Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: TESLA on January 05, 2010, 11:45:22 am
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Well, the time is upon us. the Beta for Star Trek Online starts on Jan 12th.
And Steam, Direct2drive, Amazon, etc, are all accepting pre-orders now.
Im curious to see if many people here would be playing this game?
But what I cannot make my mind up about yet, is which pre-order version to get!
Which is better? The Direct2drive, or Steam version. Which extras would be better in the game!
GameStop:
GameStop customers receive the ability to command the exclusive and always classic USS Enterprise from Star Trek The Original Series.
Best Buy:
Best Buy is offering their customers a fun in-game pet. As a Federation Captain, players own a famed Tribble of Star Trek lore that will accompany them on their travels into the final frontier. As a Klingon commander, players control the boar-like Targ, a beast found on the Klingon home world of Qo’noS.
Amazon:
Amazon is offering an exclusive “Liberated Borg” Bridge Officer. This bridge officer, who comes with unique nanotechnology augmentations, assists in missions and gains experience as the player does.
Wal-Mart:
With the Wal-Mart Bonus Skill Points package, receive addition skill points that enable players to improve their characters quickly.
Target:
Target customers who pre-order Star Trek Online receive a unique ground weapon – a TR-116. This rare projectile weapon is used in dampening fields and other challenging environments; it is also modified with a micro-transporter which beams the fired projectiles to targets at close range so that a user can fire without a direct line of site.
Direct2Drive:
Direct2Drive customers receive an exclusive Multi-Spatial Personal Shield. This advanced personal shield system is based on Borg technology, which constantly regenerates itself and the health of its wearer.
STEAM:
STEAM is offering customers Chromodynamic Armor. This armor is based on technology brought back from the Delta Quadrant by USS Voyager improves the damage and critical hits of energy weapons.
For most of us europeans, Wal-Mart, and a couple of other places are not an option.
Which one to get.....cannot decide!
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Hmmmm.... I'd say it depends on how you play the game, Steam adds Gank, Direct2Drive adds Tank, personally, I'd go with Direct2Drive based on the offer alone, but it really depends.
Edit: Thinking about it, this is an ingenious way of doing market research, it's easy to tell which outlet is selling what percent of the goods by using a simple database search.
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:wtf:
What ever happened to the days of getting a game... where you got the whole freaking thing without having to worry about the extras available depending on where you bought it???
Reminds me of the crap Microsoft pulls with its "options" depending on the version of the OS you buy. Crap. Total crap.
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pre-order bonuses piss me off.
less so if the are acquirable ingame still, and/or the pre-order is just convenience.
still, i can SEE why dev's like pre-orders, but I just don't want to rush to buy almost any game until release, especially since a little piece of news on Oct. 20th regarding MW2..
though, this game looks quite interesting, its just i can't givee the commitment that most MMORPG's ask for.
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Looks good according to my PCG issue.
I'm looking forward to (once I sort out a decent connection) answering distress calls by blowing up the victims.
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TODO: Name ship Kobyashi Maru. Hang out near Klingon border sending distress signals, just to see if anyone bites.
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:wtf:
What ever happened to the days of getting a game... where you got the whole freaking thing without having to worry about the extras available depending on where you bought it???
Agreed - how is anyone looking at this as a good thing?
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I can't see how it hurts, I guess. They're extra bits tossed in to incentivize the buyer. They hardly seem critical to the game experience.
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I suppose It really depends on how significant the change is. I mean, if it raises your combat potential by a few (<5) percentage points, then it isn't that big of a deal.
I still find it to be in poor taste, though.
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Agreed. When I buy something, I want the whole thing. Expansion packs are different - but this clearly isn't an expansion pack. I don't want to be limited in what I can do and get because of how I bought something.
I believe I've heard a few people complain about this sort of thing with regards to pre-orders/pseudo-special editions. I think that Dragon Age game was an example of that...
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You aren't limited at all. All you're missing is one of a handful of special items. That's it.
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Give it six months and the exclusives won't be exclusive any more anyway, they'll nerf them, shunt them over to the main items and create some different incentives for new customers. This will, inevitably, lead to bad feeling in the community with accusations of preferential treatment and it'll all end in a hail of phaserspam. ;)
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http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/gaming/news/article/6630.html
Suppose they were not too far out this their timing....
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Open beta started today if you have a key :)
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Open beta started today if you have a key :)
f*ck ive a key, didnt know it was today!!!
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So what does anyone think?
Mixed views
Liking the space combat. Ground play needs a bit of work, suppose thats way its a beta
Can be a bit slow frame rate on ground missions.
Fun though
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What was the intro cinematib like?
I'm easily pleased . . . ;-)
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There wasn't one.
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Ok, first impressions having spent about half an hour / hour in game.
1. Quite an in depth character creator. I kinda skimmed through it but it had some nice selections in there.
2. Graphics automatically set far too high. I had to significantly nerf my settings to get a decent frame rate out of the game (this is ground combat, I've yet to sample space combat). Suffice to say it figured my old rig could manage 16xAF and 8xFSAA as well as all other details set to Max. I wish, but no.
3. The interface starts off slowly but it does give you the whole HUD from the word "go" which can be daunting. Since it's a beta, maybe they'll streamline this a bit. I missed a communication in the first levels and ran around for ages not realizing that I couldn't proceed and had to restart the mission.
4. Server issues. I played for an hour, quit out, came back five minutes later and now I can't log in *at all*. Looking on the forum this has happened a lot, not a great sign.
Overall there's potential there and I'm looking forward to trying starship combat as that's my main draw. But so far it feels like it needs some polishing. Again though it is a beta...
Edit/Update:
Ok, I've now tried starship combat and to be honest I'm not sold. There was the initial thrill of flying about in my own Miranda class starship, pretending I was Khan and the worst thing to happen to space baddies anywhere. That has faded.
Controls remain cluttered and there's too much button mashing. I don't know if there's a "continually fire any weapon that can be fired at the enemy" toggle but there should be one, as I found myself mashing the "fire fore/aft phasers" button over and over. The game is half way towards making a decent space combat game, but it doesn't manage it in my eyes.
I won't be buying into this. There's potential but not at the prices they're asking. I'll be un-installing it now.
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Kalfireth you really have to teach me how you can spend ages when you've only played for about a hour :p
Starship combat is by far the best part of this game, it kinda plays like the old starfleet command games. Ground combat is rather meh if you play it solo but the large 'fleet action' ground battles are incredibly fun to do (like wise, so are the fleet action space battles).
There are some really questionable design choices in mission design though. There was this one mission where you are put into a team and all you have to do is fly to a freighter which will then slowly follow you to a mining center. That's it. No enemy contact, no further follow up. There is one more mission where you are teamed up, travel to a planet, beam down, run in one straight line and activate some sensors and beam back up again... Again no enemy contact etc. Why did they think it was a good idea to have people team up for that? Is there any need at all?
Then there is a mission where you have to scan 5 asteroids... solo. In which you will encounter loads of strong klingons.
I mean seriously, what were they thinking there?
Overal the game kinda feels 'underdeveloped' though and well... it feels like a typical mmorpg. Where borgs are reduced to respawnable grindable enemies and completed quests have no impact on the game world at all. Everybody flies the same type of ships and dying so far has no penalty on it.
I already have the money to buy a tier 2 ship but I can't buy one yet because I have to grind more quests to rank up... (oh and low level quests give about the same exp reward as higher level ones. And you can keep doing low level fleet battle quests over and over again.) Ah well, im having fun....
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Maybe I'm just not the sort to enjoy MMORPG games... I tried the 30 day trial of WoW though and found it far far easier to get into and indeed enjoyable than this has been. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy space combat and wanted to love the sensation of flying about etc. but it just didn't grab me like I hoped it would.
And honestly, I know I've only completed the "here's your own ship, have fun" missions but they were pretty uninspired and a lot of the time what I was doing didn't make any sense.
For example, one of the last "graduation" missions sees you helping to destroy a damaged Borg cube and a sphere. I joined, destroyed both, but only got a confirmed kill for the sphere. Waited around some more and another Cube/sphere show up - same thing. Finally I head away from the instance then back into it again on impulse power and I get the kill for the Cube. No explanation about why that should be - I'm guessing a bug but with only a couple of weeks to go that's pretty shoddy. I encountered plenty of other bugs along the way as well.
All in all, there's hope but it's not nearly ready yet. It felt like playing an alpha build.
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Controls remain cluttered and there's too much button mashing. I don't know if there's a "continually fire any weapon that can be fired at the enemy" toggle but there should be one, as I found myself mashing the "fire fore/aft phasers" button over and over. The game is half way towards making a decent space combat game, but it doesn't manage it in my eyes.
Right click on the phaser icons toggles them to auto fire.
Also, I highly suggest you at least play a bit more and visit the starbase 24 instance.
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Well that brings up my second problem... it keeps crashing on me. In between level loads it'll load part of the new area and then stop entirely. I'll have to ctrl+alt+del the game and restart it. Then, if I'm lucky, it'll let me in.
Useful to know that right clicking on the phasers auto-fires them though. I'm glad they thought of that. And what happens at Starbase 24? :)
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Massive fleet action
Flying together with 20 other players against a large fleet of klingons is the best part of the game.
I just created a klingon character to check out on things there... There is hardly anything there content wise...
This game needs at least an other year of development before I would think its fit for release... but the way things are these days, release the game first then add content later. The money must flow. Oh and be sure to label it beta to make sure people can't complain too much :p
The crashing sucks though, I personally only had 1 crash so far and that wasn't while loading. Just server issues (got disconnected once at the last bit of a long quest, had to redo that one completely :blah: )
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I had to delete the game file couple of times because of 'version mismatch'
Klingons dont have much going for them at the moment
All seems to be very Federation orientated at the moment.
Still fun though..
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The crashing sucks though, I personally only had 1 crash so far and that wasn't while loading. Just server issues (got disconnected once at the last bit of a long quest, had to redo that one completely :blah: )
Yeah, it happened several times in a row the first time I tried to enter the Sol system. I gave up and checked out the forums, found that dropping all graphics to absolute minimum could work. Tried that and it did... but just today I had it happen again in another system so I gave up at that point. Plus last night I went through about an hour of "server busy, try again later" although the game reported that the server was up.
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Yeah that server is busy message is new and if im to believe the message in the launcher they are trying to resolve it. (i'm currently spamming log in attempts)
It wasn't like that before. But yeah it leaves a bad impression when you've hardly had a chance to explore the game.
PvP queues are really long and the actual matches themselves are over before you can blink.
Also the klingon content is so bad, you'll receive "starfleet merrit" when completing klingon quests and the Gorn don't have a description of their species yet in the character creation.
They can't release a game like this :blah:
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Yeah that server is busy message is new and if im to believe the message in the launcher they are trying to resolve it. (i'm currently spamming log in attempts)
It wasn't like that before. But yeah it leaves a bad impression when you've hardly had a chance to explore the game.
PvP queues are really long and the actual matches themselves are over before you can blink.
Also the klingon content is so bad, you'll receive "starfleet merrit" when completing klingon quests and the Gorn don't have a description of their species yet in the character creation.
They can't release a game like this :blah:
Still problems.... server more temperamental than a girl on PMS
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Ships feel...lacking.
Here you are, flying a massive ship, hunderds of meters long with complex subsystems, lots of crewmembers...and it doesn't feel like it.
It's just underwhelming. Bridge Commander did a far better job.
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Got it last saturday (apparently Atari has begun distributing boxes early, here in switzerland... don't ask me why).
Up until now, I'm enjoying it.
1. Space Combat is very nice :) Just like I remembered in Starfleet Combat. As someone said, you should definitely try the Fleet Actions... Intense but rewarding, (and I'm not talking loot-wise... who cares about that stuff...)
2. Ground Exploration: not bad, could use some work though: at times I had problems with keeping track of what was happening, everything was too fast. But maybe it's due to the fact that I'm not 16 anymore...
3. Graphic wise it's more than ok. On par to today's standards, but what really stands out, it's the amount of detail. Many small touches that make it a pleasant experience. Try navigating through an asteroid field, or crossing planetary rings... you even get the "wake" effect. I was flabbergasted.
That said, I'm not really sure how "long the content will last", for lack of better words... I mean, I've become more of a "casual" player, as the years have passed, so I'll be having fun for some time (6/12 months). And I would be happy with the Space Combat alone. But I wonder what more hardcore players might think...
Karador@CmdKewin - U.S.S Paradox
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Spent near an hour defeating klingons in space,
solving ground combat,
defeating klingon Captain in space.
Then, when on the verge of victory, the server fecks up, logs me out, and i have to repeat it again...... :mad:
Ah well, overall i am really enjoying it, land based lag can be annoying, esp in the starbase or memory alpha.
Space combat does look good, detail is nice.
Loads of extras are a nice touch.
Music really suits the game.
Solaris@Seraphs - U.S.S Galway
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Ships feel...lacking.
Here you are, flying a massive ship, hunderds of meters long with complex subsystems, lots of crewmembers...and it doesn't feel like it.
It's just underwhelming. Bridge Commander did a far better job.
Do you know what I really wish for? Something that can give me the same feeling that you get watching the final conflict in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.
It really feels like two large ships playing cat and mouse. The mention of 2 dimensional thinking is a nice touch and many space sims tend to echo it - only having attacks along a central plain rather than from any angle. I would absolutely love to be in command of a replica Enterprise and in a position to order "Z-minus 10,000 meters. Standby photon torpedoes". It's geeky stuff, but it gives this feeling over absolute control of the ships position in space, its direction and 3D location.