Should I try out Star Trek Online?

[Lord Revan]

It doesn't help that from what I've heard PvP is horribly unbalanced (even more so then PvE).

[The Romulan Republic]

Another day, another band of Cardassian extremists who somehow think that an Admiral who waded through fleets of Borg and Undine is someone they should be fighting.

[Lord Revan]

well Mirwast had flown her ship against fleets of Iconian ships and came out the victor, yet still those True Way extremists think they got a prayer when all they got is a handful of Hidekis and Galors.

[The Romulan Republic]

This last mission, to be honest, wasn't even terribly challenging. Their were no ship battles that were really hard, and the only time I had a really tricky fight was taking on the boss in his base, where he had holoprojectors creating new troops out of thin air.

Quite short, relatively easy, and fairly forgettable. But then I think its a mission I've had sitting around for a while unfinished, so maybe its just below my current level.

[LastShadow]

Its an ok game, fun for what it is, you get to fly ships so theres that. For free to play its pretty good, interior designs of the ship have 0 sense of scale. But the ships are pretty cool, and the missions are fun the first 10 or so times.

Its not an all the time game, i come back to it every now and then just for funsies. I like the different ships, i wish there was more to it, but i hear they have added some stuff recently to make it better i havent played it in a while.

All in all its fun enough and worth the go if you like star trek.

[Lord Revan]

actually the interiors are designed that way due to the camera system or more specifically the limits of said system, it's gameplay demand rather then a design choice. Kind of like how whole of Azeroth has similar surface area to NYC in WoW but in lore these are suppose to be large continents, but it wouldn't be fun if it took weeks or months to travel from one side of azeroth to the other and most of that would empty space anyway as that's how it realistically would be.

[TheFeniX]

Yea, but you don't see doors as if designed for giants. The towns in most video games are scaled down to serve the gameplay, but what's actually there is to scale for the inhabitats. But the ship interiors for STO were such a rush job, Cryptic likely didn't care. They just wanted the playerbase to shut up already about it. So, they gave them/us garbage, then started selling reskins in the C-store the second they could.

There is no excuse for what Cryptic did with starship interiors except straight laziness. Even Bioware did a much better job with ship interiors in SWTOR (if not the designs themselves) and dealing with a few odd camera issues was better than having what STO got considering it's source material spends so much time with cameras pointed at a ship bridge.

[LastShadow]

actually the interiors are designed that way due to the camera system or more specifically the limits of said system, it's gameplay demand rather then a design choice. Kind of like how whole of Azeroth has similar surface area to NYC in WoW but in lore these are suppose to be large continents, but it wouldn't be fun if it took weeks or months to travel from one side of azeroth to the other and most of that would empty space anyway as that's how it realistically would be.

On the ground, sure, maybe even in the interior of Earth space dock. but DS9 and the ship interiors are CRAZY big, they could have scaled them back by HALF and they would have been more appropriate. The interiors denote vessels at least twice the size they should be, look a the interior of a runabout, we have alot of reference for those from DS9, boom massive interior.

Yea, but you don't see doors as if designed for giants. The towns in most video games are scaled down to serve the gameplay, but what's actually there is to scale for the inhabitats. But the ship interiors for STO were such a rush job, Cryptic likely didn't care. They just wanted the playerbase to shut up already about it. So, they gave them/us garbage, then started selling reskins in the C-store the second they could.

There is no excuse for what Cryptic did with starship interiors except straight laziness. Even Bioware did a much better job with ship interiors in SWTOR (if not the designs themselves) and dealing with a few odd camera issues was better than having what STO got considering it's source material spends so much time with cameras pointed at a ship bridge.

The LARGEST alien character you can possibly make is dwarfed by most of the damned doors, its crazy. But hey, who doesnt want to pilot type 15 shuttles and work bees through the corridors? Maybe make an Argo track out of them? At the very least with corridors that big you would expect to see more people in them....

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I've had all manner of trouble with the Omega minigame, it'll work perfectly one day, then the next day it'll end almost as soon as it begins. Luckily because I'd farmed enough shards/slivers/fragments last year to get 100 upgrades it wasn't too big a deal. Not bad, until you realise that when sharing between 7 characters it suddenly isn't that much. Still I reckon I've managed to grind out a couple dozen kits. If I ever get around to creating a Vulcan Sci character they might come in handy!

In space, PvP is ridiculous- to be competitive you need a completely different skill-point build to PvE and is no more rewarding than it. What's also ridiculous is the Dil-to-Zen exchange rate, it's over 300 right now. It's going to have to come down a lot before I'll even think about shelling out on the T6 flagships.

[Elheru Aran]

STO interior scale is just fucking absurd. Try walking around a Klingon Bird of Prey sometime. It's like being in the Superdome. And that's a boat that's supposed to have about the same amount of room as a double-wide trailer, or at least not much more!

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The funny thing is, you can select which interior you want to use. Even the small interior for the escort is huge!

Proof if proof was needed that regular play doesn't mitigate downloading updates- todays maintenance has reulted in an update 1GB in size

[TheFeniX]

STO interior scale is just fucking absurd. Try walking around a Klingon Bird of Prey sometime. It's like being in the Superdome. And that's a boat that's supposed to have about the same amount of room as a double-wide trailer, or at least not much more!

Even some of the ship scales themselves were way off IIRC. Nehg'vars are supposed to be xboxhueg, but I don't recall them being much bigger scale-wise than a BoP. And as mentioned, even some of the vanilla locations such as DS9 are pretty far off. But the ship interiors make sense on why they are so shitty: Cryptic never intended to have them in the game. It wasn't until the playerbase in a game where the source material is pretty much centered around a ship (or space station) bridge devoting next to zero time to them. Really, that didn't piss me off so much, it was their almost immediate decision afterward to throw reskins in the c-store after fucking the player-base.

It's been forever and a day, so I can't find any info, but I also recall ship bridges being promised outright before launch. Closed-beta tester complaints were met with: "don't worry guys, they will be in the launch."

In space, PvP is ridiculous- to be competitive you need a completely different skill-point build to PvE and is no more rewarding than it.

I didn't mind this so much when I played out of the beta. Then again, my Cruiser builds were OP in PvE and PvP. But without dual specs, it's idiotic to say the least. Even when I played, it didn't cost you a whole Hell of a lot to respec (but this was pre-F2P) however, having builds in a third party spec builder website is stupid gameplay design. Sure, it worked fine for Klinks considering if you didn't PvP you were doing it wrong, but it forced you to just not run fun PvE abilities at all because it was such a hassle to respec.

Sadly, the game that didn't even need a real respec system (FFXIV) because there was no real options for a given class was also the one that said "fuck it" and made it trivially easy to respec. That said, at least the bridge officer setup of STO makes it viable to run sub-standard builds and just swap what you want.

But this is a problem with MMOs in general. The high-end content almost always requires specific builds: PVP or PvE and any deviation makes you the worst player ever.™ Damn, even Warframe suffers from this as many weapons which do great in the 30 level range are completely worthless in the 60-100 range as they will do next to no damage. Meanwhile, other weapons are murder machines even below max-rank (looking at you Tonkor). But just any weapon capable of crit % stacking is bound to destroy most enemies. It's so bad, as far as I know: weapons aren't allowed to crit in PvP because they have no way to balance this without gutting PvE.

Really, PvP and PvE just need to be completely broken out in these types of games, but instead everyone goes with the Blizzard approach. Namely "We have no fucking idea what we're doing, so Warriors are on top this season." The joke of Raiding content in Cata making Tanks supremely overpowered was a hilarious road hump in this mentality and I got mine while the getting was good.

[Elheru Aran]

I've never understood why they didn't implement a bridge-view ship control scheme. I get that 2.5D space combat would be hard to pull off with that... but Bridge Commander managed it. Hell, they could split-screen it if they wanted to. Bridge view on one screen, external view on the other.

[Lord Revan]

I'm guessing the space controls are a variation (mechanically) of the ground controls so that they wouldn't have to develop 2 different controls styles and ground is third person.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

IIRC they answered the whole "bridge view" question long ago, because it would require a complete redesign of the game engine for something which is at the end of the day entirely cosmetic. And they'd also have to reduce the bridge sizes to more realisitic proportions

[TheFeniX]

If the "spawn in space as your character, not your ship" bug is any indication: it wouldn't be all that feasible to have controllable NPCs in a ship model that you can control as part of the ship since you are the ship. The implementation they had cut both ways for Ground and Space instances: why do anything else?

The real answer is Cryptic didn't care to because they weren't really in the mood to make a Star Trek MMO. Because blowing shit up sells more to non-ST fans? They had their idea for space pew pews and the implementation is so generic, you could do model/sound effect swaps and it would cover any other Sci-Fi MMO design.

The one thing Cryptic really went all out on was the character creator. A shame really since every other MMO I've played has garbage in comparison.

[Lord Revan]

If you play with Foundry at creation system at all you notice that only major mechanical difference between ground and space is that of scale (if you put certain space elements onto ground map it starts to lag badly as the space map elements in ground scale are massive), everything else seems pretty much identical.

[RogueIce]

And as mentioned, even some of the vanilla locations such as DS9 are pretty far off.

If you're talking the exterior, IIRC that was an intentional upscale because they felt DS9's canon size made it look too wimpy, especially when you had the Space Parking Lot of ships clustered around it.

The interior is weird, though, if they did that off-scale. Because they already had a perfectly legitimate reason for fuckoff huge ceilings as it's two decks high anyway on the Promenade. Not sure why the clickable doors are still pretty big, though.

[LastShadow]

If the "spawn in space as your character, not your ship" bug is any indication: it wouldn't be all that feasible to have controllable NPCs in a ship model that you can control as part of the ship since you are the ship. The implementation they had cut both ways for Ground and Space instances: why do anything else?

The real answer is Cryptic didn't care to because they weren't really in the mood to make a Star Trek MMO. Because blowing shit up sells more to non-ST fans? They had their idea for space pew pews and the implementation is so generic, you could do model/sound effect swaps and it would cover any other Sci-Fi MMO design.

The one thing Cryptic really went all out on was the character creator. A shame really since every other MMO I've played has garbage in comparison.

I miss the "spawn into stations and ground as your ship" bugs, nothing like booting around ESD as an Oddy class.

But in all truth aside from the novelty of flying around in the ships, it was pretty generic, not even good generic.

The class types didnt the roles correctly, IE the Healer/Tank/DPS roles, they did a crap job trying to shoehorn them in and then did the poorest execution of it they could.

[Lord Revan]

STO seems to be down, I got DCed and I can't get back.

[Elheru Aran]

STO seems to be down, I got DCed and I can't get back.

It's not just the regular maintenance?

[Lord Revan]

STO seems to be down, I got DCed and I can't get back.

It's not just the regular maintenance?

nah a) that's on thurdays not tuesdays b) it's back (sort of).

[Lord Revan]

Anyone got any idea how big the Callisto light escorts are suppose to be (in relation of to canon ships or the actual length)?

[LastShadow]

Anyone got any idea how big the Callisto light escorts are suppose to be (in relation of to canon ships or the actual length)?

Big enough to be another disappointing C-Store ship?

Note: I haven't booted it up in awhile, i am literally assuming they are new C-Store ships as most new ships are.

[Lord Revan]

Anyone got any idea how big the Callisto light escorts are suppose to be (in relation of to canon ships or the actual length)?

Big enough to be another disappointing C-Store ship?

Note: I haven't booted it up in awhile, i am literally assuming they are new C-Store ships as most new ships are.

That was about as useless comment as you could probably make, but the Callisto are a Light Escorts tied to the Jupiter-class carrier well you can technically use them in any Fed carrier but to unlock them you need the Jupiter and cannot be bought independently, though from what I've hear when the work the Callisto are the best hangar pets in game atm.