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I think to make a Star Trek game like this really work, it will take a lot more effort for "live" content from the developers. Star Trek first prioritywas about exploration and discovery - everything else is secondary. To keep it rich, I think it would require active "game masters". Something more like a traditional table-top RPG with officials designing quests for the players. If it were given an easy enough interface, a team of writers could assemble new stuff very quickly and get it out to the game.

I'm not necessarily thinking there shouldn't be a lot of warfare either though. It just wouldn't have to be race vs. race if that would take away too much from the spirit of Trek. Join a Klingon House and you'll have all the combat you can take.

I see a lot of obstacles to overcome if they expect to make this game work though. One of my biggest questions is how will they handle Starships/ground? Private ships in Trek isn't as common as Star Wars. More likely you'd be on a large capital ship and you'd only get to visit planets if your Starship was orbiting one. All of this would require a LOT more player cooperation than what we need for SWG.

Perpetual Entertainment in S.F. has the unlimited license for a planned mmorpg. They just got their funding a couple of months ago near the time they signed the license. They have a founding technology for the connectivity. Don't look for this till sometime 2006 or 7. They didn't hire me as producer, so I predict it will suck!

A Star Trek MMO seems a little awkward to me. I mean, the whole set-up of Star Trek is that you're in the military on one huge ship. How's that going to work in MMOs, where you build a character and do your own thing mostly? Oh sure, we have guilds in SWG, but you don't HAVE to join one.

Are there going to be space mercenaries in Star Trek? Seems to get away from the whole capital ship thing. What are people going to do, organize a guild of 500 people to crew a ship?

"Beaming down a party of one!"

Just seems like a bad fit to me. Plus, trekkies don't need to have more conventions. Think about the fanfest for that game. It's hard enough to get that B.O. smell out of the hotels trekkieshold conventions innow.

Just kidding. Please don't killme with your Klingon battle sword.

Tulasi Kid

Ok, let's put it this way, if this is to work, when you join Starfleet, you aren't going to be able to form a "guild". It will *hopefully* involve you being assigned to a ship after graduation from some academy (where you begin to learn the skills needed to solve problems you will encounter). The ship will probably be run by both players and npcs.

What do I want in a Star Trek MMORPG? Well, first of all, I don't want it to become a pvp free for all mess.

But content wise? Go search google for "Star Trek PBEM". You'll probably find hundreds of sites, which are basically run like this: You create a character, you choose what your character does,you write this all down, and then you send it to everyone in the simm. Not that I actually do it that way, (I prefer forum based, but it's pretty similar) but there are more PBEMs than any other type.

So

JoKen Jash
Commando to the end!

SWG in a nutshell:
JoKen Jash flips a coin.
RandomJedi: OMG!!!! IT'S AN I WIN BUTTON!!!! NERF IT!!!!!!

"It's the End of the World as we Know it, and I feel fine..."

Ok... If the MMORPG was set 50 years into The Next Generation's future and opened up the Delta Quadrant and Alpha Quadrants for exploration...Species 8472, Borg, the Dominion, Jem'Hadar... and that's just to name a few of the known races. The potential is there to create a lot more and I think if Gene Rodenberry was still alive, he would be a lot more liberal as far as what kind of content was allowed using the Star Trek name. There is a lot of potential for content in Star Trek that Star Wars really can't compare with.

Also, on the other side of that,I really don't see how the ships will work since most Starships in Star Trek have huge crews. The ships would have to be massive as far as game design goes to accomodate so many people.

That's the concern I have with the idea - Starship use (especially if it's to be the dominant part of the game) would be pretty complicated. We get a SLIGHT idea of what it'd be like through multiplayer ships, but that's nothing compared to the intricacies of Trek. How far could they take it without it becong too mundane? Unless your warp core is about to explode, I doubt there's anything very exciting about working in the engine room while up on the bridge, there's a huge fleet battle taking place. Very few crewmembers on a Starship get front-row seats to the action, if they get seats at all...

I'm just as big a ST fan as I am for SW.

I hope they can pull it off well for ST. It'll be interesting to see how they implement life on board a starship, whether you're with the Federation or one of the other big races/powers like the Romulans and Klingons.

Time setting wise, until somewhat recentlyI generally prefer the era of The Original Series and their movies. The Federation was less into "hippy c**p" and had no problem with smacking someone hard if it was wronged. I say recently since the Dominion War in DS9 changed drastically how the Federation looked at things. With a costly war, the Feds seem less like "tree-hugging hippies." How so? Their ships, though good, wereprimarily meant for exploration, scientific, and diplomatic missions. New ships were designed with alot more combat emphasis. Old ships refitted for war.

Well, I'm starting to go way out there.

A good starting time and for their reasons:

- The Original Series/TMP era- The Federation was still young and got into numerous wars. It had a feeling that there were more "unknowns" than in the TNG era... more to explore since the Federation and its allies were far less established. Plus, the females in TOS Starfleet had those cool short skirts

- The Dominion War (set of course in TNG era)- A huge war going on. The Dominion, Cardassian, and later Breen, facing off against the Feds, Klingons, and later Romulans. There's going to be a huge mess out there and lots of danger. The only problem for a player I could see in this setting is that there will be a much smaller focus on exploration. Starfleet had a desperate war going and suffered huge losses. They need every ship they can muster for the war.

Anyways, best of luck to the Devs on this online game. If pulled off right, I'll be sure to check it out.

"If they can be fooled, they can be killed."
Un-Nerf the AT-ST. Why? Here's Why...
Are you an X-Wing:Alliance Fan? Check this out...
... and this one too, while you're at it.
Loyalty to the Empire!

I'm not completely sure about this, but aside from the conflict with the Klingons (which was brought to a grinding halt a half-hour later by the (Organiens?)), has the UFC ever actually been in a declared war with the Klingons? I seem to think there was a war before TOS, but I may just be remembering childhood daydreams.

I'll definately be giving this game a look when it gets further into development.

Something else I thought of is how they're going to implement Starship command structure. Starship operations requires a LOT of interactive cooperation and communication. I have to wonder if they plan on integrating actual voice chat into the game (because bandwidth by then will probably be much more abundant anyway). It would make the game much less frustrating though.

I believe the Feds have gotten into war with the Klingons before TOS. At the very least skirmishes. The OrganiansI believe just stopped them from flaring up again against each other.

I do recall an episode in DS9 in the Dominion War... there was afamous Klingon Commander (played by the human badguy from Battlestar Galactica) who has fallen from grace because he had a disorder and became extremely forgetful. There was a point in the episode where he was relieved of command during battle of his Bird of Prey: During a skirmish against Dominion forces, he lost it and had flashbacks to his younger days... he was giving a series of commands and then spoke along the lines of, "The Federation will rue the day it came across the Klingon Empire!"

"If they can be fooled, they can be killed."
Un-Nerf the AT-ST. Why? Here's Why...
Are you an X-Wing:Alliance Fan? Check this out...
... and this one too, while you're at it.
Loyalty to the Empire!

For game content alone... I think they're going to have their work cut out for them. If they think SOE has trouble keeping Star Wars fans happy, this game is going to be a lot more difficult.

Not to say that the SW universe isn't as detailed and vast as Trek, but the thing is that we've "seen" a lot more of the Star Trek universe.

(I'm going to coin a couple phrases here to help explain it a bit better.. Film CANON vs EU CANON... both franchises started out in visual media... television/film, and that's what the majority of the fan base has access too. The EU books of both franchises quickly add onto that. In Star Wars, the film CANON is pretty brief - we can count the number of planets we've visited with just our fingers. It didn't take SOE long to delve into the EU planets to provide more content for the game. But Trek... wow... in just one television series, dozens of planets were visited and many more talked about - to say nothing about the other 4 series and the films. Trek fans are going to be screaming for content. "Oh, I want to see Horta, why can't we visit Tholian space, what about the Gorn... it'll go on and on and on. This will probably have to be the most content-rich MMORPG ever written in order to keep the fans happy - and the actual fans of the series will probably make up a much better % of the players than SWG. I think SWG has attracted a lot of gamers who aren't necessarily big SW fans, but Trek has a reputation for being "goody goody" and that will turn off a lot of potential non-Trek fan players before they even give it a look.

.... when this game comes out, one of the first things I want to do is get on-board someone's ship and drop a tribble into their food-storage.

I was asked at work recently what the difference was between star trek and star wars... I told my co-worker that trekkies have pocket protectors and physics/science books, while star wars fans have bongs and imaginations.

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