Star Trek: Online

I do not see the problem with you starting out with a small ship. You do not start out with the official rank of captain. You are called "Captain" because that is the standard title of anyone in charge of a ship. You will have to advance in rank and skill to command different ships. You do get to choose a particular area other than command like science, medical, engineering, etc... The thing that I find interesting is the bridge crew and the ability to recruit them and train them.

I honestly thought Star Trek Online would never see the light of day but the screenshots that Cryptic Studios have shown look promising and there will be a closed beta in october.

 

Another "new" ship, the Vigilant class. It is a rather uninspired update to the Defiant...

 

Hey, look, its the first original STO ship design which doesn't look like ass.

Though it is basically the Defiant wearing one of those stick-on fake moustaches and a silly hat.

 

Frankly, again I'm disappointed. I know there can be only so many ships in a game of this size, but still: it's possible to use old ship classes but if you're going to create new classes, then go all out! These "new" ships are just very, very contrived.

If you're going to make a ship based on the Defiant, then just make the Defiant. If you're going to make a new class, then show us something that's never been done before. The former is why so many "extra" ships in Trek TV are memorable, but the latter is why the hero ships (E-D, Voyager, Defiant) become stars in their own right. And since Starfleet loves to be so integrated, you can have both types of ships anyway.

To wit, nobody has ever said the Ambassador is just a lazy version of the Excelsior. They share design elements for sure, but not enough so as to be considered its own unique class.

 

So you like the "Where EVERY man has gone before" premise, I see.

 

See, I'm kind of on the fence with this one. I play City of Heroes MMO regularly, and although there are no ranks per se (like Starfleet ranks), the power sets you get as you level up supposedly get more sophisticated and advanced. On the other hand, you don't want to wait several months to reach, say, Level 45 and command your own ship. I can tell you that as a casual CoH gamer, some of my characters took months, if not years, to reach certain levels.

Why can't they design ST:O so that "supergroups" or leagues of on-line players can create their own starbases (similar to CoH) and own or build their ships? I sort of understand BolianChief's reasoning in that it's not logical from a storytelling standpoint (cadets or low-ranking officers don't get their own starships, unless you're a freighter captain, which is outside of Starfleet). Personally, I don't care much for spaceship/aircraft battle games, and I could get easily bored if the highlight of ST:O is about space battles. I don't know much about the upcoming MMO or the scope of which space battle is going to be used. It would be interesting if the designers would consider making "space exploration" a separate component; e.g., it could be an instanced mission or a holodeck program.

 

I would like progression, going off of what WoW leveling and other leveling

1-10 Cadet, you learn about the Federation/Klingon at the academy. At the end, you get posted on a starship. Either a guild or a random starship.

10-30, going from Ensign to Lieutenant Commander, basically you start delving into your specialty. Security, engineering, science (medical is part of science). Each class, security, engineering, and science have two branches and you pick either or branch and expand there.

30-40 Lieutenant Commander - Commander...BAM! You get your own ship to run. A small ship, you can pick from the smaller classes like the Defiant, or an older science vessel like the Miranda or even a freighter. You start building up your own crew (including friends).

40-50 Commander to Captain - Now your starting to get somewhere. Bigger ships to command.

50-60 Captain - Hello Galaxy or whatever the warships for the Klingons are. You also are inline to be fleet captain when emergency calls at 60.

Progression. I got to run but that's just a streamline of what I'm looking at.

 

Mirandas?
No thank you.
I would hope that SF would do away with them (finally), and since this would be in the early 25th century, a Nova class for example sounds like a better option to start in.
Old designs such as the Miranda's or even possibly Exelsiors (but not necessarily) would have likely been done away with by this time frame.
Mid to late 24th century ship designs would work better in this setting in my opion ... with the most recent designs being reserved for high ranking officers.

 

I guess the 23rd Century designs would perhaps be relegated to the players who are high enough ranked for the ship level but haven't got the 'prestige' for getting the more advanced ships, or for the captains who are sentimental towards certain classes, like Riker and the Galaxy-X version of the Ent-D in the future alt. universe in 'All Good Things...'.

I will have to say though that these 'new' Starfleet designs are very dissappointing. Hopefully these are just the 'variants' rather than all new class designs, but I'm not hopeful

 

New video

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/26006

 

Star Trek Online Gamescom Off Screen Footage

Wow! thanks IDIC for posting the 5 minute edited video! I haven't seen any video from this game yet until today.

At 2:09 you see the interior of a ship and it looks cool! atmospheric effects! I think that is Borg.

also the ship explosions in space look pretty good.

At 3:10 you see the freighter ship jump to warp.
at 3:17 you see a ship with a unique weapons that is being retracted.

at 3:51 we see what I think is the Enterprise-D for a while fairly closeup and a nice flyby at 4:21 where you can see the registration # on the dish.
at 4:31 you see this big wide shot with a massive battle with dozens if not over 100 ships.

All of the spaceship shots have orchestral wall-to-wall music so I couldn't hear much sound FX.

 

There are four tiers of ships at present, and a good number of vessels within each, the more powerful ones are in higher tiers. For example Sovereign and Prometheus-class starships are tier four starships. However even lower tier ships can be useful and can even be upgraded to match the next tier up of starships.

On the Federation side you all start at the rank of Lieutenant, and are in either a Miranda or Centaur-class starship, you can obviously alter the looks of it if you want.

According to what someone was saying on the official boards, in the new issue of PC Gamer it's suggested that you may start the game on the Klingon's side in an old D7 Battle Cruiser.

 

that video did not inspire confidence... the player animations need a lot of work. combat looked like every other mmo, except everyone looked the same. the ship battles looked like the more recent star trek games (except the explosion effect was much smaller than the object it originated from).

hopefully they are still a really long ways off from launching...

 

^ Watched the video as well ^

Looked just like another shoot-em-up space game, ho hum....

Where's the exploration that make Trek, well Trek ?

- W -
* Who possibly won't plunk down $ for STO at all *

 

I concur, it's looking very space shootery... though I guess it's hard to show the exploration side of things adequately in a few minute long video that can generate interest, so there may be a saving grace there...they've only got a year to show us the rest of the content available though.

*fingers crossed*

 

I am REALLY looking forward to this game, on par to how I look forward to Final fantasy games. I've been following it's development very closely and it looks amazing - exactly the type of Star Trek game I've always wanted - a universe I can get lost in and explore.

I'm even going to buy a new high end PC laptop dedicated for it, and I usually only stick with Mac's!

I hope it lives up to my expectations!

 

The video was an okay action trailer but I would have liked to see more general stuff, like character interactions, upgrading characters and ships, environment shots, that sort of thing. Hoping they'll come up with a cool trailer along the lines of The Old Republic "deceived" trailer. Nothing in-game but it gets you interested in the universe they are creating in a completely superficial way.

 

Yeah that's a point really, the trailer just showed fighting.... I hope there is going to be a lot of exploration, trade and character interaction etc.

Does anybody know if we get to walk around the inside of our ships? or is our ship just an avatar like our character is on a planet?

 

We've seen images of characters inside the ships previously so maybe; then again when those were shown in the original trailer the ship was being invaded...

 

They have said that at least at launch, you will not be able to freely walk around inside your ship. However, there will be missions which take place inside your ship!

As far as the trailer being action like, I think that is typical when you have a trailer for something. They did have a nice shot of a crew standing in front of the Guardian of Forever. And this new interview talks about some quest types:

http://pc.ign.com/articles/101/1016354p1.html