Star Trek Online Open Beta

[Raekwon]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Can I have a beta key anyone?

I signed up for 1 month access on www.curse.com to get a key $4.95 for the month. its no World of Warcraft thats forsure

[Regorium]

Gonna give this a shot. Just got my key from mmorpg.com for free (they still have about 3000 left as of this post).

Though every single MMO since EQ1 (and maybe WoW) has burned me. I've bought VG, EQ2, DAoC, AC2, Aion in that time and each have been fun for like 1 month, and then fail afterwards.

From the good folks over at ########, it seems like this game is just another buggy fail.

[flamesfan6]

Originally Posted by Regorium

Gonna give this a shot. Just got my key from mmorpg.com for free (they still have about 3000 left as of this post).

Though every single MMO since EQ1 (and maybe WoW) has burned me. I've bought VG, EQ2, DAoC, AC2, Aion in that time and each have been fun for like 1 month, and then fail afterwards.

From the good folks over at ########, it seems like this game is just another buggy fail.

its a beta....

[nik-]

Originally Posted by flamesfan6

its a beta....

It's in open beta, its release is in two weeks.

[BlackArcher101]

Originally Posted by nik-

It's in open beta, its release is in two weeks.

Still a beta? Which is being patched everyday? I'd be worried if I log in one day and it didn't patch, and the server wasn't down for maintenace. I don't get why some have the desire to just cut it down at every possible angle. This game is gonna fail, it's buggy, this should be a closed beta, it's releasing in 2 weeks, blah blah blah...

Bottom line, it's in beta, they are testing now with more people than the closed beta, they are constantly working on it, and if the release is pushed 1 or 2 weeks who gives a crap.

[photon]

The problem is the market is fully accepting of games that are launched unfinished and broken, so companies continue to do it. They won't push release back, they'll just launch and keep patching until finally 3 months in it'll actually resemble a launchable product.

They all do it, it's just annoying, for the first few MMOs I can understand but you'd think after over a decade of MMOs either they could get better at learning from others' launches or the public would get tired of it.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by photon

The problem is the market is fully accepting of games that are launched unfinished and broken, so companies continue to do it. They won't push release back, they'll just launch and keep patching until finally 3 months in it'll actually resemble a launchable product.

They all do it, it's just annoying, for the first few MMOs I can understand but you'd think after over a decade of MMOs either they could get better at learning from others' launches or the public would get tired of it.

this is why for as much as i want to play Star Trek Online, there's no way in hell i'm buying it until i see how it is 6 months after release. i got burned by both Age of Conan and Warhammer which were complete messes when they were first released (and so was WoW too), so i'm done paying lots of money to be an extended beta tester

personally i'm betting ST:O fails because of the studio that is releasing it. Cryptic is a very small company and they're already working on another MMO, so Star Trek will be an afterthought in a few months. it's the same reason that FunCom failed with Age of Conan, they had too much other crap going on at the same time and all their games suffered

[BlackArcher101]

Crap, didn't know Cryptic was working on another already.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

Crap, didn't know Cryptic was working on another already.

my bad, Champions Online came out in September, though for some reason their website says it's still in production. point still stands though, not even Blizzard has tried supporting multiple MMO's at the same time, and they'd be the best suited for it

[sclitheroe]

Well I tried it today, and its pretty horrible.

I love how on the very first starship, there is one turbolift connecting each floor, each in a different spot. One to go from 1-2, one, on the other side of the ship, to go from 2-3, etc, etc. Blows your suspension of disbelief out the window in the first 2 minutes. Although the fricking arrows on the walls showing you which way to run between them is a nice touch...


I love how you can't crash your ship into the asteroids or debris

I love how you can't fire phasers under full impulse power, but as you zip by another ship, you can beam their injured crew over while moving under full impulse.

I was willing to give it a shot, if, in my first hour of playtime, there was evidence that they had put an honest effort into it. But when I see starships with the same layout as dungeons (stairways at the end of passages), I know its not worth my time or money to continue with the product. Too bad, so sad.

So my complaint with the game isn't the beta, that it's unfinished, etc. My complaint is that its pretty obvious that they didn't put much thought, nor PASSION into the game.

[Hack&Lube]

Sounds like the classic "how to give players more quality gameplay in an MMORPG"

...

MAKE THEM WALK REALLY FAR AND BACK AND FORTH ALL THE TIME

[Kerplunk]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

But when I see starships with the same layout as dungeons (stairways at the end of passages), I know its not worth my time or money to continue with the product.

Is that all it takes? Yeesh

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Kerplunk

Is that all it takes? Yeesh

Yep. I've played enough MMO's to see how this one is gonna end up. It's clear that the designers weren't even visualizing the maps as ship interiors when they laid them out. It's an existing MMO engine with a Star Trek applique (and an ugly one at that), which would be OK, if they had even taken 5 minutes to think about why a ship doesn't have individual lifts for every pair of floors.

[BlackArcher101]

So did you even do a mission or PvP yet?
There are other starbases that have different layouts. And to communicate with the people in the earth starbase, you just hail starfleet. I haven't had to go back there for quite a while now.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

So did you even do a mission or PvP yet?
There are other starbases that have different layouts. And to communicate with the people in the earth starbase, you just hail starfleet. I haven't had to go back there for quite a while now.

My point is that the SHIPS are layed out like dungeons. Starbases having multiple lifts scattered all over the place would be semi-acceptable.

They also took shortcuts with the whole crew thing too, I'm discovering. They aren't crew. They are buffs attached to your character. So my engineering office has a "cool down"....how quaint

[Kerplunk]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

My point is that the SHIPS are layed out like dungeons. Starbases having multiple lifts scattered all over the place would be semi-acceptable.

They also took shortcuts with the whole crew thing too, I'm discovering. They aren't crew. They are buffs attached to your character. So my engineering office has a "cool down"....how quaint

Ships with multiple lifts are canon, but where they are in game is very MMO-esque. Would probably be less noticeable if the zones had less loading in them.

Not sure why you call how they did the crew a shortcut. Different crew gives different abilities to your ship, depending on what station they are assigned to. Makes sense to me. On ground each is a separate AI, albeit an incredibly ######ed one. Hope you are putting your thoughts on how things should work into the beta forums.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Kerplunk

Ships with multiple lifts are canon, but where they are in game is very MMO-esque. Would probably be less noticeable if the zones had less loading in them.

No, a turbolift network is canon - I should be able to get back into the lift I stepped out of, and get to any other part of the ship connected to the lift network. I shouldn't have to run to the end of a hall to step into a completely separate entrance as if they are physically discrete elevators joining only two decks each.

Worse, the fact that they have consigned the turbolift to a zoning/level loading point means we won't get to experience that most elemental of Star Trek experiences - getting stuck in a turbolift is practically canon itself, but the game isn't going to have that either, since the inside of a turbolift isn't actually a location, just a boundary.

[Hack&Lube]

Okay the big problem with this is that it feels like a terrible homemade single player game. It's like a game that feels like a homebrewed mod somebody made in their basement.

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

The problem is the MMO part doesn't feel like an MMO. It's just a big empty universe where you spend all your time slowly flying on the damn sector map because it takes 5 minutes to get from one place to the next. All too often, when you get in a sector to do a mission - nobody else is doing the same mission at that time and so I end up doing it alone and then it really is no fun at all. In fact, it's incredibly tiring and boring.

It's the same at the Starbase, there's no interaction between people, everybody is just running around doing their own stuff buying and selling and leaving.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by Kerplunk

Not sure why you call how they did the crew a shortcut. Different crew gives different abilities to your ship, depending on what station they are assigned to. Makes sense to me. On ground each is a separate AI, albeit an incredibly ######ed one. Hope you are putting your thoughts on how things should work into the beta forums.

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. Oh, except that when in space, you aren't really a character in a ship - your character gets skinned as a ship. This is why crew are really just buffs - because they are buffing your character, the ship. You can also see evidence of this when you beam down to a planet, and for the first 10 seconds or so, you're actually a small starship sitting on the ground among humanoids - its because the game didn't re-skin your character quickly enough (a graphical bug that will no doubt get fixed, but one that illustrates the underlying game play mechanic, which is not to separate the concepts of ship and character at all).

[Dan02]

I'll be honest I didn't play for long, but it felt like a single player game that for some reason connects everyone who is playing together. Didn't feel like a MMO at all.