MailOrderClone said:
Honestly, I never really cared to try the PVP features out in Star Trek Online during my time playing it. Me and Captain Freddie Mercury of the starship Killer Queen found more time doing regular missions, and occasionally helping other players out with theirs. Oddly, the ship combat was the best part, as the ground combat felt more than a little boring.
While they're in the mood to tweak their games, Cryptic should dial back Champions Online too and make that game a bit more co-op focused. That's why their first game was such a big hit, after all. City of Heroes was game where team play and cooperation where the letter of the law and attempting to solo wouldn't get you anywhere quickly. Really, that's kind of the point of an MMO in my eyes. Work with other players to complete tasks that you otherwise wouldn't be able to, even if sometimes those tasks are in contrast with the goals of other groups of players. The moment that an MMO stops being about multiplayer play is the moment when it loses sight of it's defining feature, and once that happens even the greatest MMO is only as good as the most middling of single player action games.
Yeah, that explains a bit of a philosophical problem with Star Trek Online.
Star Trek is, 90% of the time based around the idea of a single starship, going around the place by itself.
On rare occasions you get massive fleet engagements, but it's not a common thing.
However, a starship itself is a cooperative effort, since all the crew members have to work together to accomplish a mission.
Yet, the STO setup makes everyone the captain of a starship... While I see why they did it, it's the arrangement that causes the biggest conflict between the purpose of an MMO, and the setting.
Why would you have multiple captains, each with their own ship, going around all over the place together?
It does strange things to the setting.
Yet, what's resulted instead is that you can do pretty much the whole game by yourself. Makes sense in context, but as you said, for an MMO, that's kind of missing the point.
I don't know. Every time I see STO in action... While Í'm impressed it exists at all, it also makes me sad that the original concept for it, (before cryptic took over) has more or less been lost entirely.
Thinking back on that, I suspect a single-player (or at most, small-scale multiplayer) star Trek RPG could be great.
STO however, just isn't. It's too much of a compromise between it's setting/premise, and MMO game mechanics.
Basically creating the worst of both worlds.