I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but is it really likely that using the same engine for a kapow blammo kaplooey superhero game and for a Star Trek game is going to make anything more than a re-skinned superhero game? I mean I guess it's possible the Cryptic engine is insanely powerful and diverse but... I can't imagine there being many similarities between the Champions universe and the Star Trek universe.
They built the Cryptic engine specifically to sell to other companies to make MMOs with, along with making their own MMOs. In essence they built it to be the MMO version of Unreal.
Seriously, you guys are talking a lot about specific mechanics that I don't see actually written anywhere.
Can someone point me to where you're getting all this? Like I said, just the little blurb that's on the site is really vague and could mean lots of things.
We're comparing the blurb saying you're a captain of a ship to the old company's blurb that said you'd be a crewmember of a ship.
I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but is it really likely that using the same engine for a kapow blammo kaplooey superhero game and for a Star Trek game is going to make anything more than a re-skinned superhero game? I mean I guess it's possible the Cryptic engine is insanely powerful and diverse but... I can't imagine there being many similarities between the Champions universe and the Star Trek universe.
They built the Cryptic engine specifically to sell to other companies to make MMOs with, along with making their own MMOs. In essence they built it to be the MMO version of Unreal.
Besides, the only thing that stands Champions' engine aside from most other 3d engines is the cel shading. Everything super-heroey about it is just artistic design.
Count me among those who liked the Elite Force games, but I wouldn't put them among the highest pantheon of FPSes either. However, the Deep Space 9: The Fallen game, which was a third-person shooter, was really very good, but I don't think anyone but me played it.
And since the show was more about the characters than the ships it seemed like an obvious choice to have the players playing the people aboard the ships. And if you did get into a battle with another ship how badass would that be to have 5 or 6 players all talking over voice chat and working together, one doing evasive manoeuvres, one in engineering adjusting shield polarities to deflect incoming fire, one targetting the enemy ship's phaser banks with photon torpedoes at the weapons console, one being the captain and co-ordinating it and one guy standing at the communications array and getting killed when it unexpectedly explodes when the ship gets hit.
And then the shield guy goes AFK and you go boom.
I don't think the problem is their tack. I think the problem is that the Star Trek universe just isn't going to make for a good "grinding" experience. I mean, how many Ferengi lobes do I need to collect before I get the Phaser of the Mongoose?
Star Trek would be good for a social MMO, though they may not make much money off such a thing. You still run into the problem of not everyone wanting to be stuck down in engineering pressing buttons. "But, I wanna be the councilor this time! He was the councilor last time. Stick him in the engine room watching the WOOP WOOP WOOP thing."
Yeah, that'd be fun for a 2-3 hour task force.
WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP
"What the hell is that racket?"
"It's the warp core, honey."
"Well, make it stop."
"But if I turn down the sound I won't hear the other people screaming for me to fix the positronic matrix capacitor injector."
"Ok, time to go to bed."
"Sorry guys, my wife is making me go to bed."
"But, we're ALMOST THERE! It's just another hour before we get to the Beta Adrani II system and camp the Gowron spawn!"
Federation Starships didn't have 'gunners', they had Tactical stations that handled weapons systems- most of the time, it was only one officer manning it. Worf's on TNG also handled communications.
But... I... thought they cancelled this. Whatever, I'm a sci-fi junky. I'll end up spending money on it.
Cryptic did decent work on CoX and they actually managed to talk to the community without sounding like an uppity asshole on a horse so high you could call it a giraffe so there's some credibility there NOT to make it a "ooh, time to cash in on the sure-fire IP" game.
I get what people are saying with regards to the story happening on the ship, etc. I just don't see how you could make that interesting without having something to fill the time between those conversations about dilithium crystals fading or an attack by the Borg. What, make the whole ship the "world" with people walking around in it? I dunno about that. You need the ships and the ship combat, so hence, it's a ship game.
I liked Earth and Beyond, for whoever mentioned that, and I expect it'll be along the same lines, without the boring ass travelling system that allowed you to do laundry while you moved from place to place.
Federation Starships didn't have 'gunners', they had Tactical stations that handled weapons systems- most of the time, it was only one officer manning it. Worf's on TNG also handled communications.
So what.
give each player a console to tap into a 'virtual blah blah blah', because it's better for some reason.
If we all followed the series we'd need hundreds of players to run each ship, and we'd spend our days drinking tea in the officers lounge, discussing what is right and wrong
I guess what I'm saying here is; I want gunners, so screw you
There are many gameplay mechanics that would enable 4+ on a ship, it's crazy. However, it needs strong design and forethought, which might be outside of the realm of MMOs (and their players).
So we've got say, Engineering, Tactical, Captain, Pilot. Captain has to co-ordinate the movements of all players. Engineering plays minigames and such, Tactical shoots guys and mans the shields, pilot flies around. Easy, and a bit obvious.
Now we have things like away teams to go on boarding missions. Medical needs someone in there. What about reconnaissance? If things are going bad, someone manning the star maps to tell the Captain where they could go hide would work.
While these all sound boring in and of themselves, no-one would be specialised into that traditional class role; you take it as you want it. NPCs play the characters on the ship not available, but would be ineffective in a large-scale conflict (crossing into The Neutral Zone with just you logged in is a quick way to lose a ship).
The ship is a flying guild hall, players log in and out in their quarters. It has a 10-Forward. A holodeck for training skills and playing minigames. It has missions that occur on board the ship (shit going down in the Jeffery's Tubes!)
Just like EVE has huge corporations, so could STO, and these would be the ships. I would be quite happy with say; a Starfleet of 30-40 ships on the entire server.
And this is just a design I came up with right now. And I'm not a game designer. Imagine what you could do if you really thought about it?
From those screenshots, I predict the game will be flying around, maybe some pewpew, then away missions that will play exactly like Generic MMO 204.
And this makes me sad, because the Star Trek franchise not only doesn't work with that, it has so many opportunities for it to work in other ways.
I'm hoping for something along the lines of "sidekicks" when it comes to player crew. If you want to be a lone wolf and fly around (or if no one else from your guild is online and you don't want to spend 30 minutes spamming "LFG Engineer Lvl 18 PST" in the general chat channel) you can leave with your ship and an NPC crew, but if a group of friends is online and they want to play together, they can all crew the ship of the highest-level player to complete missions.
The starship as a flying guild hall sounds like fun until I try and think about what all the spare engineers would do with their time. Unless the game is Puzzle Pirates in space, it could be very, very boring for the junior engineer just hanging around in orbit while the six highest-ranking players do an away team mission.
There are many gameplay mechanics that would enable 4+ on a ship, it's crazy. However, it needs strong design and forethought, which might be outside of the realm of MMOs (and their players).
So we've got say, Engineering, Tactical, Captain, Pilot. Captain has to co-ordinate the movements of all players. Engineering plays minigames and such, Tactical shoots guys and mans the shields, pilot flies around. Easy, and a bit obvious.
Now we have things like away teams to go on boarding missions. Medical needs someone in there. What about reconnaissance? If things are going bad, someone manning the star maps to tell the Captain where they could go hide would work.
While these all sound boring in and of themselves, no-one would be specialised into that traditional class role; you take it as you want it. NPCs play the characters on the ship not available, but would be ineffective in a large-scale conflict (crossing into The Neutral Zone with just you logged in is a quick way to lose a ship).
The ship is a flying guild hall, players log in and out in their quarters. It has a 10-Forward. A holodeck for training skills and playing minigames. It has missions that occur on board the ship (shit going down in the Jeffery's Tubes!)
Just like EVE has huge corporations, so could STO, and these would be the ships. I would be quite happy with say; a Starfleet of 30-40 ships on the entire server.
And this is just a design I came up with right now. And I'm not a game designer. Imagine what you could do if you really thought about it?
From those screenshots, I predict the game will be flying around, maybe some pewpew, then away missions that will play exactly like Generic MMO 204.
And this makes me sad, because the Star Trek franchise not only doesn't work with that, it has so many opportunities for it to work in other ways.
Because if there's one thing people want in their MMOs, it's being forced to do everything with a large guild all the time.
Edit: And fighting for pilot/gunner every single time you log on.
I'm hoping for something along the lines of "sidekicks" when it comes to player crew. If you want to be a lone wolf and fly around (or if no one else from your guild is online and you don't want to spend 30 minutes spamming "LFG Engineer Lvl 18 PST" in the general chat channel) you can leave with your ship and an NPC crew, but if a group of friends is online and they want to play together, they can all crew the ship of the highest-level player to complete missions.
The starship as a flying guild hall sounds like fun until I try and think about what all the spare engineers would do with their time. Unless the game is Puzzle Pirates in space, it could be very, very boring for the junior engineer just hanging around in orbit while the six highest-ranking players do an away team mission.
That's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Puzzle Pirates in space could be awesome.
I'm hoping for something along the lines of "sidekicks" when it comes to player crew. If you want to be a lone wolf and fly around (or if no one else from your guild is online and you don't want to spend 30 minutes spamming "LFG Engineer Lvl 18 PST" in the general chat channel) you can leave with your ship and an NPC crew, but if a group of friends is online and they want to play together, they can all crew the ship of the highest-level player to complete missions.
The starship as a flying guild hall sounds like fun until I try and think about what all the spare engineers would do with their time. Unless the game is Puzzle Pirates in space, it could be very, very boring for the junior engineer just hanging around in orbit while the six highest-ranking players do an away team mission.
That's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Puzzle Pirates in space could be awesome.
It would be awesome, but I doubt very seriously that's what we're going to get. Might I recommend Puzzle Quest 2?
As long as it isn't WoW in space I'll be happy to check it out. If they could take EVE online, stream line it and add the odd "walk around your own ship" or "away mission" I'd wet myself with glee pee.
I think a good method would be for each player to have their own small ship, maybe not shuttle small, but a destroyer size thing. The player can fly around on their own with this, has npc crewmen, do whatever. However, you can also group together on a ship, either on one of those same ships, or on a larger ship if you can buy one, or get promoted up to it or whatever.
I'd love to do a guild crewed ship based MMO - whether it be this or something else - but how would this really work? I'm no MMO god, having only played WOW, but are there any current MMOs or other games that build a collective machine/ship/device that is manned by multiple human players that interacts with other player manned "things" or the environment.
So if there are no pre-existing models of how this would work in a game perhaps it's just been thrown into the too hard basket and they've reverted to more known models - aka lets rip off EVE/WOW/EQ etc
My friends and I were brainstorming this around the time the Star Trek MMO got announced. The only good idea we came up with in how the Engineers would work: basically as a ship takes damage, parts break, and various types of minigames and puzzles are required to fix different kinds of broken bits. (Like a circuit rerouting minigame).
There are many gameplay mechanics that would enable 4+ on a ship, it's crazy. However, it needs strong design and forethought, which might be outside of the realm of MMOs (and their players).
So we've got say, Engineering, Tactical, Captain, Pilot. Captain has to co-ordinate the movements of all players. Engineering plays minigames and such, Tactical shoots guys and mans the shields, pilot flies around. Easy, and a bit obvious.
Now we have things like away teams to go on boarding missions. Medical needs someone in there. What about reconnaissance? If things are going bad, someone manning the star maps to tell the Captain where they could go hide would work.
While these all sound boring in and of themselves, no-one would be specialised into that traditional class role; you take it as you want it. NPCs play the characters on the ship not available, but would be ineffective in a large-scale conflict (crossing into The Neutral Zone with just you logged in is a quick way to lose a ship).
The ship is a flying guild hall, players log in and out in their quarters. It has a 10-Forward. A holodeck for training skills and playing minigames. It has missions that occur on board the ship (shit going down in the Jeffery's Tubes!)
Just like EVE has huge corporations, so could STO, and these would be the ships. I would be quite happy with say; a Starfleet of 30-40 ships on the entire server.
And this is just a design I came up with right now. And I'm not a game designer. Imagine what you could do if you really thought about it?
From those screenshots, I predict the game will be flying around, maybe some pewpew, then away missions that will play exactly like Generic MMO 204.
And this makes me sad, because the Star Trek franchise not only doesn't work with that, it has so many opportunities for it to work in other ways.
Because if there's one thing people want in their MMOs, it's being forced to do everything with a large guild all the time.
Edit: And fighting for pilot/gunner every single time you log on.
You just decribed the typical raid night for any number of MMO's.
Only in this case, raid night is every night. For as long as you want to do anything.
If people can get burnt out on just 2-3 days a week, expecting all gameplay, 7 days a week to be nearly the same is going to be crazy.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
Third page and no one has mentioned star fleet battles yet?
The old pen/paper game which was the model for the star trek starfleet command games.
I am guessing that where they are going with the one person, one ship idea. Very old school.
I hope they don't go the whole shared space ship route. Because what would you do when the rest of the crew is offline? Or when you log in and find some dude was bored and decided to crash into a starbase?
Eve may have shared owernship on in-space structures... but everyone still pilots their own ship.
I'm looking forward to seeing the beta reports in a few years.
Yea, ownership just becomes a huge issue. Either only guild "captains" can pilot the ship, and people log on unable to do anything, or anyone can, and random newbie dude manages to trap you deep in borgland during the middle of the night.
I think the people wishing for a multi crew ship game need to step back and take a look at this for a second. The ship shit in the shows was always a last resort, it was just a way to get some where, find out something crazy, and then either defeat it with the ship or with some crazy fucking techno babble.
I can't imagine anything awesome about being Gordy LeForge standing around in engineering going "I think I can rerout the whatchamacallits to the jinjersnaps, that should cause our candy coating to sour making that space monster think we taste like shit" and having it cut to Capt. Mcgee saying "Make it So!"
There was never anything exciting about watching anyone do anything on that show, I can't figure out how they would make pushing buttons on control pannels fun or engaging. What was cool about the show, was seeing what kind of crazy shit the crew would get in to each episode. That's probably what there trying to capture with the one ship system. Most of the people on the ships are Red Shirts anyway. Who says I can't captain a Star Ship and be a Master Engineer at the same time? Then when I do a In Ship mission on my friends Ship I can bring my Engineer skills with me. Same deal with Away Missions.
Being able to Captain your own ship means you don't have to be a Red Shirt and that you don't have to cut out the red shirts just so 5 guys can maintain a ship designed to be maintained by thousands of people.
Who says I can't captain a Star Ship and be a Master Engineer at the same time? Then when I do a In Ship mission on my friends Ship I can bring my Engineer skills with me. Same deal with Away Missions.
I hope you don't mind me reducing the signal to noise ratio and cutting out the "these people don't know what they're talking about" a little bit--I wanted to highlight the little nugget of goodness at the core of it because this is precisely what I want. A combination of the opportunity to do my own thing when it suits me and being able to play with a group when that suits me, too.
I will be following this game with some interest. Time will tell if they get this one right. At least they aren't Sony...
I'm not going to defend SOE, except to say they're doing a good job with EQ2 where they've prevented expansion-pack insanity and added good free stuff and made huge positive changes to the game. I've seen what SOE has done to other games (Planetside being a bigger tragedy for me than, say, SWG) and I still have to look at their ad-laden launcher a lot.
But I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. Cryptic has a track record of exactly one released game. And that game got bought out from them after they let it founder in favor of developing Marvel Online (which got canned but morphed into Champions). Working on two games at once didn't work the first time Cryptic tried it, so I can't work up much confidence in them doing it again.
At least Champions and STO don't overlap their target audiences quite as much as CoH and MUO did.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
I will be following this game with some interest. Time will tell if they get this one right. At least they aren't Sony...
I'm not going to defend SOE, except to say they're doing a good job with EQ2 where they've prevented expansion-pack insanity and added good free stuff and made huge positive changes to the game. I've seen what SOE has done to other games (Planetside being a bigger tragedy for me than, say, SWG) and I still have to look at their ad-laden launcher a lot.
But I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. Cryptic has a track record of exactly one released game. And that game got bought out from them after they let it founder in favor of developing Marvel Online (which got canned but morphed into Champions). Working on two games at once didn't work the first time Cryptic tried it, so I can't work up much confidence in them doing it again.
At least Champions and STO don't overlap their target audiences quite as much as CoH and MUO did.
Sony may be doing a decent job running EQ2, but let's face it, it's EQ and it's their flagship game. You are right to be sceptical about Cryptic's track record, though. I just hope they learned from their past experiences and put a dedicated development team to work on STO. Time will tell.
As far as my opinion towards Cryptic, considering the alternatives I'm glad that anyone decided to pick it up rather than seeing it rot. It's a brave thing to do since it's such a big name and people will definitely have high expectations. If STO goes right, then Cryptic will have earned a lot of respect. If STO goes horribly wrong, then they will probably be hurting a lot, and maybe lose more than they bargained for. I am assuming they realize this. I hope they do, anyway.
Because if there's one thing people want in their MMOs, it's being forced to do everything with a large guild all the time.
Edit: And fighting for pilot/gunner every single time you log on.
I didn't say it would be a workable game, just what Star Trek would mean to me.
To be honest, they'd probably be better off without the license at all. It's pretty much the nerdiest license they could have got, but the Star Trek lovers might hate it.
I guess we'll have to wait for the gameplay video.
I will be following this game with some interest. Time will tell if they get this one right. At least they aren't Sony...
I'm not going to defend SOE, except to say they're doing a good job with EQ2 where they've prevented expansion-pack insanity and added good free stuff and made huge positive changes to the game. I've seen what SOE has done to other games (Planetside being a bigger tragedy for me than, say, SWG) and I still have to look at their ad-laden launcher a lot.
But I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. Cryptic has a track record of exactly one released game. And that game got bought out from them after they let it founder in favor of developing Marvel Online (which got canned but morphed into Champions). Working on two games at once didn't work the first time Cryptic tried it, so I can't work up much confidence in them doing it again.
At least Champions and STO don't overlap their target audiences quite as much as CoH and MUO did.
It's not that they couldn't work on two games, its that they wanted/needed the money. There's still one or two more MMOs they're working on right now that are still unannounced.
To be honest, they'd probably be better off without the license at all. It's pretty much the nerdiest license they could have got, but the Star Trek lovers might hate it.
As a broadcast product Star Trek has been trying to survive for the better part of a decade on big-budget special effects, poor writing and strong brand ID--and it's been failing pretty miserably at it. I don't think you make a Star Trek product financially successful by appealing to people who think of themselves as "Star Trek lovers" nowadays--you go after the people who watched Star Trek: TNG in the 1990s but thought that the subsequent series were shit. There are plenty of normal people out there with real-people jobs who don't consider themselves Trekkies but still liked Star Trke. On the other hand, if their goal is to go after the people who still go to conventions...well, I guess 150,000 in box sales isn't all that bad for a videogame. Maybe this is the best way for Star Trek to finally die.
While having a group run a ship sounds fun superficially, I can't see why anyone would want to be something other than pilot/captain or gunner. If a ship needed 4 engineers, would you sit at port til you could beat or bribe four people into it?
Being an engineer would be awesome if engineering was basically done like Monkey Island swordfighting.
Posts
They built the Cryptic engine specifically to sell to other companies to make MMOs with, along with making their own MMOs. In essence they built it to be the MMO version of Unreal.
We're comparing the blurb saying you're a captain of a ship to the old company's blurb that said you'd be a crewmember of a ship.
You win this round, Cryptic.
I also liked that one 4X game they released.
And then the shield guy goes AFK and you go boom.
I don't think the problem is their tack. I think the problem is that the Star Trek universe just isn't going to make for a good "grinding" experience. I mean, how many Ferengi lobes do I need to collect before I get the Phaser of the Mongoose?
Star Trek would be good for a social MMO, though they may not make much money off such a thing. You still run into the problem of not everyone wanting to be stuck down in engineering pressing buttons. "But, I wanna be the councilor this time! He was the councilor last time. Stick him in the engine room watching the WOOP WOOP WOOP thing."
Yeah, that'd be fun for a 2-3 hour task force.
WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP WOOP
"What the hell is that racket?"
"It's the warp core, honey."
"Well, make it stop."
"But if I turn down the sound I won't hear the other people screaming for me to fix the positronic matrix capacitor injector."
"Ok, time to go to bed."
"Sorry guys, my wife is making me go to bed."
"But, we're ALMOST THERE! It's just another hour before we get to the Beta Adrani II system and camp the Gowron spawn!"
A pilot, and gunners.
That would be enough for me
You didn't watch much Star Trek, did you?
Federation Starships didn't have 'gunners', they had Tactical stations that handled weapons systems- most of the time, it was only one officer manning it. Worf's on TNG also handled communications.
Cryptic did decent work on CoX and they actually managed to talk to the community without sounding like an uppity asshole on a horse so high you could call it a giraffe so there's some credibility there NOT to make it a "ooh, time to cash in on the sure-fire IP" game.
I get what people are saying with regards to the story happening on the ship, etc. I just don't see how you could make that interesting without having something to fill the time between those conversations about dilithium crystals fading or an attack by the Borg. What, make the whole ship the "world" with people walking around in it? I dunno about that. You need the ships and the ship combat, so hence, it's a ship game.
I liked Earth and Beyond, for whoever mentioned that, and I expect it'll be along the same lines, without the boring ass travelling system that allowed you to do laundry while you moved from place to place.
So what.
give each player a console to tap into a 'virtual blah blah blah', because it's better for some reason.
If we all followed the series we'd need hundreds of players to run each ship, and we'd spend our days drinking tea in the officers lounge, discussing what is right and wrong
I guess what I'm saying here is; I want gunners, so screw you
I will be keeping my ears open though.
Between this, Champions, and the Kotor MMO, I think one of them will be good enough to get me hooked again.
So we've got say, Engineering, Tactical, Captain, Pilot. Captain has to co-ordinate the movements of all players. Engineering plays minigames and such, Tactical shoots guys and mans the shields, pilot flies around. Easy, and a bit obvious.
Now we have things like away teams to go on boarding missions. Medical needs someone in there. What about reconnaissance? If things are going bad, someone manning the star maps to tell the Captain where they could go hide would work.
While these all sound boring in and of themselves, no-one would be specialised into that traditional class role; you take it as you want it. NPCs play the characters on the ship not available, but would be ineffective in a large-scale conflict (crossing into The Neutral Zone with just you logged in is a quick way to lose a ship).
The ship is a flying guild hall, players log in and out in their quarters. It has a 10-Forward. A holodeck for training skills and playing minigames. It has missions that occur on board the ship (shit going down in the Jeffery's Tubes!)
Just like EVE has huge corporations, so could STO, and these would be the ships. I would be quite happy with say; a Starfleet of 30-40 ships on the entire server.
And this is just a design I came up with right now. And I'm not a game designer. Imagine what you could do if you really thought about it?
From those screenshots, I predict the game will be flying around, maybe some pewpew, then away missions that will play exactly like Generic MMO 204.
And this makes me sad, because the Star Trek franchise not only doesn't work with that, it has so many opportunities for it to work in other ways.
The starship as a flying guild hall sounds like fun until I try and think about what all the spare engineers would do with their time. Unless the game is Puzzle Pirates in space, it could be very, very boring for the junior engineer just hanging around in orbit while the six highest-ranking players do an away team mission.
Because if there's one thing people want in their MMOs, it's being forced to do everything with a large guild all the time.
Edit: And fighting for pilot/gunner every single time you log on.
That's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for. Puzzle Pirates in space could be awesome.
It would be awesome, but I doubt very seriously that's what we're going to get. Might I recommend Puzzle Quest 2?
Jean-Luc Picard.
Of the USS.
Enterprise.
Then you could group up and participate in larger missions that placed the group in cooperative control of a larger vessel.
Instead of 5 year missions, it's more like... well... 1 hour missions... or 5 hour missions if it's a raid!
There's plenty of ways you could make multi-crew ship control interesting with enough brain power.
My friends and I were brainstorming this around the time the Star Trek MMO got announced. The only good idea we came up with in how the Engineers would work: basically as a ship takes damage, parts break, and various types of minigames and puzzles are required to fix different kinds of broken bits. (Like a circuit rerouting minigame).
because their alchemy mini-game is the devil. so addictive
You just decribed the typical raid night for any number of MMO's.
Only in this case, raid night is every night. For as long as you want to do anything.
If people can get burnt out on just 2-3 days a week, expecting all gameplay, 7 days a week to be nearly the same is going to be crazy.
The old pen/paper game which was the model for the star trek starfleet command games.
I am guessing that where they are going with the one person, one ship idea. Very old school.
I hope they don't go the whole shared space ship route. Because what would you do when the rest of the crew is offline? Or when you log in and find some dude was bored and decided to crash into a starbase?
Eve may have shared owernship on in-space structures... but everyone still pilots their own ship.
I'm looking forward to seeing the beta reports in a few years.
Thank god I am not the only person here who's played that pen and paper game. I loved that game.
I can't imagine anything awesome about being Gordy LeForge standing around in engineering going "I think I can rerout the whatchamacallits to the jinjersnaps, that should cause our candy coating to sour making that space monster think we taste like shit" and having it cut to Capt. Mcgee saying "Make it So!"
There was never anything exciting about watching anyone do anything on that show, I can't figure out how they would make pushing buttons on control pannels fun or engaging. What was cool about the show, was seeing what kind of crazy shit the crew would get in to each episode. That's probably what there trying to capture with the one ship system. Most of the people on the ships are Red Shirts anyway. Who says I can't captain a Star Ship and be a Master Engineer at the same time? Then when I do a In Ship mission on my friends Ship I can bring my Engineer skills with me. Same deal with Away Missions.
Being able to Captain your own ship means you don't have to be a Red Shirt and that you don't have to cut out the red shirts just so 5 guys can maintain a ship designed to be maintained by thousands of people.
I hope you don't mind me reducing the signal to noise ratio and cutting out the "these people don't know what they're talking about" a little bit--I wanted to highlight the little nugget of goodness at the core of it because this is precisely what I want. A combination of the opportunity to do my own thing when it suits me and being able to play with a group when that suits me, too.
I'm not going to defend SOE, except to say they're doing a good job with EQ2 where they've prevented expansion-pack insanity and added good free stuff and made huge positive changes to the game. I've seen what SOE has done to other games (Planetside being a bigger tragedy for me than, say, SWG) and I still have to look at their ad-laden launcher a lot.
But I'm going to play devil's advocate a bit. Cryptic has a track record of exactly one released game. And that game got bought out from them after they let it founder in favor of developing Marvel Online (which got canned but morphed into Champions). Working on two games at once didn't work the first time Cryptic tried it, so I can't work up much confidence in them doing it again.
At least Champions and STO don't overlap their target audiences quite as much as CoH and MUO did.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Sony may be doing a decent job running EQ2, but let's face it, it's EQ and it's their flagship game. You are right to be sceptical about Cryptic's track record, though. I just hope they learned from their past experiences and put a dedicated development team to work on STO. Time will tell.
As far as my opinion towards Cryptic, considering the alternatives I'm glad that anyone decided to pick it up rather than seeing it rot. It's a brave thing to do since it's such a big name and people will definitely have high expectations. If STO goes right, then Cryptic will have earned a lot of respect. If STO goes horribly wrong, then they will probably be hurting a lot, and maybe lose more than they bargained for. I am assuming they realize this. I hope they do, anyway.
I didn't say it would be a workable game, just what Star Trek would mean to me.
To be honest, they'd probably be better off without the license at all. It's pretty much the nerdiest license they could have got, but the Star Trek lovers might hate it.
I guess we'll have to wait for the gameplay video.
After doing a quick database survey, we've noticed that the NPC most often killed is 85% of the time named 'Ensign Ricky'.
The harder the rain, honey, the sweeter the sun.
It's not that they couldn't work on two games, its that they wanted/needed the money. There's still one or two more MMOs they're working on right now that are still unannounced.
As a broadcast product Star Trek has been trying to survive for the better part of a decade on big-budget special effects, poor writing and strong brand ID--and it's been failing pretty miserably at it. I don't think you make a Star Trek product financially successful by appealing to people who think of themselves as "Star Trek lovers" nowadays--you go after the people who watched Star Trek: TNG in the 1990s but thought that the subsequent series were shit. There are plenty of normal people out there with real-people jobs who don't consider themselves Trekkies but still liked Star Trke. On the other hand, if their goal is to go after the people who still go to conventions...well, I guess 150,000 in box sales isn't all that bad for a videogame. Maybe this is the best way for Star Trek to finally die.