Star Trek Online has really hit it’s stride recently with their weekly episodes, so I’m very much looking forward to the third episode of the Deferi-Breen arc on Saturday.

Lord of the Rings Online free-to-play (or free-to-try as I like to think of it) launch starts on Friday, the 10th, but I’ll be in headstart on the 8th, which is for current subscribers and F2P beta players. While, I’m looking forward to getting into the new zone, I’m still ambivalent about the store and LUA changes. Still, the sooner the changes launch, the sooner we’ll see how it impacts the Landroval server community.

My Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions preorder is in the mail. Of all of the super heroes in the Marvel and DC universes, Spider-Man has always been my favorite, and I’m really hoping that this game will be more like Spider-Man 2 and not Web of Shadows.

I finally finished all of the available Mass Effect 2 DLC last week, just in time to pickup and play the Lair of the Shadow Broker which should release today. Like I mentioned last week, my excitement level tripled when I saw the trailer for the new content, it looks epic.

As if all of the gaming stuff wasn’t enough, I got an email from Amazon promising that my Kindle should arrive this week. I’m looking forward to spending some time with it and see if this whole ebook thing is for me or not.

I don’t remember it being a problem at earlier ranks, but at Vice Admiral, I’m finding that I often have to constantly stay in motion (often running backwards) because of melee opponents rushing me. While this does make ground combat more exciting, it also gives combat a bit of a Benny Hill feeling. This might just be because I’m playing a science officer, but that really just impacts which kits I can use (which affects which abilities I have access to) not what kinds of shields and armor I can equip.

A cover system would lead to battles that look more like what I’m used to seeing the the television series and movies, where people are shooting around corners or from behind rocks. The game’s current aim, sprint, and roll mechanics would still be useful and maybe actually more so than now. The major change would be the impact to melee NPCs and tactical officers.

By adjusting the cover available on maps and the stats on the sprint mechanic, I think there’s a way to balance between the current system which leads to enemies sprinting right up to you and then beating you senseless and keeping everyone pinned down behind crates for ten minute phaser battles.

The first thing was an article on Elemental by PC Gamer. Pete from Dragonchasers has already covered most of my feelings about Elemental, so I’ll leave it at that.

The second was the whole buying used games is piracy debate (and I’m using that word ironically). This whole thing was pretty off target, in my opinion. When I read Tycho’s post, I put the emphasis on the intent part of the statement and went on with my day. Then I got home and found half of the blogs in my RSS were talking about it in a completely different way from the way I understood his point. Since I’m so slow to post though, Tycho has already explained himself, so that’s that.

Moving on to more interesting stuff.

I’m reading the latest Mass Effect book, Retribution, and enjoying just as much as the prior two. This has started me jonesing to be back in that world, which is good because I still have DLC to finish. I had stopped playing halfway through the Firewalker DLC, so I finished that as well as the Kasumi missions. I was a bit disappointed that there was no real dialog on the ship with Kasumi outside of the missions, she does say some things, but she’s similar to Zaeed (which makes sense, but I was hoping for more). Her loyalty mission was still pretty fun though. I’m playing Overlord now, it’s the biggest DLC so far, and has a good mix of ground and driving sections.

I hadn’t originally planned to, buy I ended up buying SC2. Not to say that I was never going to buy it, but I had planned to wait until the sequels were out. I blame nostalgia and Twitter for my failure in self-control.

The funny thing about playing Star Craft 2, is that it has made me want to go back and play Dawn of War again. Ten years (or more) ago, when I played SC1, I’d never heard of Warhammer 40k, but now playing SC2, the similarities are is striking.

So, I’ve actually been playing a lot more DoW2 than SC2. I bought the Chaos Rising expansion during the last Steam sale, but hadn’t fired it up yet. Mostly this was because while I really enjoyed the original DoW2 campaign, the multi-player wasn’t as fun for me. This left me feeling a little cold towards the game. So I was pleasantly reminded of how much of actually enjoyed the single player when I fired up the expansion campaign. I’ve also started to enjoy the multi-player, I had a good night of CPU stomping in 2v2 with Oakstout, and I’m looking forward to trying Last Stand with Jayedub.

MMO-wise, I’ve just been dabbling. Played a little Champions yo check out the new update, popped into LotRO to get my house out of hock and catchup on my maintenance fees, and the rest of my time has been spent in STO. I made Vice Admiral, got my Discovery-class refit (my favorite looking ship in the game), and made Attaché in the Diplomacy ranks.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve also been writing quite a bit, but I’m having trouble publishing. Several times, this week, I’ve finished posts and just found no inclination to publish them. Apparently with venting, it’s enough to write it that I don’t need to share it, and honestly you’re not missing much.

I am curious though. If you blog, how much of what you write do you publish?

This is making me think about the dozen plus unfinished articles in my drafts folder. I really need to do some fall cleaning and either trash them or finish them.

Not a name I recognized, but based on some Googling and forum diving, he was a designer involved with the original Fallout games and worked on the Trek RPG for two years. Sounds like an excellent addition to the team.

Of course there’s a lot of speculation about an exodus of people from Cryptic, and what it might mean for the company’s future. So far, I think all of the personnel changes have been very positive. I’ve been much happier with Champions since Shannon took over, and while I was happy with Zinc’s tenure at STO, I’ve been even more impressed with Stahl.

Like anything that happens within a private company, we’ll probably never know for sure. Personally, I’m much less concerned by this than I was by Zinc’s departure. First, Roper left his position as Executive Producer of Champions back in March and Shannon Posniewski has (for whatever reason) done a much improved job. Second, Bill has been a lightning rod for bad press since he started as Cryptic. A lot of that is fallout from the failure of Flagship Studios, but the launch day nerf and Vibora Bay announcement also contributed a lot of bad PR. So, while his departure may impact whatever Cryptic has in development, I don’t see it having any impact on their released games. Deserved or not, Roper’s name comes with a lot of baggage attached, and it can only help Cryptic not to have to deal with that anymore.

Two of the big highlights: skill cap (level) increase and diplomacy.

The skill cap was increased allowing for new ranks of Rear Admiral Upper Half (yeah I know but it’s canon) and Vice Admiral. In WoW-terms that’s a level increase from 45 to 51. There’s also new high level content to match, but I haven’t done any of it yet.

The big feature I’ve been excited about is the addition of the Federation Diplomatic Corps. Cryptic has added a diplomatic rank system to the game. There are seven new non-combat missions to Memory Alpha, Vulcan, Bajor, and Starbase 39 that are quite good (and include some branching). Unfortunately I haven’t gotten a chance to do any First Contact missions on the live server (Holodeck) since that requires the Attache diplomatic rank, which I haven’t earned yet. I have played a few of those on Tribble though and they were interesting, although I’ve enjoyed the investigations on Bajor and K7 (one of the missions that starts on Memory Alpha) more.

I also spent a lot of time scanning anomalies, which is not something new for me, but now that there’s a signal matching mini-game, those missions are a bit more interactive.

I’m planning a few non-spoiler, in character, write-ups of those episodes. Hopefully the first one will go up on Friday.

I was completely caught off-guard by Zinc leaving, and initially very concerned at what his departure might hint about the game’s future. Unlike with Roper’s management of Champions, overall I’ve been very happy with Zinc’s tenure as EP. Still, that initial fear reaction was just  my normal reaction to change. After reading the announcement twice and heading over to the forum thread, I was much less concerned.

Daniel Stahl, formerly a Producer on the game, is taking over for Craig and has brand new Twitter account, Cryptic_dStahl, if you’re interested in following him. Daniel is very active on the forums and well respected by the community, at least for now. MMO forum communities being what they are, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.

If you want an idea of what kind of person is taking over management of the game, just read Stahl’s awesome response in the forum thread about Zinc leaving. There’s also a good follow up by Zinc to some of the comments in the thread, and an additional post by Daniel to address some of the conspiracy theorists. My cynical side suggests that all of this is exactly what Cryptic would post, but given the number of dev posts I’ve seen by Cryptic staff I don’t think that’s true.

Of course how this will actually affect the game is any one’s guess, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87958.97

Admiral Bryn Aev, Captain of the U.S.S. Nym Kae

We’ve just completed a patrol of the Arawath Sector. The crew and I are returning via transwarp conduit to Earth Spacedock to resupply before heading to the Gamma Orionis transwarp conduit near Risa. Since we’re going to be in the neighborhood, I thought it would be an excellent time to schedule shore leave for the crew. After spending months in Cardassian space dealing with Jem’Hadar, and now looking forward to months fighting the Borg, a few days on the beaches of Risa should be excellent for morale.

Out of Character…

Bryn made max level, Rear Admiral 5, in Star Trek Online on Sunday night. He still had several missions in his journal from RA1-4 and hadn’t even entered the end-game zone of Gamma Orionis. To celebrate Admirals Longasc and Tipa took Bryn to the Borg infested sector and tried to get him killed in elite-level exploration missions. They succeeded once, but Bryn and the crew of the Nym Kae did pretty well. It took a heavy attack of Undine battleships to trigger the first experience of the new death penalty. Fortunately the Nym Kae suffered only minor damage to it’s sick bay which slowed the pace at which crew men were cleared to return to duty stations.

While not a difficult accomplishment, this is another check mark on my goals for the year just like reaching the level cap in Champions Online.

I was late getting started on reading it, so I did end up reading Adventure Historian’s and MMO Gamer Chick’s reviews before I started. That might have caused me to drop my expectations a bit, but overall I enjoyed the book. I thought that the interviews with well known characters like Janeway, Seven of Nine, Quark, and Worf were done very well and stayed very true to their TV portrayals. The interviews with Maddox and La Forge alone were worth the read though. Data was my favorite character from Next Generation. I always wondered after watching Nemesis, if the foreshadowing that was done with Data and B-4 would ever be explored, so it was really good to see that finally happen. The timeline appendix included in the back was pretty nice too, but I think it’s more useful as a reference than entertainment.

Besides connecting the game to the TV and movie timeline, the other thing that reading Needs of the Many has done is generate some interest in reading more of the Trek novels. I recently discovered that there’s a series of novels that follow the Enterprise crew between Insurrection and Nemesis. Since there’s no Star Trek on television right now, this is the next best thing.

The big additions: Cryptic has added a death penalty and a difficulty slider. Neither of these things were anything I was looking forward to, beyond hoping that that wouldn’t affect me. The difficulty slider has three settings: normal, advanced, and elite. On normal difficulty the game remains the same as pre-1.1, no change to missions, and no death penalty. The higher difficulties include the death penalty and offer better rewards. I am more interested in exploring and experiencing the content, than in figuring out how to beat a tough encounter, so I’ll generally stay on the normal difficulty.

They’ve also done some balancing on Feedback Pulse, Subnucleonic Beam, and Viral Matrix. Of the three, Viral Matrix is one I use often and it’s switching from a straight hold to a power that knocks weapons, engines, and auxillary offline. The trick is they go offline in a random sequence and not all at once. This seems to me like a PvP related change, and I’m not quite sure how much it’ll impact me in PvE but it’ll definitely require some changes to my tactics.

Turn rate for ships has been switched from auxiliary to engines; now auxiliary is just for deflector, probe, and sensor powers.

The rest of the notes include some great quality of play improvements:

• Players now get info about what types of commodities are needed in nearby clusters.
• Commodity types needed within a cluster have been reduced from 5 to 3.
• Commodities can now be replicated on-board ship, but they’re more expensive that way.
• Commodity tool-tips now give information about where they can be purchased.
• Commodity missions now provide a gift in addition to the normal rewards.
• Exchange UI now allows sorting by price or item name.
• Items on the Exchange now expire after 1 week.
• You can drap and drop an item from inventory to the search box to look for similar items.
• Starships will now adjust their heading on warp-out so they don’t warp through planets.
• Removed some of the bas spawn points in Deep Space Encounters

I’m looking forward to getting patched up tonight and seeing how the changes play.