Fractral said:
Therumancer said:
I hadn't realized TSW had gone free to play. I vaguely remember having heard a lot of negative things about it back when it came out, although no more than usual for a new MMO being talked about on this site. I'll look into it; if it's a one off payment then I see no reason not to give it a go.
How do the Cryptic games play? Star Trek online sounds tempting for the spaceship battles. Do they play out in an RTS fashion, or do you command from the bridge/cockpit?
Hard to describe as they have variable control options. It's not an action thing by any means. Basically your captain has a bunch of skills that determine the effectiveness of various equipment and abilities. You control the ship in real time from an outside view, typically from right behind your ship sort of third person, though you can rotate the camera and such. When you fire your weapons hit or miss based on skills, equipment, the defense of the target. Different kinds of weapons have different firing angles depending on what they are. For example cannons like what the Defiant used in "DS-9" do a lot of damage but have a very limited fixed firing arc, beam arrays, your basic "Phaser" from the TV shows have like a 180 degree arc of fire. Movement is in real time as I pointed out, but it depends largely on the degree maneuverability of your ship. Ships like the defiant or various smaller Klingon ships (you can play as Klingons or Romulans as well as just Federation) are fast and maneuver well, and are designed to largely attack from their forward arc with massive barrages of cannon fire. Larger ships, various kinds of cruisers, dreadnaughts, etc... move verrrry slowly and turn badly. This can lead to predictable tactics like say the bigger ships mounting lots of wide arc weapons and using broadside tactics where they can bring both their forward and aft weapons to bear on a target from the side. Of course in STO things vary greatly as you can modify your ships with equipment which can increase maneuver, and of course there are special weapons like cannons with wider firing arcs (added into the game via the new version of the crafting system) and things like that. Not to mention very special ships and equipment gained from reputation grinds, lockboxes, high end crafting, or involvement with a fleet. Basically you can see some very exotic ships with odd equipment set ups that can say create an unusually maneuverable dreadnaught.
In addition to this there is a sort of party management involved. In addition to your captain you have Bridge Officers who are other characters that group with you on the ground in your away missions (NPC companions) and all have their own skills and are geared seperatly. In space each ship has X number of bridge stations of a given quality, and you assign bridge officers to those spots, and then while your flying you use the skills of your bridge officers as additional things you can do in space other than fly, shoot weapons, and distribute power (you can distribute power from a pool to different ship systems like shields, engines, weapons, etc.. as well as focus shield power in specific directions), this can range from a basic heal (telling say an engineer to do an emergency patch to the hull, or a science officer to give the shields a power boost restoring some of their health), to attack patterns a tactical officer knows that give you buffs (defense, accuracy, reduce enemy damage resistance), to various offensive and defensive abilities, like say having a science officer create a gravity well/spatial anomaly with the deflector array to crowd control and damage other ships. There are tons of different abilities, many of which have different levels, and certain types of captains can train their Boffs in higher levels of these skills by leveling up their own basic skills.
I guess you could say that it's sort of "real time strategy" but it requires a more active approach than just telling your ship "kill this guy". I know some people apparently manage to play it with X-box controllers but I'm not sure how they manage to map all the things they would need to do it right.
To be honest I think the space component is a lot better than the ground component, but ground has been getting better (this game is years old). Your away team isn't as dumb as it used to be for example, but some of the animations for NPCs are still kind of spastic even allowing for how long this game has been around.
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When it comes to TSW I'm a lifetimer ($200 grandmaster) which is why I pop in periodically. It is indeed now "free to play" their big gimmick is "pay once, play forever" however this is mitigated by charging for new quests and content as I explained. You pretty much get everything up to Transylvania in the main story arcs, but if you want the new side arcs they added in (Vanishing Of Tyler Freeborn, A Dream To Kill, etc...) you have to pay for them, and the new major play area they added in, Toyko, also requires you to purchase it... basically they sell expansion packs, costumes, and the usual array of exps buff potions and the like.
As far as it's initial reception went, it was tragic, but not unexpected. TSW is a very niche game, and I think it got blasted for it. It had the usual array of launch problems, but the things that actually seemed to irritate people were things like the sabotage or investigation missions. Especially early on before there were solves on sites like Unfair.co, people who came in with a grind-tastic mentality wound up getting stonewalled by some of the puzzles, especially seeing as some of them give vague hints on how to proceed. An example would be a very early investigation mission which I won't spoil in it's entirety other than to say that to enter a jail cell you need to die, and walk into it in ghost form to meet the ghost of a dead prisoner. The game gives a few very subtle hints about this, and how unlike in WoW, using your spirit form is a must in some places, but a lot of people got very miffed about that (and to be fair I have to admit the game could have been better about explaining something like that early on). The concept of TSW is one where your character is defined as being functionally immortal and indestructible (if someone, even a god, kills you, you just come back, even entity-class beings make it clear how hard you are to destroy and that the best thing for them to do is to slow you down) and this is used for some of the puzzles. Getting killed being a tool you use occasionally took some adjustment for some people even if it doesn't happen too often.... there are also a few areas where you say need to dodge laser beams and hide from cameras and such as a sort of stealth puzzle (failure kills you and respawns you at the area start) some of them can be a little tricky, and early on some of the detection was a bit spotty (though to be fair part of it is also that some of them are set up intentionally so you won't know what was spotting you initially, and then go "oh duh" once you figure it out). The meat and potatoes of TSW still ultimately comes down to "find scary monsters, shoot them in the face" though... but if your clearing all quests/progressing the story you inevitably run into the puzzles and stuff. Of course nowadays you can just cheat your way through it if you want, a quick call to unfair.co and chances are you'll get unstuck in like 30 seconds.
To be fair, I will also say that while the art style is decent, and the atmosphere is good, it's important to note the game was done by Funcom, the guys that did Age Of Conan and Anarchy Online. They aren't a Podunk operation, but they aren't AAA either. As a result I think a lot of people were turned off by the lack of "wow factor" compared to a lot of other big MMOs in development. The huge array of possible costume combinations came at the expense of nobody having Hollywood good looks for the most part, and occasionally spikes of lag when you have tons of PCs all standing around wearing elaborate garb depending on your machine. Some of the big events like the recurring "Guardians Of Gaia" have gotten criticisms for this due to packing so many PCs into such a small area. This is however not something your likely to run into in general play.. and it's important to note that the game is not only a few years old now, but it wasn't ever exactly selling itself on "bleeding edge" graphics to my knowledge.
Good game, one of my favorites, it's just my hands go through periods of hurting too much for the end game telegraph dodging. It's not for everyone though, and as I said, while you can cheat through it now, some parts of it take some actual effort to do right. TSW is for example a game where to begin with we actually had the community finding people or programs to help translate morse code. Most recently in Tokyo while it didn't last long there was a need for some Japanese translations to solve an Origami themed quest, but that's up on Unfair now too.
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EDIT: Oh and one thing I will also mention, while it's usually only a way of setting duty officer assignments, and you can't command the ship from inside your bridge, each ship has it's own "bridge" instance where you can walk around inside your ship. Some ships have unique bridges, some have modular bridges where you can set the type of instance you want. They of course sell different bridge set ups for cash (since it's cosmetic).
Some ships, especially the exotic ones, have a very small bridge where everything is accessible from a small area. Things are usually themed to the ship though, such as being entirely crystalline if you happen to have obtained and are flying a Tholian ship. A lot of the basic ships though have a full ship instance where things are separated and you can say hop into your turbo lift, head down to engineering, visit your own personal cafeteria/bar, and/or place trophies (like a huge chunk of crystal for having scored #1 in DPS during a slaying of The Crystalline Entity, or a Bat'leth trophy you can get from an early story mission if your a Klingon). A scant few missions require you to use your bridge, to do something like solve a code breaking puzzle using the computer in your command office. Probably the most elaborate ship set up is the Romulan Scimitar (cash shop ship of course) which comes with a full ship interior, including the ability to visit your ship's Thalaron core.
You can for example sit in your captain's chair, but you can't fly from there, and honestly that would be a pain in the arse to try and do given the way the combat works where you generally need to be aware of things around you, turn the ship for firing arcs... etc.
