Star Trek Online: Here We Go Again!

[Venkman]

To paraphrase: the game would be easy and obvious, and wrong.

The likely candidate design would be five or so Races with their own origin story arcs and levels until some point when they meet up in some adjacency-based frontier space for resource gathering and pew pew. Then there's the truly centralized gathering point where all races choose to fight eachother in some part while banding together against things like Borg and 8479 NPC forces. Meanwhile characters are levels based careers that can be changed based on "forgetting" one career while learning another. Everyone gets a personal runabout until they eventually evolve to the highest level ship in their career. Maybe some ships allow SWG-like multiplay on board.

This is all TNG 24th century timeline. Its the most fully realized unless they want to tie into the JJ abrams reinvention.

I just don't trust anyone to do it right, because the whole IP is cursed.

[Lantyssa]

If you thought SWG was a clusterfuck that pissed off SW fanbois.. zomg I can't imagine any game EVER making ST fanbois happy.  Anyone who tries to make a game with this IP has to ignore those fans. It killed SWG and it WILL kill any ST mmo.

Worse than that, Star Trek is an even harder IP to replicate faithfully.  There were some consistencies around the SW universe that even with all those races and some variations on technology and locales, the universe is surprisingly homogenous.  In Star Trek, everything is different, even the little cultural bits.

[LC]

What? I thought it was Turbine's job to be given incredibly valuable IP to make mediocre games from.

I was thinking the same thing.

[Numtini]

Too broad a universe, too much deux ex machine stuff in the lore.

Most of all, success is evading conflict and adding to understanding. That doesn't make for compelling gameplay.

It might make a compelling table top/GMd game. But not an MMO one.

[Daeven]

1) Races:  You have to include a deep political structure for each race/ faction.  Starfleet, Romulans, Klingon Empire, Cardassians, that DS9 group whose name escapes me, Ferengi, and others.

This is the one thing that games based on the Star Fleet Battles and Federation and Empire 'setting' have going for it, a fully fleshed out background that at least nominally makes sense. As opposed to the TV material which hurts if you really try to think about it.

[Venkman]

Same problem SW has. All of the good lore is relegated to the EU material way less read than the TV show watched. And the EU material for Trek is even more inconsistent and retcon'd than the SW stuff. By a lot.

[Sir T]

The "Star Fleet Battles" races and lore:

Federation at the center
To the right you have the Gorn, Romulans and (later) The ISC
Below the Federation you have the Tholians, who's main function on the map is to keep the Klingons and Romulans from joining up.
To the left, you have the Kitzinti, the Lyrans, the Hydrans and the Klingons.
All over the place you have the Orion Pirates.

Power blocks :
(1)Federation with the Kitzinti and the Gorns. During the general war the Hydrans were co-belligerents but not allies as they wewre stuck on the other side of the opposition.
(2) Klingons, with the Romulans and Lyrans as allies.

Relations: The Klingons hate the Tholians and Hydrans. The Feds are strong allies with the Gorn. The Kitzinti and Lyrans hate one another's guts. The Romulans while nominal allies with the Klingons don't like them much since they got shafted in a deal where the Klingons sold them some out of date ships, and pretty much left them to fight the Gorns and Febs alone.
The ISC wanted to stop the war and nearly succeeded by seeding their fleet into everyones neutral zone. They were halted by an out of galaxy invasion.
The Tholians are refugees of an empire that fell in another galaxy and want to be left strictly alone. The took over some Klingon space when they arrived. The Klingons could never get it back due the Tholians excellent defensive web technology.
Some other minor powers around as well.

That's largely it.

[MahrinSkel]

There are two IPs on my personal nightmare list of Properties I've Enjoyed A Lot That Would Be Difficult As Hell To Make A Good MMO For:

1) Star Trek
2) Dune

Dune would be considerably easier than Star Trek.  The problem with Star Trek is that the canonical work almost entirely character driven, very little of it is about the overall universe of Star Trek, and that little is not easily adapted to a game.  Dune was more about the world than the characters, who were mostly vehicles for exposition about the world.  A Dune MMO would be about the same level of difficulty as LotR.

Star Trek would just be hell.  A death march.

--Dave

[Hartsman]

There are two IPs on my personal nightmare list of Properties I've Enjoyed A Lot That Would Be Difficult As Hell To Make A Good MMO For:

1) Star Trek
2) Dune

Dune would be considerably easier than Star Trek.  The problem with Star Trek is that the canonical work almost entirely character driven, very little of it is about the overall universe of Star Trek, and that little is not easily adapted to a game.  Dune was more about the world than the characters, who were mostly vehicles for exposition about the world.  A Dune MMO would be about the same level of difficulty as LotR.

Star Trek would just be hell.  A death march.

--Dave

Once you've made a game that's received by a near-universal "too brown," you start finding reasons to add Dune to the list. :)

[photek]

Dune could be a good MMO in 10-15 years. Worry not about the brown, we got many scales :

[HaemishM]

Star Trek is an awful, AWFUL game license. The series is not about binary decisions, it's not about pew pew (not enough anyway) and it's fans are pedantic cumguzzlers who all think learning a made-up language and flashing interstellar future gang signs is the height of cool. Star Trek fans are another group I'd like to fire into the sun, so they can burn up along with the Great Phoenix or whatever shitbird slack-jawed nickname they came up with for Gene Rodenberry. Majel Barrett should be bitchslapping anyone who signed the papers to allow such an abomination to be made.

[shiznitz]

Women who speak Klingon will take it in the butt, though!

[Venkman]

The series is not about binary decisions

No?

[MahrinSkel]

Once you've made a game that's received by a near-universal "too brown," you start finding reasons to add Dune to the list. :)

You could cheat a bit, though.  There were other planets in Dune, they just didn't get much of a focus.  You could extend the canon there, get away from the brown, and still be reasonably true to the license.  Not easy, but comparatively doable.  In Star Trek, you'd have to set it in some distant part of the universe (the Beta quadrant?) just to get enough room to work in.  You could make a good game, but the fanbois wouldn't just trash you, they'd burn you in effigy and challenge you to a Mok'bara duel.

--Dave

[Aez]

You are all missing the opportunity this IP offer :

The entire game world is an instanced Enterprise ship.
You are a Klingon Grunt.
You grind your way trough red shirts until you reach the epic raid : the command room (were Kirks and the gang are and they speak to enemy on giant TV).
Once you decapitate Kirk, your Klingon Emperor appear on the giant TV to congratulate you. He also promise an undisclosed number of Klingon's finnest pleasure girls.
Every expansion is a new Enterprise/season.


There's a secret level were you can kill the last whales on earth.

[stray]

Once you've made a game that's received by a near-universal "too brown," you start finding reasons to add Dune to the list. :)

You could cheat a bit, though.  There were other planets in Dune, they just didn't get much of a focus.  You could extend the canon there, get away from the brown, and still be reasonably true to the license.  Not easy, but comparatively doable.  In Star Trek, you'd have to set it in some distant part of the universe (the Beta quadrant?) just to get enough room to work in.  You could make a good game, but the fanbois wouldn't just trash you, they'd burn you in effigy and challenge you to a Mok'bara duel.

--Dave

After the first few novels, those other planets did get a lot of focus though. The Ixian planet was highly technological and subterranean (to keep away from prying eyes, since there were bans on computers); Harkonnen planet was heavily industrialized, polluted, dark; Imperial planet was earthlike; the older Imperial planet (Selusa Secundus) was fucked by nuclear fallout and kept around as a prison of sorts (and a training ground for the Sardaurkar); Wallach IX (Bene Gesserit homeworld) was earthlike; the original homeworld of the Bene Gesserit was all jungle; the Atreides planet was oceanic; Ginaz (Duncan's swordmaster planet) was also oceanic, and marshy; there's a planet that's almost entirely made up of jewels; Tleilaxu were xenophobes and the planet was off limits (perhaps conjuring up a picture of the Kremlin is fitting enough); Guild planets are, more than likely, full of shipyards at the very least.

/dune geek off  

[Slyfeind]

You are all missing the opportunity this IP offer :

The entire game world is an instanced Enterprise ship.
You are a Klingon Grunt.
You grind your way trough red shirts until you reach the epic raid : the command room (were Kirks and the gang are and they speak to enemy on giant TV).
Once you decapitate Kirk, your Klingon Emperor appear on the giant TV to congratulate you. He also promise an undisclosed number of Klingon's finnest pleasure girls.
Every expansion is a new Enterprise/season.


There's a secret level were you can kill the last whales on earth.

omfg someone give this man $50mil and a team of 60 professionals.

[Sir T]

You know, bioware were really really clever to take the licence, make up their own universe and just say "its got lightsabers and magic spells. Now eff off"

[MahrinSkel]

After the first few novels, those other planets did get a lot of focus though. The Ixian planet was highly technological and subterranean (to keep away from prying eyes, since there were bans on computers); Harkonnen planet was heavily industrialized, polluted, dark; Imperial planet was earthlike; the older Imperial planet (Selusa Secundus) was fucked by nuclear fallout and kept around as a prison of sorts (and a training ground for the Sardaurkar); Wallach IX (Bene Gesserit homeworld) was earthlike; the original homeworld of the Bene Gesserit was all jungle; the Atreides planet was oceanic; Ginaz (Duncan's swordmaster planet) was also oceanic, and marshy; there's a planet that's almost entirely made up of jewels; Tleilaxu were xenophobes and the planet was off limits (perhaps conjuring up a picture of the Kremlin is fitting enough); Guild planets are, more than likely, full of shipyards at the very least.

/dune geek off  

And only the hard-core trufans even remember those books existed, never mind the Kevin Anderson add-ons.  The rest of us quit at "Children of Dune".

--Dave

[stray]

I wonder why anyone would quit at the third book. Leaving there would make you utterly fail at grasping even a single point of the story, and what Paul's son set out to prove.

Seriously. 

That, and you don't get to see how badass a character Duncan is.

[Draegan]

I got half way through the 3rd book.  I couldn't take it anymore.

[rk47]

You are all missing the opportunity this IP offer :

The entire game world is an instanced Enterprise ship.
You are a Klingon Grunt.
You grind your way trough red shirts until you reach the epic raid : the command room (were Kirks and the gang are and they speak to enemy on giant TV).
Once you decapitate Kirk, your Klingon Emperor appear on the giant TV to congratulate you. He also promise an undisclosed number of Klingon's finnest pleasure girls.
Every expansion is a new Enterprise/season.


There's a secret level were you can kill the last whales on earth.

omfg someone give this man $50mil and a team of 60 professionals.

gimme double that and i'll make it a Guild v Guild ship boarding war 
"Shield's down CAPTAIN!  THEY'RE IN THE TELEPORTER ROOM!"
"This is your captain speaking, WE ARE BEING BOARDED, EVERYONE grab a phaser AND FLAG PVP! For the FEDS!"
"Teleporter room, how big is the boarding party?"
"*static, klingon speak over comms*"
"Fuck"

[stray]

I got half way through the 3rd book.  I couldn't take it anymore.

Oh, I thought people were refusing to read more out..I don't know...laziness. That they liked the series, but lost track of it.

If you simply didn't like it though, fair enough. I've done that with every other sci-fi series attempt myself. Dune's the only exception.

[UnSub]

I got half way through the 3rd book.  I couldn't take it anymore.

Oh, I thought people were refusing to read more out..I don't know...laziness. That they liked the series, but lost track of it.

If you simply didn't like it though, fair enough. I've done that with every other sci-fi series attempt myself. Dune's the only exception.

The first Dune was good. The place we are up to now in the Dune saga counts only as necrophila.

It's like Magician by Raymond E. Fiest. Fantastic book, great world, I wish to god he'd stopped writing in that world about 3 mini-series in.

... but it's the nature of sci-fi / fantasy authors to want to release book after book after book of a successful title in order to keep the money rolling in (and probably because they also enjoy what they've created .

[stray]

I got half way through the 3rd book.  I couldn't take it anymore.

Oh, I thought people were refusing to read more out..I don't know...laziness. That they liked the series, but lost track of it.

If you simply didn't like it though, fair enough. I've done that with every other sci-fi series attempt myself. Dune's the only exception.

The first Dune was good. The place we are up to now in the Dune saga counts only as necrophila.

It's like Magician by Raymond E. Fiest. Fantastic book, great world, I wish to god he'd stopped writing in that world about 3 mini-series in.

... but it's the nature of sci-fi / fantasy authors to want to release book after book after book of a successful title in order to keep the money rolling in (and probably because they also enjoy what they've created .

He wasn't doing that though. He had a lot of this stuff charted out from the beginning. People were too dense to realize what he was trying to communicate with the first trilogy (that messiahs sucked), and instead, made it out to be some typical Campbellian hero story. So he kept on writing and spelled it out. They were also too dense to realize that he was saying it was a BAD thing if "He who controls the spice, controls the universe" became a reality. It was never Herbert's intent to make Paul out to be some kickass good guy, who takes away the spice from the baddies, and we all live happily ever after, with a good guy controlling the universe.

Herbert thought it was bad that any one interest could have that kind of grip on humanity, and that it was bad if there was a possibility that someone could control that single interest. At the end of book 3, he starts getting into that with Paul's son (actually, when Paul became the wandering hermit). Paul had the ability to see into the future, and saw the futility of being ruler and hero, saw what needed to be done to rectify it -- but didn't have the balls to do so. His son Leto later saw the same thing, and did have the balls. Book ends without you ever realizing what exactly it was he had to do.

[Phred]

I got half way through the 3rd book.  I couldn't take it anymore.

For some reason I could never make it through Children, but read God-Emporer just fine. I found his writing style in Children really awkward compared to Dune itself though.

[lamaros]

He wasn't doing that though. He had a lot of this stuff charted out from the beginning. People were too dense to realize what he was trying to communicate with the first trilogy (that messiahs sucked), and instead, made it out to be some typical Campbellian hero story. So he kept on writing and spelled it out. They were also too dense to realize that he was saying it was a BAD thing if "He who controls the spice, controls the universe" became a reality. It was never Herbert's intent to make Paul out to be some kickass good guy, who takes away the spice from the baddies, and we all live happily ever after, with a good guy controlling the universe.

Herbert thought it was bad that any one interest could have that kind of grip on humanity, and that it was bad if there was a possibility that someone could control that single interest. At the end of book 3, he starts getting into that with Paul's son (actually, when Paul became the wandering hermit). Paul had the ability to see into the future, and saw the futility of being ruler and hero, saw what needed to be done to rectify it -- but didn't have the balls to do so. His son Leto later saw the same thing, and did have the balls. Book ends without you ever realizing what exactly it was he had to do.

If you're a fucking idiot, maybe.

Dune and Dune Messiah are all you need (There's nothing subtle about Messiah). While the rest of the series is interesting in parts they're also obvious, laboured, and rather boring at points. This comming from someone who has read the series at least 5 times (And Dune itself about 20). Dune was my favourite novel for about 10 years and I still enjoy it, but to talk it, let alone the series, up with such self importance really misses much of what is actually in the books.

Children and God Emperor are assuredly the worst of the lot.

As for making a MMO out of it. On the back of what Frank wrote you dont really have a lot to work with. A prequal series would make the most use of the IP, but wouldn't really work well for a game, and everything after God Emperor is so generic that you would basicly be making it from scratch without much relationship beyond the name.

Fiest got shit because he "learned how to write". Pretty sad when your supposed mastrey of your occupational craft results in you work being worse.

[Wasted]

While we are throwing broad ideas around that could possibly give this game any hope in hell, I personally would (try to)make a fun pew pew space game where you are the captain of your own ship, with some space colony development game for the builders and as a base for some pvp.  Then I would have a holodeck option where, under the guise of 'training under the oldmasters', you can enter popular episodes from all the series and live out all your Spock/Kirk yaoi fantasies or kick arse alongside Worf, or disintegrate every ferengi that ever existed in any episode, ever.

Give the gamers a decent game, and give the cosplaying diehards a skin for their second life desires.

[stray]

Dune and Dune Messiah are all you need (There's nothing subtle about Messiah). While the rest of the series is interesting in parts they're also obvious, laboured, and rather boring at points. This comming from someone who has read the series at least 5 times (And Dune itself about 20). Dune was my favourite novel for about 10 years and I still enjoy it, but to talk it, let alone the series, up with such self importance really misses much of what is actually in the books.

Self importance? Man, some shit must be in the air here lately. I keep on getting this. I assure you though, I'm quite aware than I'm just fucking around pointlessly on a message board, and trying to be informative about a sci-fi novel. It's not really on my list of things to be self-important about.

Besides, you're the one saying that you could understand the entire plot just by Dune and Dune Messiah. No way could I do that. I recall being utterly clueless at why Paul decided to become a self-hating hermit when I read Messiah, and needed more. I was basically saying "wtf?" the whole time he did that. That's how self important I am. I'd need at least Children of Dune to even be aware of what the Golden Path was. Then I needed the rest just to see what an complete cunt Leto was.

I'd agree that it isn't exactly ideal for an MMO though. I was just chiming in to Dave that there was more of a fleshed out universe there than just the desert planet.

[edit] Just to rerail..

Uber loot: TOS boots. Really, I need a pair of those.

[Merusk]

That the thread has degenerated into a discussion of Dune after less than 2 pages is ALSO an indicator of how badly a ST MMO does NOT need to be made.

[Draegan]

I always like the Feist books.  I never read anything past Battle for Krondor but I always thought the series was good.  Not a masterpiece, but a nice quick read and a good story.  I liked the characters.

[Xerapis]

I always thought Feist's best was the Empire Trilogy  personally.

[Draegan]

Yeah, that was an excellent trilogy.  Almost as good as Apprentice/Master, or perhaps just as good.  Hrmmm.

[Furiously]

Set your players against the federation. Really piss off the people that love star trek. Make em pirates.

[Sir T]

The whole point of trek was to put the most powerful, richest most technologically advanced bunch with the best weapons into moral dilemmas. Which was what what DS9 was going to be till someone watched a few episodes of Babylon 5 and went GAAAAA!!! Must have big military threat like Shadows!! *unleash really powerful race* *Spend 2 years (where nothing happens) panicking and trying to figure out what to do with them other than "Dominion invades -> Feds lose, huge"* while watching B5 get better and better and even more extreme.

And I would not even call B5 a great setting for an MM0 either.