Star Trek Online Open Beta

[BlackArcher101]

I hear ya on the... "where's the MMO?"

It's starting to get boring for me. Sadly, I pre-ordered it, so I might as well play for a month.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

I hear ya on the... "where's the MMO?"

It's starting to get boring for me. Sadly, I pre-ordered it, so I might as well play for a month.

Look on the bright side - at least it isn't like Age of Conan, which had a fantastic newbie campaign in the starting city, only to dump you into a sparsely populated, largely catatonic real world. At least, you know up front with this game what its going to be.

[photon]

Age of Conan had boobies tho.

[Regorium]

Finally got into the beta (stupid download corrupted on me several times)

I felt kind of ridiculous fighting through the spaceship. It didn't look much like a star trek ship to me, and like Scith, I was surprised that it was so linear. Arrows on the walls pointing to turbolifts might make sense, but there's no arrows pointing to the original turbolift, which takes out the immersion slightly.

Space looks great. I was pretty impressed with the visuals when you first exited the newbie dungeon. However, it started getting old real fast, with extremely slow movement. I feel like if I really wanted to get into the game, I would have no problem with it the first time I did it, but if I wanted to play it through again or an alt I would probably flip out at the travel time.

I beamed down as a spaceship the very first time. Very surprising to have such a ridiculously huge, game-immersion breaking bug so close to release. I mean, at this point I'm expecting typos in quest text, some pathing bugs and glitches, but this is really really obvious to the player and the devs. Not sure why they haven't fixed it.

I'll probably give it a couple levels before absolutely ditching it but who knows.

The problem with new-age MMO's is that they are very very afraid to take risks. The "single player with a lobby connecting everyone" is probably the safest route you can go, because you don't need a critical mass of players before things become doable. Games like VG took the opposite approach, and built a HUGE world that needed a critical mass of players (probably something like 15k) to feel "alive", and it never really reached that point, which meant it died off in a slow and horrible manner. However, had it succeeded, it really would've been the definition of an immersive world.

STO could plausibly exist with just yourself in the world, and should the game fail, even the lifetime subscribers could have fun by themselves, instead of even them having nothing to do. If it succeeds on the other hand, the mass of players really does nothing to enhance the gameplay, which means that the game really isn't much more than the sum of its players. You'll never make a great game going the safe route, which puts some doubts about this game for me.

[Kerplunk]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Then to that is attached the "MMO" thing which is what drives you to keep playing.

I'm beginning to think the term MMO is starting to become more of a marketing term than a description of actual gameplay. Even in WoW the main times I felt a part of a larger online community was: a) battlegrounds, which I can get in an FPS, and b) the main cities, which is basically IRC chat. Hmmm....I wonder if MAG is good enough to get when it comes out...

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

If they had done this properly, your crew would be your alt's. And when you took them on away missions, side quests, and whatnot, their individual skills and stats would improve. Properly done, it would make your ship "better than the sum of its parts", it would also help power gamers around skill caps, since each of their crew could specialize, and you would be able to switch between them in various situations without having to logout (ie. beam down as that alt), etc.

It would also have provided an outlet for gamers that wanted ships crewed by multiple RL players in a sense - your buddy could run one of your alts for the duration of a play session.

Ideas like this were commonly floated around on the beta forums. Hell, if this sort of gameplay is that popular...we can find some capital, get together a few more coders, and churn out a game with all the ideas left out.

[GreenLantern]

I think the definition of MMO has been distorted over the years..

[Hack&Lube]

I'm on my 3rd day of playing the beta and I feel physically ill.

This must be what MMOs do the human body.

I better delete this game before I start self-medicating with cheesy poofs and mountain dew and really fry my brain.

[Hack&Lube]

If anybody is still playing this, the beta ends on the 26th so they've opened up the entire universe. Everything is updated too with a new look and more features.

You can visit DS9. I tried flying into the wormhole but I went right through it.

[starseed]

Cryptic changed the Canadian pricing of the Lifetime and yearly subscriptions. They are now:

Lifetime: $251.99 CAD
One Year: $125.99 CAD

All Canadians who bought the subscriptions, will be refunded the difference in about a week.

*edit* apparently this news came out 4 days ago, but I did not see it because I was on vacation until last night.

[Thor]

I gave up on the beta, too bad I really hoped this game would be much more enjoyable.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Thor

I gave up on the beta, too bad I really hoped this game would be much more enjoyable.

Yeah, on the 2nd week of play, the game was utter crap. Everything about the game is wrong and looking at what Cryptic has done with Champions Online, you know they are going to screw you over.

The original version by Perpetual Entertainment was a much better concept. This one is is just full of shortcuts, laziness, and bad design.

[Yeah_Baby]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Yeah, on the 2nd week of play, the game was utter crap. Everything about the game is wrong and looking at what Cryptic has done with Champions Online, you know they are going to screw you over.

The original version by Perpetual Entertainment was a much better concept. This one is is just full of shortcuts, laziness, and bad design.

Kind of like Crypic took over half way though development?

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Yeah_Baby

Kind of like Crypic took over half way though development?

Cryptic only got some of the graphics content from Perpetual. They threw out Perpetual's code and gameplay style to basically throw a skin on their 6 year old Champions Online engine to make it into Star Trek. Champions Online fans also complained back then that the game slowly became nearly 100% meaningless combat and that after release, lots of content was promised but it never really arrived and the game grew stale. When they finally came out with content, lifetime subscribers found themselves paying more fees for it.

In the Perpetual version, you couldn't own the biggest ships like Galaxy class, they were actually rendered in full size and were controlled by multiple players at once and operated like towns and communities in space. It sounded like there was much more variety and exploring and diplomacy as well.

STO as it stands is a horrible game. All the missions are basically "go find s***" as it's a scavenger hunt to locate and scan annoying and impossible thing to see after annoying impossible to see thing (sensors don't do anything) both in space and on the ground. Before you get to that point, you have to fight off hordes of boring ships or ground soldiers. Wash, rinse, repeat. Every mission is basically the same.

What makes it all worse is that space isn't really 3D, you are prevented from flying or turning past a certain angle so everything is on a 2D plane which takes everything about it being space out of it.

The game is also pretty much all solo play with none of the thing that makes MMOs worth playing. There is no interaction or teamwork unless it is a fleet mission and even there you just show up and shoot stuff.

Navigating is also stupid. You spend most of the time just flying through space with nothing to do but to set a course in the void of sector space and alt-tab to surf the internet or watch a movie or something and come back 3 or 5 minutes later when you have reached your destination.

The funniest thing is that in the short open beta which was about 2 weeks, some players reached Admiral rank which is the highest level in the game - and that's with a level cap for the first week. They basically completed the entire game in half a month.

[jolinar of malkshor]

I wasted 69.95

[starseed]

So Galaxy class ships act like towns. You are an engineer working for the cheif engineer. You have to scrub plasma manifolds and perform level 4 diagnostics all day... how would that be fun?

I am now convinced cryptic was bang on with the idea that everyone should be a captain. I also love how you can have friends make up your away team, and you can have massive fleet battles. I loved open beta, and cannot wait for Friday.

I loved this thread:

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=85214

Monday, after having played for a couple of days and finishing the tutorial and missions, I warped into an enemy contact instance. Immediately after warping in (I'll never get tired of that cut-screen) I see another player in a Miranda getting pounded by 2 Klingon Cruisers and a couple of Birds of Prey. I go to full impulse, ready a photon spread, and fire right at 10km.

Phasers are blasting, tachyon beam churning through shields. The Birds of Prey start engaging me, probably because of my area attack, but I keep firing on the cruiser. Finally, the cruiser starts attacking me, so I start pelting the other cruiser. Eventually I've got them all on me, minus a couple Birds of Prey. Valiant rescue, but at this point it looks like it's my butt in the fire.

Pretty soon I'm directing full power to shields. Things are not looking good, and the computer is freaking out on me. Soon enough, my shields are down and I'm starting to take hull damage.

Yet, right in the nick of time, a cruiser appears out of nowhere and starts blasting the crap out of the Klingons.

We easily dispatch them from there on, and go our merry way never to meet again.

Missions, experience and loot be damned. That was Star Trek!

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by starseed

So Galaxy class ships act like towns. You are an engineer working for the cheif engineer. You have to scrub plasma manifolds and perform level 4 diagnostics all day... how would that be fun?

There are plenty of people who would enjoy it if its creatively presented with interesting things to do. Just because most modern MMO's like Star Trek Online have also dumbed down the crafting classes doesn't mean they don't have a rich history played by a lot of people.

[Regorium]

Originally Posted by starseed

So Galaxy class ships act like towns. You are an engineer working for the cheif engineer. You have to scrub plasma manifolds and perform level 4 diagnostics all day... how would that be fun?

I think if Galaxy class ships acted as something like a guild hall, it'd be extremely solid. For example, for a fleet mission (ie. raid), you could have say, 7-8 members in your guild running it, while others are piloting smaller ships (maybe 4 or 5 members) and even others piloting single fighters and such.

However, this concept kind of got mixed reviews in WoW, where very simple vehicle fights made people rage. One of hte arguments was that they didn't want to spend years building up a character only to use like 2 abilities in a top end fight. Maybe it'd help that the massive ship that is built completely by the guild members (and hopefully significantly customizable)

Maybe you could have several ships in your arsenal if you have enough resources and all that. I don't know. All I know is that the whole "you're the best captain evar and will be the 12853rd person to save the whole freakin galaxy from destruction" idea is wearing thin with me. Obviously too late to make massive design changes, but yeah, the game just wasn't for me.

[3 Justin 3]

You nerds, go play Call of Duty.

[CaptainCrunch]

So lets say that they get 50,000 people signed up, does that mean that there are 50,000 star ships, cause the temptation would be to get them all in one spot and have a brawl for it all.

If I was playing my characters name would be God, because what does God need with a Starship.

[CaptainCrunch]

From what I heard they finished off the Beta last night by sending in a Borg Klingon invasion that pretty much laid waste to everyone that was playing.