The "No Actual Writing On My Own Site" World Tour 2010 Continues!

“Maybe if I shout “Computer!!” at my mouse?”

Well done.

Last night I found a bug where the Warp to Sector option after a completed mission didnt work and I literally had to Impulse Power to victory.

I’m in the same boat as you Lum. I’ve seen this rodeo before but I preordered the collector’s edition like a battered wife bailing her redneck husband out of jail. He’s learned his lesson this time, things will be different. You’ll see!

I don’t mind being in the Miranda for as long as STO leaves you there. It’s not exactly the same as being stuck at levels 1-10 in WoW for that length of time with only a handful of abilities. The tier 1 ship has the full set of functions and complexity to cope with and learn to make use of.

Server performance, though – that’s what WILL kill this game at birth if Cryptic don’t have their hardware ready in time. Login failures, disconnects and the wonderful “captain in space/ship on the ground” bug (blamed on latency issues) will make a piss poor first impression on launch day.

Poor Scott. He doesn’t realize this is based off the continuum created by the last Star Trek movie. So none of his previous fanboy rules apply. JJ Abrams has your number.

I have been underwhelmed with the beta. I’d like to see more Trekkie drama than pistols and phasers. Maybe Picard negotiating with Q for the last ounce of earl gray left in the universe – and they have to foil fence for it. I’m a life long fan too.

The minute I realized that they weren’t doing space combat from the perspective of the bridge I wrote this game off as fail.

This is going to be the SWG of the Start Trek IP, though that probably isn’t entirely fair to Galaxies.

Like everyone else, I can see the flaws in the game, but I can’t care about them due to the whirling all-consuming maelstrom of nostalgia that surrounds the whole thing.

It’s like this plastic toy Enterprise I had as a kid. It had buttons on it that made various authentic sound effects. My parents got it for me from a garage sale, and the warp nacelles had long ago fallen off – but damn if I didn’t run around the room hitting the photon torpedo button for hours anyway. Who cares if part of it is broken? It’s my very own Enterprise!

STO is pretty much the same way. Who cares if it’s buggy? I have my own starship! IT MAKES THE PHOTON NOISE. YES!

Let me be a ray of sunshine in the darkness of negativity, especially from the MMORPG.com forums. I’ve been playing beta and have been following the game for awhile. Also huge Trek fan. I can say that the players are not ripping Cryptic apart over the little stuff of the lore. In fact the game is filled with the little bits of lore Trekkies love. Missions have lots of references, some pretty obscure, from episodes and films of the various series.

One thing people seem to forget about MMOs is that they grow and improve over time. So maybe it will launch a little sooner than optimal, but Cryptic has 20 million reasons to release it when they will, that’s the bonus they’re getting from Atari for fulfilling the release window. That, and the lifetime subscriptions (I have one) will get them over the hump while they add content for Klingons and improve the weaker areas.

And improve it will. Don’t like the game at launch? 6 months or a year will probably make the game one that could shut up all but the most bitter critics. But I find that getting in on the beginning usually comes with some benefits as well as hassles over bugs at launch. We’ll take advantage of everything the devs nerf or change before they do it. And of course, by pre-ordering, I’m getting all the geek thrills of flying the original Enterprise, playing a joined Trill, and putting my crew in the TOS uniforms.

For some reason, game forums have a ferocity of argument only matched by the extremely low stakes of such arguments. Oh no! The game has bugs! That’s obviously more important than Haiti or anything in the real world, given the degree of shrillness.

Lastly, people are writing this game’s epitaph already. I wish we could actually call them on this after they’re proven very, very wrong. But forum threads are forgotten soon enough. Star Trek has a huge draw to the IP, attracting both MMO players and Star Trek fans. Since SW:TOR wont be out until 2011 it also gives STO a big window to get in on the sci-fi fan market.

I predict several hundred thousand subscribers or more at launch, and they will keep a lot of them, plenty enough to keep the game up for the long haul. They have the opportunity to make several expansions of the game too since there is so much lore in the IP that it can always be mined for more.

I guess some people will gripe at anything.

I’d be curious what your thoughts about the last patch are, Lum

Especially the implementation of a skill cap with the current way skillpoints are spent and the layout of the skilltrees.

Perhaps something like you want will come in the future. I can think of ways to “watch” the same game interface from the viewscreen, but it probably would be inferior to the current system in actual combat. But if I can imagine it, and a large number of people want it, I think they will implement some form of bridge combat in the future. Will it be Bridge Commander? Probably not, but BC wasn’t the best game, even the best Star Trek game around. Still I’ve seen countless references and instances of the shows and films during beta.

So never say never.

I agree, never say never.

But the truth is for myself, and I suspect other gamers as well, games like these have a window. Once that window of time closes the likelihood of ever playing that games.

Right now I am kind of busy with the whole Fall of the Lich King thing, but once we down Arthas I am up to trying new things. As it stands STO won’t be one of them, I’ll probably just end up playing ME2 and Dragon Age DLC.

Had they actually taken the time to develop a solid combat system based around the bridge, maybe. But not too far on the horizon lies a Cataclysm and an Old Republic. I don’t think post patches fixes of STO will be something I am even thinking about by then.

Who knows, maybe someday Bioware will get the ST license. But if I had to guess I think Bioware is using SWTOR as a guinea pig/advertisement, and the real end game is not another license but a Mass Effect or Dragon Age MMO.

I went lifetime because a) I played Guild Wars for more than 4 years, I expect to play Star Trek Online a long time too, b) I don’t like monthly payments either, now I’ll never have one for STO, and c)If I want to take a break for Starcraft 2, Guild Wars 2, and/or SW:TOR next year, I wont feel badly about paying for a game I’m not currently playing. I expect the game will still be there when I come back, as I wrote above.

I do expect lots of things to change and hopefully improve over the next year, I can play it then if I get bored with it now. But I’ve not been bored by beta, I’m ready to do it for real and not for practice in beta already.

And the “no playing MMOs for reasons that ought to be considered legitimate by professionals” category fits, too.

Oh yes. Lifetime sub is mine. I’m hoping a lot of age 45+ players like myself will be playing this one.