Star Trek: Online

The screenshots for it look great, but I'm really gunshy after having issues with Champions Online. I might actually try and get in on the beta for this one to see if it's worth the effort.

My one hope for ST:O is that there is a reasonable amount of non-combat content. I recognize that killing things will be an inegral part of MMOs forever more (and I'm not lamenting this at all, I love killing virtual people and things as long as the process is entertaining), but exploration and non-violent interactions (and non-violent solutions to problems) is a hallmark of Trek and I want that dimension properly realized.

I'll be cold in the Earth for years before they ever make a decent Star Trek game.

And hoping that this thing will follow some TNG ethos about working everything out, good luck with that. Hope you like phaser battles.

I admire and respect your dream, I just think that you'd be better off finding that in a MUSH or some shit.

I begin to wonder if it's even possible to make a decent Trek game. All I'm saying is I wouldn't hold my breath.

I'm digging your Kool-Aid.

Well, I went ahead and pre-ordered this from Direct2Drive, so I'll be in the open beta starting on the 12th. All the recent videos look great. Hope this doesn't bomb like Champions...

I'm very intrigued by this. I do think Cryptic has some good ideas and people working there so I'm not off put by the fact that they did CO. We NEED a good Star Trek game and if it can be an MMO more power to them. If initial reviews are any good I'll definitely give it a whirl. One thing Cryptic did really well was the "events" in City of Heroes...like the alien invasions and Halloween surprises. I can just imagine a random Borg attack on all players...awesome.

I do have some questions/concerns about the fact that everyone is a captain and can have their own ships. Won't that just bog down the system immensely if you go to a planet and there are 54,000 starships orbiting it? And if they instance it to avoid that how do you offer PVP? What would stop a fleet of experienced players with bad ass ships from flying planet to planet just obliterating every ship they see?

Having said that, starships MUST be part of the game. While there are 1,876,987 things that went wrong with Star Wars Galaxies no personal ships was one of the biggest.

This won't be a non-combat game. Every trailer and gameplay video released so far has focused on player-versus-player combat and cooperative combat against the random spawn Borg cube bosses. Exploration quests will exist (for Federation players), but the plot of the game seems to hinge on the cold war between the Federation and the Klingons heating up again.

You ship phases out of the game when you beam your away team down to the surface. It's a suspension of disbelief breaker, but a necessary game mechanic to avoid just what you've described. And unless plans have changed since the last press release covering this, you can flag for PvP voluntarily at any time, but ships and crews are auto-flagged for PvP only when they're in the Neutral Zone in order to avoid ganking in the questing areas. It's essentially the same rule set as WoW's PvE servers.

Just missed out on getting into the closed beta through FilePlanet. Still skeptical thanks to my Champions experience, but I'll keep an eye on this.

After getting burned on Champions Online, I'm gonna wait and see on this one.

I'd won a contest about a year ago on the cryptic website with the prize being a guaranteed closed beta slot, I got a couple emails from the community relations person telling me congrats and all that and told me I was in the system for access to the beta once it started. For whatever reason that never happened and the new community relations person(the previous one left Cryptic) never responded to my pm or email on the subject. So yea, off to a crabby start with them but Im still optimistic about the state of the game. The only part I'm really concerned about it the ground game. From all the video I've seen, it feels like sort of an afterthought so heres hoping it turns out well.

By the way if anyone plans to pre-order the digital deluxe, be sure to get it from direct2drive or steam instead of Atari since for some reason d2d and steam have exclusive bonus items while Atari just has the basic package...plus Atari's download service comes through Digital River which is pretty terrible in its own right.

QFT. Digital River is ass. That is all.

Well, looks like they started the open beta early. I'm logged into the client and downloading the newest patch, so it looks like I'll be playing in about an hour.

Report back after you've had a chance to play Jacob, I am very curious to see what this one is really like.

Jacob, I can't recall: did you play Champions Online? I'd like to hear how promising (or not) ST:O is from someone who can reliably compare it to Cryptic's prior endeavor.

So...?

Maybe he died from being so old.

Hahaha that would be funny if that happened! What a dumb old guy.

*clickety tap tap click* "GERK MY OLD HEART HAS STOPPED WORKING." *die*

I wonder if this game will come with an actual manual that explains stuff. Your thoughts, Brad?

Why? There's a TV show you can watch!

Sorry for not reporting sooner. Apparently there was a glitch last night that allowed people who bought the game from Direct2Drive to log in, patch, etc.. They caught it fairly quickly and locked us back out 'til tomorrow. So no joy. I didn't think to come back here and mention it.

At least that's what the nurse tells me.

It's a g-g-g-g-ghost!

There's open beta keys all over the place now. I got one this morning, so I'll give this a try when I get home from work.

Thanks for taking one for the team, Richard. I want the opinion of someone who endured 'Champions Online' to assess whether or not this game is worth the expenditure.

Well, I've completed the basic tutorial, with both rudimentary ground and space combat. Obviously, there are a gazillion people online at the moment, and I've been dropped from the servers twice.

Quick first impressions:

I'm in this for the space battles and exploration, and my initial skirmishes with Borg probes, spheres and a (already damaged) cube were very entertaining. These tutorials are prettly clunky, though, and you're pretty much left on your own to figure out the two interfaces (ground and space). Definitely needs work there, and if I decide to stick with this I'm gonna need a good guide. It sure looks like there's a lot of depth here, but it's too soon to tell.

Graphically, I'm pleased. Space battles are suitably gorgeous on my new rig, and look exactly like the videos that are out there. Explosions, phaser and torpedo fire, leaking hulls, all that stuff looks and feels right to me so far. The ground portions aren't as impressive, but I really only had one short away-team battle and a little space station exposure.

All in all, this is still a beta, and I hope I can provide them with some positive feedback. I know jack shit about anything Trek past the series and movies, so I couldn't care less about canon or any of that shit. I just wanna have fun and explore the galaxy and blow shit up and have sex with aliens. Frankly, I have to admit that after only an hour or so playing I'm itching to get back in there right now, spend the experience points I've already earned, and customize my ship.

So, if you join the beta, keep an eye out for the U.S.S. Jacob Singer. I'll be the one limping around on partial impulse power, venting gas into space. Just like real life.

Yep, sounds like Cryptic.

Yeah, it's not very polished at all. Hell, there's no intro or anything, and voice acting seems scattershot. Of course, I'm assuming the game universe is (intended to be) pretty big, so I'm not really sure what to expect. Not to mention I don't have a lot of recent mmorpg experience. I'm sure others here can give better impressions than I.

Brad, Richard, and I played alot of 'Champions Online'. One of our major complaints with the game concerned the complete and utter lack of documentation/instructions available. As a player, you were essentially forced to figure out all of the game mechanics through trial and error. The tutorial section taught you the basics of movement and combat, but that was about it. Navigating through the interface and figuring out how to customize builds was all learned on the fly.

Wanna know what's important when designing your powerset? Wanna know how the different items you pick up alter your powers? You're on your own.

I don't need to have my hand held on these games, but I want to be able to figure out basic shit without having to put out an APB on the zone chat channel.

The game didn't even fucking tell you how to quickly reply to a private message in chat. They literally gave you no documentation for the controls or commands, in or out of the game. My friend Jon and I had to spend almost a half hour just figuring up how to set up a private in-game chat channel, stuff that should be simple and self-explanatory.

Cryptic just doesn't seem to have grown as a developer since City of Heroes, and again, in a post-WoW world, the lack of that basic level of polish is pretty unforgivable. Granted, ST:O is still in Beta. Maybe this time they'll actually release a finished product.

They have posted an online manual, which is a hell of a lot more than we got from Champions at launch.

Jake, since you're in it partly for the exploration, please share your thoughts on that aspect of gameplay. I know fighting is the dominant activity but I want to know if, say, I would be able to spend an hour checking out planets and nebulae and shit without having to fire my torpedoes at something.

Also, any element of strategy during combat? Ground combat sadly looks like an exercise in endurance: pound on your opponent and hope you deplete his health before he depletes yours. Am I missing some unnoticed depth to ground combat? What about battling in space?

I agree that the ground combat is pretty drab. Not terrible, just not likely to be anyones favorite part of the game. It just seems like it was tacked on as an afterthought and then maybe sometime last week some programmer realized it wasn't actually done yet. I'll bet it eventually gets patched to be better than it is sometime down the road after they've lost lots of subscribers. Cryptic seems to like the reactionary approach quite a bit. The space stuff is pretty fun though and aside from some pretty terrible lag(first day of beta at 4:30 pm it's to be expected) it runs nice on my mid-range machine.

Somewhat surprisingly just getting to the character select screen kicks both cores to 65% load and that doesnt seem right really, like maybe its not accessing the gpu enough or something. Maybe a Win 7 issue?

Can't say for certain yet how much "free range" exploring you can do, or what sort of wandering mobs you might get in different sectors. I do know that you can move from sector to sector without an actual mission, and you can also complete missions and move on without having to go back to a starbase (depends on the mission, of course). As far as ground strategies go, you can move your team where you want them in order to get "flanking" bonuses, and yeah, you have disposable redshirts to soak up some damage.

I just finished an early mission to rescue a stranded freighter, and it entailed warping to the system, destroying 4 Orion Corvettes, beaming over to the ship to kill boarders and repair leaks, escorting the wounded back onto my ship, then destroying 2 more Corvettes and a Battleship.

This sounds promising, but I'll have to see how it's implemented. Ideally, instead of your character being able to take a half-dozen direct phaser blasts before expiring, you would beam down with 5 Red Shirts. Every time "you" were hit by phaser fire, one of the Reds would disintegrate like Paul Winfield (except slower and with more screaming), and only the sixth and final blast would kill the shit out of you.

A MAN CAN DREAM.

Just finished the space battle portion of the tutorial, and so far I'm fairly impressed. It's fairly immersive, and it feels like Trek. It's also done a much better job of explaining things than Champions did.

I've only watched a few minutes but this just doesn't do anything for me.

So far the Patrol missions have had the greatest amount of pure ship-to-ship fighting, and it's kinda cool that you often only have to complete 3 of 4 objectives to satisfy a patrol mission, and even though they may all involve combat, they can all be fairly different.

That's what I'm sort of curious about -- will there be missions that can be completed in multiple ways? Can you choose to be diplomatic and talk things out instead of going in with guns blazing?

What'r'you, bald and French or sumpin'?

No, but I demand the option to be!

A randomly proccing option to use the Corbomite Maneuver in dialogue wouldn't hurt.

Hey guys, got a basic technical question.

The minimum specs suggest that I might be able to run this game, but I wanna make sure I can before I buy this. Any insights on what I need?

I saw the specs and I'm covered on everything but potentially the graphics card. I'm not sure if it will work or not.

I did check out a site that can determine whether or not my comp could run the program and it actually said my specs were too low. Only problem was that it said the same for WoW and WoW works pretty damn good on my comp.

Does this really take more graphical power than WoW?