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[Nilocy]

I've always been interested in STO; but then I realised I play Eve-online and could do no better in the space MMO genre.

[Labs]

Mortal Online doesn't look THAT bad, is there a free trial available?

[x2yzh9]

Mortal Online is sux.
It is bad Labs. It's in beta, so...

[fenrif]

Oh hai, wanna design a race? theres hundreds of options! go ahead feel free!

BTW the model we have to show you the changes has some sort of nervous fidgety disease, and will constantly move and look in every direction except where you want!

[Soulwynd]

It has ADD. The model on Fallen earth does the same thing during creation, never stops looking around and does it fast too, like it was worried about zombies.

[Labs]

Mortal Online is sux.
It is bad Labs. It's in beta, so...

Oh, could I get the login info if it's not too much trouble then? Just wanna see what it's all about.

[LordBucket]

Fenrif has the STO logon now.

May Armok have mercy on his soul.

So, any reports for us?

I see that the game is now live. Apparently some people are already max level after five days and complaining that there's nothing to do.

[fenrif]

Well I've just reached Lieutenant commander rank, which is i suppose lvl 10. Got a new ship and a few extra bridge crew. I've mostly just been playing it like a singleplayer game, do a few missions here and there. I tried to make a klingon character, but there didnt seem like there was anything to do, and you couldnt customise your bird of prey at all, so i got bored quickly.

Overall it's pretty fun, though there are alot of things wrong with it. First and foremost is that it's only very very superficially a star trek game. Sure they got the ships and the names (every single star trek character is in the game some how, sulu's grandson, naomi wildman, etc) but the feel of the game is just right off the mark. Hard to describe what it is exactly, partly the writing, but nothing feels like star trek at all.

It's also pretty much a single-player game, I have no idea why they decided to make it an MMO aside from the subscription money. It's very slow paced (Everything takes aaages) and theres very little challenge, even when soloing things, as there is no consequence for dying or failing at all.

Upgrading the ship is cool though, getting a new weapon and trying out a different strategy is fun, not too keen on the away missions because there all really repetetive, and buggy. The slow pace makes it pretty good for playing while watching a film, or tv or whatever. Also, because its a cryptic game customizing your character, bridge crew, etc is pretty fun. The ship cusomisation is a bit meh, each class has 3 choices for each part, so the first one has pylon/saucer/nacelle/strut or something like that, my second ship only had nacelle/saucer/bridge.

The lack of endgame content is worrying, but not really surprising, as they couldnt even be bothered to remove all the references to champions online (customizing your ship tells you "costume updated" or something like that)

[LegoLord]

I haven't played this myself, but my brother has and he has showed it to me.

Clearly it's a different game that what all of you are talking about, because the graphics looked beautiful to me.  We had fun playing around with the character creation settings.  And he's enjoying it, and he plays DF

[fenrif]

Yeah the game looks pretty decent, I dont think anyone said otherwise did they? But you can't judge a game by its graphics alone... Well you can, but that would be silly.

Cryptic, the company that developed it, are really good at designing intricate character customization tools... and then mediocre games. As a star trek MMO this game fails, because it is star trek in name only, and i'd hesitate to call it an MMO due to the single-player nature of it, and the heavy heavy instancing (another thing cryptic is known for).

[LordBucket]

the graphics looked beautiful to me

Don't know what to tell you. The graphics style reminded me of bloodnet from the early 90's. No clear lines between objects...a gray object sitting on top of a gray background tended to blend in.

STO has pretty loading screens (which you see an awful lot) and the character creator is very flexible, but actual gameplay looks bad. Eve was released in 2003 and has vastly superior graphics. Morrowind was released in 2002 and has better textures, smoother character movement, and fantastically more attention to detail. In STO everything kind of looks the same.

STO also clearly had very different teams of graphic artists. The relatively low quality of the in-game graphics probably wouldn't stand out quite so much if it weren't for the relatively high quality of the loading screens. You'll sit watching a beautiful picture while the next area is loading, and then graphics quality suddenly drops once you start playing again. And you see that once again in the game menus. Go press f at somebody and look at the beautiful 3d animated character head...encased in a solid blue block. It's not that all of the graphics are bad...but the graphics that are bad are very bad. Seriously...go play Princess Maker from the early 90's. It has more intricate character window displays than STO.

We had fun playing around with the character creation settings.

...yeah, but that's kind of one of the better parts of the game. I definitely had more fun making a character than doing anything else.

I think that says something. Like fenrif says, there's a lot more to games than graphics...we all play Dwarf Fortress, obviously. But I didn't find STO gameplay to be fun at all. Like I said a couple pages ago...gameplay seems to consist of pressing f at things you can't kill and pressing 1 at things you can. I'm simplying a bit...yes, combat is more than just presing 1...but overall STO gameplay is just not very complicated. I don't see it staying interesting for very long. Personally I got bored in under an hour.

I think the target audience is people who watched Voyager and thought it was really cool, but haven't played any games except maybe Myst. To that crowd, sure...STO is probably amazing.

But I'm not one of those people, and I was disappointed with it. And I'm not alone. Take a look at the official forums. A lot of people are unhappy.

[fenrif]

I've been trying to work out the target audience for it as I've been playing, and from what I've seen its designed to appeal to fans of the 2009 film reboot of the franchise. Which is odd, because the marketing and pretty much anything the devs have said would indicate they were goin for fans of the older series.

[Nilocy]

ah, is this account thing still going round? I got into an argument about how bad this game was with people at uni today, and found they didn't want to listen to me because I hadn't played the game. And i sure as hell ain't paying a months sub to play this just to say "Hah, it is bad!" in their faces.

[Soulwynd]

ah, is this account thing still going round? I got into an argument about how bad this game was with people at uni today, and found they didn't want to listen to me because I hadn't played the game. And i sure as hell ain't paying a months sub to play this just to say "Hah, it is bad!" in their faces.

Well, if you go play with that attitude, it will certain suck no matter what.

I was expecting a lot more from a startrek mmo, but considering I was playing CO for a while before getting into STO, I already knew somewhat what to expect. It's very arcade and repetitive. The sort of thing console people might like.

If you take it as a casual console style game, it can be sort of fun, but it's not something that would keep me paying a monthly fee.

Oh btw, don't judge the game until you get to level 11 at least and get a new ship and better crew members. The number of things you can do increase a little and makes the combat seem less bland.

[fenrif]

I'll PM you the logon stuff, but ditto on what soulwynd said, if you're allready not liking it, then playing it isnt going to change you mind

edit: fired off a email i think, so check there