The best Star Trek Online beginners guide EVER!

BigBadB over at his new blog The  Engines Cannae Take It! has posted a most excellent character guide. Go take a look!

You can see my review of Star Trek Online here

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Star Trek Online: A few suggestions!

Star Trek Online has been my main form of entertainment since head start began. There are a few things that are really ruining the immersion of the Star Trek world for me. These have been brought up before by other people but I have some simple solutions that I believe would work very well. I am still not ready to give it a review but these things are bugging me and I need to complain

• Zoning and sector space: There is a lot of zoning and it is very distracting, and sector space could use some work. I propose that you are able to bring up the galaxy map at any time and set a course for anywhere all zoning is done automatically. When you zone a warp like video is shown instead of the screen shots and the transition is somehow smoothed out so it looks like you are entering warp not zoning. Sector space should have the grid removed and less people per zone maybe 2 or 3. If this is not possible they could remove the squares around the people in sector space so they are not so obvious. These steps would be easy to implement and I believe would add a large amount of polish to the title.
• Feel of progression: I have played a little over 10 hours and I am only level 6. I do not feel I have gained much power in that time and it is beginning to wear on me. They should add an option to get a new ship at level 5 that is a slight upgrade to your starter one. They should also make kills worth about 5 times the skill points they currently are. I can spend 25 minutes fighting ships and only make like 5 skill points this is entirely unacceptable and makes you find ways to avoid fighting because it takes so long. I don’t want the fights shortened they are nice this way but I want something for my time.
• Chat format and bag space: These are very minor but the chat format is extremely annoying. I do not need to know the zone people are in and I don’t need their full name. Half of the first line of chat is useless info. Make an option to turn off zone info and an option to only show account name. There are too many different types of crafting materials make a separate bag for it.

I am enjoying the game a lot and these should not been seen as me hating the game.

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Some Star Trek Online Screen Shots

This is on one of the first missions you get. I am about to rescue a stranded mining ship

This is right after I beamed down to a planet. This has been my favorite mission so far. It had several steps with multiple ground and space missions. It shows me what this game is capable of.

Star Trek Online

Well that is about all I have been doing lately. I am in the head start and I will post all my thoughts on it when I get to T2. I am enjoying a few of the missions and it is a nice change of pace.

Where did the seamless worlds go?

When the second generation of MMOs (DAoC, AO, FFXI, and Shadowbane) was being release this was one of the biggest selling points for these games. Big open worlds and no zones, at the time this was one of the big complaints about EQ (King of the mountain at that time). So all of the developers were working on ways of making a game that did not have small zones like EQ.

DAoC actually accomplished its goal of making most of the world seamless. The only times that you zoned were into dungeons and the capitol cities. When they added an expansion you would have to zone in to it also. But the world was big and alive. You could actually walk around the capitol cities they existed in the game world. This really added to the feeling that you were in a real world and felt real.

Then out came the 3^rd generation MMOs (EQ2 and WoW) EQ2 stuck to its guns and continued the zoning thing the zones were huge but you still had zones. WoW on the other hand has a pretty much seamless world there are zones but only where they make sense. Wow’s system is very similar to DAoC and I personally believe is the right way to do it.

Now come the current generation of games and the first one out of the gate is Age of Conan. Age of Conan decided to go extra heavy on the zones. Then WAR is released and what do you know every zone is instanced. We also have the recent cryptic MMOs that don’t even try to hide that the entire game is instanced.

Now that the history lesson is over, why are they doing this?

Developers will tell you it is to customize the experience for the player, it is make the story better, or even reduce lag. But the real reason is Laziness! That is why. By making everything instanced they are able to dynamically allocate resources based on load and it saves a ton of money and time doing it this way. Every server can load any instance, it is really a very cool technology. But it is killing immersion in games.

In WAR the map and the physical world do meld well together through most of the game. But when you get to the end game and you do a city siege all of the cool siege weapons that you have been using just disappear and you zone into the city. You are not trying to break the walls down you zone into it and fight over some flags. Then you fight some PVE battles and in the end you really had no effect on the real world. Mythic really screwed the pooch on city sieges they should have been epic but they ended up being and epic PVE zerg fest.

Now to the game that prompted this entire wall of text Star Trek online. The entire game is instances which would not be so bad if they were large, but they are not. What kind of space has small zones? Space is huge the zones should be huge. They should all be connected by space it should be seamless. Cryptic really missed the entire premise of Star Trek

Space… the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.

How the hell can you do any of that if there are 30 other people in the zone with you? There should be expanses of empty space with random encounters and planets to explore. How can you make a Star Trek game without exploration? HOW?

By making the entire game instanced. They were lazy and decided to make it on the Champions Online engine because it was easy. But don’t worry you can customize your ship like nobody’s business.

Developers stop being lazy and make a real game. If you want to even try to compete with WoW the world needs to feel like a world.

Star Trek Online

Continuing with my tourist themed post, I have decided to pre-order STO and try out the open beta. Ever since SWG was screwed up I have been waiting for a good sci-fi game. I know EVE is out there and I try it every once in awhile but it just does not scratch that itch. Will STO be that game? I really do not know, but I have got to try it. I just hope that it does not suffer from the same problem I had with Champions Online of running out of quests. That is a total deal breaker for me especially in a theme park game like CO.

I really do not know anything about the game. I have not been following it and I have no idea what it’s Major “features” are. But it does have one thing going for it and that is Star Trek. It is one of the most complete sci-fi worlds in existence and it can go almost anywhere with it and that is exciting.

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2010 Predictions

Everyone is doing it so I thought I would jump in and make some predictions for the New Year.

Here they are

1. WAR will stop loosing subscribers and start a slow and steady climb up. It will get a huge infusion of players when an expansion is announced that introduces a third faction
2. Aion will continue to lose subscribers and will settle at about 200k it will merge servers and will release most of the features in its visions trailer. The first features to be released will be the graphics enhancements and player housing.
3. WoW will not release Cataclysm and will bleed subscribers as people burn out and run out of content. Most of them will go to F2P games
4. Star Trek Online will be just like champions online nice opening numbers and people will quickly quit because it does not have any content.
5. Mortal Online will release and will not totally suck like Darkfall did
6. Syncaine at Casual Hardcore will burn out on Darkfall and his post will turn into DF hate posts as he switches to Mortal Online or FreeRealms he will deny ever loving DF and delete all of his DF love posts.

And a few long shot predictions

1. WAR or/and Lotro will go F2P
2. Everquest 3 (Different name Norrath Online) will be announced and this will be the WoW killer (2011 prediction). It will also be F2P with a subscription option
3. We will see no AAA titles released this year
4. Star Wars Galaxies will be shutdown

There you go!