TallGuyCalif's Computer Gaming and Entertainment Site

Tag: MMO

  • Star Trek Online Skill Cap

    My Science Officer Admiral has maxed out the level cap in Star Trek Online, which means he won’t advance in rank any more, but it also means he doesn’t earn skill points. Now if he were already maxed out in skills, that would be fine, but he’s not even close to being maxed in all the relevant skills. Sure, I could replace all the ship’s weapons with Polaron beams, for example, and respec his skills to ignore anything other than Polaron weapons. That would help, but is annoying and lame, particularly as enticing Tetryon or Phaser weapons pop up occasionally.

    Now that I’ve hit the cap, I am a little disappointed and the fun of playing that character is diminished. Perhaps I should try one of my other characters, but that’s mostly repeating ground I’ve already covered. My Admiral still has missions he hasn’t done, yet he won’t get points for them. Kinda reduces the incentive a bit.

    I will still play the Deferi/Breen story episodes, but the daily missions don’t buy me much, because of the skill cap. Maybe a good weapon will drop, but probably not. So I really will have to think about either starting a new character or playing one of my low level guys.

  • Star Trek Online Weekly and Daily Missions

    I’m really enjoying Star Trek Online’s Weekly and Daily missions dealing with the Deferi and the Breen. The Breen ships are quite a challenge, and they’re nearly as tough as the Borg on the ground. So far, the plot is moving slowly, but it has a lot of potential. Most of the missions can be done in an hour each, and this weekend’s one took less time, but was quite a change of pace to play doctor (though not with an Orion green girl, I’m sorry to say). If you like Star Trek, give STO a chance – it’s pretty fun!

  • Why I quit Eve Online

    Full disclosure: I changed the title of this post. I didn’t really hate Eve Online, but decided I didn’t want to play it, so I quit it.

    I really wanted to like Eve Online. I really did! I was about done with my free trial sometime back and was thinking about starting the paid subscription. I had joined a corporation with a couple of nice guys from Ireland and was progressing through the ranks and through missions nicely. I had just earned enough rank to buy a cruiser, if I remember. Then I decided it wasn’t for me, gave all my stuff to my corporation buddies, and left the game and never looked back. Here’s why:

    Eve Online is a massive multiplayer space game, which immediately sounds awesome. But it is also an RPG.That means hits are calculated based on dice rolls rather than your dogfighting skills. In fact, there is no dogfighting at all. But that was OK – I like RPGs. Essentially, you can choose targets, and select an orbit distance so the computer approaches to that distance and then stays that far away. And you reload when your guns are empty. The computer takes care of all the aiming and fighting. But that’s okay, it’s an RPG. I could live with that.

    Your ship has a shield, which protects the hull, then when the shield is gone, it has armor, which also protects the hull, then when that’s gone, hits eat into your hull. If your hull goes to zero, your ship explodes and your escape capsule flies off. Your capsule can be shot down, in which case, you’d better have a recent clone in storage or else you lose a lot of abilities. Insurance can help replace your ship, but not what was in the hold or mounted to the hardpoints. You can go reclaim your wreck to recover some gear if you can defeat whatever killed you in the first place.

    Eve Online looks pretty. The graphics are on par with most other space games (perhaps X3 is prettier, perhaps not). To get between areas within a system, you warp, which is very fast travel, and it is disconcerting when the game would warp you right through the space station you just left, for example. You don’t land on planets, but on stations near planets and moons. The stations have shops, repair bays, corporations, and assigners of missions. To travel between systems, you use jump gates that connect neighboring systems. And the whole universe is one live universe, though parts of it are “instanced,” so many of the other ships flying around and perhaps shooting at you are people, not NPCs.

    For the missions, you generally have to go somewhere, fight a wave of baddies, take an accelerator gate to a nearby area, fight more baddies, repeat a few times, then go report in to get your reward. If you are part of a team, you and your buddies go through this together, which is fun. If your ship is damaged, you can escape (sometimes – the enemy may prevent you from warping away!), but then you have to start the whole chain of gates over, though the baddies don’t respawn for a while.

    The reason I dropped Eve Online and never looked back was the travel time. The time it takes to navigate to the next acceleration gate in a mission just got tedious. It turns out that as you get bigger and better ships, they get slower, so the problem gets worse. My destroyer was slower than my smaller frigate, while my cruiser was slower than my destroyer. I realized that it would only get worse and never better as I progressed to bigger, “better” ships. So I quit cold turkey. If they ever change that hierarchy, I would be happy to try again, because I did have fun, for a while, but until then, I don’t like having my time wasted for me.

  • Star Trek Online Battle

    In this Star Trek Online battle, my ship, the USS Ampere, is protecting a damaged ship from waves of alien attacks. Since my ship is a science vessel, it doesn’t have very powerful weapons, but does have good shields, so my hull is well protected. You can see that the battle is generally turning and worrying about firing arcs. The enemies are not very tough in this battle, so they don’t do too much damage. Against the last battleship, I call in a “photonic fleet” of helpers that take the heat off me as we weaken the enemy’s shields and I pump quantum torpedoes into it. This is an HD video, so be sure to view it full screen and at 1080p resolution if your machine can handle it.

  • Star Trek Online Sector Map Navigation

    This video shows sector map navigation in Star Trek Online. My ship, the USS Ampere, is in the galactic map sort of near DS9 and Bajor. I turn around an enter the Rolor Nebula, an area with randomly generated missions that you can repeat over and over again (and must if you want to rise in the Diplomatic Corps ranks). Once in the nebula, I head over to an anomaly, which in this case is something to scan. Then you see the scanning mini-game where I match the waveform of the scan and get bonus materials. Note: This is an HD video (1920×1080) if you go full-screen and choose 1080p in the video size options.

  • New Star Trek Online Content

    The folks that run Star Trek Online are doing their best to keep us from becoming bored and to draw gamers in. Now they have added some new weekly episodes, plus some daily repeatable missions that involve fighting the Breen. On the ground, the Breen use freeze grenades and things to slow or freeze you, while in space, they are tough cookies. They are also introducing each episode with a Star Trek-looking title as you warp into the system. Pretty nice! The first episode is up now, and I’d guess the next will pop up in a few days, so I’m looking forward to it!

    I also has a fun mission against the Borg last night with lots of fun ground combat. Somehow, fighting the Borg in ground combat seems more fun than fighting Romulans or Klingons. Perhaps it’s that they keep beaming in more to fight!

  • Star Trek Online

    A game that I’ve been playing on and off for a few months is Star Trek Online. Because it is Star Trek, I signed on early, during the beta period, and even bought a lifetime subscription. Even back then, the space combat was quite good, though it is only partially 3-axis. Remember that these are big starships, not little fighters, so they turn slowly and it is really a game of “facing” (which weapons can be brought to bear on the target). The ships can’t roll over or flip upside down, which is different from many space games, but consistent with the Star Trek universe, where ships are always facing “up” unless they are drifting.

    Because it is an MMO, some missions are played with other players, so together, you can split targets or gang up on one. Each player only has a single target at a time, so half the weapons may be idle because of facings (certain Bridge Officer powers allow multi-target firing). All in all, the space battles are fun and look good.

    In the early days, ground combat was horrible. Since then, it has vastly improved, but is still much weaker than the starship battles. In ground combat, you and four of your computer-controlled Bridge Officers (BOs) go up against groups of enemies spread throughout a mission area. You fight Klingons, Jem Hadar, Cardassians, Romulans, Borg, and more, and each has their own characteristics that affect how much damage they do and how much damage your weapons do. The ground battles can get quite frantic and are sometimes fun, but are usually a chore. But they are somewhat Star Trek-ish, so it’s okay.

    There are also a few large group battles both on ground and in space, and, as with other missions, the space ones are mostly fun, while the ground ones are a pain. The exception is a mission to defeat a Crystalline Entity (remember that from TNG?) – this is a terrible space mission that I have never succeeded in. Just stupidly hard, particularly when other players make mistakes that heal the damn thing.

    Overall, I like Star Trek Online and think it is good fun. If you have any interest in Star Trek, check it out. The price on Steam and elsewhere has dropped to only $20, I think, then there’s a monthly fee after the first month.

    You can look my characters up in the game. My captain page is here: http://www.startrekonline.com/character_profiles/user_characters/TallGuyCalif