Cryptic Studios Releases New Star Trek Online Details, Trailer 272
Two days ago, an AP interview with Cryptic Studios' Jack Emmert provided new details about Star Trek: Online, which was lost in developmental limbo for quite some time. Today, Cryptic released a game-play trailer and a forty-minute webcast discussing the game.
For the lazy.. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:3, Informative)
That's Picard/Janeway Star Trek. Most of us prefer Kirk Star Trek ("Shields Up! Not chess Mr. Spock, poker!").
Re:Will this become.... (Score:2, Informative)
Kinda looks like it. I just went to the web site. First thing I wanted to see was the trailer. Not only is the trailer not available as a stream, it's bundled in a zip file. No competent webmaster does stuff like that, and if they haven't hired a webmaster, they're obviously a long, long way from a deployable game.
The trailer itself is not encouraging. Except for a few brief scenes of people getting phasered and transported, none of it shows actual game play. The rest was just animated eye candy, obviously not part of the game.
Oh yeah, and they showed the warp nacelles trailing some kind of glowing smoke. Somebody's not a Real Trekkie(tm)!
Ur-Quan Masters (Score:3, Informative)
Slightly off-topic but I just discovered Ur-Quan Masters, an old Star Trek-like RPG game that's pretty decent. Massive world to explore, engaging storyline. Open-source, too.
It's a little old, but worth a look. http://sc2.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:4, Informative)
*ahem* Libertarian Socialist here.
Socialism is about distributing wealth equally
No, it's not. The bait-and-switch redefining of socialism was done by the Bolsheviks to seal their hold on power, and accepted by the western power elite for the same reason.
Socialism is about people being in control of their own labor, by owning and controlling the means of production themselves.
o If you have a set of tools and use that set yourself to make furniture which you sell, that's socialism.
o If you hire someone else to make the furniture, and you take the money and give him back enough to live on, but not enough to buy his own tools, you have capitalism. *
o If you have a set of tools and let your friends, neighbors, relatives, or whomever you trust borrow them to make furniture when you're not doing it, that's communism.
o If you give your tools to the government so they can share them more fairly, that's state communism. It's also naive, since the government will quickly be occupied by people who are not going to share squat once they get their hands on everyone's stuff. (see: Soviet Russia, China, various other state "communist" nations.)
Distributing wealth fairly (not necessarily equally) is a communist ideal.
Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved".
In Star Trek's defense, they seem to postulate that psychiatry will make advances towards reliable treatment of abnormal behavior in the future. Someone who feels compelled to own more than he can possibly use is treated as normal, even desirable in modern consumerist society, but I'd say he's got a borderline hoarding disorder. There's not a lot of difference between a guy who spends every waking hour trying to find ways to increase the numbers in his bank account and the old lady who has 40 cats, IMO. (I recall a psychiatrist about ten years ago who had worked with a number of Donald Trump Fortune-500 types, who said the most striking thing about them was that they had no "inner lives," that is, they didn't go for walks in the park or kick back listening to music for an afternoon like normal people. They were utterly driven. They'd get up in the morning and immediately start making phone calls, because that was all they did.)
If a hypothetical future psychiatry treats and cures such individuals, then a society designed to minimize their negative impact via pricing signals and other market forces becomes unnecessary. (Not that I believe it will, but it's possible.)
* You might wonder why it works out so that the employee doesn't figure out some way to get the money to go into business for himself. It's due to the design of the unfree market -- capitalism can only function under certain unnatural economic conditions. The first thing that's done in a third world country when the WTO and World Bank come in to "modernize" their economy is to have the government rig the market in such a way as to create those conditions. This involves robbing people of self-sufficiency and driving them into desperation so they will accept a bad deal as the "best alternative available," as the sweatshop apologists love to say. Kevin Carson has some detailed analysis of this stuff over at mutualist.blogspot.com which I highly recommend.
- mantar
Informative? (Score:5, Informative)
Unless you have reason to believe they are lying the eye candy is part of the game.
Thanks for trolling, try again.
Re:Informative? (Score:3, Informative)
All footage might be "in game", but it's not necessarily game play.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:5, Informative)
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
On smaller ships, he could often double as a boatswain, being directly in charge of the seamen. Later, the title was split into Chief Mate and Chief Engineer, with the Mate being an officer, and the Engineer not. Depending on nationality, the chief engineer might still de-facto outrank all officers except the captain, despite not being an officer.
Re:For the lazy.. (Score:1, Informative)
Hands-on jobs: Red :D
Hands-off jobs: Blue
Hands on the Hotties: Yellow.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:3, Informative)
I think he meant... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I'm not the GP poster, but I think he meant, like many of use SW fans, a good SW game. Note the keyword there.
Actually screw that. We just want a Star Wars game. SWG wasn't even that, when you get at the bottom of it.
SWG from the start was not just incompetently done, but mostly a merchandising exercise. You know, like printing Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt. It doesn't really make it a better t-shirt, nor really SW equipment, it just serves to sell more copies and more expensive.
SW was launched as little more than a SW-themed DIKU MUD with graphics and lots of empty, generic, fractal-generated terrain, but (here's the important part) without vehicles, starships or Jedi. That tells you from the start how well the dev team and Raph Koster understood either SW or their target market segment. It's been a race against time from there to figure out how to put Jedi in, for example, and went from one clusterfucked abomination to the next clusterfucked abomination as results went.
And while the big gripe is gameplay, let's not forget that it wasn't very SW either. Their "solutions" to everyone wanting to be a Jedi was worse lore-wise than the problem. They required you to be already an accomplished and skilled adult before anyone trained you as a Jedi. Hello? That was exactly what they tried to avoid: training someone who's already used to taking all the wrong approaches, and has all the wrong reflexes.
Duly noted, it was the only MMO which allowed a flexible character build. It gets kudos for that, and many people stayed because of that. Many still remember it fondly because of that. But was its only merit.
And there was nothing particularly SW about that either. You could transplant the same system to a high-fantasy MMO and it would work just the same. Heck, something similar worked in Oblivion.
The NGE just managed to make it worse, and God knows that's an accomplishment. It's akin to making a rotten corpse even less sexy.
And again, it became an even more exercise in merchandising. Signature characters are used even more willy-nilly, in places and situations that make no sense for them, like in bad fanfic.
(Though if it makes anyone feel better, the actual game ignores not just the official lore, but also everything that their own tutorial told you half an hour ago.)
So, well, I think all of us SW nerds can be excused for wishing for a SW game, not for SWG.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:5, Informative)
In mariner terminology, the chief was usually the second in command on a ship, even if outranked by the pilot and mates. The captain and pilot would decide where to sail, but the chief would be in charge of how, including keeping the boat afloat, which took precedence over any orders except scuttling.
It is different in civilian and military usage. In the Royal Navy, for example, the Captain was the commander of the ship, but until the development of a professional officer corps, the captain's primary skill was being able to fight his ship -- and originally was in direct command only of the Marine unit aboard the ship; the sailing master was the person who actually directed the sailing of the ship. The sailing master (shortened to master) was a warrant officer, along with the master's mates, and ate in the wardroom with the ship's officers, who were above him in the chain of command; the promotion of warrant officers was under the control of various boards and commissions, not captains, unlike the midshipmen and rates. The sailing master eventually became a commissioned office, becoming the navigation officer.
Re:For the lazy.. (Score:3, Informative)