Star Trek: Online

All that's been confirmed (by the Dev Stormshade) is that they plan to start/release the next featured episode set in January 2011. No concrete details regarding it's storyline or possible start location have been announced or leaked as yet.

 

Update:

Dan's back. He hasn't had time to put together his engineering report yet, but he posted the following about this month:

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=3261575#post3261575

Knowing Dan, it might be worthwhile to draw a conclusion from there being 8 underlines, and it might not. Enjoy.

 

Well, just guessing off the top of my head, with 8 spaces, it could be about:

• Bajorans
• Romulans
• Tholians
• Hirogens
• Edosians

My money is on Tholians since they were working on concept artwork for them. Romulans are a close second, and Hirogens a distant third. The other two, who cares???

 

I suppose I have to wait out the month.....

 

Back when Raven was making Elite Force, they actually took the blueprints of the Voyager bridge and made a perfect, precisely-to-scale digital copy of the bridge so that you could walk around in it. It was totally un-navigable. It was absolutely tiny, you basically had to turn off clipping to be able to do anything. So they redesigned it so that it FELT like the bridge, but in reality it was a LOT bigger than the actual bridge the actors worked on.

This seems to be what Perpetual have done, to a larger degree, with the STO environments.

 

And considering how frustrating the movement controls can be, it's just as well.

 

Is this thing free to play yet?

 

lol, no why would it be?

 

Because it's player base is tiny and getting smaller all the time.

 

I'm not disagreeing with you here, I don't know one way or the other, but do you have access to a source on that?

 

Please provide proof of that allegation.

 

Here is a reply on the main site to someone claiming what Bishop claimed.

StormShade
Online Community Rep



Join Date: May 2009

I'm going to close this down. However, while I do so, allow me to simply state that not only are those numbers wrong, they're also very low when compared to fact.

Also, in case you missed DStahl's comment earlier in the week, we saw a pretty nice increase in subscribers over the last month. So, essentially what I'm saying is not only are our numbers good, but we're also growing as well.

Remember to be nice and helpful to all the new players everyone!

Thanks,

Stormshade
_______________

 

First off, no companies release their subscription numbers - they're all based on speculation. But, at launch estimates had them at 1 million subscribers, which was down to 100k after 3 months.

http://hailingfrequency.com/boards/...online-struggles-with-only-100k-subscribers!/

I'm guessing numbers have dropped off further from there.

There are other indicators too. Cryptic's other MMO, Champions online has gone free to play, STO's head developer left (voluntarily?), the price of the game itself is about $2.50 on Amazon, and the fact that for smaller MMOs like STO the free to play model is far more profitable (See again Champions, LotRO, DDO)

Also, I was just curious because it's an okay game but not worth paying subscription fees for.

 

I think you will find some pretty strong disagreement with that.

 

With what part of it?

 

All of it but particularly the "it's not worth 15 bucks a month." I mean really that's less than most people spend on soda's in a month. It's like a fifth of a monthly cable bill. It's less than the cost of a single person going to an hour and a half movie. etc.... Plus the changes they have made over the last few months are extraordinarily.

 

Well, I do find that people disagree with my subjective statements a bit more than my objective. So, what have they done to improve it? My experience with it was that I levelled very quickly to RA5 (I believe they've gone beyond that now) and there was no endgame content other than a few dailies that got real old, real fast. I did try the first "episode" of content, but was just as unimpressed.

It's not an all around failure of a game - the ship combat is pretty tight, but it fails in almost every other regard. The away team missions are abysmal, the quests are uninspired, and even the stories that I have seen were almost embarrassing.

So, again, sell me on it. What has made it a better game?

 

Lets see there are the new sector maps which are beautiful. The weekly missions which really are amazing. The replay missions, several of which have new rewards.. The TOS hand weapons, the massive number of new ships, uniforms etc...
The Diplomacy missions are a nice distraction and the new crafting system is so much better than the old.
Really all of the season 3 stuff is way above and beyond what one normally expects for an MMO in the first year.
Then there is the foundry system which is still in beta but shaping up nicely.

My brother is going nuts over the new Gorn ship and is bouncing off the walls waiting for the new Gorn character customization to hit live.

EDIT and by new sector maps I mean all of the sectors were redone.

 

Sounds like they've done a lot of work. I'm still a bit skeptical. See, I want to like this game - really, I do - it just wasn't a $15/month experience when I played it.

Maybe once I get bored with Cataclysm, I'll swing back in and give it a try for a month if it isn't free to play by then.

 

It's not going to go free to play anytime soon if ever. So you can drop that idea.