Some might wonder why the single most popular science fiction franchise in the history of media has taken so long to be turned into an MMO, myself included — But I think it’s a better use of our efforts to instead not speculate too much on the why of it but rather to channel that raw emotion and energy into the heart felt desire for STO to not suck.

Let’s be honest here, Cryptic Studios is very good at bringing out games that look kinda keen, but have zero long term playability.   City of Heroes and City of Villains suffered from this, and the successor Champions Online (City of Champions?) was even worse.   They looked great, but for whatever reason they just didn’t have the sticking power to keep players interested.

Will STO be the same thing?  Look good initially and maybe be fun for a week or two, but rapidly drag down into a grind-tastic mess?  God I hope not..

I can’t actually put my finger on what it is about CoH/CoV and CO that make them lose their fun.  I will say that of the three, I think City of Villains was the best with regards to game play but that was primarily due to the controller character architecture.  What can I say; I enjoyed having a pack of zombies at my disposal..

Game play wise though, all of them got very boring and repeatative very very quickly.

One of the main cool points about the game was the ability to make all your characters 100% unique, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if that was part of it’s downfall too..  When you look at games that have a more ridgid class structure you end up having a sort of community around that class, and with that community you have competition.  “Oh yeah? Well I’m a better Warlock than you are.. and I’ll prove it!!”  etc..

Players end up putting a lot of time and effort in to trying to make their cookie cutter class stand out from all the other cookie cutter classes.  That in and of itself forces a person to form a bond or an identity with their character making them want to keep playing..

When you can start your characters virtual life as being 100% unique, you have one less thing to strive for..  So while it’s really cool I can go out of my way to make my character look completely different.. it doesn’t lend itself to longevity..

This also completely ruins the whole sense of community around a given class which is a problem.. What’s more community is completely thrashed by the total lack of classes where group play happens..  The open architecture of characters, while initially cool, makes group forming painful because suddenly you can’t say “We need a healer” and know that there are only 3 or 4 basic classes that heal..

STO appears to have classes with regards to ships; tanks, dps, and support ships.  So that’s a damn good sign.  I’m hoping the realize the issues I described above and are working to correct the issue.. But I still have fears about the game as a whole..

For example; I absolutely cringe at the notion of wandering around a space station and having random NPC’s run up and yell about how awesome I am like they did in CoH/CoV and CO..  Please rip that page out of the CoH/CoV/CO hand book and burn it..

I also worry that the game’s look (read: graphics) are dated even before the game has been released.  Cryptic has always intentionally made their games sort of “middle of the road” with regards to hardware requirements so it’s very likely that the game will not be super high quality, but even so they screen shots look very lack-luster.   These could all be beta shots with poor textures or something, but I doubt it.

I’m the first to admit that gameplay comes over graphics every time though, so if the game play is good then I can forgive just about any graphics decisions.. But then they aren’t known for their game play so its easy to jump to conclusions..

I guess my greatest fear is that Star Trek Online will end up being “City of Star Trek” and will be to Star Trek, what the original Star Wars MMO was to Star Wars. (Read: Horrible)

Or is it? The more I play it the more I find super secret hidden stuff that is in the background. I’m discovering that there is a lot of depth in the game that I never realized was there.

It made me realize that CoH/CoV took the EQ1 style of game play to heart, instead of the WoW style. Meaning that in World of Warcraft if the guy standing there doesn’t have an exclamation or question mark over his head — you don’t need to talk to him, ever..

In EQ1 that wasn’t the case at all.. In fact if you didn’t talk to just about everyone, you missed all the good quests. I think it added a lot to the sense of accomplishment, but the cost of having to run around and talk to everyone was pretty high and kinda sucked.

City of Heroes has both methods employed. You have a list of contacts which you can talk to or even call in order to do quests.. but there are also super secret ninja monkey heroes in the world that you have to go find.. This means that there are levels of depth to the game — you don’t have to do the super secret stuff.. or you can.. You choose.

That’s pretty cool. Plus with the invention system and the set powers they have going now, you can further refine your characters abilities. You don’t have to..but you can if you want to.. The neat thing about the set inventions is that they get stupidly powerful..

I recently got my toon fully outfitted with the “Blizzard” power with a complete set on it. Aim + Build up + Ice Storm + Blizzard… wow.. lots of shit dies very quickly. Suddenly that pack of 20 orange mobs isn’t a problem, and I’m just one guy.

It’s a fun game.. but eventually I’ll get tired of it and cancel my account… until I need something new and reactivate it.. haha.. I have done this like 5 times at this point..

Currently I am trying to get City of Heroes to work under Ubuntu. I’m going through another cycle where windows has pissed me off, so back to Ubuntu. I’ve already replaced my secondary computer with a mac mini (formerly an old windows box), if windows doesn’t knock it off I’ll just stay Ubuntu.

Either way it shouldn’t be too hard — I’ll keep you posted. Right now its downloading. 2.5 gigs takes a little while. I tried the “move it from the windows partition” trick but the patcher just didn’t understand. So fine.. download the thing again.. whatever..

Ps. Whatever you do — don’t install Vista. And don’t install IE8 on XP. Wine runs most windows programs better than windows. As soon as I get a couple more of them working I may not go back.

Update: Well it works. I don’t know why it surprises me but it always does.. I guess I’m still programmed to think that you have to have the OS printed on the box in order to run the application..

I had to completely reinstall it from the updater which confused me because it was replacing the exact same files with brand new files.. in the same place.. *shrug* Oh well it took an hour longer than I had anticipated.. wooptie do..

It works very smoothly and so far I can’t tell that I’m not in windows.. Wine, rocks.

The only bug is that the mouse cursor looks like its been “de-interlaced”.. After doing some looking, this is a known issue and one I care less about.  It still works just fine, it just looks like the mouse has been sliced up horizontally..

It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh)

After a while I moved on to other games, but found myself reactivating my account from time to time to give it a try. For a while I played my City of Villains character almost exclusively until it once again just tired and I moved on.

Well I’m back at it. They have added a lot of content and depth to the game that really is interesting. Firstly its not like your more modern / typical MMO in that there aren’t characters standing around with question marks over their head letting you know there is something to do. Lets be honest here, World of Warcraft is a good game but its seriously “dumbed down” in that it almost holds your hand while it plays itself.

City of Heroes hearkens back to the days of EverQuest 1 whereby you didn’t know if someone had a quest or something for you unless you talked to them. Accomplishments were hidden from you, and thereby meant more to you when you actually accomplished it.

Death in CoH means something too compared to modern day MMO’s. CoH has debt! Now I played Ultima Online and EverQuest 1 for years, so extremely painful death was the norm for me. In UO each time some naked PK ran up and killed you, you lost EVERYTHING! It sucked. In EQ1 though they changed that a lot in that you just had to make a corpse run and lost exp. But you didn’t lose your stuff.. When CoH came out and they made it so you just got a little bit of debt, I was stunned. They made death meaningless.

HA! Look at what modern games do. In the most recent MMO, Age of Conan, death means absolutely nothing. You just get shot back to a respawn point.

But I get side tracked — the CoH is a good game and I’m finding I really enjoy the new Rikti invasion stuff and I hope they will let us “counter invade” at some point. It’d be really cool to go to the Rikit homeworld or whatever and attack them back!! (maybe you can do this already and I just havent gotten to that content.. I dunno)

Something else they have added to the game is a pretty thorough marketplace and crafting system. I like that — thats pretty darn cool. Well, one of the tricks of old is to watch your prices on that market. I mean I dont understand why players, in game after game, will put stuff on the market below what they could sell them to the merchant for!!

I spent about 4 hours last night just running goods from the market to the local merchant to sell. People would put stuff on the market for 10INF, that they could sell to the merchants for 4500+INF. Seriously.

In 4 hours I made 2 million INF which just goes to show you, super heroes is st00pid. Or lazy. I prefer to think of them as stupid.