Tag: STO

Are Elite:Dangerous ship interiors worth doing?

Fleet Carrier Camenecium visiting a precarious three-body barycenter.
Is her interior a ship interior or a station interior?

The long-awaited “space legs” feature has been announced for the next major update to Elite:Dangerous: Odyssey. Commanders will get to walk around stations and planets, shoot and be shot by things, and … practice xeno-botany with a hand-held probe-ulator. The community has been up in arms since that announcement also said that ship interiors would not be included in the first release.

Frontier can learn something from Cryptic here. Star Trek Online stopped doing elaborate interiors because they were expensive/resource-intensive to make and added very little gameplay. They only do bridges now if they use them in missions.

With dozens of ships to backfill and assuming they would all have unique interiors beyond existing cockpits, Frontier could better spend their time and money crafting social areas (fleet carriers?) or actual gameplay. Except for VR players, who I’d guess are a minority, who’s going to walk around their ships just to walk around their ships more than a handful of times? No gameplay would be a terrible waste.

Worse would be punitive gameplay like interiors meaning you have to repel boarding parties or it takes longer to get in and out of your ship without any gameplay added. Interiors should not be a tax I pay to play the parts of the game I like.

The best bet for making interiors worthwhile would be including optional beneficial gameplay like mini games inside to provide long-lasting buffs or find/fix damage without an AFMU or repair limpet. Still doesn’t seem worth the cost as a goal at launch.

The one interior I’d love to see at launch is my fleet carrier’s. I want to be on a super-star-destroyer-style bridge when she jumps. It’s really a station in its own right, can have many of the same features like shipyards and stellar cartographics, and could be a mobile social zone.

Bridge (starship) | Wookieepedia | Fandom

See Also

Star Trek Online: Best Space Wars simulator ever?

The upcoming season of Star Trek Online features an instance with a black hole, and Cryptic dev “trekhead” couldn’t resist turning it into a PVP map. Yes, boys and girls, STO just became a giant Spacewar!/Space Wars simulator with a huge graphical update!

That early vector-graphics arcade game ate more than a handful of my quarters in the distant past, but it’s not the only blast from that past with Season 12. Remember the Breen Rezreth Dreadnaught Cruiser? It wasn’t just the game’s Rock Lobster; it always reminded me of the Cygnus from the Disney flick The Black Hole. See for yourself:

I haven’t touched PVP in years even though I have many fond memories. In STO’s first year, PVP was how Klingons leveled: there was great PVP to be had at every tier all the time. Since then, balance went out the window for a bunch of reasons, and it’s just too much grind to be competitive with the min/maxers and pre-mades. Regardless, I’ve already dusted off my Rock Lobster and renamed her Cygnus. I’ll definitely queue up for this PVP map a few times before hitting the hyperspace warp-out button back to PVE.

Here’s the big unanswered question for me: Is the black hole map going to be a Foundry asset?

UPDATE: R.R.W. Cygnus with Reman Prototype Shield

Poor Impulse (Engine) Control: @trekonlinegame’s third expansion, Agents of Yesterday, approaches!

Star Trek Online‘s next expansion, Agents of Yesterday (AoY), goes where we’ve all gone before, into The Past. It’s 50 years since The Original Series (TOS) first aired, and STO’s paying tribute by adding a new faction and episodes squarely set in the “Wild West” period of the Star Trek universe.

Pinoeer, the new starter ship, is a TOS version somewhere between NX-01 and Reliant
Starship Porn: Pioneer, the new starter ship, combines bits of the original Connie,  NX-01, and Reliant. It’s best viewed from behind, but I’ll leave that as an in-game pleasure for you”shuttle bay” aficionados out there.

When the new episodes arrived on the test server in their current “diamond in the rough” state, I swore I’d do the tutorial and no more. That was easy at first because a bug half-way through prevented completing the tutorial. But that got fixed, so last night I thought I’d finish the tutorial, quietly put AoY back in its virtual box, and get to bed early. So of course I stayed up late and finished all the new episodes. Ugh, it’s the same kind of post-binge-eating guilt that leaves me feeling both satisfied and ashamed.

STO producer and shamelessly hard-core TOS fan Maria Rosseau talked with Trek.fm about the loving attention to detail–and sometimes lack of detail–it took to get the look and feel right [TREK NEWS AND VIEWS 103: PUTTING THE TOS IN STO]. AoY doesn’t attempt to improve on or reimagine TOS through the eyes of STO or all the Trek that followed it; that’s created some controversy in the STO community among players who can’t look beneath the veneer of TOS being a late-sixties TV program that sometimes viewed the future through groovy-colored glasses. I’ll gladly take another dose of go-go boots and space hippies and 23rd Century Gorn fashion over this year’s dreadful installment from that talentless hack. Set phasers to groovy and full speed ahead!

StarTrek-Gorn