The original show is almost forty years old. The whole Star Trek license is becoming less valuable – there are no shows on the air, the movie coming out this year seems more like a homage to a fading memory than a new start to the franchise, and I just have to admit that that ensign phasoring a Gorn just didn’t do it for me. Kirk spent an episode fighting a single Gorn; now they’re trash-mobs? Nuh-uh. Don’t go there. ...
2007 opened with me splitting my time between EQ1 and EQ2. Through brief flings with LotRO, Dungeon Runners and Mythos, and even briefer flings with a half dozen more I played just once, I ended the year in pretty much the same place – playing EQ2 exclusively. There’s these incredibly massive hype/PR machines and all they want to do is build up expectations for their ground-breaking, world-shaking title, or book, or movie, and then when it finally arrives, you go “meh” and wait for the next big thing. And the hype machine worked overtime this year. Burning Crusade, Vanguard, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa; all have (or had) the hype machine promissing so much that almost anything that came (or will come) can only disappoint. ...
2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed. In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered. ...
We know very little about Star Trek Online, but what we do know doesn’t sound much like Star Trek. Very “gamey”, not very “worldy”. You form a group in a city (or starship or starbase), choose a quest (mission) and beam down, run the quest, beam back up. OR, you get in your shuttle, meet up with other shuttles, run the quest, and then go back to a shuttle port. ...
Via Tobolds, more news: apparently Perpetual and STO have been on deathwatch for awhile, and last-gasp development is trying to change the direction of the game to more casual. It didn’t sound very hardcore to me anyway… Free to play? Merde… This is definitely not how I saw the game being released. Reaction on the STO Forums and [ STO Source ] has been muted. Perhaps with months of little attention to the title, it’s slowly lost fans to keep the community alive. ...
According to this article over at Massively, Perpetual Entertainment, who recently closed down their nearly-released Gods & Heroes MMO, is about to shut down altogether. It was clear from all we’ve been hearing over the past year that they were in trouble, but who knew just how bad it was? The dev blogs they’ve been posting have shown Star Trek Online at a somewhat early phase of development – we’ve mostly seen some level design and know little about the actual gameplay – so I doubt it would be unrealistic to think that Perpetual’s STO game hasn’t much more going for it than a design document, a demoralized development team, and the Star Trek license itself. ...
The Star Trek Online devs have posted their first devlog. If you’re at all interested in the upcoming Star Trek-based MMO, you should definitely check it out. Their first devblog focuses on their world creation tools – VERY interesting, at least if you’re into that kind of thing. I thought the moons/planets in the sky of their demo scene looked a little too close, but I guess that’s standard for the genre. ...
Getting the right background to play a Fantasy MMO is pretty easy. Read Lord of the Rings? Seen the movie? Okay, you’re in. Rangers, pick up your bows on the left. It’s a little harder for titles that have some history to them. In Final Fantasy XI Online, you better know your Chocobos. In World of Warcraft, unless you’ve played Warcraft, you’re going to be wondering who the heck these people are, anyway. ...
There’s a race in the Star Trek universe with a racial ability so amazing, so irresistible, that when I read a thread about racial choices in Star Trek Online, I just had to add my thoughts on the compelling qualities of this mystical race. Theirs is the power of sexual attraction. Betazoids? Well, they’re telepathic and get married in the nude and have a tendency toward skintight cat suits with plunging necklines, but no… even Deanna Troi’s family fell prey to them. Even unemotional Vulcans. Heck, even xenophobic Romulans. ...
So there we were, three light years into the Neutral Zone, with two Romulan cruisers starin’ us in the face, an’ we could tell by the micro distortions in the subspace that there were probably three more we couldna see. Usually we’d have the Captain there with us to use his Negotiate skill to even the odds summat. But he had ta leave early ta pick up his kids an’ the XO was in command, an’ the XO had a thing for the photon torpedoes. ...