Last night I found a bug where the Warp to Sector option after a completed mission didnt work and I literally had to Impulse Power to victory.
I’m in the same boat as you Lum. I’ve seen this rodeo before but I preordered the collector’s edition like a battered wife bailing her redneck husband out of jail. He’s learned his lesson this time, things will be different. You’ll see!
I don’t mind being in the Miranda for as long as STO leaves you there. It’s not exactly the same as being stuck at levels 1-10 in WoW for that length of time with only a handful of abilities. The tier 1 ship has the full set of functions and complexity to cope with and learn to make use of.
Server performance, though – that’s what WILL kill this game at birth if Cryptic don’t have their hardware ready in time. Login failures, disconnects and the wonderful “captain in space/ship on the ground” bug (blamed on latency issues) will make a piss poor first impression on launch day.
I can’t imagine this flying far. I think the more robust and stringent the IP is the faster the MMO fails. You literally CAN’T hire talent to write for the game that fans aren’t going to tear apart on message boards like an arm in a wood chipper.
Poor Scott. He doesn’t realize this is based off the continuum created by the last Star Trek movie. So none of his previous fanboy rules apply. JJ Abrams has your number.
This is my favorite thing you’ve written. Who knew you had a Star Trek fan hidden deep down in that grumpy exterior! Nice post on mmorpg.com (can’t find my login information for there).
I have been underwhelmed with the beta. I’d like to see more Trekkie drama than pistols and phasers. Maybe Picard negotiating with Q for the last ounce of earl gray left in the universe – and they have to foil fence for it. I’m a life long fan too.
Boanerges :Poor Scott. He doesn’t realize this is based off the continuum created by the last Star Trek movie. So none of his previous fanboy rules apply. JJ Abrams has your number.
Actually it isn’t. STO is set in the ‘original’ Trek universe – the one Spock and Nero left behind. It is, and shall remain, un-JJified
Oh man, spot on article. I get the same questions a lot from my friends about why I am playing STO.
Now I just link what you wrote!
The space combat is pretty awesome, and away team missions remind me of the TV combat which was so bad it was hilarious.
It’s pretty funny how often doing missions makes me think:
‘Hey, that reminds me of episode ‘
It’s true the game isn’t perfect, and doesn’t shatter any MMO genre glass ceilings. But it’s definitely not lowering the bar under any other past MMO’s.
As you said, we’ve all done this song and dance before.
Surely we can put up with it again just to pilot our own starships haha.
Like everyone else, I can see the flaws in the game, but I can’t care about them due to the whirling all-consuming maelstrom of nostalgia that surrounds the whole thing.
It’s like this plastic toy Enterprise I had as a kid. It had buttons on it that made various authentic sound effects. My parents got it for me from a garage sale, and the warp nacelles had long ago fallen off – but damn if I didn’t run around the room hitting the photon torpedo button for hours anyway. Who cares if part of it is broken? It’s my very own Enterprise!
STO is pretty much the same way. Who cares if it’s buggy? I have my own starship! IT MAKES THE PHOTON NOISE. YES!
I too am willing to sub (on a monthly basis) despite the flaws evident in the “beta”. I love the license, and that matters to me — an IP I can immerse myself in.
Sure, the space combat is Starfleet Command – Lite; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
Sure, the ground combat is basically Champions Online with Star Trek sounds; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
Sure, the general gameplay is a mishmash of MMO mechanics borrowed from other games; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
What I don’t get is how inflamed some people on these here Interwebs get about why I’m willing to buy the game. Apparently, even if I enjoy it, I’m encouraging the decline of the game industry as a whole by encouraging developers to… er… put out games that I like?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I refuse to feel Internet-fueled guilt over enjoying something other people do not.
Let me be a ray of sunshine in the darkness of negativity, especially from the MMORPG.com forums. I’ve been playing beta and have been following the game for awhile. Also huge Trek fan. I can say that the players are not ripping Cryptic apart over the little stuff of the lore. In fact the game is filled with the little bits of lore Trekkies love. Missions have lots of references, some pretty obscure, from episodes and films of the various series.
One thing people seem to forget about MMOs is that they grow and improve over time. So maybe it will launch a little sooner than optimal, but Cryptic has 20 million reasons to release it when they will, that’s the bonus they’re getting from Atari for fulfilling the release window. That, and the lifetime subscriptions (I have one) will get them over the hump while they add content for Klingons and improve the weaker areas.
And improve it will. Don’t like the game at launch? 6 months or a year will probably make the game one that could shut up all but the most bitter critics. But I find that getting in on the beginning usually comes with some benefits as well as hassles over bugs at launch. We’ll take advantage of everything the devs nerf or change before they do it. And of course, by pre-ordering, I’m getting all the geek thrills of flying the original Enterprise, playing a joined Trill, and putting my crew in the TOS uniforms.
For some reason, game forums have a ferocity of argument only matched by the extremely low stakes of such arguments. Oh no! The game has bugs! That’s obviously more important than Haiti or anything in the real world, given the degree of shrillness.
Lastly, people are writing this game’s epitaph already. I wish we could actually call them on this after they’re proven very, very wrong. But forum threads are forgotten soon enough. Star Trek has a huge draw to the IP, attracting both MMO players and Star Trek fans. Since SW:TOR wont be out until 2011 it also gives STO a big window to get in on the sci-fi fan market.
I predict several hundred thousand subscribers or more at launch, and they will keep a lot of them, plenty enough to keep the game up for the long haul. They have the opportunity to make several expansions of the game too since there is so much lore in the IP that it can always be mined for more.
Oh, yeah, glad to see you write about STO, Scott. I’ve been reading your stuff since Lum the Mad, and had wondered why this game had escaped your eye until now. Glad to know you’re in the ST geek fraternity too. For a game in open beta, I’ve yet to hear about it from several sites I’d expected to by now.
When space combat is not based from the bridge, that is not “little stuff of the lore”. That is one of the fundamental Star Trek concepts.
I get that it is easier to do it from the outside of the ship, I really do, but for this gamer what was a possible buy is now something that I will never buy, simply because the bridge is where it is at in Star Trek.
Perhaps something like you want will come in the future. I can think of ways to “watch” the same game interface from the viewscreen, but it probably would be inferior to the current system in actual combat. But if I can imagine it, and a large number of people want it, I think they will implement some form of bridge combat in the future. Will it be Bridge Commander? Probably not, but BC wasn’t the best game, even the best Star Trek game around. Still I’ve seen countless references and instances of the shows and films during beta.
But the truth is for myself, and I suspect other gamers as well, games like these have a window. Once that window of time closes the likelihood of ever playing that games.
Right now I am kind of busy with the whole Fall of the Lich King thing, but once we down Arthas I am up to trying new things. As it stands STO won’t be one of them, I’ll probably just end up playing ME2 and Dragon Age DLC.
Had they actually taken the time to develop a solid combat system based around the bridge, maybe. But not too far on the horizon lies a Cataclysm and an Old Republic. I don’t think post patches fixes of STO will be something I am even thinking about by then.
Who knows, maybe someday Bioware will get the ST license. But if I had to guess I think Bioware is using SWTOR as a guinea pig/advertisement, and the real end game is not another license but a Mass Effect or Dragon Age MMO.
One thing people seem to forget about MMOs is that they grow and improve over time. So maybe it will launch a little sooner than optimal, but Cryptic has 20 million reasons to release it when they will, that’s the bonus they’re getting from Atari for fulfilling the release window. That, and the lifetime subscriptions (I have one) will get them over the hump while they add content for Klingons and improve the weaker areas.
That’s true… and it was the same reason I shelled out for a 6 month Champions Online subscription…
… and regretted it. Although MMORPGs in general improve, and City of Heroes improved incredibly, it seems Cryptic Studios was either unable to put a lot of improvement into Champions Online since release or unwilling (perhaps because a lot of their firepower was focused on the far larger Star Trek Online).
It made me very, very cautious about considering purchasing this and, indeed, question the very merit of paying $15/mo to a MMORPG to begin with when (a) they’re generally built in such a way these days you can get a comparable experience from a single player game (b) they’re hesistant to really improve them where they need to be improved and (c) there’s plenty of F2P alternatives around these days…
So at this point, I’m thinking I’m either not going to buy the game at all or I’m going to get a lifetime subscription. Such a big gap owed to not believing in monthly subscriptions anymore. Very heavily leaning on the former option over the later in that I really doubt I could get the 16 months worth of play out of this that $240 works out to.
I went lifetime because a) I played Guild Wars for more than 4 years, I expect to play Star Trek Online a long time too, b) I don’t like monthly payments either, now I’ll never have one for STO, and c)If I want to take a break for Starcraft 2, Guild Wars 2, and/or SW:TOR next year, I wont feel badly about paying for a game I’m not currently playing. I expect the game will still be there when I come back, as I wrote above.
I do expect lots of things to change and hopefully improve over the next year, I can play it then if I get bored with it now. But I’ve not been bored by beta, I’m ready to do it for real and not for practice in beta already.
I can look at Lum’s article to MMORPG.com which basically boils down to, “it’s Star Trek Online and I’m a trekkie. Sold.” I can respect that.
However, as more or less a gamer purist, I can look at Star Trek Online and notice that the game probably won’t have much of an end game. City of Heroes didn’t. Champions Online doesn’t.
I’m anticipating that, if I had a lifetime subscription, as soon as I hit level maximum I’m pretty much tooling around in my uber-high-level ship, out of missions to do, and a very poor infrastructure for roleplay based on the way they decided to build the thing as a heavily instanced fusion of Fleet Battles and Away Team.
The third mind I have about this enters the picture when I ask myself, “what MMORPG has an end game other than grinding for meaningless gear, anyway?”
about 7 months ago
“Maybe if I shout “Computer!!” at my mouse?”
Well done.
about 7 months ago
Classic LTM, good stuff.
about 7 months ago
Last night I found a bug where the Warp to Sector option after a completed mission didnt work and I literally had to Impulse Power to victory.
I’m in the same boat as you Lum. I’ve seen this rodeo before but I preordered the collector’s edition like a battered wife bailing her redneck husband out of jail. He’s learned his lesson this time, things will be different. You’ll see!
about 7 months ago
You forgot the grind. The wonderful, stuck in the same damn ship for far too long grind.
about 7 months ago
I don’t mind being in the Miranda for as long as STO leaves you there. It’s not exactly the same as being stuck at levels 1-10 in WoW for that length of time with only a handful of abilities. The tier 1 ship has the full set of functions and complexity to cope with and learn to make use of.
Server performance, though – that’s what WILL kill this game at birth if Cryptic don’t have their hardware ready in time. Login failures, disconnects and the wonderful “captain in space/ship on the ground” bug (blamed on latency issues) will make a piss poor first impression on launch day.
about 7 months ago
I can’t imagine this flying far. I think the more robust and stringent the IP is the faster the MMO fails. You literally CAN’T hire talent to write for the game that fans aren’t going to tear apart on message boards like an arm in a wood chipper.
about 7 months ago
Poor Scott. He doesn’t realize this is based off the continuum created by the last Star Trek movie. So none of his previous fanboy rules apply. JJ Abrams has your number.
about 7 months ago
This is my favorite thing you’ve written. Who knew you had a Star Trek fan hidden deep down in that grumpy exterior! Nice post on mmorpg.com (can’t find my login information for there).
about 7 months ago
I have been underwhelmed with the beta. I’d like to see more Trekkie drama than pistols and phasers. Maybe Picard negotiating with Q for the last ounce of earl gray left in the universe – and they have to foil fence for it. I’m a life long fan too.
about 7 months ago
Actually it isn’t. STO is set in the ‘original’ Trek universe – the one Spock and Nero left behind. It is, and shall remain, un-JJified
about 7 months ago
The minute I realized that they weren’t doing space combat from the perspective of the bridge I wrote this game off as fail.
This is going to be the SWG of the Start Trek IP, though that probably isn’t entirely fair to Galaxies.
about 7 months ago
Oh man, spot on article. I get the same questions a lot from my friends about why I am playing STO.
Now I just link what you wrote!
The space combat is pretty awesome, and away team missions remind me of the TV combat which was so bad it was hilarious.
It’s pretty funny how often doing missions makes me think:
‘Hey, that reminds me of episode ‘
It’s true the game isn’t perfect, and doesn’t shatter any MMO genre glass ceilings. But it’s definitely not lowering the bar under any other past MMO’s.
As you said, we’ve all done this song and dance before.
Surely we can put up with it again just to pilot our own starships haha.
about 7 months ago
Like everyone else, I can see the flaws in the game, but I can’t care about them due to the whirling all-consuming maelstrom of nostalgia that surrounds the whole thing.
It’s like this plastic toy Enterprise I had as a kid. It had buttons on it that made various authentic sound effects. My parents got it for me from a garage sale, and the warp nacelles had long ago fallen off – but damn if I didn’t run around the room hitting the photon torpedo button for hours anyway. Who cares if part of it is broken? It’s my very own Enterprise!
STO is pretty much the same way. Who cares if it’s buggy? I have my own starship! IT MAKES THE PHOTON NOISE. YES!
about 7 months ago
I too am willing to sub (on a monthly basis) despite the flaws evident in the “beta”. I love the license, and that matters to me — an IP I can immerse myself in.
Sure, the space combat is Starfleet Command – Lite; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
Sure, the ground combat is basically Champions Online with Star Trek sounds; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
Sure, the general gameplay is a mishmash of MMO mechanics borrowed from other games; it’s fun for me, and when it stops being fun I’ll stop playing.
What I don’t get is how inflamed some people on these here Interwebs get about why I’m willing to buy the game. Apparently, even if I enjoy it, I’m encouraging the decline of the game industry as a whole by encouraging developers to… er… put out games that I like?
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I refuse to feel Internet-fueled guilt over enjoying something other people do not.
Oh, and great article.
about 7 months ago
Let me be a ray of sunshine in the darkness of negativity, especially from the MMORPG.com forums. I’ve been playing beta and have been following the game for awhile. Also huge Trek fan. I can say that the players are not ripping Cryptic apart over the little stuff of the lore. In fact the game is filled with the little bits of lore Trekkies love. Missions have lots of references, some pretty obscure, from episodes and films of the various series.
One thing people seem to forget about MMOs is that they grow and improve over time. So maybe it will launch a little sooner than optimal, but Cryptic has 20 million reasons to release it when they will, that’s the bonus they’re getting from Atari for fulfilling the release window. That, and the lifetime subscriptions (I have one) will get them over the hump while they add content for Klingons and improve the weaker areas.
And improve it will. Don’t like the game at launch? 6 months or a year will probably make the game one that could shut up all but the most bitter critics. But I find that getting in on the beginning usually comes with some benefits as well as hassles over bugs at launch. We’ll take advantage of everything the devs nerf or change before they do it. And of course, by pre-ordering, I’m getting all the geek thrills of flying the original Enterprise, playing a joined Trill, and putting my crew in the TOS uniforms.
For some reason, game forums have a ferocity of argument only matched by the extremely low stakes of such arguments. Oh no! The game has bugs! That’s obviously more important than Haiti or anything in the real world, given the degree of shrillness.
Lastly, people are writing this game’s epitaph already. I wish we could actually call them on this after they’re proven very, very wrong. But forum threads are forgotten soon enough. Star Trek has a huge draw to the IP, attracting both MMO players and Star Trek fans. Since SW:TOR wont be out until 2011 it also gives STO a big window to get in on the sci-fi fan market.
I predict several hundred thousand subscribers or more at launch, and they will keep a lot of them, plenty enough to keep the game up for the long haul. They have the opportunity to make several expansions of the game too since there is so much lore in the IP that it can always be mined for more.
I guess some people will gripe at anything.
about 7 months ago
Oh, yeah, glad to see you write about STO, Scott. I’ve been reading your stuff since Lum the Mad, and had wondered why this game had escaped your eye until now. Glad to know you’re in the ST geek fraternity too. For a game in open beta, I’ve yet to hear about it from several sites I’d expected to by now.
about 7 months ago
I’d be curious what your thoughts about the last patch are, Lum
Especially the implementation of a skill cap with the current way skillpoints are spent and the layout of the skilltrees.
about 7 months ago
@ Ecletic
When space combat is not based from the bridge, that is not “little stuff of the lore”. That is one of the fundamental Star Trek concepts.
I get that it is easier to do it from the outside of the ship, I really do, but for this gamer what was a possible buy is now something that I will never buy, simply because the bridge is where it is at in Star Trek.
about 7 months ago
Perhaps something like you want will come in the future. I can think of ways to “watch” the same game interface from the viewscreen, but it probably would be inferior to the current system in actual combat. But if I can imagine it, and a large number of people want it, I think they will implement some form of bridge combat in the future. Will it be Bridge Commander? Probably not, but BC wasn’t the best game, even the best Star Trek game around. Still I’ve seen countless references and instances of the shows and films during beta.
So never say never.
about 7 months ago
I love you for your hate Scott.
And yha, if i had time i’d play sto because, damnit, it’s trek!
about 7 months ago
I agree, never say never.
But the truth is for myself, and I suspect other gamers as well, games like these have a window. Once that window of time closes the likelihood of ever playing that games.
Right now I am kind of busy with the whole Fall of the Lich King thing, but once we down Arthas I am up to trying new things. As it stands STO won’t be one of them, I’ll probably just end up playing ME2 and Dragon Age DLC.
Had they actually taken the time to develop a solid combat system based around the bridge, maybe. But not too far on the horizon lies a Cataclysm and an Old Republic. I don’t think post patches fixes of STO will be something I am even thinking about by then.
Who knows, maybe someday Bioware will get the ST license. But if I had to guess I think Bioware is using SWTOR as a guinea pig/advertisement, and the real end game is not another license but a Mass Effect or Dragon Age MMO.
about 7 months ago
That’s true… and it was the same reason I shelled out for a 6 month Champions Online subscription…
… and regretted it. Although MMORPGs in general improve, and City of Heroes improved incredibly, it seems Cryptic Studios was either unable to put a lot of improvement into Champions Online since release or unwilling (perhaps because a lot of their firepower was focused on the far larger Star Trek Online).
It made me very, very cautious about considering purchasing this and, indeed, question the very merit of paying $15/mo to a MMORPG to begin with when (a) they’re generally built in such a way these days you can get a comparable experience from a single player game (b) they’re hesistant to really improve them where they need to be improved and (c) there’s plenty of F2P alternatives around these days…
So at this point, I’m thinking I’m either not going to buy the game at all or I’m going to get a lifetime subscription. Such a big gap owed to not believing in monthly subscriptions anymore. Very heavily leaning on the former option over the later in that I really doubt I could get the 16 months worth of play out of this that $240 works out to.
about 7 months ago
I went lifetime because a) I played Guild Wars for more than 4 years, I expect to play Star Trek Online a long time too, b) I don’t like monthly payments either, now I’ll never have one for STO, and c)If I want to take a break for Starcraft 2, Guild Wars 2, and/or SW:TOR next year, I wont feel badly about paying for a game I’m not currently playing. I expect the game will still be there when I come back, as I wrote above.
I do expect lots of things to change and hopefully improve over the next year, I can play it then if I get bored with it now. But I’ve not been bored by beta, I’m ready to do it for real and not for practice in beta already.
about 7 months ago
I’m of at least three minds about that, really.
I can look at Lum’s article to MMORPG.com which basically boils down to, “it’s Star Trek Online and I’m a trekkie. Sold.” I can respect that.
However, as more or less a gamer purist, I can look at Star Trek Online and notice that the game probably won’t have much of an end game. City of Heroes didn’t. Champions Online doesn’t.
I’m anticipating that, if I had a lifetime subscription, as soon as I hit level maximum I’m pretty much tooling around in my uber-high-level ship, out of missions to do, and a very poor infrastructure for roleplay based on the way they decided to build the thing as a heavily instanced fusion of Fleet Battles and Away Team.
The third mind I have about this enters the picture when I ask myself, “what MMORPG has an end game other than grinding for meaningless gear, anyway?”
about 7 months ago
And the “no playing MMOs for reasons that ought to be considered legitimate by professionals” category fits, too.
about 7 months ago
Also, http://www.thyla.com/fan-art.html
about 7 months ago
Oh yes. Lifetime sub is mine. I’m hoping a lot of age 45+ players like myself will be playing this one.
about 7 months ago
Well, I’ve shelled out for a Lifetime subscription just now.
Was it because I’ve enough geek in me to have a thing for Star Trek? No, but I’m sure that helped.
Was it because the gameplay is fairly tolerable – a rarity for an MMORPG? No, but this, too, probably helped.
Was it because I have great and unwavering faith in Cryptic Studios? No, after Champions Online, Cryptic Studios /cons dubious to me.
Was it because I believed I would honestly get 16 months of play out of this? No, that would really surprise me.
Honestly, it was mostly because I was curios about what owning a lifetime subscription to a major MMORPG would be like.