Star Trek Online

There is a lot of discussing going on about ship interiors and capital ships being manned by many players.

I do in fact see a way how it could actually be done, but you gotta start with a completely different game concept. So unless Perpetual starts over from scratch we will likely not see this version of STO happening anytime soon.

We gotta be honest to ourselves: It will be impossible to create a universe full of things to do, thousands of unique and remote planets to explore and adventure on, Capital Ships manned by lots of people, Fleet combat, mysterious things happening everywhere for players to solve, and so on ...
Basically you can't have it all in one package. At least not without many expansions.


So whats my idea then?
(Please read a few paragraphs. I cannot describe it in two sentences and therefore the first few might not make sense to you. You will only understand all possibilities if you read for a while  )
This is not a complete concept since I thought about it for maybe 20 minutes. It definately can be expanded and refined in many ways.

It basically works like an episode from the series:

The Core game is the capital starship itself. Everything starts there.
Let's say it is the "Enterprise"!  And for this example we'll use the TNG setting. I'm not a Trekkie (I just like Star Trek) so I may get something wrong.
Since the ship is the core game we can put 1000+ people on it. Which means the whole server is the ship plus the things that happen around it.

The ship will be completely modelled, meaning you'll find every corridor and room that is supposed to be there.

The Enterprise will have a mission. Could be many things, but it obviously needs to be a very important, exciting and mysterious one. To understand this game concept it doesn't matter what exactly it is, just know that you are part of the Crew and the Ship is on this mission.

On the ship you will find the core crew members you know from the series. All of them will be NPCs that evolve the storyline with quests and information.
You'll find Captain Picard, Worf, Data, Geordi and so on. Obviously there will be many other NPCs that give quests, or are just there to fill the more uninteresting crew positions.

There will be quests (quest lines) that all players get, and there will be class specific quest (lines).

If you for example choose to be a part of the security team you will probably get a quest line that involves stopping/killing hostile intruders. Most likely quests for medics will be connected to your quest line. It could take a long time to complete this chapter of the story and it will probably involve the whole crew. Engineers that repair this and that, or maybe build force fields, eventually discover some new technology to battle the invaders. You see there are endless possibilities.

And it's not a problem that people are working on different parts of the story either. If you have played GuildWars or Lord of the Rings Online you'll have seen how this is handled. Along with other players you are in a different instance of the ship which is part of the stories chapter you currently are working on. In your ship there may be aliens invading and different parts of the ship might be destroyed, while for someone working on another chapter the place might be fully intact.
This opens up the opportunity to put much more people onto the ship than the normal crew would be, since players will work in different instances of the ship.

Player housing would be there as well. (Your cabin, which you could customize.)

With expansions there maybe "out of ship" content added to the game. Small ships for example.
Shuttles, fighters and so on that support the big ship.

As an engineer you would go to the shuttle bay, enter a shuttle which might fly you out to repair something while a security class player may fly a fighter to support the Enterprise in destroying an enemy. You would see Enterprise shooting torpedos and stuff, detonations in the shield and so on. Obviously it would be scripted and part of a quest line. There would be "vehicles" that could be manned by up to lets say 3 - 6 people (full group size?). Thats reasonable and has been done in other games (Planetside for example). Everyone could do something interesting.

It is important to understand that everything is part of an evolving story and the whole crew works towards the same goal. (I haven't come up with a plan for PVP yet, maybe someone else will  )
You definately wont go out every day to grind through 500 aliens just to get exp. There may not even be exp at all. By doing quests you'll likely get better in what you do and get better reputation with your NPC superiors. Which in turn will open up new skills and you will get promoted!
You can then eventually command lower ranked NPCs to do stuff. This may be through quests or "henchman" type NPCs.

The next thing that could be added with an expansion might be planetary missions with away teams.

And after that it could be.....

Well, I think you now have understood where this is going and you probably can come up with a lot of things yourself from here on.


Some people will like this idea, others may not. It's just an idea. Maybe someone picks it up and creates a game from it. Even if its not a "Star Trek" titled game. What's important is: It could be done. It's not unrealisticly complex.

Have fun thinking about it 

Players will not be piloting multi crew Capital ships. They fly smaller ships that can be operated solo or multi crewed by others on your team, but everyone will have only an exterior view of the ship.

Basically everything you mentioned is what PE is already planning, with the addition of away missions on planets. The capital ships will operate as hubs where you'll have housing, get missions, be able to explore the ship or form teams for missions, etc. However, players won't control the ship, its a stationary hub.

You need to go to STO.net and look through their archives.

 

Originally posted by Keogh  

Basically everything you mentioned is what PE is already planning

I have to disagree. I think it would be very different. The Perpetual version hub ships dont have much in common with my ship here.

From what the FAQ says you'll just have a few interior rooms on those ships and that the ships would be basically stationary.
Which is understandable since there will likely be a lot of these hub ships. They have a quite different function in PEs game.

In my version the actual ship would be like 90% of the initial game world. A 42 deck complete galaxy class star ship with every jefferies tube, console and so on. It may not all be accessible to you unless you got a specific quest, but it would be there. Much like other MMO worlds where you cant go everywhere with your newly created character.

Also, I would never make people fly the small ships in 3rd person view, it would definately be cockpit view to control it.   3rd person ship views are nice to watch your ship in battle, but you click on your cockpit buttons to do stuff.

I must congratulate you Corun. You are thinking like a developer.  I would go to every ST Online forum out there and post a link to your thread here.  I think that everyone should read it and perhaps be inspired by your idea, and maybe come up with some of their own.

 

Good job, Corun.  Good job indeed.

Well, certainly a grand idea that probably hasn't been mentioned on boards before, but there are problems with that idea.

 

What you've described is basically just playing on one giant size city or hub ship in STO as the entire server content, with outside ship content in expansions. You've limited the higher roles in the game that players can obtain such as Captain and Chief officers, even moreso with the addition of main characters from the shows on board. You've also limited the roles such as pilot and tactical, you only need one person for each role. This by the way is one of the problems I see with the current sto plan has as well with multi crew on a single ship, makes me think of like having five people on one mount in WoW, with one person steering, one doing the attacking, and another hitting the repair button, it's limiting and doesn't like much fun.

Players enjoy playing these games to explore and playing the game the way they want to, but you limit that to just exploring the ship. Boarding battles? well I hope the ship is in constant battles, because it'll be hard to satisfy all the security players on board for very long, except running holoprogs all day.

The concept is great for a single or small group type of game, but for a massive multiplayer game with thousands of players wanting to play and explore the game their way like the many that want to be their own captain, I don't think it could have a lasting appeal.