Tag Archive: Star Trek Online

Dec
16
2011

A week without games.

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December 16, 2011

x3ap_screen_002After a week long break from playing any games at all (more on that later) I decided to jump back in and give a couple a go last night. This was mostly caused by Egosoft releasing the latest X expansion, which bridges X3 to the new game that is due out next year and so I though I would fire it up and take a look.

Some strange decisions aside (there is no plot at all for the Terran faction, and amazingly one of the others still tells you to shoot something in the tutorial when you don’t have any guns. That’s been a bug since the first version of X3!) but it’s fun enough and I’ll potter away at it until the new game is released. That’s the good thing about the game, you can just potter and leave it earning cash through a massive industrial infrastructure. I’m really not selling it to you very well am I?

I also jumped into Star Trek Online to see the Christmas event, which seems to consist of snowman watching (like Twitching, but more boring) and running a race on an icy track. It’s a dismal little event that gives some interesting rewards randomly, but you can buy them from the store as well. That leaves some food, snowballs and three scarfs that have instantly become the focus of my obsession as every Starship captain needs a scarf for when they have away missions on cold worlds. It’s all getting a bit Douglas Adams at that point.

I think christmas events in MMOs are a post-ironic statement about the futility of greed. They require you to grind daily in order to get something cosmetic that you don’t really want and what’s worse I fall for it every time.

The ability to actually just buy the cool stuff is interesting as it gives me a “I think that my time should be valued at £x” value for the event. That’s a slippery slope of objectifying the worth of content in games that I’ve not had to really deal with before. Well I have, I’ve just chosen not to say that item X has Y hours of content and so is not worth it, and of course the other way around too. Maybe I should.

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Dec
07
2011

What Jon is Playing Week 49

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December 7, 2011

Who says I’m obsessed with games, I’ve only played three in the last week. What’s more two of those are on PC, which is a little unusual for me but it just reminds me that my PC is on its last legs and needs replacing.

Star Trek Online

Season 5 for STO launched and I eagerly jumped in the second I noticed that it had actually launched a few days earlier and I should probably pay more attention to gaming news nowadays. I created a new character and have been racing up the levels at a frankly scary rate of knots.

The big new feature is the ability to send crew on missions around Europe to give you influence and rewards. You add the right number of people with the right abilities and hopefully get the success percentage up to a high enough level to make the mission succeed. These missions destabilise the Templar control of the cities and allow the Assassins to take over. Hang on, that’s Assassin’s Creed. Same mechanic, but the STO version is a bit cleverer and a bit more evil. Each officer has various traits and if you match the traits to the mission then you stand a bigger chance of success. A period of time then has to elapse while they run off and have their own boring midseason filler episode of an adventure (or all of Voyager) leaving you to get on with the serious business of space battles and the like. If you win you get some XP, some cash, some skill points and sometimes some items.

The evilness comes from the method of distribution of these officers. They are common, uncommon, rare and rarer. There may even be an even rarer level as well. To get a set of new officers you pay 220 cryptic points and get given a bunch.  If this sounds like collectable card games then you will understand why this is evil. You can also get officers at a slower rate in game, which is OK I guess.

I’m not sure of the effectiveness of this system yet. Where before there was just Diplomacy as a secondary levelling mechanic now there is about six million mission types that all need levelling up that give you, well, mostly nothing important. The only set that does is the Diplomacy one, and that’s because it’s still got all of the old system rewards attached to it. Grinding diplomacy will either be faster or slower now, depending on how you play. That statement should win an award or something.

Minecraft

Did you know Minecraft now has a win condition? It was enough to get me pottering around in the game again, building away and totally forgetting to work towards anything useful. There was a mountain with a waterfall on it you see, and so I’m cutting the top of the mountain off to build a house there.

No doubt I’ll stop playing again just as soon as I realise I’m wasting time in there, but for now it’s quite fun.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North

I have a dream. It is a simple one in which there is a good Lord of the Rings game. How could I resist getting a three player co-op RPG LOTR game then?

Is it awful? Shockingly no. Some of the voice acting is a little bit dire and so far the levels are all very linear but on the other hand I did get through Fornost without needing to start drinking so the game is better than LOTRO right there.

I need to play a lot more in order to get a full opinion, but it’s competent in a way that games used to be able to get away with. Now they can’t because there are so many brilliant games each month that these lower level of also rans just doesn’t get a look in any more. Shame.

I’ve yet to try the co-op, and I was sort of hoping that the game would be a LOTRO beater for a small group. I think it probably could be if everybody is prepared to overlook the rough edges, but it’s only three players which feels a bit limiting.

So that’s it for another week. Three games played, none completed and a lot of things done that didn’t need a PC or console. I’m calling that a victory in a useful kind of way, but it doesn’t help deal with that backlog.

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Nov
28
2011

What Jon is Playing Week 48

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November 28, 2011

A slow week this time with only a few hours spent playing games. So slow in fact I even tidied up the studio instead of playing, and that’s saying something.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

It turns out I was only two hours from the end of this so I pushed through and completed it, then I went and did the Desmond missions so I knew what was going on. They didn’t help.

The game is as solid as ever and I really don’t get people who are saying that it’s worse because of it. The game plays the same and nobody is doing these things better so why expect each version to be a massive change when small tweaks are more suitable for yearly franchises. Still, now that the next game is free to be the third game in the trilogy (and the 5th released. No, I don’t quite get it either) they should mix it all up a bit. The ending certainly hints that the next one will be different.

There was some nice storytelling along the way. I found the older Ezio an interesting character and his attempts to find happiness was really the bigger drive in the plot than the gathering of artifacts, which was nice but I’m not sure that reviewers saw it that way with their complaining that there were far too many distractions along the way.  That’s the point of the story, the journey of older Ezio compared to his younger self and a quest for stability in his life and those of his fellow assassins. At least that’s the message I took away from it after the big exposition hammer was used at the end, but I suspect it wasn’t good enough or people really don’t go looking for the meaning in game stories. And with that Ezio’s journey finishes, as does that of Altair as stored memory fragments give Ezio insight into what happened to his ancestor, the end of that story being quite a nice touching scene.

The big question is about the third one. Will the big name addition to the cast in this one actually have a meaty role in the next one as all the real world stuff was really on the sidelines this time round. Who will the third historical person to be controlled be? Or is Desmond actually that third one and it’s all being done by somebody in the future? There is a whole year to wait, which is really annoying me. How about releases every six months?

Star Trek Online

I jumped back into STO for a day in order to polish off a few things before the big patch comes.  I finally hit the level cap (all I needed to do was spend some skill points…) and got my diplomacy up to the point where I can do the first contact missions. I then tried a Klingon character to see the new (for me) areas. Man that’s a boring quest line of running around between NPCs exploring the place.

After a few hours play I’m satiated again and so can drop it until some time in December. I really struggle with these MMOs nowadays, it’s just all so slow and pointless! Roll on the featured episodes again.

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

The gameplay is still as perfect as ever, but I’m really getting annoyed by all the backtracking.

I know it’s fashionable to say that modern shooters are just a long pathway with cut -scenes being the only thing that breaks up the action. The problem is that when you do end up having to retrace your steps it really does feel annoying and I’m not  sure that a game that was designed like Doom nowadays would feel very good. These last nods to that kind of structure in Halo really do feel painful and old fashioned now, but I’m glad they didn’t remove them.

A very light week going by hours played, and the one completed game this week brings my total up to 35. This usually means I’m about to go nuts and play constantly for a few weeks, but if I’m lucky I’ll manage to stay sane and avoid that.

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Nov
17
2011

Star Trek Online and the Future

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November 17, 2011

Star Trek Online goes free to play early next year, and it’s about time. I do wonder if it’s a bit late.

It’s been a rough year for Cryptic. First off Atari dropped them in an effort to get some cash and refocus the business into (rolls a D6) extreme fishing simulators. This seems to have placed them in an awkward position for a few months when they couldn’t hire more people and couldn’t do anything that could damage the share price. It turns out that this includes releasing many things. The featured episodes stopped being released and all hands were on deck working towards Season 4, which released to near universal disappointment.

Luckily everything is all right as the featured episodes will be back in three months. Only they always say it will be three months so I’m not holding my breath. It will mark a whole year between the third and fourth set of episodes if they release around when they say they will, which is kind of shocking and very disheartening as somebody who loves them.

Next month we current subscribers get access to all the spanking new features they’ve been working on for, well, forever. This is a smart move as you really want the issues to be worked out before all the impressionable new players stream in when it’s free. There’s some nice changes coming in that update, including a revamp of the overly complicated skill system that is desperately needed.

I do wonder if it’s not too little too late at this point. After a quite frankly non-event of a year in the game as far as progress goes will going free to play actually bring people back in? The featured episodes are jewels in the crown of the feature list and they will pull me in weekly without fail, but it depends how they are handled for free to play people. Actually it depends how they are handled for paying players too come to think of it. Will they charge for them, but charge less than the stipend that gold players get? Give them to gold and make free players pay? Or will they be free to all and used as a draw to bring players in? The last option is the best to my mind, but I know nothing about what’s going on behind the scenes of course. The real good pull here is the picture that’s included in this post. That’s the new Enterprise, which is apparently considered canon as the replacement for the ship from the last few Picard and co films and will be introduced via a featured episode. If that can’t draw in curious Trek fans then nothing can. Actually from that angle it looks like the old ship. Never mind.

The future should be bright, but I’m not sure. They have effectively wasted a year (not by their own choice it seems, even the free to play is something they claim they wanted to do from the start but were told no) and I wonder how much good will they have left with the existing players and anybody who might consider it.

It’s all daft really, when the featured episodes are being released it’s nearly unbeatable if you like stories in your games. That should count for a lot more than it does at the moment. Maybe TOR will show people that it’s the way forwards and people will appreciate them more.

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Sep
19
2011

Sometimes knowing what you are not is just as important

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September 19, 2011

isengardMy name is Jon and I’m not an MMO addict.

There was a time where I would play them every night and obsess about little things, but now I just don’t care. The whole genre seems dead to me, what with Eve lurching through stagnation and player revolt, Star Trek Online having given up on adding new content (it’s OK, there will be some in 3 months, which has been how it’s been all year) and Lord of the Rings Online adding more and more of the bad parts and ignoring what made the game fun for me.

It’s now reached the point where I dislike having other random players in MMOs at all. I played the first 11 levels as a Captain in LOTRO the other day and got really pissed off by people getting in my way by killing named mobs that I needed. That horrible habit of games to dynamically group you up with people near you now annoys me too, if I wanted to group I would be in a group, that always gets turned off in the games that have it. Random people just get in the way of what I want to do and I don’t like it.

Eve was the first to go, there just wasn’t anything left I wanted to do that didn’t require more dedication than my life allows. Star Trek went next with a promise to return if they ever feel like doing anything crazy and add new missions or something. Oh, new uniforms and ships to buy on the store instead? Great.

That just left LOTRO and the Monday night group of thoroughly nice people. Controlled mayhem of the best kind with everybody knowing how to mess around just enough to keep the content from getting too closely examined. I had to peek, didn’t I? I had to pay attention to what was going on and as we started trying more instances the inane design decisions that is apparently what MMO players want started grating more and more. In the end the game got in the way of having fun far too much and I just can’t face playing. But there’s an expansion any day now that will have more things to do! Only I have no faith in Turbine adding any content that isn’t hub based repeatable nonsense to grind more faction points for more gear that I don’t care about. Very soon it’s just going to be a large patch that I really should download but never quite get around to doing that prevents me from actually ever playing the game.

My name is Jon and I’m not an MMO player.

I wonder which company will win me back?

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Jul
06
2011

Playing games just for fun

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July 6, 2011

I’m in my usual summer gaming lull at the moment, which is good as it means I’m nice and fresh by the autumn games blitz starts as there’s a hell of a lot of good games coming out later this year.

This means that I’m officially down to “pottering about” status in all my games. I haven’t actually turned on my 360 for a week, and the PS3 was only on because of the extended editions of Lord of the Rings being released in gorgeous high def. Well I say gorgeous, I have two problems. The first is that some of the special effects are beginning to look a bit dated and the other is that there’s a lot of orange and teal in places. I’m sorry if you hadn’t noticed the colour of films nowadays, if so I’ve probably just ruined nearly every film for you.

What I have been playing lots of are a couple of MMOs. Firstly there’s LOTRO, which I’ve been slowly picking away at my 65 minstrel trying to figure out what the best build is while coming to the conclusion I can be awesome in a group, or awesome solo but if I want to do both I’m going to have to respec my traits before every Monday night grouping session. Last night saw me grinding out unfinished class deeds because the gaps in my (useless to me) abilities was bugging me. I might spend the evening killing hundreds of grey mobs so that I can get some more useless traits filled in.

Incidentally while playing on Monday a few of us got the Master of Stairs deed, which you get for climbing a hill 20 times. I don’t remember doing it 20, or 10 if it counts going down as one as well and it really pointed out to me how used we are to the grind that I didn’t notice it was that many times! We also aced some 3man content due to the younger members of the group being away, and in the process demonstrated that we are really good if we have no real DPS or AOE as the game starts to run at a pace at which our aging brains can actually handle. Well until the point where we suddenly realise we need AOE or DPS to actually kill things of course.

The rest of my time in LOTRO is getting XP for about three-zillion legendary weapons that I am levelling up so that I can deconstruct them for useful bits and also farming skirmish marks for armour or, when I get annoyed, actually remembering that my soldier in skirmishes needs some skills in order to work. I’m currently running a Herbalist and going full out DPS with my Minstrel but I found I could actually die. After I actually put some points into her healing skills that soon got better though. I suspect I might have optimised the defence of the prancing pony beyond the difficulty level I’m playing it at. Time for tier 2 maybe.

The other game I’ve been playing is Star Trek Online. The upcoming release of Episode 4 this week has given me the push needed to start a static group from the start (Thursdays if anybody is interested) and I’m quite looking forwards to playing through the early content again with the changes that have been made. I’m also quite keen to actually try some of the group content as I’ve not done any before. This time through I’m going to try a science officer and use my inability to not buy ships from the cash shop to start in an Oberth. You know the ship, it’s the one that accidentally blows up in the 3rd film because it’s so weak you can’t even disable it without it exploding and making Klingon Doc Brown angry. Should be fun!

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May
06
2011

Maybe max level isn’t so boring after all

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May 6, 2011

Some times bad things just happen and sometimes you make an awful mistake and have nobody to blame but yourself. This was all my fault and I didn’t mean it to happen, but I’ve accidentally levelled up in LOTRO.

I’ve hit the level cap.

I’m sure most of you don’t understand my weird thing about level caps, but I’ve been at 64 for a long while now and managed to avoid doing anything useful to gain XP. Yes, that included small things like not actually playing for a while but now the Monday night group is back together they all insisted on doing things that are useful and then I went a bit nuts and ran through a bit too much of the books after one particularly fun session and now I’ve seen my last ding until the next expansion.

The first thing I did was go raid my bank vault for all those level 65 legendaries I’ve been hoarding to find a couple that looked promising. The joy is that LOTRO has a whole new levelling game with those at 65 so it never actually stops and so here I am with a new sword which has a whole new grind back at level 0 and my old, still quite good sword will be used when I actually need to be powerful on Mondays until I level up the new one to match and exceed its abilities.

It’s actually quite clever and does go a lot of the way to helping with one of the two main problems I have with hitting max level, which the lack of perceived progress. I don’t care about raiding so max level usually means I rely on content, and that soon runs out. In fact I believe that ignoring the tail end of the first two volumes of books I have completed all level appropriate solo content for my character outside of the last expansion, and that’s not particularly large.

The solution for this in LOTRO is of course skirmishes, for which I can tweak the difficulty to be as challenging (or not) as I want each time I start one. Again it’s a nice system and although I would like a bit more of a range of maps to actually choose it’s a nice way of killing the hour or two of solo time I desire every so often.

I am, as you all know, prone to flitting between games at an alarming rate and so the lifetime sub for LOTRO really fitted me in the end. I got more than enough months of playing heavily (for me) to cover the cost through what I would pay monthly otherwise and now I get a F2P game in which I have all the bonuses that you usually have to pay for and in the long run I came out on top. Hang on, I’m just going to feel smug for a second. Right, back to games.

The other lifetime sub I have is Star Trek Online, and it’s a game that I am really enjoying. My play levels don’t quite stretch as far as me having hit max level there, but I’m in no rush to do so. A couple of hours play every few weeks is enough to keep me happy at the moment. Even when I hit max level all that really means is that my skills stay still and I can still play Bridge Officer Pokemon and level them up until I hit on an optimal build. I’ve really been detached from the levelling in that game for some reason with new ranks bring new ships being the only real reason to care. Sure it unlocks content, but that always seems to be available about when I run out of the last set (although I know I’m coming near to the end of that line soon).

Of course Trek has two major advantages in the content at max level area as they have the featured episodes and the foundry. The episodes are just outstanding for me and in many ways I think I prefer them to having a regular TV show, but perhaps Voyager and Enterprise have more to do with that. When they are running new ones my Saturday evenings become something of a can’t miss gaming event for me and although I might finish that weeks content in an hour or so I come away feeling like I’ve got my moneys worth.

The foundry is still early in its evolution and development but I can already see it being a great source of content for me as well. I gush about it a bit too much in our latest show if anybody wants to hear more about it, but the scope at the moment is enough for the creative players to do some amazing things already and surely there are enough players who want to tell interesting Star Trek stories to keep us furnished with content even if most of us players have zero desire to tell stories ourselves. Hats off if you are one of them. Again I only really need a few adventures per week to keep me more than satisfied so it’s looking good for me.

For me LOTRO and STO are both examples of games that directly address my need for solo and group content above all else to keep me interested. Games can use raiding or PvP to keep other players happy, but I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to keep exploring the world and Lord of the Rings and Star Trek have a large amount of content still waiting to be drawn upon. There are advantages to basing your game on a very well established IP after all.

Mind you it doesn’t hurt that I liked Lord of the Rings and Star Trek before modern MMOs were even invented. I wonder how much that helps, and how much it explains my apathy towards something like DC Universe Online and the reason why Star Wars Galaxies still interests me more than The Old Republic does.

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Feb
11
2011

Boardwalking: Star Trek Online

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February 11, 2011

More stumbling out beyond the final frontiers of my own personal gaming experience today. I wonder if I should even be trying to offer commentary on games I’ve never played in these jaunts, but many of the underlying issues raised do transcend title-specifics and offer insight into larger, genre-wide concerns which anyone who has played any of these can identify with in some fashion.

Also, there’s always the comments for corrections by more informed folks. Thanks for those by the way – I genuinely appreciate the additional perspectives to set right anything I’ve misunderstood!

On to the threads:

Poll: How would you feel about “mini-factions”?

The busiest thread on page one of Star Trek Online Discussion is an attempt to gauge the general mood on Factions in game. The attendant poll is here. If you don’t want to vote to see the results, I’ll spoiler that for you here: 152 (73%) Yes, 57 (27%) No. A curiously worded question and topic.

At present STO has only two factions, Federation and Klingon Empire, and all the various playable canon or home-made races fall into one of those two groups. I’d imagine Federation massively outnumber Klingon, despite the Klingons having the Green Skinned Alien Space Babes on team! All I remember about the Klingons from the shows and movies is that they only ever turned up when the plot required some shoutey disposable thugs to stomp about and get blown up. And Worf!

The OP suggests that adding Romulans and Cardassians as additional factions in a very cut down manner is better than not adding them at all, and seeks opinion. Almost immediately, people point out that the current Klingon faction (KDF) might as well be called a ‘mini faction’ and there is a general sentiment that the Klingons are overlooked and unfinished content-wise. Some tie this to a perceived de-emphasis of the KDF’s initial role as a PvP-based faction, without a compensatory fleshing out as a faction on par with the Federation for PvE gameplay.

The poll minority disagree with original suggestion, and want fully fleshed out content for any new factions, if they’re to be added at all, and some accuse the OP of some kind of surrender to Cryptic. I think it’s probably more pragmatism than anything else. A lot of semantics and ‘what ifs’ flying about, but at the core is a general dissatisfaction with the lack of commitment to the KDF faction in general. Farther down the thread, population stats of 12% KDF, 88% Federation are requoted from a Dev, which says a lot. I guess you can’t blame Cryptic for putting Federation players first; Federation is where all the popular and cool characters work! And Harry Kim!

A difficult balancing act and given limited resources to work with, I’d probably make sure the largest faction is given the most attention, as seen with all these Weekly Episodes I hear so much about. Are they available for KDF players too? I’ve only seen Federation type screenshots so far.

Another interesting sub-current; I get hints of a kind of subdivision in the player base between Trekkies (people who are here for the Star Trek of it all), and STO-Playing Non-Trekkies, (people who are here for the Space Combat Game of it all). A subtle distinction. Some of the Gamer types are scornful of the standards of the Trekie types, who they believe will be happy with anything at all Cryptic deign to provide, unlike themselves, who are much more choosy and discerning. I sort of find myself envying the Trekies to be honest. It must be nice to enjoy all aspects of a game all the time and not care about armchair design arguments!

Thread number two concerns crafting:

A note to Cryptic about ship crafting…

All very polite, and encouragingly, attracts official dialogue almost immediately! The OP would like more elaborate and involved ship crafting, and Executive Producer Daniel Stahl (dstahl) chips in with evocative words about player-run starbases. I’m not sure how the specifics of crafting currently work, but in all my forum travels, I’ve rarely seen anyone who is opposed to more customisation in MMOs.

Balance concerns are the limiter here I’d guess. Few people will want improved ways to make their spaceships worse at combat, but the Devs are already working this stuff out, it seems. Interesting to see Stahl specifically citing Pirates of the Burning Sea as a positive example in such matters.

However, the key reason this thread inflates so considerably is a somewhat different matter. Stahl links future spaceship refitting plans to the player-run starbases currently in development, which implies a necessity to join a guild to get at the good stuff. This immediately reignites the perpetual Soloers vs Guilds debate that rumbles on in the background in all MMOs, always. Soloers should be able to get all the good stuff! Or Why join a guild if you don’t get anything special for it! And of course, my favourite; Why solo in an MMO?

Lots of ideas for a middle ground though, with better things rewarding groupwork, but ‘good enough’ things available by solo crafting. This middle ground seems to be what Stahl is aiming at too, so may become the final implementation of it all. Various individual ideas abound, and a there seems a general understanding, managed well by Stahl, that all this is still being worked out anyway. Hopefully the more rational posts in this thread will be taken into consideration when the final design goes live.

Despite the occasional bout of namecalling, and a tendency to veer in and out of the old Soloers vs Guilds Debate, the thread seems a robust yet healthy example of developer-player discourse and who knows, might define the future of top-end starship crafting. I’d image a developer is always going to develop the game they have designed, having access to far more relevant information than most players, but its nice to think that ordered, rational use of forums can bring that design closer in line with what customers want as well. Too often, forums are just pressure release valves, anger-sinks and hate-dumps. Not so in this thread!

I really must find some time to try this game out one of these days. I think I have 2am-4am on Saturdays free…

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Feb
04
2011

Star Trek Online

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February 4, 2011

It’s no secret that over the last few years I’ve lost my love of MMOs. In fact mentally I have consigned them to a place where I just think that I play them every so often and don’t really do more than have a quick look around. I’ve let all of my regular gaming sessions drop away and even games that I love such as LOTRO just don’t get any minutes out of me. Eve gets the odd burst, but my enthusiasm for that is countered by a massive feeling of weight whenever I think of playing it: it’s just going to absorb a whole evening.

Take last night for instance. The tasks I had set myself were simple: Cook food, Edit and post the podcast, capture some video for the next video show and tweak the website a bit more as part of the (very slow) upgrade I’m doing. Every one of those tasks has a wait X minutes then do a bit more aspect to it that really wouldn’t have fitted in with a game like Eve.

So I played Star Trek Online instead. I played around with the new shuttles, equipped the latest loot I had been stockpiling to my new Galaxy class ship, promoted and trained bridge officers I had overlooked with my recent promotion and did a few missions.

Then I realised something. Trek Online, for all of it’s faults, is getting way more hours out of me than I was counting. A quick check with Raptr confirmed it: I have played more of it in the last month than anything else and that includes completing a couple of single player games from scratch. My top 5 games for the month look like this, remembering that I’m being a completionist idiot so most are games from 2006:

13 hrs Star Trek Online (PC)
11 hrs DeathSpank (XBLA) (a whole play though)
10 hrs Test Drive Unlimited (360) (Racing and driving around exploring the island)
6 hrs Burnout Revenge (360) (picking away at races)
5 hrs Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (360) (a whole play through)

Amazingly the Tom Clancy game was totally completed in that time, and it’s a retail game! Wow, that was good value.

I think Raptr is not counting Eve much either, I’m know I’ve put in more than 5 hours into that.

So why aren’t I mentally counting my time in Trek Online? Probably for the same reason that I didn’t think I’d put 10 hours into Test Drive Unlimited: I just get sucked in without any feeling that I must be doing something. I might end up doing a daily or two, fly to the other side of the galaxy because I’m bored with those dailies or I want to fill in some missions that I’ve skipped in the past. I’ve taken a look back at missions I’d played before to relive the experience and generally done everything I could in order to not level up very fast. Test Drive Unlimited does have a goal though, I’m trying to drive along every road for an achievement. It’s relaxing yes, but still a goal. STO is just… pottering around.

The thing is that the game lets me do this without really working towards anything very quickly. Somehow over the last year they’ve managed to make something that I can waste time in without getting too annoyed with. The “Kill X boars” missions aren’t waiting for me at every turn waiting to drive me off to a console. The fear of running out of cash because I I’m being punished for trying to play in a challenging way isn’t there (unless I want it).

That was when I realised why I wasn’t playing LOTRO. The normal gameplay is too easy, and when you try and push it to be challenging you start having to worry about repairing your armour and equipment. Screw that, it means I have to make money and at that point it’s classed as a chore mentally and then I get bored. I’ve explored most of the game so that drive to play just isn’t there and I don’t want to spend whole evenings doing a single thing at the moment so grouping is out.

I don’t think I’m a hardcore MMO player at the moment. I just want to absorb the atmosphere and potter around with no real objective. I want to explore. I just want to see what is around the next corner. I don’t want to worry about holding other people back because I want to see what’s behind that rock or over that ridge, I just want to go on long rambling holidays in the hills. Or in space.

Over the years I’ve also become scared of the level cap. I’m not joking when I mention that I’m half a level from the LOTRO level cap, have been for nearly a year, and can’t bring myself to play that character any more. From then on it’s just weapon XP and end game raiding in my mind and I just can’t be bothered.

Star Trek on the other hand is rapidly getting to a point where I don’t fear the end at all. Regular episodes and player created content may well be enough to make me stick it out in the long term without worrying about content.

End game content for dawdlers if you will.

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