Star Trek Online

[Morreion]

Star Trek Online - Star Trek Online, commonly referred to as STO, is the title of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) being developed by Cryptic Studios based on the popular Star Trek series created by Gene Roddenberry. The game is set in the 25th century, 30 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis.[2] After its completion, Star Trek Online will become the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game within the Star Trek franchise. Release is set for 2010.

STO official site

MMORPG.com STO overview page

Ten Ton Hammer STO roundup page

Dev chat, 7/14/09

[Morreion]

Star Trek Online release date set (Massively)

February 2nd, 2010.

Hands-on with Star Trek Online's space combat (Massively)

See what makes Fleet Actions a big deal in Star Trek Online (Massively)

Ground combat! Star Trek Online community answers (Massively)

STO is essentially PotBS (Keen and Graev)

Anyone else agree? Watch the Part 1 and Part 2 videos (Part 2 embedded below) and, if you played Pirates of the Burning Sea, you’ll see quite plainly how STO is going to be almost exactly like it. The naval combat in PotBS looks exactly like this space ship combat with ships circling each other jockying for shots on the hull (or shields in STO) weak spots and focusing on one area to weaken it and bring it down. Damaging crews to weaken a ship and using different attacks to accomplish it; in STO it’s shuttles and in PotBS it’s grape shot and the like. When it mentioned boarding parties I was waiting for it to show us a similar scenario that we saw in PotBs where it teleports you to the ship and you do a quick skirmish to see who wins. Heck, we could still see that implemented.

Star Trek Online: Inside Beta: Missions (MMORPG.com)

SS Azura

In the first mission that I undertook, I was sent to the aid of a Federation cargo ship called the SS Azura. The Azura is under attack by Orions. My first order of business was to fend off the attackers. This was your more typical "destroy all attackers" objective. After completing the space combat portion of the mission, I learn that the ship has suffered heavy damage, numerous plasma conduits have ruptured and that they have been boarded. Like a good Starfleet Ensign, I beam over to the ship with my away team to help out.

Once on board the Azura, I see damaged systems and unconscious crewmen. I scan the nearest crewman and learn that he's been overcome by radiation from the leaking systems and that I can beam them to my ship's sickbay as soon as I get those leaks fixed.

My away team and I make our way through the ship, interacting with the appropriate consoles to shut down the leaks which have been blocking us off from the Captain in Main Engineering. Once we shut down the leaks, we are able to beam injured crewmen away and make our way to Engineering.

Upon arriving in Main Engineering, we find that the Warp Core is too heavily damaged and is going to breach, so we have to fight our way back to our beam-in point to return to our own ship. Once back on board, we are hailed by an Orion battleship. Bigger and more powerful, it tells me to back off or be destroyed. I fight the battleship, which basically equates to a small "boss fight" before beaming the captain and remaining crew from the Azure to safety. Mission complete.

Lots of good detail on missions (quests) in STO in this article.

[Morreion]

Star Trek Online: Preview, Part One (MMORPG.com)

The Star Trek Online intellectual property is so huge that it is impossible for Cryptic Studios to please everyone. In fact, it's near on impossible for them to fully satisfy anyone. To meet the expectations of many hardcore fans, a Star Trek MMO would take hundreds of millions of dollars, at least a decade and no doubt a time machine more improbable than the red goo from the latest movie. Even Cryptic COO Jack Emmert lamented things they had not been able to include in a recent interview.
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So, when it came time to preview the soon to launch MMORPG, I have not been looking at it to see if it captured everything that I dreamed a Star Trek MMO would be. Instead, I've asked myself if it did enough.

Honestly, it's too soon to tell. So far, the game is a mixed bag. Some of it is a lot of fun, while other parts need a lot of polish in very little time, and still other aspects leave me scratching my head.

The following hands-on preview is based on hands-on time with the game through their ongoing Closed Beta testing. I've logged, as a rough guess, about 20 hours in the game over that time. This preview won't cover every single detail of the game, but honestly, I think it's a fair amount of time and as much as any prospective customer is likely to give it before they make up their mind.

Star Trek Online: Preview, Part Two (MMORPG.com)

Star Trek Online: Preview, Part Three (MMORPG.com)

Star Trek Online: Lore Interview (MMORPG.com)

Hands-on with Klingons and PvP in Star Trek Online (Massively)

[Regolyth]

I like the whole "Klingons level almost only through PvP" aspect. It fits their race and the lore.

[Morreion]

Seven tips for Star Trek Online newbies (Massively)

STO Impressions (Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog)

Pros

* Skill System – Lots of skills and customization, lots of points to allocate, a feeling of progression.
* Ship Combat – Like PotBS, it works. The addition of the z-axis is good. Feels tactical and like Star Trek.
* Galaxy Map – Have to comment that the Galaxy map looks nice. (Hit M, go to Galaxy Map in the top left).
* Star Trek Feel – Although it lacks in many areas, STO does have a sense of Star Trek.
* Space Graphics – They look very nice. I don’t think we could expect much better.


Cons

* Performance – Like CO, it’s sluggish. To get those nice graphics you have to crank the settings. Cranking makes systems cry.
* Ground Graphics and Animations – Need work. Animations are really bad.
* Ground Combat – Like PotBS, it’s severely lacking. Ground missions feel like clusterflucks of annoying phaser sounds (Actually gave me a headache).
* Sector Space – To quote Graev, “It’s like they tried to represent the entire galaxy in one little room. It’s that feeling you get when they turn the lights on in a Disney Land Ride.”
* Instancing – Entering Sol System #1345 (yes, there were literally 1300+ instances of the same instance) puts it in perspective. The game is chopped into a bazillion instances. (Yet it still lags!) Instancing destroys a lot of the potential fun and actually hinders the design.
* Server Side lag – It’s Beta, but it’s unplayable. The three of us playing together logged out because of it.
* No Ferengi – Whoever removed them, may you die slowly in a plasma fire.

[Morreion]

Scott Jennings: Why I'll Play Star Trek Online (MMORPG.com)

You see, I am a horrible, horrible Trek fanboy who can spell Klingon words from memory. I am That Guy. I am the person who is going to recoil when all the many, many compromises necessary to translate an hour-long five-act drama into a hundreds-of-hours massively multiplayer interactive game make themselves manifest. My fingers will fly, nay, dance across a keyboard as I post (on my completely anonymous "Capt. Tim Watters" account) how allowing Pulse Phaser 360 degree turret mounts on Defiant-class ships completely destroys the entire experience of Star Trek. Oh, and, uh, diplomacy would be nice, too. And meaningful PvP! And trips to Risa! WTF, Cryptic.

See, at this point I don't even *care* about the skill system (which destroyed my enjoyment of Champions Online before I got very far into it), or how soloable it is, or how much polish the game may or may not have. I am a license fanboy. I have lived and breathed Star Trek for the past 30 years. God, I only wish I were exaggerating. I am a community manager's worst nightmare.

[Morreion]

Skill cap changes hit Star Trek Online's open beta (Massively)

Cryptic has been getting some fan heat over a recent revelation that Star Trek Online would, in fact, have a skill cap. This runs counter to the original message, which was that players who've reached the maximum rank of Admiral continue to gain skill points. In the new design, those skill points will dry up along with the new ranks once you've reached the cap.

It's a sound design choice, as game balance, respecs and future expansions all require some kind of level cap. However, Cryptic noticing this problem so late into the game's open beta is not such a great thing. The dedicated player base is used to the old system, and to them this change appears incredibly insidious. We doubt the more casual players will ever notice or care about the change, but that doesn't help with the ire fermenting amongst the core community.

STO's skill cap announcement

Lots of controversy about this move happening days before launch- see the comments in the Massively link.

[Regolyth]

You know, it seems like a lot of games throw out huge, last-minute decisions like this all the time. Sometimes it's for the better, but most often it's a horrible a decision and pisses off a large majority of it's potential playerbase (at least the ones in the know). I don't know if anyone ever has looked into it, but if you haven't, you should see all the last minute changes WoW threw in as it was heading out the door. Some were great, some were horrible.

[Morreion]

Massively's Star Trek Online launch day roundup (Massively)

Today marks the official launch date for Cryptic Studios' newest title, Star Trek Online. We know there's a massive amount of information for new players to process, so we've put together a nice round-up of our various guides, tips and op-ed features to help out. Follow our advice and you should be more than ready to begin your heady Starfleet (Or Klingon Empire!) career.

Massively's Star Trek Online Page

Lots of great info!

[Morreion]

Scott Jennings: STO - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (MMORPG.com)

Is Star Trek Online an MMO? At first blush this is a patently silly question – thousands of players playing at once? Well, of course it’s an MMO. Yet, like Guild Wars, Star Trek Online is heavily, heavily instanced – while this allows all players, like in Guild Wars, to effectively play on a single “server”, this also means that at any given time you’re only with at the most 20 or so other players, and usually no more than 4 others. Unless you’re in a well-organized “fleet” or guild, those 4 people will be total strangers, and because of that there’s almost always no communication at all between them. Ironically, the one part of the game that is most massively multiplayer is the one you will turn off almost immediately – the global chat channel.

Insightful comment:

Choices would go along way in making STO more of a ST game. Not everything should be about killing everyone. Diplomacy needs to be there as well as exploration.

Star Trek Online's producer: "In hindsight, it was pretty darn risky" (Massively)

Star Trek Online hit some pretty major windfalls, even disregarding the fact that it's built on a popular intellectual property with legions of dedicated fans. It launched during a timeframe when there were no other major releases scheduled, came out not too long after a very popular movie in the franchise, and caught a lot of exposure with its open beta. And as executive producer Craig Zinkievich points out in a new interview, the entire operation relied not just on hard work, but also on luck.

The full interview confirms that the whole game had a two-year development cycle -- an astonishingly short turnaround for a game starting, essentially, from nothing -- and details the scope of problems that the staff had to deal with. The game included a number of major departures from expected norms, up to and including divorcing the player from their avatar to a greater extent than normal and creating two different combat systems with just one team on the assignment.

Star Trek Online producer warns against feeding bridge officers (Fidgit)