Beam me up... damnit...
In the limited experiences I've had with MMOs, I've never really had any of them in particular reach out, grab me, stick their claws into my brains and rot my time and sanity away into oblivion. World of Warcraft, however fun in a relaxing "gotta catch 'em all" attitude of rep grinding or skill grinding or level grinding, really just gave me a feel of lethargy. Go here and grind this. Watch out, or you'll get ganked by others using you to grind themselves. I want characters that are more than walking mortar and pestles. Guild Wars was not much better, but that was partly my fault; I tried to embrace the PvE aspect of a game that will always be dominated by PvP. And the PvE aspect was more rep grinding to get shinier things in your Hall of Monuments in the hopes that you'll have SOMETHING in Guild Wars 2, whenever that will be released. D&D Online was very grindy with no overarching storyline, except that you're some "chosen one" just like everyone else is, and I didn't bother playing after that.
Hellgate: London captured the idea of Diablo in a futuristic, MMO-style that would have had some serious potential... if the missions didn't involve the same black and gray warehouse, sewer, alleyway, or Trafalgar Square, with the same bad guys doing the same boring attacks. I don't mind level grinding to get past a certain area in a game. What I hated about the game could only be described as this: I would fight Zombies starting out to level up because they're really easy to kill while they're brainsing all over the place (it's a word now, shut up), then as the game got harder, more difficult bad guys would show up. Eventually I would get to the point that I couldn't defeat the bad guys, so I had to go to an easier area and level up. I get sufficiently high enough and go back to the same area, and what happened? The really hard bad guys were replaced by ZOMBIES! At least Diablo had the decency to throw different bad guys at me all the time!
Other MMOs, I only participated in the beta trials or trial versions, and that was good enough for me not to waste another $50. Warhammer had a good environment system that had timed instances in the persistent world instead of separate from it, but it wasn't too different from WoW in everything else. Lord of the Rings Online felt... fake. Aesthetically it was downright unsettling, and if I'm going to stare at things for that long, they need to be pleasing to the eyes. Tabula Rasa felt like a ripoff of what Starcraft: Ghost was supposed to be, and it basically came down to this--if you couldn't snipe, you couldn't play. City of Heroes took too long for anyone to really get in deep with the game before the trial version expired, and everyone was playing City of Villains anyway. Star Wars: Galaxies was boring, like the way that Eve Online is boring. And don't get me started on Final Fantasy XI.
Then I saw the pre-order box in the store, and it reached out to me. I went online to look at the site, and it grabbed me. I saw what my options were, what I could do, and how rich the story is leading up to the game, and I felt sweet oblivion coming to take me away, ha ha.
Star Trek Online.
Okay, I recognize that it's a simple child fantasy wish fulfillment of me wanting to captain a ship with a crew, going on away missions, doing the kinds of things we've seen on the shows for the past 40 years. And you know what? I'm okay with that. Within two days, I registered an account on the site, applied for closed beta testing, and even entered a contest to name a starship class for the game. First, let's get the bad parts out of the way.
When you start, you can play as either a new Ensign in Starfleet or a Klingon of the Empire, and thus begins the good vs. evil bit. In Starfleet, you have the option to choose from many different races or you can create your own, which REALLY bothers me. I'm wondering if you will have to choose a hybrid offspring of two or more species or if you'll choose many different aspects and jumble it into one person. I'm going to laugh if someone tries to ask why they can't have a hybrid Andorian and Soong-type android! I'm a little skeptical about the Klingon Empire aspect, because the game is to be released in one month, and there's little to no information about the Klingon game mechanics.
Okay, now the good stuff. When you start off, you have a small ship with a green crew, and you level up EVERYTHING. Your experiences allow you to level up your character, your bridge crew, and even modify your ship. The galaxy is persistent, with sectors dedicated to PvE (in Federation space) or PvP (the Neutral Zone). You can specialize in Tactical, Engineering, or Science, and the ships are catered to each of those. You have away missions which are deemed "episodes," because you can expect the missions will be very similar to what you would have seen on the shows. Because of that, you will get to see places like Vulcan, Qo'noS, Deep Space 9, Risa, and many others.
That's the biggest selling point for me. It's all part of the standard story line. To quote the site: Star Trek Online is set in the "prime" Star Trek reality. This is the timeline of the five television series and the first 10 movies. It is the world in which the Gorn attacked Cestus III, Kirk fought Khan in the Mutara Nebula, Picard explored the galaxy, the Federation fought the Dominion War, Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant and Captain Archer and the crew of the NX-01 showed us how it all began. Because of this, there's no telling what might happen. You may end up encountering Species 8472, or the Jem'Hadar, or the Nausicaans, or the Borg!
I don't want to give away too much, because it still hasn't been released yet, but I'm anticipating the open beta that starts tomorrow. I've only had one other big complaint that will ultimately decide if I'm going to continue with this game after launch on Feb. 2: there is a subscription fee and there possibly will be a microtransaction section of the game as well, and this does not set well with me. I can handle microtransaction stuff, but if the subscription is $15 a month, I'm not going to bother. It's sad, really, but I'm not having a game turn into a monthly bill; I learned that lesson from WoW. I'll just go back to playing Torchlight or Dragon Age until the Next Big Thing shows up--I just wish it was Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 already.
Hellgate: London captured the idea of Diablo in a futuristic, MMO-style that would have had some serious potential... if the missions didn't involve the same black and gray warehouse, sewer, alleyway, or Trafalgar Square, with the same bad guys doing the same boring attacks. I don't mind level grinding to get past a certain area in a game. What I hated about the game could only be described as this: I would fight Zombies starting out to level up because they're really easy to kill while they're brainsing all over the place (it's a word now, shut up), then as the game got harder, more difficult bad guys would show up. Eventually I would get to the point that I couldn't defeat the bad guys, so I had to go to an easier area and level up. I get sufficiently high enough and go back to the same area, and what happened? The really hard bad guys were replaced by ZOMBIES! At least Diablo had the decency to throw different bad guys at me all the time!
Other MMOs, I only participated in the beta trials or trial versions, and that was good enough for me not to waste another $50. Warhammer had a good environment system that had timed instances in the persistent world instead of separate from it, but it wasn't too different from WoW in everything else. Lord of the Rings Online felt... fake. Aesthetically it was downright unsettling, and if I'm going to stare at things for that long, they need to be pleasing to the eyes. Tabula Rasa felt like a ripoff of what Starcraft: Ghost was supposed to be, and it basically came down to this--if you couldn't snipe, you couldn't play. City of Heroes took too long for anyone to really get in deep with the game before the trial version expired, and everyone was playing City of Villains anyway. Star Wars: Galaxies was boring, like the way that Eve Online is boring. And don't get me started on Final Fantasy XI.
Then I saw the pre-order box in the store, and it reached out to me. I went online to look at the site, and it grabbed me. I saw what my options were, what I could do, and how rich the story is leading up to the game, and I felt sweet oblivion coming to take me away, ha ha.
Star Trek Online.
Okay, I recognize that it's a simple child fantasy wish fulfillment of me wanting to captain a ship with a crew, going on away missions, doing the kinds of things we've seen on the shows for the past 40 years. And you know what? I'm okay with that. Within two days, I registered an account on the site, applied for closed beta testing, and even entered a contest to name a starship class for the game. First, let's get the bad parts out of the way.
When you start, you can play as either a new Ensign in Starfleet or a Klingon of the Empire, and thus begins the good vs. evil bit. In Starfleet, you have the option to choose from many different races or you can create your own, which REALLY bothers me. I'm wondering if you will have to choose a hybrid offspring of two or more species or if you'll choose many different aspects and jumble it into one person. I'm going to laugh if someone tries to ask why they can't have a hybrid Andorian and Soong-type android! I'm a little skeptical about the Klingon Empire aspect, because the game is to be released in one month, and there's little to no information about the Klingon game mechanics.
Okay, now the good stuff. When you start off, you have a small ship with a green crew, and you level up EVERYTHING. Your experiences allow you to level up your character, your bridge crew, and even modify your ship. The galaxy is persistent, with sectors dedicated to PvE (in Federation space) or PvP (the Neutral Zone). You can specialize in Tactical, Engineering, or Science, and the ships are catered to each of those. You have away missions which are deemed "episodes," because you can expect the missions will be very similar to what you would have seen on the shows. Because of that, you will get to see places like Vulcan, Qo'noS, Deep Space 9, Risa, and many others.
That's the biggest selling point for me. It's all part of the standard story line. To quote the site: Star Trek Online is set in the "prime" Star Trek reality. This is the timeline of the five television series and the first 10 movies. It is the world in which the Gorn attacked Cestus III, Kirk fought Khan in the Mutara Nebula, Picard explored the galaxy, the Federation fought the Dominion War, Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant and Captain Archer and the crew of the NX-01 showed us how it all began. Because of this, there's no telling what might happen. You may end up encountering Species 8472, or the Jem'Hadar, or the Nausicaans, or the Borg!
I don't want to give away too much, because it still hasn't been released yet, but I'm anticipating the open beta that starts tomorrow. I've only had one other big complaint that will ultimately decide if I'm going to continue with this game after launch on Feb. 2: there is a subscription fee and there possibly will be a microtransaction section of the game as well, and this does not set well with me. I can handle microtransaction stuff, but if the subscription is $15 a month, I'm not going to bother. It's sad, really, but I'm not having a game turn into a monthly bill; I learned that lesson from WoW. I'll just go back to playing Torchlight or Dragon Age until the Next Big Thing shows up--I just wish it was Diablo 3 or Starcraft 2 already.