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It’s quite an event in it’s own right for an MMO other than World of Warcraft to be advertised on TV. Because the embedded player is extremely poorly behaved, and will attempt to redirect your browser to IGN after it is done (Please come back!), I’ll put it after the fold. Hopefully it’ll turn up on youtube eventually and I can replace it.  Episode 8 – Unequal Odds
Deep in the outer reaches of the solar system, Jack Steel has taken the fight to the Qaxorian enemy, only to discover that the Starblade’s weapons are useless against the alien shielding. Now, surrounded by enemy vessels, Jack and his friends face a tough fight to escape. If you happen to like our little show, do please share it with anyone else you think might be interested. Season one’s Episodes 1-7 are also available through the player below. The Star Trek Online headstart has been having a few difficulties. The servers have been rather slow, with zoning times often so long that you get kicked out for inactivity, if you’re lucky enough to not hang on zoning altogether. From time to time the servers crash for a few hours. Such is the way of headstart, which as I am constantly reminded, is just as good an excuse for any game issues as “This is Beta!”. Login queues have been implemented to try and improve ingame performance, but do little to sooth out-of-game-because-we’re-still-queueing annoyance. A lot of people, myself included, have been finishing missions only to not receive the promised reward. This breaks one of the cardinal rules of MMOs: Never mess with a player’s stuff. While not being a big deal for me in the case of equipment, which I’d outlevel soon enough anyway, it is a problem in the case of rare Bridge Officers. The green and blue named Bridge Officers are superior to the ones you can buy on the station, and are intended to grow alongside you. Losing them has a long-term effect on your character.  My least favourite STO screen. The obvious concern amongst many is “If the servers are this bad during Headstart, what is it going to be like when we release properly?” I’m not so sure that we’re going to see all that much difference. Surely anyone who wanted to play from the game’s launch would have pre-ordered, and so been in the headstart? Headstarts are really the true launch of a game, but calling them a headstart provides the developer with a little wriggle-room to excuse early problems. Of course, I have no numbers to back up my suspicions, but it would feel kind of unlikely that “launchday” would see much of an increase in the number of people playing (or at least *trying* to play) at any one time. Not a massive one, at any rate. I’d be interested to know what other folks, especially inside the industry, have experienced in that regard. I hope I’m right, because if I’m wrong, on Tuesday the queue to log in is going to be extraordinary, and the servers will probably melt. There has been a lot of dissatisfaction that most pre-order goodies are not available during headstart, and it is easy to understand why. They are mostly low-level equipment that is only useful in the early phases of the game, or like the joined trill, a race that you have to start as. As, with so few character slots, we are not going to be levelling a lot of alts, it seems very poor planning to not have the pre-order items available when they would be most useful. I’m waiting on a joined trill, myself, but with the vanishing Bridge Officer issue I’m not all that sorry that I’m being forced to wait. Update, 1st of February. The servers are still collapsing constantly, and if anything it is getting worse. I am beginning to dread the morrow. There are bizarre reports that Amazon.uk has cancelled all pre-orders of the gold edition of STO today, right at the last minute, leaving folks without their Borg Bridge Officers. Something very strange going on there. Possibly a result of large numbers of people cancelling their own orders, or maybe a supply issue? Just in, a post from Zinc:
Another patch. We’re now up to version 20100123a.14, but we’ve had no release notes since 20100123a.1 back on the 23rd of January. Ahh, the hours before a game launches. Around the world, people are attempting to log in, just to see if somehow the servers have come up earlier than expected. They haven’t, and they won’t, but we can’t resist checking every few minutes anyway. Theoretically they should be coming up at 6 pm GMT. We’ve also had some extra information about what additions to STO are planned over the next couple of months. The Klingons amongst us will be the happiest, with their lack of content being thoroughly sorted, by the sound of things.:
While we’re waiting, here is DarkMateria’s Worf song. He’s the same chap that made the more famous Picard song, but this one is just as good in my book. But then I like Klingon opera! Cryptic let us know what’s in store over the next month: Note: This is my opinion of Star Trek Online as it currently stands just before launch. Like any MMO, it is likely to change greatly over the months and years, and not everything I say here will necessarily hold true at the time of reading. Like so many, I had high expectations for a game based on Star Trek. I don’t think those expectations were unrealistic. Indeed, most of what I expected had already been done in other games. I love Star Trek, and I wanted to love this game. I was, as any of you that have bravely read all thirteen parts of my liveblog may have guessed, pretty darn disappointed. If you have a spare half hour and like watching paint dry, you can find the start of that epic here. I found both good and bad on that adventure, and depending on what you’re looking for in STO, you may find it more encouraging. Myself, I was looking for an MMORPG. I have a lot of issues with STO, but I’ve already written about a million words on it, so I’ll try to keep this short: War is everywhere!Combat was always going to be a big part of any Star Trek MMO. I can live with (and enjoy!) having more fights in an hour of gameplay than would normally happen in a season of TNG. I did expect to be able to limit casualties, through diplomacy, trickery, or disabling ships. On the ground I expected to be able to set phasers to stun, and be able to leave my enemies unconscious but alive, ready to be beamed to the brig. Instead, I leave corpses and burning hulks in my wake. Some people, especially on the forums, say that it is WAR!!! That we can’t act like Federation officers in the TV shows because we’re at war and the rules all change: Firstly, us being at war was brought in after the fact as an excuse for the game being all about killing. Secondly, the rules don’t change in war. Not for the Federation. We’re still supposed to abhor violence except when strictly necessary, and supposed to try to limit casualties on BOTH sides. In STO you have a mission where your job is to kill the witnesses to deeds Starfleet don’t want reported. Picard would resign his commission if he was ordered to do something so obviously against everything the Federation stands for. “The first duty of every Starfleet Officer is to the truth.”. The non-combat missions consist of you wandering around an empty planet, or bit of space finding glowy things (usually 5 of them) and pressing F. Sometimes they mix it up a bit and you have to fight enemies AND press F at glowy things. Sometimes those glowy things are people and don’t actually glow, but they work in much the same manner. Combat in STO is fun, don’t get me wrong. If you want an online ship-combat game then you’ll probably really enjoy this. I also enjoy the ground combat, which is quite chaotic and surprisingly tactical. The lack of choice. The problem-solving aspect of Star Trek has been completely neglected. Any interaction with a console or device is simply a case of it being one more glowy object you have to walk up to and press F at. If only they’d taken the time to have actual engineering/science skills, and minigames to use them in. NPCs too are just objects you press F at to talk to. You might have a few different questions you can ask them, but in the end, you have to press the green line to carry on with the mission. They feel like mere automatons. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the “diplomatic” exploration missions, where they ask for a resource, you give it to them, and then thats the end of the mission. Mike Singleton’s games showed, two decades ago, how you could procedurally generate interestingish NPCs with their own likes, dislikes, goals, and desires. There was no need for STO’s NPCs to feel so static. Pull Up! Pull Up!!! Klingons Crafting Where are our scientists and engineers, building clever contraptions, and jury-rigging ship improvements? Researching cures for mysterious plagues, or inventing a weapon that can harm an otherwise invulnerable space-worm? To EndStar Trek Online is in many ways like Pirates of the Burning Sea, but without the in-depth economy, and the meaningful RvR. Even with those positive differences, I still tired of PotBS (though I pop back from time to time) as one ship combat feels very much like another. Unlike on the land, there is far less variety of location and enemy to make you feel you’re doing something different. STO has exactly this same problem. I pre-ordered from Direct2Drive. They have a no return policy on MMOs, even if you change your mind before launch. If it were not for that, I would have cancelled my pre-order. As it is, I will play out my included month, and I suppose I’ll see what sort of state the game is at that point. Maybe magical things will happen between now and then, but we need more features, not just more of the same sort of content we already have. I’ve been at this too long to trust developer promises terribly much though. Final advice for any MMO developer that happens to swing by: 1. Stop designing MMO to be released on both PCs and consoles. You end up removing half the depth, the game fails, and then it never ends up coming out on a console in the end anyway. See: Champions Online, Age of Conan. 2. You need to try to appeal to multiple playstyles. The successful MMOs knew this. STO, I fear, will only appeal to people who really really like the limited space combat it offers. Perhaps also the subset of Star Trek fans who find the bits outside of the fight scenes boring. 3. Don’t make all the best stuff pre-order bonuses. I know that the idea of someone buying multiple copies of the game in order to get all the gear is the sort of thing that makes accountants weep tears of joy. Personally I find it rather exploitative. STO made the uniforms from the television shows all different pre-order bonuses, leaving us with unfamiliar, and not terribly nice uniforms. Being like Picard or Sisco is why so many people are buying the game. It boggles my mind that something so iconic, and able to bring joy, is considered an extra. That greed will cost in the long run. Some folks will enjoy Star Trek Online for what it is. You might be one of them, and even if you only get a month or so of enjoyment out of it, you might consider that a good deal. Maybe I had unreasonable expectations. I hope, one day, someone makes the Star Trek MMO I dreamed of. Cross-server instanced PvP is coming to Norrath as part of Everquest 2’s Sentinel’s Fate Expansion release. As part of the GU, they’ll be available to all subscribers, whether or not we have the expansion pack yet.  Maltheas gets a bit of practice in for EQ2's Battlegrounds! EQ2 has had Arena ever since the Desert of Flames expansion. They were briefly popular, but fell into disuse and these days you can queue as long as you like, but you’re not going to get a fight. These were not cross-server, which didn’t help the matter. This then, is sort of Arenas Mark II. I wonder what’ll become of the old Arena. It had some perfectly decent maps, so perhaps they could eventually upgrade it with their new Battleground cross-server technology. There are also open-world PvP servers, but, having tried one once, they are not for everyone. Certainly not for me, when I want to get a bit of questing done. Consensual PvP, on the other hand, appeals to almost everyone, provided it doesn’t interfere with their main playstyle. PvP is one of those subjects that gets a lot of folks hot under the collar. Many are saying that Battlegrounds have no place in EQ2, or that it was a waste of Dev time. Me, I feel that it is better to create new sorts of things to do, as has been done here, rather than to just make more of the same. We have more than enough PvE to be getting on with, and more incoming. EQ2’s new feature is clearly targeted at folks who enjoy the instanced PvP part of games like WoW and Warhammer, but who might also appreciate EQ2’s greater depth. For those of us already dwelling in Norrath, we can use this new option, or not, according to our individual lights. I’ll certainly give them a try, and if they turn out to be fun I might Battleground a fair bit. Having a wide range of activities to choose from is one thing that sets the older-school MMOs like EQ2 apart from the more recent ones. I like choices, and was often a bit irritated I couldn’t find anyone to join me for a game of capture the flag in the original Arena. The cross-server nature of Battlegrounds should make a match far easier to get into. Provided this new feature has been done with care, I think it can only help EQ2 attract new players. As the new player experience launches with GU55, the more Norrath has to offer, the more of them’ll stick. I’m quite looking forward to it. While I am a bit of a carebear (though tell that to my foes in PotBS and WAR :) ), I do like a bit of a scrap from time to time. The appearance of Battlegrounds, which has taken me quite by surprise, makes me wonder what else SOE might have in store for us in the coming month.
You can find more info, including pics and maps, at the official EQ2 Battlegrounds site.
I can always use more statues! Update: Apparently Battlegrounds will only be for folks over level 80 to begin with. Maltheas says “Booos!!”. Other tiers will open up in later game updates. I don’t really see the logic to this. It somewhat sticks the knife in my argument that it’ll help attract new players. Certainly folks ain’t going to be able to try them out in their trial period. |
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