STO Sucks

[AdmiralBruno]

The original company doing this game had a much better vision.

I actually got bored during the BETA.

I LOVE Star Trek.

I hated this game.

As opposed to Star Wars Galaxies which made me almost captivated when I started playing....

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Uhm, so you haven't played the game for the last 5 years and post this now why? (Never mind that it has changed tremendously during that time)

 

[AdmiralBruno]

changed how?

first time here

 

[Stephen!]

The original company doing this game had a much better vision.

Hard to say whether the original developer's version would have turned out better or not, since it was apparently just concept art and some 3D models.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

changed how?

first time here

Well, the game has expanded a lot.
They have revamped most of the original content to a higher quality,
The Klingon faction has a complete PVE arc, there is a Romulan fashion, it is free to play.
They completed the whole Iconian story.
Most missions have actual voice acting with many of them featuring canon Star Trek characters like Worf, Tasha/Sela, Tuvok, Paris, Seven of Nine, Neelix, Harry Kim, Spock, Nog, Leeta and most likely more in the future.
Lots more ships.

You may still not like it, but at least check out the changes, before coming in here five years later and declare it sucks.

 

[AdmiralBruno]

One of the main issues was the ship and traveling. I want to walk around my ship while it travels... interact with the crew... command from the bridge in first person.

 

[shivadas]

I just started playing the game less than a week ago and haven't learned all of the ins-and-outs, but I am enjoying it.

Regarding walking around the bridge, there is a button you click that will take you there. You can visit almost all areas of your ship; the bridge, captain's quarters, engineering, sick-bay, etc. I did not notice if the ship was actually moving while I was touring the ship or if I stayed in the same spot. I just learned how to minimize/ maximize my ship in third person and have been enjoying that feature.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

That will never happen.
The thing is when you are traveling through space, your character and boffs don't exist like the they do in ground play.
Your ship literally is your character in that moment.
And vice versa, when you are in any ground environment, that includes your ship interior, your ship does not exist anymore.
So no, when you are on your bridge you can not be found, seen or interacted with anywhere else in the game.
So there is nothing to travel anywhere.

Effectively your bridge is the same as sector space. An environment for you character to interact with. You can not be in two places at once.

The only feasible workaround would be a simulated travel.
Go to your con station and click on a destination. The system would than calculate the travel time based on your previous location and your ships maximum speed and start a timer.
When that timer has run down, you get a prompt to instantly transport to that new location.
But even then there would not be a ship flying through sector space for others to see.
And it would require significant programming time for a feature that effectively can not be monetized or even has influence on the larger meta game. So is possible but highly unlikely.

 

[mos6507]

The engine is modified from Champions Online. It was never designed to deliver a Star Trek style game. Unfortunately, the way MMOs work, they have so much invested in the thing just to launch it that they stick with it for upwards of a decade. All of the enhancements to the game are really lipstick on a pig. They can't solve the underlying limitations of the engine. It's a far cry from the kind of seamless and immersive Trek universe experience that should be possible in 2015. The best thing for STO would be to just kill it off and start over again.

 

[Scout101]

seems a tad...drastic. Admittedly it's very war/fighting based, but kinda an inherent problem in a MMO, if you aren't fighting something, not going to draw a big crowd just walking around talking through things. There are plenty of those sorts of missions, and a million more in the foundry, but the main basis of the game is ship or ground fighting.

Do you really want to spend most of your time sitting in the chair watching stars fly by? Just do that, and transwarp to your destination when you're done. Not really a killer. think you'll find pretty quickly that there's not a ton to DO on the ship, though...

 

[AdmiralBruno]

The thing is.... I want to feel that I am in the ST universe. I want to have that seamless experience..... and maybe the game is better now than it was, but when I played it during beta I was so not interested at all.

Juxtapose that to Earth & Beyond and Star Wars Galaxies which I was addicted to.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The thing is.... I want to feel that I am in the ST universe. I want to have that seamless experience..... and maybe the game is better now than it was, but when I played it during beta I was so not interested at all.

Juxtapose that to Earth & Beyond and Star Wars Galaxies which I was addicted to.

As I said, the gameplay might not be for you,but that doesn't warrant a generalized judgement. judge it for what it is, not for what you want it to be.

i hear Star Citizen will have a kind of gameplay similar to what you are looking for.
Large ships crewed by lots of plyers and you can work your way up through the ranks interacting them and commanding large capital ships from the bridge... or something like that.
it is not Star Trek, though

 

[AdmiralBruno]

Star Citizen right now is basically a pretty chat room, a 3D arcade game, and a hangar you can walk around.

That's about it.

I've lost a lot of respect for Chris Roberts over the past few years.

 

[MantaBase]

The problem is multi-fold.

Making a ST game that has many of the characteristics that folks want would require most game developers to step out of their paradigm. With some exceptions, they have shown over and over that even in the face of market data from their own professional association they will not drop the paradigm.

Developing games is very expensive and only a few of the large games make the publisher money. Thus companies are risk averse. On the one hand they know that certain targets are potential windfall money makers. On the other hand, it's unproven territory that requires a much different approach and would increase the costs. The smaller more certain targets are safer - so they will always include them even at the detriment of the game.

So, you get STO - a decent MMO space game with familiar characters and ships - but not really ST in nature other than in look (just IMO).

 

[Captain_Amasov]

The original company doing this game had a much better vision.

Hard to say whether the original developer's version would have turned out better or not, since it was apparently just concept art and some 3D models.

According to one of the guys working on it, not a lot would have been different; other than Cryptic's space combat actually being better than what PE were trying to figure out:

http://www.eldergame.com/2010/03/sto-hey-not-too-shabby/

Other blog posts about STO:

http://www.eldergame.com/2007/12/star-trek-the-hardest-mmo-ip-ever/

http://www.eldergame.com/2008/01/advice-for-cryptics-star-trek-team/

http://www.eldergame.com/2008/01/pouring-explosives-on-the-sto-fire/

http://www.eldergame.com/2008/01/sto-and-the-niche-game-approach/

 

[AdmiralBruno]

I spoke to a guy who was on PE's dev team. He told me privately that they knew they were putting out an unsuitable game.

 

[Scout101]

and maybe the game is better now than it was, but when I played it during beta I was so not interested at all.

Gonna ask same question that was already asked though: how is your experience from early 2010 relevant in late 2015? Stop telling us the beta sucked; try it now if you want to have that discussion. Otherwise, you're just telling stories about a game you played more than 5 years ago, and ignoring anyone that tells you the game has drastically changed since...

 

[Haggis and tatties]

The original company doing this game had a much better vision.

I actually got bored during the BETA.

I LOVE Star Trek.

I hated this game.

As opposed to Star Wars Galaxies which made me almost captivated when I started playing....

If you have not played it since the beta then i would give it a go again, they have added a lot of stuff, fixed a lot of things, and it is now free to play, so go download it and give it a go again, won't cost you anything but some free time, you might like it and what they have added to it, hell i am a life time sub from the beta and yes, it did need a lot of work at launch, and yes the transition from Atari to the present owners was a nightmare for us Trek fans and for the game, but i think you will find you actully quite enjoy it, i guarantee you will find more stuff to do than you can take in, when you fire it up again.

Oh and there is a cracking Trekbbs STO clan if you are looking for help and some fun runs.

So why not give it another go, remember, Risk, risk is our business.

 

[mos6507]

and maybe the game is better now than it was, but when I played it during beta I was so not interested at all.

Gonna ask same question that was already asked though: how is your experience from early 2010 relevant in late 2015? Stop telling us the beta sucked; try it now if you want to have that discussion. Otherwise, you're just telling stories about a game you played more than 5 years ago, and ignoring anyone that tells you the game has drastically changed since...

It's not that different from how it was at launch.

There are still way too many load-screens for instance. You can't just fly your ship straight into earth-space-dock. The load-screens popping up and reminding you that you are playing a game. It's like playing an old CD-based game it's so chock full of load-screens.

And there is so much instancing and repetition it really doesn't feel like an MMO. It feels like a multi-player game with some hardcoded missions that repeat over and over again.

The ship models are also looking increasingly crude as they haven't gone back to increase the detail of any of them. And they aren't fully functional. You can't fly a shuttle in and out of the shuttlebays, for instance. The shuttles aren't even in their proper scale.

It's just plain outdated.

 

[DeMilburn]

Anyone else think that No Mans Sky would have been an amazing Star Trek game. Just a quick point i wanted to make lol

THAT would be the online Star Trek game I would like to see. Although I did enjoy playing STO my laptop cant really cope with the graphics. If they released it on console like DC Universe I would be all over it and probably never off it lol!