I remember hearing about this. This is how I wanted it to be:
You choose a race. You are obviously in the fun, let's get out there and explore for king and country kind of job. But maybe you want to be a frieghter or a pirate or something. Point is, you join one of many factions within your race.
Your character starts out small. You mainly are just a crewman to start with. You pick a job, and go through the tutorial for that job. To actually do your job, there are mini-games to do. For example, if you're an engineer and the EPS relays go offline, you'll have to FPS your way through the ship with the other crewmen (some AI, some players) and get to the bad conduit to repair it. Then you can just sit there and repair it, but you get it done faster and you get more XP if you do the mini game for repairing EPS conduits.
During a battle, engineers should really work harder at doing the mini games because engineer repairs directly help the ship survive.
If you're not logged in, your character still exists and you run on the standard AI but tweaked to act more like you. Do you typically stand around in the engineering room playing video games on your console instead of working? Do you look at Klingon porn instead of working? Then your AI will do that instead of work while you're offline.
But if the ship is caught in a fight online, your engineer works in emergency mode because otherwise it would kinda suck for everyone else
Of course if the ship is crippled, you'll have to eject the core. And it takes time and materials to get a new core up and running. And it's probably best to ask the captain if he wants you to eject the core, but you can always just do it and accept the fallout later.
The different jobs in the ship would be taken care of by players. A ship that had its players all online at the time would perform a LOT better, and a ship with players whose characters had high experience levels would perform a LOT better anytime.
Gameplay:
The factions would send captains out on quests. Explore this system. Escort this colony ship. Cure this plague. Investigate this space station we lost contact with. Steal these plans for a kewl new warp core. Rescue these political prisoners. Remember the Prime Directive!
The captain would be a player too. He might have less to do, I dunno.
Trick with this is that you can set the game up to email you or text you on your mobile asking you what decisions you want to make. Replies sent to the game company's phone system use your phone number to validate your account. But the messages to you are things like "captain, you've entered the system. there is a small klingon colony. 1: explore and scan, 2: attack klingons, 3: talk with klingons, 4: wait. A: Carefully, B: Normal Stance, C: Recklessly. Example reply: 3A" The default is to do nothing and act defensively, and the opportunity to give a command expires in a few minutes to avoid problems with other people getting ahold of your phone.
This way an engineer can prioritize his actions, the security chief can direct his squads to someplace the AI wouldn't normally go.
Also, the FPS ship is actually the same thing as the space sim ship. If you're perceiving the world from the ship perspective, you see a ship arrive. Let's say it has a portion of bulkhead missing. You can zoom in and see the phasers arrayed, and you can see the bulkhead damage, and you can see a little dude in a spacesuit repairing things. From the little dude's perspective, he's hanging out in a spacesuit in a blown-out section of his ship repairing it. He has forcefields up to keep the ship from decompressing. And he can look out from his hi-res damaged ship and see this other ship come cruising up. But until it gets fairly close he just sees a low-res large ship model and as it advances he sees more and more detail, eventually noting its weapons, and its windows, and possibly a guy standing in a window on the bridge looking at him if they get within a couple hundred feet of each other.
You could actually board a ship by blasting off with a jetpack. Possible, but EXTREMELY unlikely.
It would all be handled by loading only what you'd reasonably expect to see anyway. Since you'd never have five ships full of people within a few feet of each other, you'd never load all that.
Full sized planets, suns, star systems. Warp speed allows fast movement so that's not a pain.
You would get personal leave, which you could spend doing all kinds of fun stuff. You want to bulk up and be more of a badass? Train with the Klingons in a Shakespeare-loving monastery somewhere. Maybe you want to just relax on Risa and maybe get caught up in a little local intrigue? Investigate some ruins somewhere? Visit your family? Do a little side deal that's too shady to do on the job? Maybe go study some really nerdy thing that might come in handy someday when your ship gets caught in a temporal flux anomaly?
There would be random encounters spawned all over, which encourage exploration. I mean, most of the star trek episodes that didn't involve fraternization among the crew were about a ship or a planet they met along the way.
Captain gains XP for completing missions. Higher level captains get access to more materials and better missions. A science officer might get XP for recording a solar anomaly or discovering a new life form on a jungle planet.
AWAY MISSIONS!
DIPLOMACY!
cloaking devices!It would be grand.
That said, I have no idea how the ST:MMO will be.
Author
Topic: Star Trek Online (Read 18420 times)