It's not an official trailer by any means, but it is a closer look at the gameplay of Star Trek Online. We've got an embed of the video for you after the jump.
If you're hoping to hear more about Star Trek Online, Massively's own Kyle Horner is on the ground at PAX to speak with Cryptic Studios about STO today, so watch for that soon.
Space Combat looked pretty decent for the same old boring "you're the ship" design, at least it did have the Star Trek space feel to it. The ground combat looked pretty hideous with way to many particle effects going on. Luckily it's not even in beta yet, so many things can and hopefully will still change.
I couldn't disagree more... I feel that the space combat didn't have anything remotely resembling a Star Trek feel to it. Ships were swooping around and behaving more like aircraft than submarines. Only the combat shuttles should be capable of that, like the one from DS9. Other than that, Star Trek ships do NOT move like that.
Honestly, though, Cryptic has made it abundantly clear that they don't "get" Star Trek by a lot of the really terrible decisions they've made in the design of this one. They're even proud of some of them, such as the fact they've decided that Star Trek Online is going to be about everyone being Captains. Star Trek isn't about the space combat, and it never was. It's about the interactions of the crew. If you don't have a human crew to interact with, the stories are not going to resemble a Star Trek story at all.
I'll be giving this one a pass, I personally think it's going to be a very short lived flash in the pan and I won't miss it.
That's completely contrary to everything we've seen in the shows and movies. DS9 had everything from the Defiant to the Birds of Prey moving fast and weaving through ships. To include ship classes like the ones shown in this video. Even larger ships like the Excelsior maneuvered very quickly and with great agility when upgraded. Miranda class type ships and other destroyer class vessels consistently strafed and harassed the larger vessels in DS9. They even flew in formations, like aircraft and not submarines.
That may not be what you want to see in Star Trek Cliff, however that's how the movies and shows treated combat.
Din A3 - Honestly, given the choice, I'd be the ship's doctor. The ship's captain should be the equivalent of a guild leader.
Nint - I must admit, I always hated DS9 so I didn't watch it much, but I disagree with you about the amount of swooping in the combat in most of the movies or other series. There's also a line in the history of Trek, after that line you have Rick Berman slowly making things worse over time.
Not to say you aren't entitled to your opinion, and I hope you enjoy the game, but I am not going to be an easy sell on this, and showing me videos of space combat that looks like what they have isn't a good first step.
They couldn't create a game about space exploration, could they.
All they showed game footage of ships blowing each other up. Way teams killing each other in close combat. This is not the Star Trek I grew up with and learned to love. /sigh
I always find it interesting how games in development are always met with such harsh criticism based off a single presentation. I'm guessing the reason for that here is because fans like us hear about a Star Trek mmo and we are immediately foaming at the mouth like Pavlov's dogs, dreaming of the exact sort of experience we want in the game. I'll be the first to admit that the game seems much more focused on combat than exploration "at first glance." That being said, this is just a first glance and, rather than getting worked up about the game not providing the exact experience we want, we should see the direction the development takes and judge it on its own merits.
I for one will be following the development of this game closely as I love the Star Trek universe and I find the direction of the game to be fresh and unique amidst the clamor of orcs and elves.
It will be my first MMO that I will try again after WAR killed that years long LOOOOOONG series of duds I laid my hands on.
Now it was not very hard to skip DF, that silly lied by hyped up Korean copycat or Champions on line (already played CoH,so...) and the rest of the FTP were never on my mind.
But as a old ST fan, I can't let this one pass by.
Seeing the efforts of Cryptic I can't say my expectations are high... But I'll do this one for the Lore.
It remains to be seen how long it will keep me interested by Lore. But in Lotro it was about ... 4 weeks.
I hope it doesn't launch together with Cataclysm though.
1. Twitchy Ships moving fairly unrealistic in space. 2. Laughable ground combat animations. 3. Textures Low Res. 4. Particles and Explosions were deplorable. 5. I don't care!
This game is still waaaay early in development. I think they are right where they should be. This was great to wet my appetite, I have high hopes for this game picking up and being great. I can't wait to see another video in the future where we get to see some polish on all of the above.
There is a reason they show this stuff at cons and not via the official sites at this point.
They want to give the hardcore fans who made the trip a little something, which is generally why there are non disclosure agreements and they ask that you don't use cellphones or digital cameras.
At this point in development people will tear the game to shreds if they released anything on the net. We all remember Warhammer Online don't we? One of the few games to give us LOTS and lots of info about the game and show us its development and what happened? Every screen shot and every scrap of info was scrutinized to the last pixel and devoured and discarded like a bad shrimp dinner. People knew (supposedly) how the game was going to play a year and a half before it came out. And lets not talk about the hachet job Tabala Rasa got, shall we? And take a look at the comments on SW:TOR articles...yeesh!
The game is not even in closed beta yet and its already fail? No wonder developer's are leery to put up details about their games until they are ready for release.
And we wonder why developers don't like giving out any info
It's sad Cryptic wasn't smart enough to figure out a way to add in bridge officer roles and make it fun. Obviously you aren't going to have someone in engineering hitting a button, but you could have a chief engineer, chief medical officer, ops, helm.. anything else I'm missing. Instead, no we're all captains.
As for the ships, they seem pretty true, the only thing that bothers me is the ships look really twitch based, you can see a kink in the vapour trail of a ship when the controller was jerked a bit. the whole ship shouldn't move that easily on the slightest touch
It really is sad. I can understand them making a game where they give you NPC's as your Crew Pets, but a good developer would have found a way to let those who wouldn't mind sitting at a Tactical or Engineering station an entertaining way to play the game as well. A game like Guild Wars encourages you to group with other players, but also offers you their NPC "henchmen" as a backup plan so one can solo or fill in a group with what's needed. A good developer would have sat down and figured a way to do both and make it work. All they offer is excuses of why they couldn't do things a certain way, but a good developer would have took that as a challenge and a chance to find a unique way to make Multiplayer ships with interiors work, on top of offering the annoying pets to those that would rather subscribe to a massive multiplayer game and play alone.
Sadly Cryptic isn't a good developer anymore, these days they're more worried about proving a MMO can be developed and launched in under 2 years time (regardless of its quality), so they can sell other cheap gaming companies their engine design tools to make even more low quality rushed instant MMO's.
"It's sad Cryptic wasn't smart enough to figure out a way to add in bridge officer roles and make it fun."
I don't see "Scribe", "Shop Owner", "Pub Wench", or "Inn Keeper" in WOW, or any other MMO, as class options.
Every player is the Captain in STO but look at other MMOs: Unless you're in a raid, you aren't being commanded by other players on where to go, what to do, who to target, which quest to take, etc. Everyone in GW, WOW, etc are the "Captain" too.
Perhaps some ships will repair their friends ships - Just like healers in other MMOs.
Perhaps some ships will primarily absorb damage - just like tanks.
Perhaps some ships will ECM or ECCM - Just like support classes.
All those, and more, are possible in a SciFi MMO right now: EVE Online. We haven't seen enough to know if STO won't offer similar options.
Warhammer sold over 800,000 copies and was a success at retail far beyond what Mythic even imagined.
It failed because end game pvp was utterly unbalanced screwed up in the end game. Because of the patches they released in the first several weeks as well as the comments by them in regards to t4 issue's showed a utter disconnect with the game.
Took several weeks for the game to start losing a significant amount of players.
It did not fail because of them releasing information to the public prior to launch.
You are absolutely correct. WAR sold over 800,000 boxes of their game, Age of Conan sold over 700,000 boxes, even Vanguard sold 500,000 boxes at launch.
Bottom line is people -WANT- to like these new MMO games, but every one of these new MMO's rush to launch, their dumbing down the gameplay, making the games less social, and making them way to solo friendly where people play the game for 30-60 days and uninstall it out of boredom when they're not challenged anymore.
