Star Trek Online - "Boldly going where Everyone has gone before"

[Venkman]

Try and convince a newbie/startup developer with dreams of cash and the huge company they landed a big IP from that WoW is a bad game.

[schild]

Try to convince a newbie/startup developer that making games is hard.

[Stephen Zepp]

Try to convince a newbie/startup developer that making games is hard.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner--and the VC's are even harder to convince--therefore more willing to listen to crazy proposals and fund them.

[CharlieMopps]

I think that the 2 competing problems lately have been "Scope Creep" and "The bottom line"

Vanguard of course being the best example. They want to be soooo innovative... but they stick in all the innovation before they have a decent game. Then they run out of money before the basics are done.

I never understood why in Vanguards beta we were doing diplomacy quests, placing housing and beta testing boats... while at the same time I couldn't even get past character select half the time... and when I did I would appear 2 miles above the ground and fall to my death. STOP the dude working on diplomacy and have him help the dude working on the login problem go over his code for gods sakes.

Of course I'm going way off topic... sorry. On topic: This mmo will suck. lol

[Venkman]

Try to convince a newbie/startup developer that making games is hard.

Ding ding ding, we have a winner--and the VC's are even harder to convince--therefore more willing to listen to crazy proposals and fund them.

But is Perpetual being funded by VC or Paramount? If the former, I can see that. But if the latter, I cannot imagine they'd be open to very risky things, hence the state of what is being promised in STO (the reason for this thread :) ). There was a bunch of radical thinking Perpetual seemed to be throwing around, but something is compelling them back to what they can realistically pull off in an age of not-infinite cash and not-infinite time.

[Musashi]

I can't really imagine a scenario that would create the right conditions for this game to be a success.  I don't know if game play really matters for the people who want this game.  They just want to run around declaring allegiance to Starfleet, and more power to 'em.  But I also can't imagine that the overlap of those kinds of fans with people who are MMO players is very high.  100k?  Less?  In order for the right kind of word of mouth that would attract more demographics, they'd have to have a game that was dramatically appealing to MMO fans, and it appears they won't.  They spent how long in 'pre-production?'  This is what they came up with?  WoW in space?  Well, maybe by the time this game comes out in 2025 we won't need to pretend to fly around in spaceships anymore.

[Margalis]

Star Trek Online is the kind of game Raph should make. Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is not action-centric. I can see a lot of social elements, living on the same ship, negotiating trade agreements and things like that.

It sounds like STO, the way it is being produced, would be much better off as an MMO X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter.

[CharlieMopps]

I can't really imagine a scenario that would create the right conditions for this game to be a success.  I don't know if game play really matters for the people who want this game.  They just want to run around declaring allegiance to Starfleet, and more power to 'em.  But I also can't imagine that the overlap of those kinds of fans with people who are MMO players is very high.  100k?  Less?  In order for the right kind of word of mouth that would attract more demographics, they'd have to have a game that was dramatically appealing to MMO fans, and it appears they won't.  They spent how long in 'pre-production?'  This is what they came up with?  WoW in space?  Well, maybe by the time this game comes out in 2025 we won't need to pretend to fly around in spaceships anymore.

Yes, but being a treky myself, I think it's important to point out that nearly every Star Trek game every made has sucked. And I don't think any of them sold very well. Especially when compared with the size of the franchise.

[jlwilli5]

  earth and beyond ?

[Modern Angel]

Star Trek Online is the kind of game Raph should make. Unlike Star Wars, Star Trek is not action-centric. I can see a lot of social elements, living on the same ship, negotiating trade agreements and things like that.

It sounds like STO, the way it is being produced, would be much better off as an MMO X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter.

Yes. YES. I'm not a rabid fan of Trek but I followed TNG when I was a kid pretty closely. It just strikes me that out of just about any license you could pick up for a social/explorer/crafter game Trek is the one to do. This is just stupid.

[Margalis]

If you rank what Trek is about, especially TNG, you would probably put exploring first, socializing second and combat third. (By socializing I include solving moral dilemmas and the like) Whereas in Star Wars any "trade disagreement" inanity is just a plot device to introduce more pew pew action.

Crafting is a bit tricky given how stuff is replicated but you could always roll crafting into engineering and schematic design and the like. (Which is what SWG did...)

In Trek I can imagine jobs like "barmaid" and "negotiator" and "cook" and "doctor" without considering them complete fabrications by the developer. Hell DS9 had about 3 or 4 characters in the casino business.

I would really worry about a combat-centric ship-bound Trek game, considering that ships have exactly TWO types of weapons. (Phasers and photon torpedos) That's a recipie for excitment right there.

[Baldrake]

One of my favourite board games as a kid was Star Fleet Battles. There was plenty of depth in the combat when you included things like speed vs armour trade-off* and Romulan cloaking. Hits were directional, so it mattered where on your ship you had your shields. Half the fun was designing new ships and trying them out in combat.


* Yes, I know, physics ftw...

[naum]

http://www.cactus.org/~nystrom/startrek.html

[Trippy]

I used to play that game for hours as a wee little lad.

[Venkman]

Isn't "Wee little" a redundancy?

;)

I completely agree with Margalis on the Trek stuff. These are great insights, particularly on the combat side. That's always been Trek's sorta-weak portion, except maybe Dominion-era DS9. There's just too much tech for them to so ignore how it could be used in four dimensional battles (they're so scared to use time-enhanced weapons when they so easily could). And ground combat? Please. You've either got unintuitive "which way is this pointing?" phasers, or the First Contact era Buck Rogers props. It's never been the point of the show to be all guns and war, which I suppose is why they're so inconsistent at it. But it doesn't make it easy for Perpetual either. Here you've got an IP where you literally do hit auto attack and watch.

Target their engines
Aye aye captain
Ready Room meeting
Sir, should we try hailing them again
There is only a 0.062 chance they'll respond sir
Captain, we just lost the forward shield to their 411th shot
Number One, move the civilians out of 10 Forward
...
<ten minutes and a commercial break later>
Sir, we're getting a response to our surrender
Good, now we can save that cat from the hole on Daikatania IV.

[Nebu]

I played that game on teletype before monitors were commonplace.  Sadly, I think that is as good as Star Trek games are likely to ever get.

[Modern Angel]

Isn't "Wee little" a redundancy?

;)

I completely agree with Margalis on the Trek stuff. These are great insights, particularly on the combat side. That's always been Trek's sorta-weak portion, except maybe Dominion-era DS9. There's just too much tech for them to so ignore how it could be used in four dimensional battles (they're so scared to use time-enhanced weapons when they so easily could). And ground combat? Please. You've either got unintuitive "which way is this pointing?" phasers, or the First Contact era Buck Rogers props. It's never been the point of the show to be all guns and war, which I suppose is why they're so inconsistent at it. But it doesn't make it easy for Perpetual either. Here you've got an IP where you literally do hit auto attack and watch.

Target their engines
Aye aye captain
Ready Room meeting
Sir, should we try hailing them again
There is only a 0.062 chance they'll respond sir
Captain, we just lost the forward shield to their 411th shot
Number One, move the civilians out of 10 Forward
...
<ten minutes and a commercial break later>
Sir, we're getting a response to our surrender
Good, now we can save that cat from the hole on Daikatania IV.

And with all of that the only pvp is duel based as opposed to fleet combat which is where it's actually interesting in Trek.

[Soln]

We used to play Netrek on the HP machines at school and that was cool beans way back when in 1995.  Still great PvP I bet.  Over the Interweb no less.

[Dren]

Nerf the Q race.  Take away that damn "I Win" button of theirs.

[Mrbloodworth]

Nerf the Q race.  Take away that damn "I Win" button of theirs.

This may be the only time this statement was ever true (the "I win button").

[Venkman]

That's why I promote the use of time-based weapons. Even the Q have problems with the multiverse :)

[WindupAtheist]

Nerdy question.  If time-travel is as easy as it appears to be in Trek, how does the universe ever make any sense at all?

Spock:  We need to go back in time and get some humpback whales.
Kirk:  Okey dokey.  Hey Sulu, swing us around the sun a couple of times.
Sulu:  You got it.  Also, I love penis.
*FWARK*
Kirk:  All right, it's the 1980s, let wacky adventures commence.

So why isn't every shmuck with a spaceship flying a couple laps around the sun and screwing up the space-time continuum?

[Daeven]

Make. Something. Different.

Remember that episode where Kirk, Bones, Spock, Sulu, and Scotty, flew their pack of ships to lower Neutral Zone, and camped some Romulans? Scotty forgot to repair, so the group broke up early. One of my favorites.

You know, it would be amazing if someone revisited the Online Persistent Universe promised in Star Fleet Command 2 but never quite accomplished. I'd pay for that. Me and my Gorn MCC. For a plot line model 'Operation Unity'. I want to blow up alien ships. I want 'quests' that make sense via Federation and Empire in a strategic sense. I want my crew to gain experience.

I don't want EverSpaceWowQuest.

Fuckers.

[WayAbvPar]

Give me a cross between Traveller, Omnitrends Universe (complete with duping bug ftw!), and Elite. Maybe mix in some squad based loving ala X-Com. No. GODDAMNED. LEVELS.

[Daeven]

Give me a cross between Traveller, Omnitrends Universe (complete with duping bug ftw!), and Elite. Maybe mix in some squad based loving ala X-Com. No. GODDAMNED. LEVELS.

I'd pay for that too.

[Fordel]

Wait, what does purple represent? Seething rage?

[Teleku]

Gayness last time I checked.

[pants]

Dunno why everyone is surprised by this - Star Trek has a long, distinguished history of being licenced into crappy games.  As one game reviewer said in a magazine I seem to remember reading about 10 years ago 'Its another turd in a box with Star Trek written on it.  Of course, having Star Trek written on it means it will sell like hotcakes.'  The only interesting bit will be to see if the sell-like-hotcakes paradigm still works.

[Fordel]

Gayness, so noted!

[Venkman]

Nerdy question.  If time-travel is as easy as it appears to be in Trek, how does the universe ever make any sense at all?

So why isn't every shmuck with a spaceship flying a couple laps around the sun and screwing up the space-time continuum?

Ask a nerdy question, get a made-up because-it's-half-from-books-Paramount-barely-endorse-much-less-care-about answer:

Timelines. TOS was very linear, Back to the Future / Timecop -style timeline where time is a single sequence of events. TNG and in some ways Voyager explored a bit the concept of multiple timelines, even more so in the books, the idea that there are many concurrent realities "traveling" at different "speeds" (so Line A was at the 24th century, Line B might be the same, or the 26th, or the 22nd).

The thing about ST:IV I think was that they were able to break the then-mythical Warp 10 while slingshotting around the sun. But in TNG, they're actually using, iirc, the equivalent of Hyper-Warp where a) it was a hell of a lot faster; and, b) some of the fancy ways of breaking time were programmed out or something.

In any case, these started to get more silly as "quantum-"anything entered more popular vernacular. So they descended to shit like "err, there's quantum fluctuations causing a field that protects us from the alternate still-linear timeline so let's go back and fix this timeline even though Riker still got his Enterprise D blowed up by the very same Borg in that episode where Worf was on the wrong super/sub-string/line/event".

[Tannhauser]

This new movie will be at least the third time travel Trek movie.  Time travel is like crack to Fed captains.  I just have to wonder why Romulans aren't going back in time and killing Kirk as a baby in Iowa.  They have this richly detailed universe and they keep going back in time for their stories.  I don't get it.

One of the problems of Trek is that they have too many easy outs.  Transporters and Sensors require stupid technobabble to cause them to not work so the writer can wring even an iota of tension out of a plot. 

As for the game, I predict an intergalactic trainwreck.  It just doesn't sound like it's been well thought out.

[Hoax]

For those curious there was a great adaptation of SFB's way too slow and boring table-top game into a fairly sleek, quite tactical and good looking (at the time) PC game. 

The first game was supposed to have a persistent galactic war patched in, but that never happened.  They released a second one but the intergalactic online persistent war mode thingy was still not in.  So I didn't buy it and promptly forgot about the whole thing.

I believe the games were called Star Fleet Command.  It was pretty cool, I wonder if they ever got the galactic war working.



\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Fuck, my bad, didn't see your post.

[Daeven]

I believe the games were called Star Fleet Command.  It was pretty cool, I wonder if they ever got the galactic war working.

*points up about 9 posts*

Yes, about 6 months after release of SFC2, when no one gave a damn any longer.

[Venkman]

I think they could still do time-stuff in STO, but it'll probably be in the Warcraft/CoT guaranteed-outcome canned-quest way. Time travel was little more than an inconsistently used plot device anyway.

[Tmon]

I played that game on teletype before monitors were commonplace.  Sadly, I think that is as good as Star Trek games are likely to ever get.

Me too, I still wonder why no one ever asked why we were using so much paper.