Farewell, STO, and good luck!

Star Trek Online open beta ends today at 6pm, after being extended an extra day.   Last night was the last night I'll get to play though, as I'll be at work till after 6pm today.  So, I logged on for a bit to try a few last missions and attempt to get a feel for the "massive changes" that were touted in the great 21 Jan beta patch.  I tried to play over the weekend also, but extended unscheduled server downtimes and malfunctioning account servers put a serious limit on the amount I managed to play (as did spending some time working).

There are definitely some improvements and new coolness - most notable improvement being that scanners actually work (kind of), and most cool being voiceovers by Leonard Nimoy himself.  The down side of the scanners though is that on ground missions they seem configured to scan first for "anomalies" you can investigate, and only second (when all the anomalies are gone) do they point to your quest targets.  Possibly there was a configuration option somewhere I couldn't find that lets you choose what order to scan things in.  I hope so, because on the missions I tried the "anomalies" were often invisible or untargetable, hidden under the ground or in geometry, so it was impossible to ever get rid of them and thus you could never scan for your quest targets, resulting in much running around in circles hunting.  Hopefully this will be addressed in a pre-launch bug fix; other than this bug, the scanners were a huge improvement and help.

The down side of having Leonard Nimoy is that in order to have a professional actor provide voiceover for the game, they presumably had to sign a contract with the Screen Actors Guild.  And that means they've almost certainly had to agree not to use any voice over talent that isn't also registered with SAG, which means much more paperwork and expense to do any kind of voiceover in the future - neither of which I'm guessing STO will be in a position to afford once they launch, so that probably means very little further voiceover work at all for the game.  Which is a shame, because voiceovers do add atmosphere to a game, and judging by the terrifying scary voice that my female Vulcan security officer kept using, they could definitely use a few more voice options.

Alas, most of the problems that annoyed me before remain even after the big patch.  Space combat continues to either bore me or frustrate me.  One mission I did on the weekend involved exploring unknown sectors - the mission went like this:

• spend 1-2 minutes flying to an 'anomaly' in the specified sector
• zone in to the system you thereby discover
• get a mission to contact the planet to offer help
• spend 5 minutes flying to the planet to get close enough to hail them (literally 5 minutes - I timed it)
• talk to the planet, who demand provisions
• leave the planetary system
• spend 2 minutes flying to the sirius sector
• spend 3 minutes flying to a starbase
• spend 5 minutes running around the starbase trying to find provisions, and eventually manage to purchase them only by dint of selling every scrap of other inventory I'd previously looted
• spend 3 minutes flying back to the original sector
• return to the system that needed the provision, and deliver the food, completing the mission

15+ minutes of flying around - not even actively flying around either, just crank the engines up and stare in boredom while the ship moves itself around.  Not exactly the kind of gameplay I find exciting.  Still, was preferable to the combat missions where you have absolutely no options but to fight, and are hopelessly outnumbered, so that the only 'strategy' by which to win is to try and take out one ship before you die, then respawn, and try to pick off the next ship, etc.  With no death penalty and no way to win without using this kamikaze tactic, this seems to be an actively encouraged method of combat.

I took a screenshot of the inventory window, to illustrate how confusing I found it combined into one.  All loot goes into just one bag, whether it's personal wearables or ship equipment.  The icons range from not extremely helpful to completely unintelligible (rather like Champions Online) and you can't tell if something is ground-based equipment, ship gear, permanent, or expendable without pausing and mouse-overing every single item to see what the pop up says.This is my inventory window:

It's labeled below, but I invite you to look at the icons in the cropped shot above first and attempt to guess what they are, just for fun.  (For extra fun, look at the rest of the UI in the big shot below and try to guess what those tiny icons all do too.)  Maybe I'm just easily confused, but I do find it easier to be able to comprehend at a glance what is in my bags.

On the bright side, as you see above I managed to obtain a tribble or two, which is surely a good goal for a Star Trek beta (even though I just bought it off the exchange from another player).  Vulcan still doesn't appear to be visitable or have a space station, however.  And I still can't explore my own ship.  Adding further worry, apparently some last-minute changes are upsetting people.  The last minute balance changes to Champions are a large part of why the launch was not well received - content was suddenly too hard, abilities were totally imbalanced, people had a miserable starting experience and left.  Hopefully this has less of an impact, but I hope it's not a bad omen.

Anyway, I still find the ground missions didn't grab me; the space missions still were either very lengthy or frustrated me in their requirement for kamikaze combat tactics; and as I couldn't find anything else to do (like explore, or seek out new life and new civilizations, or decorate my ship, or tradeskill for a living), I plan to hold off on playing further and see how it goes for a while.  If it's still around in a year and is reported to be much improved, perhaps I'll try it again then.  A lot of additional fun and polish could be added, given an additional year.  It seems that large numbers of enthusiastic Trekkers are queueing up to play, so the game may have enough momentum from that to continue adding content for quite some time.  This Trekker personally still finds the game's philosophy does not quite fit my own vision of Star Trek, but perhaps I'm in the minority.  I guess we'll see.

Farewell, U.S.S Cephalopod, NCC-92305, back to spacedock storage with you.  Farewell, Lt. Blythe, and Ensigns Emma, Ghissel, Salm, and Spork.  It was fun.  Perhaps we'll meet again in a year or so.

STO follow up

I mentioned in a previous post that my expectations for Star Trek Online were not extremely optimistic. But, rather than judge on the basis of gut feeling and limited information, I signed up for the open beta to see for myself. Obviously, with my own upcoming game expansion to work on I haven't had a lot of time to play, but I've played enough to reach a few conclusions at least, and my initial opinion hasn't greatly changed, unfortunately.

However, this is still a beta and the purpose of a beta is to get good player feedback, so I have posted these exact same thoughts on the STO forums for whatever they are worth. I honestly hope the designers there are already working along these lines, because a well-designed Star Trek MMO would be awesome and I'd love to play it. Unfortunately the current STO beta that I'm in is nowhere near there yet, so it remains to be seen what can be addressed before their launch date.

So, for whatever it's worth, if I were a designer or producer working on STO, the following would be my top priority changes (ignoring actual stability and performance issues, which should be obvious):

• Give players a tactical computer UI window they can bring up during battle to automate key functions that they choose. Allow them to turn on/off choices such as ‘autofire all weapons till target is dead’, ‘autotarget nearest enemy’, ‘automatically redistribute power to shields’, and possibly ‘autopilot in optimum firing position around selected target’. Honestly, did Kirk spend each episode mashing a button on his command chair nonstop just to keep the shields up? No.

• Redo the main UI so that instead of looking just like the Champions Online UI re-skinned with a Star Trek colour theme and font, it looks like a Star Trek computer display screen or a ship’s view screen. Stick a big border all around the view screen area, and then displays and controls clearly at the side. This way if you want to do something, like go to warp or hail Starfleet, you click the clearly labeled button that says ‘warp’ or ‘hail’ instead of hovering your mouse over a dozen nearly identical miniscule picture icons trying to read tooltip text and find the one you want. It would be both easier to use and more immersive.

• Stick a starbase outside every major federation planet mentioned in the shows/movies, just clone the existing one and repopulate with the local race. Add in some kind of canned message explaining why you’re not currently able to beam down to the planet. Really, the first thing 90% of Trek fans are going to do within the first few hours of play is go “ooh look, Vulcan” and try to visit. Currently they find an empty sector with one planet, no scan results, nothing to hail, no starbases, no ships, not even any satellites, and all they can do is ram the planet (which doesn’t even kill you). Fail.

• Allow exploration. Currently you can’t beam down to explore anywhere you don’t already have a mission for. Exploration is dead. Granted there’s not time to allow true exploration but existing missions could be changed so that instead of requiring the mission from an NPC before you can go somewhere and beam down, allow players to acquire the mission when they enter a system where there is a mission available. Instead of “Lt. Fred has sent you to sector B to explore the alien colony there”, zone into the system and get offered the mission “I appear to have found an alien colony, I should explore and bring back my findings to Starfleet!”

• Allow travel around your own ship. Currently you can’t. Building the entire ship is impractical in the time frame remaining, but instances of various ship rooms already exist, so at least allow players to enter versions of them for their own ship. For example, when an away team mission goes bad and everyone dies, instead of a boring “respawn”, have everybody wake up in the ship sickbay and have to beam down again. 

• Rather than having one inventory where everything goes, from salvaged space relics to propulsion system upgrades to ration packs to personal weapons, instead separate ship and personal loot. Personal loot gained from ground missions can go into a normal inventory system, but ship loot gained from space missions should go into a separate inventory. Possibly you could access this inventory and manage it and install items gained from it by going to your ship’s Engineering instance.

• Add more noncombat methods to complete missions – far too many missions are simply kill missions, and that’s very contrary to the Star Trek spirit. More stealth, more negotiation options, maybe other possibilities. (I realize that to do this thoroughly will take more time than they have till launch, but they could do what's possible and make it a top priority and make certain their players know it.)

• Fix phasers in ground combat. Phasers are a one-shot weapon. You’re either stunned, or vaporized, there’s no in-between. STO has changed them completely so you have to take 5-6 phaser shots at a target to knock them out. Not only is this ridiculous, it also motivates players to ignore the phasers and upgrade to nastier high DPS weapons like nerve disruptors which is completely contradictory to Starfleet policy. There are at least 3 ways I can think of that would potentially allow phasers to be the one-shot weapons they should be without completely trivializing content, and something like this needs to happen. (Decrease accuracy so the challenge is in aiming, significantly increase reuse time, change 'health' bar to a 'luck' bar, convert phaser hit into a stun (essentially a mez) spring to mind immediately, there are doubtless other options too)

• Increase the speed of space combat, crawling around is not fun and nor is sitting in place mashing keys for 1 minute 50 seconds just to blow up one undefended drydock (true mission experience). (Also, I’d love to give objects in space gravity, like they have in StarControl solar system combat.) While I realize that increasing ship speed is a potential progression path, the lack of it makes the newbie experience very un-fun, and at this point you can't afford to be losing any newbies. There are plenty of other ship progression paths (shields, weapons, maneuverability, special gadgets, bridge crew slots, etc) without needing to make newbies crawl like snails.

These are just the quickest, most obvious points of course that might be realistic as a quick fix in a short time frame. They might keep people playing a little longer, but there need to be much bigger and more substantial fixes and content additions ASAP.

A lot can still change in the last weeks of beta, so who knows what exactly will be the state of the game when it launches. I know some folks working at Cryptic and they're good folks, so I hope they can turn the game around and make it a success, with or without my $0.02 worth of feedback. But I guess we'll see in two weeks.

Good luck to the Cryptic team, and I hope I'm wrong.

Update to add a link to Scott Jennings' excellent thoughts on STO also.

Easily Distracted

I'm just not very good at levelling up in MMOs, I'm afraid.  It's not that I don't like them - I do - but something about the leveling process fails to captivate me.  I know it's supposed to get me hooked - just one more quest till the next level, just one more hour till the next reward - but I guess there's just something missing in the area my brain that controls that area.  I have had the same experience in every MMO I've played, from the original EverQuest to my most recent trial of Aion.

It's not that I can't level up - I do have characters at max level in EverQuest II.  But it's not something that I do for the sake of doing it, it's just something that happens while I'm doing other things, unless I really force myself, in which case it's a chore, not compulsive fun.  (The closely related task of gearing up is equally yawn-inducing to me.)

Of course, these days it doesn't help that after spending 10-12 hours at work on EQII, it's really not extremely appealing to come home and spend another few hours staring at more of the same.  When we're working overtime at work I find myself much more tempted to do other things besides play computer games when I get home - reading, cooking, even cleaning.  Still, I did log in last night thinking I really should get my dirge the rest of the way to 80 while I still have the bonus XP from my 80 wizard. (In EQII, once you have a max level character all other characters on your account get an XP bonus so they level up faster.  However, the max level cap is going up with February's expansion so I'll lose that bonus soon.)

As usually happens though I did a few quests but soon got distracted.  In this case it was by someone in the general crafting chat channel who was low level but trying to do a harvesting quest in the Kingdom of Sky zones, which are higher level than he was.  He was clearly having trouble figuring out how to harvest safely.  Far more interesting than levelling up a dirge!  I hopped on my lower level monk and headed up there, and offered to give him a little tour of the safe areas where low adventure level players can get to.  Of course, the reason he was up there was a quest that I myself created, so I suppose I was technically responsible for his predicament in a way.  But I used to give harvesting tours long to harvesters in distress before I was hired by SOE anyway.  And I can't think of any MMO I've played in the past 10 years where I was actively excited by leveling.

There's almost always something more interesting to do than plain old XPing, in my experience.  Sometimes I hear a newbie in the chat channels who needs some help, and I go and do that.  Sometimes I decide to decorate someone's house.  Sometimes I help random people or guildmates with quests.  Sometimes I go crafting, or exploring, or finish off some collection quests, or some achievements.  Often I'm tempted to make new alts, since I really enjoy trying out new race/class combinations and thinking up new character appearances and names and backgrounds.  In Aion I've gone through three alts so far without getting any of them to 25 yet.  In City of Villains I can't even count how many villains I made, none of whom reached 30.  In WoW I managed three alts, even though I quit the game in frustration before any of them reached 20.  Champions Online was so broken it actually forced me to quit the alts before I wanted to, so that probably doesn't count, but even in Conan I had two going and that was painful indeed (one of them was a female bear shaman, the most broken possible combination at launch).

I know this is fairly unusual; MMOs are full of people who seem to enjoy leveling up just for the sake of leveling up, and it's practically the basis of gameplay in many of them.  I guess I'm fairly unusual in my lack of interest (or maybe other people like me just don't tend to play MMOs).  I still have lots of fun doing other things when a game permits me enough lateral options to have a broad gameplay experience, and EQII in particular is very good at supporting lots of different play styles.  Still, I sometimes feel as if I enjoy MMOs despite of their core design, not as part of it.  Now that I actually work in game design it makes me wonder how I would design a game that isn't so leveling-centered, and what aspects of MMOs I would actually make the core of gameplay if I were trying to appeal to people like me.  I like exploring, I like the social interactions, I enjoy the creative side, and the crafting (as in making useful stuff for other people) aspect.  And I'll generally choose any of those over XP leveling any day, as they're just more interesting to me.

Perhaps it's wrong to think of making separate games at all; perhaps it would be better to think of ways to integrate the different play styles better into one game world.  Perhaps they're just two sides of the same coin and could support each other solidly.  I sometimes feel EQII is almost there in the way it allows crafters to level up separately from adventurers, but there isn't really a true interdependency either.  In EQII it's more like two independent systems running side by side in the same world, and while that's good in many ways, I still feel there could be a better integration somehow.  Though at least it's better than most MMOs; too many try to force the different play styles together in ways that don't really make a lot of sense.  For example, in WoW you can't tradeskill without going out killing things for components, and exploration is pretty much impossible at low adventure levels as aggro range increases the larger the level difference.  In Aion your crafting skill is capped by your adventure level.  So if crafting or exploring interests you but killing things does not, well, these games are obviously not going to be ideal.  In a real world context it makes no sense - how good I am at cooking or sewing has absolutely nothing to do with my skill in karate or hunting, that's nonsensical.  Yet so many games try to force the two to relate in some way, and of course it feels awkward and forced.

I hope that as MMOs continue to mature and develop, we'll start to see more developers moving away from this forced dependency and lazy assumption that leveling is all that's needed to make gameplay fun.  EQII was a great step in the right direction (as was Star Wars Galaxies) but it's been 5 years since either of those and I'm just not seeing anybody else moving in that direction yet.  Is it a nasty catch-22 in that the current generation of game developers entered game development through their enjoyment of leveling-oriented MMOs, and therefore assume that everybody else must love them too?  Or is it just that the 500b gorilla of MMOs, WoW, is not particularly innovative in any area, and therefore new game developers (and their investors) are nervous about trying anything different?  I don't know, but I'm going to keep hoping (and poking and suggesting, where I get the chance) that future MMOs will try to broaden the types of game play options available.

(In an unrelated note, having stated my pessimistic predictions for STO in the last post, I felt obliged to sign up for the open beta now it's open, and so I'm currently downloading the patcher in the background.  We shall see ... though, judging by the snail's pace this download is crawling at, it won't be tonight.)

(Update: this comment by Zubon re: STO open beta made me nod agreement.)

Where no MMO has gone before

It's January, and if you're a Star Trek fan you may be aware that there's a Star Trek based MMO currently in beta, and due to launch on February 2nd.  (If you haven't been following it, here's a handy link to "everything we know about Star Trek Online" from the STO forums which will likely answer most of your questions.)

Rumours of the game have been circulating for years; it was originally being developed by Perpetual, but they failed to release it, and the rights to develop the game were acquired by Cryptic some time around early 2008, the same studio that brought us Champions Online last year, and long before that, City of Heroes.

I grew up a Star Trek fan; although I'm not quite old enough to have seen it in its first run on the air, I grew up with reruns, and there was a time that I could have quoted every original series episode and the animated series too.  I had a collection of the Star Trek novels that ran into the hundreds, and somewhere in my parents house there are still probably little painted models of the Enterprise in various versions, not to mention Romulan warbirds and Klingon birds of prey.  I still remember how excited I was to read that "The Next Generation" was going to be made, and where I was when I heard Gene Roddenberry died.  I can even still remember an essential phrase or two in Klingon - nuqdaq yuch daPol?

Having now established how completely hopelessly nerdy my childhood was, let me get back to the subject at hand, the Star Trek MMO.  I haven't actually been following the news about it closely, and I'm not in the beta, so all I have to go on is the FAQ linked above and the occasional article or trailer I've seen.  But a friend challenged me to make a game prediction for the new year, so here's mine:  much as I'd love it not to be the case, I really don't see how Cryptic's STO can possibly be a success.  I predict a buggy launch, poor balance (both class and economic), and content both too detailed to be popular with only casual Trek fans, while simultaneously being too vague or unfaithful to the original to please the hard core Trek fans.

Why I predict this:

• I can't imagine any way that Cryptic could possibly have had enough time to develop a solid game in the 1 year they've had the license.  EQII releases one expansion a year, and that's just an expansion based on a very solid existing game and toolset.  Create a brand new game from scratch?  (They got to keep some art assets from Perpetual, but nothing else as far as I've read.)  Even using the Champions Online engine and tools it's a ridiculously short time frame to try and do anything in the enormous world of Star Trek.  Most new games take years and years to develop.  1 year seems insane.
• I was had a few disappointments with Champions Online, so I naturally worry that, being released so close to it, Star Trek have similar pitfalls to avoid.
• All the trailers I've seen of STO feature almost nothing but combat ... even the trailer that is ostensibly the "exploration" trailer.  No.  This is not Star Trek.  Star Trek is not about guns blazing and ships blowing up and phaser shots to the head.  It's certainly easier to make a game about those things, but it won't be a Star Trek game.  The reason Star Trek was so popular in the first place was Roddenberry's message of peace and optimism.  We can outgrow our violent beginnings.  We can look forward to a future of peace and health and safety.  People who are different can learn to trust each other and work together as brothers.  Star Trek's message was hope, exploration, the triumph of peace and rationality over violence and war.  The STO trailers I have seen have nothing to do with hope, peace, or logic.  They have nothing to do with Star Trek apart from using the same ships.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a Star Trek MMO.  I'd love to play in that world.  There are so many complexities of the Star Trek universe that could make fascinating MMOs on their own.  Imagine playing at political intrigue and rivalry among the Romulan houses, in a political/space game similar to Eve.  (And my ideal Romulans will always be the Rihannsu of Diane Duane's excellent novels, not the confused mess they have become since Roddenberry's death.)  Imagine exploring space and forging the first United Federation of Planets.  Just the day to day workings and missions of an enormous Constitution class starship would be fascinating.  The holodeck could be a game tool on its own with enormous possibilities for player mods.  Heck, I could spend at least a day just wandering around exploring the inside of a fully detailed model of a starship.  Away missions, making contact with new civilizations, Starfleet Academy training, the Kobayashi Maru test, all of these would be fascinating.  Of all the things that I could do in a Star Trek online game, blowing up other starships or going head-to-head in phaser battles has to be the least interesting and least Star Trek-like of all the possibilities.  (How do you even adapt phaser battles into an MMO combat system?  One hit and you're either stunned or vaporized.)  But alas.  I haven't seen a single trailer that isn't heavily focused on combat.  And even if Cryptic's development team hadn't had a rocky start with Champions Online, I don't believe the best team in the world could create a product that would succeed in such a short time frame.

So I haven't applied to the STO beta, and I'm not getting my hopes up.  That's my game prediction for this year: STO will not be the Star Trek game I hope it could be  I hope I'm wrong, but I very much doubt I will be.

I guess we'll know in about a month.