'Weekly Episodes' Coming To Star Trek Online 62
As Star Trek Online ramps up for its Season 2 patch, the game's executive producer, Daniel Stahl, spoke in an interview about an interesting new feature: weekly episodes. Quoting:
"The team has wanted to capture the spirit of the TV shows by having something new to look forward to each week. We all remember when the various series were in full swing and there was the anticipation of tuning in every week to see what happened next. It wasn't always a continuing story, but it was always Star Trek in some way or another, and over time you became familiar with the characters and plots that developed. We are curious to see if this can be replicated through the game. Every week we plan to have something new for players to do. Sometimes it could be getting an assignment to resolve a trade dispute between two races. Other weeks it could be making First Contact with a new alien race. Other weeks you might find yourself deep in trouble and have to find a solution to your predicament."
Are legs coming in season 7? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm still waiting to walk down the corridors and crawl through the Jefferies Tubes.
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I am not 100% up to date on STO development but I believe some corridors and a few mini-games are suposed to be in for season 2.
Shame the ground game sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Space game was great but the ground game was shallow, boring and not fun (it was like playing CoH without the superpowers). Too bad I had such high hopes for it. If they can fix the ground game up I would probably purchase a lifetime sub.
Maybe if a game studio other than cryptic had made it it would have been awesome.
Disclaimer: I know some people like all aspects, I personally could not get into the away mission part of the game. I absolutely loved the space part though.
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It seems as if the devs mean well, and r
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I really hope BioWare implementing Mass Effect-like multi-player dialogue in TOR will start a trend. One of the first quests I did in WoW's Cataclysm beta even has a morality choice, though I doubt it has much of an impact on the outcome of the questline.
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It's been leaked that City of Heroes is doing dialogue trees in the next major release, so it's coming. If Warcraft does it, everyone will.
Re:Shame the game pure combat! (Score:1)
I Joined up 3 days ago, created a science officer and have been dissapointed that EVERY mission has me as a soldier, no exploration, no boldly going where no toon has gone before just travel to here, beam down, fight a 1 man war then rinse lather repeat. When i do get a mission thats not combat based it usually takes all of 5 mins for it to degenerate into a frag fest. Its a shame too as theres a lot of things it does well, but for me it completly misses the point that star trek is not star wars. Ive got 2
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I enjoyed the time I spent with the game. I got one character to max level and did a few raids all in my first free month. I tried to level a second character but I was doing the exact same missions in mostly the exact same way as my first character (I did not touch Klink cause I hate pvp).
I still plan on coming back for season two and enjoy all the cool additions (ready rooms for one).
I enjoy the time I spend with STO but it does not have the staying power that WoW or Final Fantasy for me.
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Dunno, I liked ground too (Score:2)
Dunno, I actually liked the ground game too. Charging in with a bat'leth was a nice adrenaline rush. Granted, it wasn't something deep or complicated or with tremendous lasting power either, but sometimes playing slice-a-mole with the Romulans is good fun anyway :P
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I found PvE space combat to be ridiculously boring. Fly forward, hold D to start circling my target, and let phaser turrets and photo torpedoes auto-fire until it's dead. Select next target. Hold A this time so the enemy wears down a different shield facing. Repeat. Occasionally press F to scan something. PvP combat at least had enough "oh crap I'm being primaried aaaaaaand I'm dead" excitement to keep me somewhat interested.
Ground combat wasn't any better: walk forward, fire a
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The ground game sucked on the "random" encounters. They were completely dull and boring. The big scripted ground events were absurdly fun--for example, the one where you rescue diplomats at the beachfront starbase. It felt like a movie.
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I feel much the same. Besides being very repetitive, ground combat does -not- deal with high-ping connections well (which means that it's going to suck unless you live in the US). It requires you to quickly respond to combat events . Except, the quickest you could possibly hope to respond is in 150ms, and that is if you guessed what was going to happen and responded before you saw it on screen.
I wish every MMO had stuff like this (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't play STO, but I approve of any developer effort to keep a sense of wonder in the world.
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AQ opening, the undead invasion when Naxx 40 launched, the undead invasion for Lich King, the Sunwell event are big ones.
Now the holiday events are big - Christmas, Lunar New Year, Children's Week, Love Fest, Halloween, Brewfest, Nobelgarden, Pilgrim's Week
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there's going to be drives to free the currently occupied fourth capitals of both factions--the troll home islands and the gnome city--sometime this fall as part of the ramp up to cataclysm. sort of like the materials drive that led up to AQ.
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The most memorable events for me were from Asheron's Call. The whole PK Baelzharon event was fantastic. Devs would log in as the characters and play out their parts, and the players had an effect on what was going on.
Cosmic Retribution (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously... I wonder how long they'll be able to keep it up until all that's left is... well... Spock's Brain 'episodes'.
Re:Cosmic Retribution (Score:5, Insightful)
If Next Generation is any indicator, about five seasons.
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A week's a short time in software development (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't know about that, the guy is vague enough that he could satisfy his goals through the introduction of a chain of 5 quests (or whatever the STO equiv is).
Sometimes it could be getting an assignment to resolve a trade dispute between two races. Other weeks it could be making First Contact with a new alien race. Other weeks you might find yourself deep in trouble and have to find a solution to your predicament.
He didn't elaborate any further in the article so there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume it would be something complex.
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They could take a leaf from a Japanese anime show called "Naruto". It's been airing new episodes [i]every week[/i] since [i]2002[/i]. In that time there have [i]also[/i] been 6 movies, with a 7th due shortly.
Just to show that it can be done.
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Bullcrap. Pressed the wrong button on the preview after I realised which site I was on.
Should have looked like this:
They could take a leaf from a Japanese anime show called "Naruto". It's been airing new episodes every week since 2002. In that time there have also been 6 movies, with a 7th due shortly.
Just to show that it can be done.
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Not sure you can compare this to Naruto. The anime show is following an already-written manga story, so there's no writing involved.
You're forgetting just how much of Naruto is "filler" stories, which do have to be written to keep up with the one-a-week schedule. They're actually a better comparison, because they are really short stories which don't depend on each other much, some only being one episode long.
For the actual development, they use a lot of tricks. They reuse graphics and soundtrack a lot.
I would imagine that there would be an incredible amount of asset re-use in STO, and using the same mission objectives as the ordinary missions (go here, kill these guys, scan that, etc) which makes for nearly total code re-use. And
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Well, they do make horrendously massive use of recaps, footage recycling and fillers. If you removed all the fillers and recaps then barely half the show would remain.
Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Assuming the budget is big enough, you have a set of development teams working on a cycle of independent episodes.
e.g if you have 4 or 5 teams, each team only has to release one episode per month.
I would also presume that the MMO already has the generalised rules for handling quests built in, so its a matter of generating a scenario within the MMO, not coding the MMO itself
Re:A week's a short time in software development (Score:4, Insightful)
Chances are, it would be content and not code. If they have good tools and people experienced at using them, it really can be that fast (week is ample time to create modest quest chain in Bethesda engine for example, and i do not expect moroe than modest half an hour mission for each weekly episode).
It is differece between adding new feature to CMS and writing new article.
Furthemore, chances are that they have several team working on different episodes and alternating in releasing. They could as well have two-three-month release cycle.
Easier solution (Score:2)
Patch monthly, turn the NPC on for the next quest stage weekly. Done! AC has been doing it for a while and it seems to work well for them. The problem is it means monthly patching, which from all reports out of classic AC is really really rough on the dev team and burns them out quickly. They seem to have cut back the amount of content each month just a little, which seems like enough to let the team handle it nowdays, so STO could maybe make it work.
Then again how much new content do you need to entertain
I think they may actually be able to do it (Score:1)
I really hope they pull this off, one of the things I really liked about Asherons Call from Turbine was the monthly updates and I played that for years thanks to the constant "hit" of new stuff.
From what I've seen of the engine (In both Cryptic games), I think they have some very good tools and can add stuff very quickly, so I think they may actually do it
Universe regardless... (Score:4, Insightful)
All I've heard about this MMORPG is its mediocrity. Whether it be its mixed reviews, low scores from players across all the review sites - or simply the fact that Star Trek Online does little to actually expand the frontiers of MMOGs; the glaring fact is that STO is just a forgettable game that is too entrenched in tried-and-tested formula to merit excitement. The grinding crutch that most games of the genre rely upon to retain players is very much intact in STO. I guess for diehard fans who make up much of the game's audience it can provide a great experience in the Trek universe, and there were clearly some competant artists employed to recreate Trek in this fashion.
However whereas EVE which is unique among MMOGs int that actually carving out an adventure or saga of one's own which can (albeit rarely) become something significant for many and even 'make history' as it were...STO just doesn't offer that. A friend of mine who partook in the beta lamented the lack of ease in gathering people together for activity, and as you'd expect from something so generic the philosophical and wondrous elements of finer episodes of Trek are mostly absent too.
If one is looking to experience life in the Trek universe then - as is true with many well-established franchises - one can look to past consoles and eras for Trek themed games: I don't mean pedestrian FPSs like Voyager Elite Force, but earlier with consoles such as the Amiga or early Windows titles: Star Trek: The Next Generation – A Final Unity and the 25th Anneversary edition (for fans of the original 1960s show). Oh yeah, more recent is Bridge Commander which I personally enjoyed for a good long while back in 2003.
Primarily it's these two that stood out in the 1990s era, but there are more worth playing: This page [wikipedia.org] is a good point of reference. Acquiring the titles on PC whether emulated or not is not too much trouble in many cases with the titles mentioned.
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* It have a lot of bugs. It still feels like it should have been a beta.
* It has the most non-combat missions i've ever seen in an MMO. A lot (relatively) of missions is just "beam down, talk to a person, go to another person, scan something, done!".
* The most fun aspect of the game is ship combat, both PvP and PvE. If you liked Pirates of the Burning Sea for its ship combat (and didn't care much for the pirate theme) then you wil
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Bridge Commander felt like playing an above-average plot arc during one of the later TNG or DS9 seasons; the staff on board for the writing fits with this concept. A notable exception was that you as the commander never went on away missions - navigating an area on a planet was never implemented.
The gaming did become repititive; hitting the underside of a few Cardassian Galors with torpedos became less a novel strategy and more routine humdrum. I did get about 30-40 hours out of it which isn't bad for a gam
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A big part of enjoying it is willing suspension of disbelief, just as when we go see a Bond film.
As a player, I know that I am one of twenty thousand "heroes" on my server, each of whom has killed the same zombies, done the same "fedex" quests, and raided most of the same
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I can't disagree with any of those criticisms, but it's not a terrible game. A number of the missions, I thought, were well-done and interesting (though as another poster noted, for every episode, there's a Spock's Brain). There just wasn't enough stuff. After I played through all of the episodes, it became a boring grind.
I quit the game, but I'll go back when I feel they've added enough content to justify paying for another month.
They missed the point. (Score:1)
I'm not interested in the "spirit of the TV show". I loved the show because of what it represented, it someplace I wanted to be. The whole weekly episode thing was just an artifact of the medium, and with an MMO, you don't need structure it like a TV series.
What, no pictures? (Score:1)
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When I started in STO, I was looking forward to the role playing element almost as much as the world(s) they have built up around the IP. But I found that most of the players have been more interested in power-leveling than in playing in the sandbox.
My hope is that after the initial wave of type-A players gets bored, the hardcore Star Trek fans will remain. Then maybe I'll get to play Star Trek, like I used to at recess in grade school. (I was always Captain Kirk--guess I was a bossy kid.)
In the meantime, i
This week on Star Trek Online... (Score:1)
... features a group of exploration ships discovering a new form of life, just before Starfleet Dental (aka Goonswarm) crashes into them for fun and starts both a war with the creatures and a monolithic threadnaught on the forums...
TrekMUSH (Score:1)
As an outsider, it sounds interesting (Score:2)
Haven't ever played the game, but the weekly episode concept sounds intriguing enough to make me think about trying it out.
A good idea seems rarer and rarer these days.
the future of MMOs (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think this is a foretaste of the future of MMO's.
Certainly, they may or may not be able to successfully implement, but I've always wondered at how STATIC MMO's are.
Certainly, for those of us who used to buy a computer game, you were pretty much stuck with whatever the designer(s) envisioned was possible when the game went gold. Occasionally a content patch would be released that might add some little thing (now they sell these as "DLC").
Strangely, MMO's - despite their dynamic foundation and constant-connection to the source servers - have mimicked this pattern. AFAIK the only game that ever tried to really let content change over time was Ultima Online where players could impact (in fact, drove) the economy, and perhaps today EVE, where the player-sourced economy dwarfs whatever is hard-coded by the game.
I'm talking about something less economics and more "world". Certainly the complexities of balance, loot, xp gain mean that it would be a hellish effort to try to add significant BALANCED content on a weekly basis. But would it be so impossible to have NPCs change their clothes over time? Maybe quit jobs and be replaced? Have a merchant vessel arrive on infrequent occasions into a port city, offering rare or unique items for sale? I think WoW has discovered that, between meaningless achievement points and holiday celebrations that players really ENJOY things that add depth to a world without necessarily increasing their dps. The WoW world-events are fun (of course there's some bitching, because change is scary) and memorable.
Now if they just didn't seem quite so "bolted on", discrete, and above all, repetitive we'd be getting somewhere.
Face Facts in MMO Development (Score:1)