I have been a fan of Star Trek for a long time but have yet to try out STO. Currently I am in Haiti, and missed the drop date for STO. However I will be back home in about 2 weeks!!! I was extremely excited for STO to come out but now that it has, most of the reviews I have read are pretty pessimistic. Have any of you played this game? If so what are your thoughts? I dont mind if its not "the most amazing game ever." I understand that the nature of MMOs is that they are an evolving entity. Do you think this game is heading in the right direction with updates? Is it worth investing in so that i can see it improve, having fun along the way? Or do you think its really a lost cause?
Not with Cryptic it's not. They are pretty much out to set a mmo record in terms of quantity, not quality. They really just rush games out, milke players up front with pre-orders and lifetimes, drain what's left with the cash shop and then jump ship to start a "new" game and do it all over again. I put new in quotes because CO and STO and even parts of COH have way too much incommon to be called new. It's just a new skin over an old game. But hey, don't say these things because it hurts their feelings.
Speaking of skins, it's actually funny because for a while in beta STO used the same exact UI as Champions. There were even UI elements and buttons you could click on that did nothing because they were for CO features, they didn't fix it until a few days before the game went live. Even at release a lot of the game options didn't work because they were for things not even in the game, and functions like changing power colors from CO could be used to make your ship lasers bright pink or whatever using scripts.
[quote who="Sanati" reply="27" id="2647413"]Quoting Nesrie, reply 26It's just a new skin over an old game.Speaking of skins, it's actually funny because for a while in beta STO used the same exact UI as Champions. There were even UI elements and buttons you could click on that did nothing because they were for CO features, they didn't fix it until a few days before the game went live. Even at release a lot of the game options didn't work because they were for things not even in the game, and functions like changing power colors from CO could be used to make your ship lasers bright pink or whatever using scripts.[/quote]
The funny part is that Cryptic employees, Roper specifically, gets all hot and bothered if someone actually calls STO a new skin of CO. But the truth of the matter is that it is! The flight combat, I found to be pretty fun but flawed, with weird things like being unable to make a full turn in space, and at least in the beta, whoever goes in first pretty much takes all the aggro and dies. If they had released STO as a stand-alone game with maybe some planned expansion packs in the future, I think it would have been fine. Instead, they made it an MMO which makes the price too high and it really lacks most of the meat of a lot of the other MMO games, the whole interaction part. I spent most of the Beta loading into quests with random people and when the quest was done, so was the group. PvP was broken in the last week, and fighting the crystalline entity had to be the most visually cool but ultimately lame experiences I had.
The game looks good, although I still don't like the artistic style i won't penalize them for it, but the depth isn't there and the longevity isn't there either. Apparently actually voicing that offends Cryptic though. By the way, in case you didn't know, while STO flounders and leaks subs and still doesn't have the content they talked about late in the game, Cryptic is working on another IP they want to screw over and milk.
I liked the free trial of Champions Online fairly well, but I had been hoping they'd learn from its mistakes when developing STO. Unfortunately it was not to be.
Had ground combat involved some diverse missions instead of 90% of them being mob grinding, it might have been a worthwhile addition. Seeing it turn into button-mashing against braindead AI while depending on your own AI teammates that can't do jack should have been an indicator to scrap it.
What's actually there in the space combat simulator part is quite good overall. They really should have made that the focus and perhaps given diplomatic and more planet-based missions in an expansion or major content release down the road.
The worst parts are that in typical Cryptic fashion buffs, attacks and everything to do with combat are based on their namesake. You'll frequently get ship upgrades that say something like +0.1 Starship Tachyon Deflector Array. How much is that bonus? What skills does 'Tachyon Deflector Array' affect? You won't know without researching on wikis devoted to it. The in-game explanation of anything is absent. Odd pseudocode-like phrases are abundant on items and skills. Good luck deciphering.
Next up is that with the game already fairly focused on space combat, there's so little diversity in enemy ships. You'll lose track of how many Birds of Prey and Romulan Warbirds you've disposed of.
My experience is mostly from the beta, so perhaps things have at least improved some, but I seriously doubt there's been any major overhaul of the core attributes of the game. Some of the most fun I had was removed when they strangely lowered the difficulty and stopped enemy ships from being able to launch large salvos of torpedoes. It was quite enjoyable working with others to take down ships that were only a couple levels higher than you or even the same level, but had one or two especially strong abilities that could shred your ship if you weren't paying attention or they got lucky. The issue back then was that since there was absolutely no death penalty, there was no incentive to not just charge into fleets and act suicidally in general.
Still, some very intriguing combat abilities such as torpedo spreads, attack patterns that fired phasers at multiple other ships in the vicinity, engineering teams you could send to friendly ships to repair health, etc. A lot of promise, but just a shoddy job putting the whole package together. I feel bad for anyone who paid for the lifetime subscription as it was plainly a money-making scheme and it's dubious if the game will last more than a year or two.
I've been waiting for Jumpgate Evolution forever too. Not sure what the holdup is on that, but it seems like it's been in beta for years.
They had a beta a while back, and due to feedback, scrapped the game and rebuilt it. Currently, they're teaming up with a F2P company in hopes of releasing it. Not getting my hopes up for this one, but since it's F2P, might as well download it when it comes out.
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