryptic..
They could have done something like mass effect where you basically end up scanning planets and it would have come out better than the nebula thing. I feel like Im flying around in a 10x10 room looking for a speck to scan that magically turns into a solar system.
I know Star Trek, unlike Star Wars, is mainly space based. Still I think a Star Trek MMO should have had ~ 50% planet based content, and quality content of permanent planets, not tiny random zones. Some real planets like for SWG with things to do, to explore and to fight over. Or maybe 30% planets and then another 30% on space stations and large ships, but never so heavy on space content alone. Thats what I feel is the greatest shortcoming, that fixation on being a captain of a ship.
Also the universe is tiny, there is zero real exploration and the stories have zero to do with the Trek spirit. Its all kill kill kill scan scan scan kill kill kill.
Adding an advisory council on this ruin of a game is like adding 2 drops of perfume to a 20 ton load of horsedung.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
I did. Worst thing to happen to Star Trek until a half-assed MMO was made of the IP. I still don't consider that abomination a real ST movie, not to me at least.
Hated that movie, typical Hollywood crap.
Oddly enough, I liked STO during closed beta. They destroyed the whole thing in open beta when they removed any challenge whatsoever and when they switched to limited skill points. I actually prefer the instanced game design (I hate it when I'm going into a 'new, undiscovered planet' and find 46 ships there lol. I like instancing.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
Like every aspect of STO it appears the main question was, What's easiest? What's cheapest way to do it.
Instances can be good ...within an open persistant world. STO is nothing but instances. Every where you are in game is just one copy capped at what, 50 people?
Dungeons can be instanced, but to have a load screen for every tiny box you cross is way to much.
CoH, WoW, LOTRO those games have an overall world, and instances used for scripted encounters for teams / solo. That's fine by me. Nothing in STO really exists though. If you are last to leave an instance (i.e. anywhere in the game), it ceases to exist.
The only reason the 'fans' on their fourms think the game represents the IP so well is that these are the trekkies that bought the lifetime subs and have no other choice but to validate the game in a positive way. We know damn well that they are lying out their asses and they deep down, also think STO is a crock of shit just like the rest of us.
I had high hopes for the game, much like the quoted post. I wanted it to be something special, immersive and fun. Cryptic failed to deliver on all accounts..
I think it's because those games were designed entirely for PC, while I think they had consoles in mind when designing Champions Online (and STO since it uses the same engine).
I like instancing for missions. Open world for navigation and what not, but actual missions to be instances, which makes it easier to include then a difficulty selector, as it seems many people like to win their battles by yawning.
It's interesting how Fallen Earth has instances without any loading screens at all. The only way you know you're in an instance is when a dialogue box pops up informing you that you're entering an instance.
Even some lifers can't defend that disaster any longer. Some "blue" names are starting to join the darkside.
I'm not a very hard gamer to please, I like alot of the vanilla themepark mmo's made nowadays when I left Wow it was mostly due to the lack of any rp tools or much of an rp community, I've played and enjoyed most of SOEs games even but the incredible lack of options in STO is pretty much indefensible. I've never played an mmo that I enjoyed less, while there were some I knew right away were no good and never played them again that was easy to let go of but this was different because as usual Cryptic has one decent element of gameplay in the game and for me it was space combat, I knew before launch that I wouldn't last more than two months if Cryptic could not announce something coming down the pipe soon that one could get excited over but as usual Cryptic failed to deliver. I have yet to hear about anything planned in game to make one think they should have even released the game.
Some people argue that Atari rushed them to launch which I can concede but the question is where are the things they thought they would implement if they had more time? Why are we not hearing about these things? I'm fairly certain it's because they don't exist, from what I know of Champions that games play is as shallow as STO's and nothing new has been implemented since launch with the exception of extra quests.
One of the saddest things is I fear with Cryptics use of rmt's that they may survive much longer than they should simply by the extra income they recieve from the C-Store which will just keep them in the malaise that helped release the last two dissapointments they dropped on the community.
This is the most shallow and empty mmo I've ever played hands down and Cryptic should be ashamed of themselves for dropping this game with such a glaring lack of variety, and such an empty and meaningless universe. I'm fairly certain that Cryptic won't be seeing my money again for quite sometime if ever.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
After a certain point it seemed like they just ran out of ideas. I think the last missions I enjoyed playing were the guardian of time one and the dooms day machine one. In TOS alone there are enough of those kinds of story lines that they could have adapted that would keep players engaged for a long time. People say playing Eve is like work, but after playing those two missions, the game just became a long trudge to the end for me in hopes I would see something as cool as those two missions. Sadly, I never did. For the last half of the game no mission really stands out as memorable and for something that was developed from a massive IP that's just sad to me.
I wanted StarQuest Online with better graphics and a deeper community (larger). Oh well... its a shame SQO has been loseing its community steadly since launch.
I wanted a game where the ship was primarily the playground. Space should have been dangerous, secondary and part of the exploration motif. Combat should have been prevalent also, but it shouldn't have been the top priority.
The ships flying around like dogfighters was absurd.
Old School SWG - "I paid you 1,000,000 credits not for you to slice my Krayt weapon for me... I paid you 1,000,000 credits to give it BACK to me."
Anyone notice how wonky ship flight was in sector space. Maybe it's me but I noticed it a lot more once I got my t5 cruiser. It seems like maybe the center was off or something. I could do donuts and pinwheels and all kind of weird maneuvers you wouldn't expect for a cruiser if it was modelled right. It felt like I was driving my car during an ice storm. My personal favorite was the nose down while flying forward in a direction perpendicular to your nose.
As an aside, I my free time is up this week so I deleted my characters. For some reason, the database insists you have at least one character. My last character I deleted still shows up but no log entries show up.I was wondering if it would remove me from the database entirely as many have claimed on the forums. I guess not.