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So i finally got into the beta last night. I played for a few hours, got my ship and got into sector space. This is a preliminary review. Obviously there is a lot i do not know about the game yet.
Graphics is good but not great. Obviously the game is not super polished like WOW. While the models are fine, the animation & environment seems to be a bit off. I guess no one polished with a great graphics style like WOW. I do like the star ship graphics much more than ground graphics.
I like all the customization. That is obviously the strong point. And even with all that, everything looks Star Trek. The look & feel is great, abate not 100% polished.
I like the mission structure. It is a step up from killing x boars. The key is that each mission is like a quest chain and you don't break up the action/activity by going back to a quest giver after each step. So you can have a more involved complicated "episode". Each step is like a standard MMO quest (kill this, collect that) but putting them together into an overall mission helps with the sense that you are doing something different.
The game obviously is build for combat and i don't mind that. I LIKE combat games.
The biggest problem i have seen, is that combat may not be very interesting. As a point of comparison, if you play wow, you will get many very different abilities that you will want to use in different situations. Combining with talent spec, and different types of gear, combat is complex and fun.
So far, I don't see a lot of that here. May be there are more abilities that would be needed to be used in different situations later (i am hoping). It is not very interesting if all i do is to overwhelm your shields and then blow u away with torpedoes. From what I read, there may be some cool-down management later when u get more abilities. I am hoping those will be interesting.
I think this game is not pretending to be anything else .. a heavily combat oriented PvE trek game and that is fine. However, they really need to make combat interesting if they want to keep players coming back. And the jury is still out on that score.
Comments
If someone had came up to me in 1980 when I was on my Atari 2600 and said we will be playing games with thousands of people at the same time.I guess my response would have been,"but I only have 2 joysticks"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/235780/page/8
I am responding to this post prior to actually playing it, so I want to preface that. I think that we can expect this game to be unpolished in open beta. I have been in three beta programs and I do not remember one of them being polished on the second day of open beta. WOW is the MMO that everyone compares everything to, but I think we need to focus on what the developers visions for a game are and not if the game will be like WOW, or PotBS in space. I am going to go into this beta with an open mind, and the realization that we are a few weeks from launch, so we can expect more polish before then.
Sure. But the level of polishness is still useful information. For example. AION is much more polished than this, back in the US open beta.
Note that i am not making a "fairness" judgment here (i am not saying it is FAIR to compare a open beta MMO to the most successful established one in the world). However, paying customers cares about quality (and polish is one dimension) and not whether it is fair to make the comparison.
Customers want their value, and if a company cannot compete with an established competitor, well, that is too bad.
Having said all that, i will play more and see if the combat will be shaping up to more fun when i level up more.
So Daylight, you bash the OP because he compares elements of the game to WoW, basically pulling the usual "O You play Wow, so you must be stupid." card.
But yea the poster underneath him compares the game to "POTBS in space" and you dont say a thing?
See what im going for here? Everyone of the people on this forum trying to defend STO or CO, for whatever ungodly reason, I guess because you want to lie to yourself and think this MMO will "Be the one", are just making your selves look like complete dicks.
Thats from the sole point that when someone brings up a real point, you go "O well you liked Diablo, or WoW, or Toontown....but POTBs your ok, cause no one likes your anyways, so theres no reason to bash a person who likes that game."
Its pathetic.
Not at all,I stopped reading when I read the words "I guess no one polished with a great graphics style like WOW."
Sorry but I do not care what game someone refers to but I lost interest when someone believes that wow's graphics are the best out there.Not sure why the attack,do you see me running around on this forum or any other forum flaming posters for disliking STO?
I have my opinion and they have theres,now calm down and maybe have a cup of coffee.
If someone had came up to me in 1980 when I was on my Atari 2600 and said we will be playing games with thousands of people at the same time.I guess my response would have been,"but I only have 2 joysticks"
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/235780/page/8
Yeah, complaining because the game isn't "WoW in Space"? Not as polished? What exactly is polished about the graphics in WoW? Is it the fact that they have 256x256 textures stretched over too many pixels on screen? Is it because you can see the pixel blocks when you get near any object in the game? Just because WoW is the "Easy Button" of MMO's and drew in every "tween" on the globe doesn't make it the best game in the world; it doesn't make it polished either.
You're entitled to like STO or not. You can say, "I don't like this game, it's not for me." But if you come on saying it's a bad game, that it lacks the depth and polish of World of Warcraft, you're clearly full of it.
"Polished" in gaming speak generally refers to things that could otherwise detract from the actual game. A bad user interface, keys that can't be mapped or re-mapped, video settings that aren't optimal or adaptable, are all examples of "could use more polish." The game itself could be fine, but there are just things that get in the way of the game being enjoyable. Tell me you haven't experienced this type of thing before?
When someone says WoW is polished, or something isn't as polished as WoW, they simply mean to state that the small details around, and in the game, don't get in the way of the game. WoW is extremely flexible in client support. You can have no shadows, detailed shadows or blob shadows. You can adjust your video resolution from a very outdated 800x600 to very high resolutions and even windowed with or w/o borders. Hell, you can stretch a WoW windowed game and not worry about the actual resolution. WoW has various sound settings. WoW has customizable UI elements both in game and from external sources. WoW is polished. Even if you hated the game in beta or grew bored of it after raiding for thousands of hours, it doesn't take away from the fact that it's polished.
So this guy writing that the game isn't as polished as WoW is really unfair, but I understand where he's coming from. WoW really is the bar for polished MMO's. There are none that have competed so completely and I've tried a great many that should and could have.
so...
Same
Same
hmm
Sure. But the level of polishness is still useful information. For example. AION is much more polished than this, back in the US open beta.
Note that i am not making a "fairness" judgment here (i am not saying it is FAIR to compare a open beta MMO to the most successful established one in the world). However, paying customers cares about quality (and polish is one dimension) and not whether it is fair to make the comparison.
Customers want their value, and if a company cannot compete with an established competitor, well, that is too bad.
Having said all that, i will play more and see if the combat will be shaping up to more fun when i level up more.
due to all fairness but Aion was released a year ago in the eastern countries before it hit the usa. thus the reason why the game was polished on aions us open beta. The same thing happened with ffxi. when it was released in the USA it was flawless but that was because it was out in japan and they ironed out most of the bugs at release ect.
To the op. You are kinda comparing STO's first hours of play to your wows engame play. Bad way to compare. Remember when you were lvl 1, you also didnt have that many skills to use and as you progressed you got more skills and some passive ones. compare WoW's ifs 10 lvls with STO's 1st 10 lvls.
Watching Fanbois drop their soap in a prison full of desperate men.
You're trying to compare a game that has been out for 5 years to a game that is still in BETA. Of course World of Warcraft is more polished right now, but from what I hear it was a totally different story when they first launched. Right now your level isn't very high so of course you aren't going to have tons of options like you would at the endgame.
Let's also not forget that the whole point of BETA in the first place is to fix bugs and broken content, not act as a free demo or trial. Hopefully you're sending in chits to the devs and providing feedback on the official site where a DEV will actually read it.
Currently Playing: World of Warcraft
You may be right, but right now you are comparing apples-to-oranges. You've played only a few hours in STO. In the first few hours of WoW or any MMO game, there aren't many abilities specs, gear, etc.
You're trying to compare a game that has been out for 5 years to a game that is still in BETA. Of course World of Warcraft is more polished right now, but from what I hear it was a totally different story when they first launched. Right now your level isn't very high so of course you aren't going to have tons of options like you would at the endgame.
Let's also not forget that the whole point of BETA in the first place is to fix bugs and broken content, not act as a free demo or trial. Hopefully you're sending in chits to the devs and providing feedback on the official site where a DEV will actually read it.
Sure. I am. Who says i need to be fair?
You may be right, but right now you are comparing apples-to-oranges. You've played only a few hours in STO. In the first few hours of WoW or any MMO game, there aren't many abilities specs, gear, etc.
Sure. That is why i said the jury is still out.
Secondly, I spend a few hours in STO already and if i were playing WOW, that would be getting me to around level 10 or so (the early levels are pretty fast) and you would have 3-4 interesting skills by then.
But certainly i would be playing more to find out. Plus, by doing a bit of reading, I don't find the diversity of tactics and abilities in STO. I am certainly hoping that there are more to space ship combat then face them right, shoot phasers and then torpedos. I am hopping to have interesting abilities, cool down management, rotation management and stuff like that (or watever the equivalent).