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.
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:4, Insightful)
Please. Socialism is about distributing wealth equally. Since there's no scarcity (everybody just gets what they need from the nearest replicator) there's no wealth either. Arguably that's Communism, except that government doesn't seem to have withered away. Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved". Except that explanation is scientifically naive: evolution requires natural selection (which we stopped doing when we invented civilization), and doesn't necessarily make individuals morally better. Often the opposite.
I'd call it Roddenberianism, which is defined as a system that makes everybody happy, but which nobody can tell you exactly how it works.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never figured out why it seems that everyone in the Navy (Starfleet) is an ensign or higher in the Trek universe; Ensign is a commissioned officer rank, not an enlisted rank.
Yet, most of the stuff that happens on ships gets done by enlisteds, and even officers will listen to an NCO who knows their stuff.
So, you'd think the random guy would be a private, private first class, sergeant, etc.
But nope...
(and I say this as a long-time Trek fan: "huh!?")
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:5, Insightful)
Supposedly all our social problems have gone away because everybody's "more evolved"
You may laugh, but that's exactly what many of the early Russian communists thought would happen.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:3, Insightful)
> I've never figured out why it seems that everyone
> in the Navy (Starfleet) is an ensign or higher in
> the Trek universe
I think it's because the shows are about the officers, and not about the enlisted schmucks. I think Starfleet Academy is like the US Naval Academy; when you're done with it, you're probably officer material; there are plenty of people on the ships that never did that, but the shows aren't about those people.
Of course, IANAT, so YMMV.
Hope they avoid the license trap (Score:4, Insightful)
The license trap is simple, HOW do you make an MMO game feel like the movies/book.
To bodly go where no man has gone before? Eh, this is a MMORPG. Not only has everyone already been there, you probably have to que for the boss.
Just how many Galaxy class starships are there going to be? How many horny vulcans and carebear klingon players are going to be running around?
How do you make space combat feel like naval engagements rather then sluggish fighters most Star Trek games have so far chosen to emulate?
It can be done, the original Star Trek RPG games were proper Star Trek (25th anniversary and Judgement Rites) but later games just wore Star Trek as a skin mod. But MMORPG have had a hard time with it so far.
Star Wars Galaxies had lots of bugs to be sure but the major gripe was that it just wasn't Star Wars. For me the real killer was that Storm Troopers were insanely hard to kill while of course in the movies they die if you sneeze at them. I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi. For that matter Han Solo wouldn't have been stopped and searched and nobody treated my noble character as a princess. Nobody ran away from my earlier Wookie either.
Matrix Online was a dud, never played it so can't say if it was like the movies.
Am playing Lord of the Rings Online and again, one of the things that make the game a bit of a hit and miss is that you just don't feel like one of the heroes from the book. Did Boromir constantly drop his weapon when fighting the orcs? Get knocked out every 30 seconds? Cower in fear? Fear, oh dear that was a stupid idea. You get Hope in safe areas where you don't need it but during the most tricky fights, hope is hard to come by and easily tripped. Oh yes, that makes me feel like a hero, slash half my health have me popping hope tokens on a 1hr cool down and spend most of the time cowering unable to move. Who is the hero NOW? PvP is even worse as monster players start at the highest level but a bit weaker but with killing other players gain ranks. Your average creep is now significantly more powerful then a freep. Yes, Lord of the Rings Online where the forces of darkness did not dare to move until they obtained a significant numerical advancement and sees small forces defeated by half a dozen free people has orcs/wargs/spiders that are more powerful then elves, by the truckload. Whoo!
It is tempting to ride on an existing license but hard to live up to the expectations people have of that license. So far from watching this game and knowing the previous games the company has done I see no reason but to expect this to be one of the biggest disappointments in MMORPG history. Yes City of Heroes was a success and a nice twist on the genre BUT it is hardly a good basis for a Star Trek MMORPG.
Re:Marketing Pitch (Score:3, Insightful)
So it's been clear since TNG at least that enlisted personel *exist*, but are simply very rare in the show. They seem to be growing more common, slowly, as other posters have pointed out.
Re:Platforms (Score:1, Insightful)
Why would Sony install rootkits on their own platform?
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's capitalism. The majority of people in a capitalist society work for someone else and their efforts go into making a profit for someone else.
Re:Hope they avoid the license trap (Score:3, Insightful)
I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi.
No, but he does mention that he used to bullseye womp rats, so apparently at some point in his life he did spend time grinding womp rats to up his aiming skills...
Start as captain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't it going to be a little unrealistic to have a million starships going around? Besides, what do you have to work up to? Admiral, then the game gets REALLY boring. You just sit behind a desk.
I mean, with games like WoW, its more realistic to have hundreds of people all at the starting point of the game because they are just people and there are lots of people in the world.
But if everyone starts with their own starship and you have a lot of people playing, its going to end up looking like that TNG episode where Worf quantum leaps several times. "Sir I'm receiving 250,000 hails". (Sorry Wil, I couldn't resist quoting you)
Re:This isn't going to go well ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem isn't with the players getting bored. That happens with all games. The problem is that the business model for an MMO relies on continued subscription fees in order to keep people playing. So that means the developer must stretch out a finite amount of content for an infinite amount of time. They do this by placing artificial limitations on your character and creating things like "raid lockouts" where you can only kill a certain boss once a week to have a small percentage chance of getting the gear that will make your character more powerful.
The only reason why WoW is so successful is that they have perfected this process. First, they create a character class with all of these special powers and abilities, then, they remove all of the special abilities and put them on gear that you must acquire to unlock the full potential of your character. Then, with raid lockouts, and the fact that in any given raid there may be 3 or 4 people that need that same piece of gear, and only a 10-20% chance that it will drop in the first place, they can pretty much guarantee that the average subscription will last 1-2 years before your character is fully equipped. By that time, the expansion will be out, making all of your gear worthless, and the cycle repeats.
Seriously, when I started calculating the number of weeks and months it would take me to repeat the same content over and over again, just to fully equip my character, that was when I got frustrated and decided to cancel my account. It's a contrived system of intentionally withholding rewards just long enough so that they can eke out a few more months of subscription revenue from you, the customer.
Re:I think he meant... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been thinking about starting a new SWRiP MUD, mostly because I miss the piloting system. That thing was excellent.
I'd like to see X-Wing Alliance in MMO form. Is that too much to ask? :(
Re:The only problem in Star Trek games (Score:4, Insightful)
It works because envy and greed and want are largely eliminated. The elimination of those wouldn't be communism or socialism. Such systems would be rendered obsolete. There would be little desire to (re)distribute something if everyone has it. People who want for little are generally easy going. People who have hope for something better are usually well behaved. Maybe you didn't watch enough of the show to learn how it worked.
Socialism is not about distributing wealth equally, even on paper. Please read up on what socialism IS before you talk about socialism. Germany, often described as socialist (though all countries are socialist to one degree or another {roads, public schools, cops}), does not try to make everyone equal. They just try to make sure that the disparity between the top and bottom isn't terrible. If you're sick in Germany, you go to the doctor. In the US, that's a privilege extended to those with (certain) jobs (not all jobs include benefits). Yet, it is still possible for someone through the sweat of their brow to become wealthy. Capitalism and socialism work beautifully together. But that's not what is going on in ST.
Communism, socialism, capitalism and so are moot when there's no point in being greedy, or there is less to "need". Why charge so much for medicine that certain people can't afford it, if there is no scarcity of medicine?
The social problems weren't described as evolution in the biological sense, they might have referred to it cultural evolution. The federation didn't have as many internal troubles as say, the Klingons. The federation didn't have as much external problems until something on the outside pushed in.
"But but but how did they get there?", you blubber, pretending to not understand. Time, pain and technology. Time and pain taught that version of Earth that the cause of much of their problems was want and greed. The former is mostly the result of the latter. Pain of wars and crime eventually taught them these lessons. Technology makes civilization possible. It also makes morality feasible. In an every man for themselves struggle to survive, moral decisions are a luxury. i can worry about whether is it right or wrong to kill you and take your land if i'm starving. Where people perceive that they have hope for something better, they are less likely to take stupid risks, or feel that it is ok to take from others.
The illusion of scarcity, or the sense that 'whoever dies with the most toys wins' drives most of the misery we see in the world. If i could get a Porsche from a replicator today, and get a Ferrari tomorrow, i would care far less about 'getting ahead'. i could put my time and effort into better things. Or do things and not worry about what it pays. It's the old "what would you do if you won the lottery?". i'd paint, write, travel, develop games, teach kids computers. i wouldn't be sitting in a cube farm working on TPS reports.
What would you do if someone came along and paid off your mortgage? Or your landlord said you could live rent free? Such an event would effectively double my income. i could take a lower paying job that would give me more satisfaction. Or i could spend that extra money to take art and language classes. i could buy lego sets and give them to kids so they could have fun and learn spacial and engineering skills.
If you find such a world hard to swallow, imagine how today's world would look to someone from 200 years ago. Marriages are for love? Blacks aren't farm equipment? Women leading nations? Widespread literacy? Conquest of weaker nations seen as bad? Some people of that time might see those as bad things, but i think their pretty groovy, and so would the people benefiting from those social evolutions.