At least zero of you are wondering: “Hey Dan, where’s this week’s Let’s Play Star Trek Online?”
Couple problems:
1) Lord of the Rings Online.
2) I’m (hopefully!) buying a house this week, which is kind of over-stressing me.
3) Star Trek Online has been frustrating me lately. I’ve been comparing it to LotRO, and I’ve come to one inescapable conclusion.
That conclusion is simply that Star Trek Online was not ready for release; it needed (needs!) another four to six months of development.
Compare the amount of content between levels 1 and 30 in Star Trek Online with the amount of 1-30 content in Lord of the Rings Online (that’s well before you hit expansion territory). The difference is staggering.
Compare the graphics between the two games. Despite LotRO’s older engine, it offers far more appealing landscapes. STO’s levels are blocky, repetitive and… boring. Visually speaking, that is.
What’s more, the playable area in LotRO is… vast. You can literally walk for nearly an hour (not in a circle!) without hitting a loading screen. Start at Elrond’s place in Rivendell, and walk to Needlehole in the Shire… and that’s mostly east-west. There’s tons of area to the north of that path.
Compare that to STO, where you can traverse basically any playable area corner-to-corner in five minutes (assuming you ignore enemies shooting at you).
STO has space combat down pretty well, but ground combat leaves much to be desired, especially if you’re a solo player.
The more I think about this, the more I wish Cryptic (or Atari, whoever made the decision) had waited another six months before releasing Star Trek Online. They wouldn’t have fixed all of my complaints, but they could have improved a lot of it.
What it comes down to is that LotRO has so much more content to offer that I have a very hard time making myself choose to re-play old missions in STO instead.
At any rate, I just need a break from STO for a week or so. I’ll hopefully be moving to my new house a week from Saturday, at which point I’ll probably feel a lot less stressed out and hopefully return to my former full enjoyment of STO.
My understanding is that Cryptic was not allowed to move the release date back, even though they were given the project late. I’d call this Atari’s fault. Atari’s other marketing decisions have also led me to think that any mismanagement was their decision-making.
Given Atari’s 90-day-trial special deal they pulled right after release (which pissed off a ton of people, including Cryptic), I’d have to agree with you.
On a related note, did you know that buying STO from Atari.com was the only way you could get STO without any of the extra goodies other retailers were offering? Amazon offered a Liberated Borg bridge officer; Steam offered some armor or something; Gamestop had a special ship; Atari.com had… nothing.
Epic win, Atari!
Hey, I was wondering where’s this week Let’s Play too! So there! 🙂
OK then, landscapes… Well yeah, LOTRO does have bigger landscapes. So does SWG, for example. But I don’t think that STO is going to have bigger landscapes. The reason for that (in my humble opinion, of course) is that the current model mimics its parent show (as does LOTRO and SWG).
LOTR, as Kevin Smith once said, is a movie about walking – hence, vast areas of walkable areas in LOTRO.
SWG is similiar – in movies, we’ve seen multiple locations on several planets, and the game emulates that as well.
But in ST, it usually goes like this: the episode starts with the ships arriving (or stumbling upon) planet of the week, our heroes beam down, do some stuff, and beam up. End of episode. Aaand, I think that STO has managed to capture “typical ST episode” feel perfectly 🙂
While I think you’re right that the games mimic their respective sources, and that the small-area format works well for episodic TV shows, it doesn’t work well for MMOs (IMHO).
STO’s game engine is certainly capable of larger areas (Champions Online has much larger “zones”).