Enterprise-F

I missed posting about the second Dev Diary regarding the new Enterprise, as it came out during my Android obsessive period a few weeks ago. It’s worth reading though if you have any interest in Trek starship design. Part three is out now though and features a beautiful in-game model draft of the ship. She’s going to be a cruiser, as expected, and a Vice Admiral level ship. I now have quite a bit of motivation to get my Engineer Nal working hard for promotion (he’s only Lieutenant Commander now).

Crossfired Up!

It’s here! It’s here! It’s here!

Even though I’ve been playing quite a bit on Tribble over the last few weeks, it’s still really good to have the ground combat update on Holodeck. It’s completely a perception issue on my part, but knowing I’m playing on Holodeck gives me more of a sense of permanence that’s just not there when I play on Tribble. Tribble is like Vegas. You go there to have fun and goof off, but it doesn’t count.

I logged in on my main Bryn and headed out to Gamma Orionis. One of the things I’ve been waiting to do is replay Assimilation. This mission is part of the Undine front missions and includes the Universal Assimilated Module, which was added as part of the Borg equipment set after I’d finished that chain of missions.

Pre-Season 4, Assimilation was one of my least favorite of the story missions. There’s a ton of Borg ground combat in that mission, and I remember dying while playing it. Possibly it was just because I was Science, possibly I wasn’t doing something correctly, but I think it was because of the way ground combat worked. Melee enemies tended to run up on me, so battles largely consisted of running backwards in circles trying to shoot enemies. Not fun.

Now that Season 4 is here, I picked up the replay from my Ready Room console and headed to NGC-4447. After completing a few space objectives, it was time to beam in with Bryn’s team. I started playing the mission completely in shooter mode but part way through I had to change that to just toggling into shooter mode before starting combat after accidentally clicking my mouse a few times and shooting Borg’s in alcoves. Turns out they don’t like that.

The new content was fun enough that I started out just clearing out all of the Borg I ran across  even if they weren’t hostile. I only started switching my Boffs to passive mode and leaving Borg alone once I saw how late it was.

I had a lot more fun than the first time I ran the mission. I made it all the way through the mission without dying once, although I did have to resuscitate my two tactical officers a few times. The pacing was faster, the battles were more engaging, and dodging behind walls worked well to break aggro and give my personal shields time to recharge. The kits are much more effective as well.

I hadn’t really noticed on Tribble, but I was using a Physicist Kit and dropping an Exothermic Induction Field (EIF) on a group of Borg did a noticeable amount of damage. Pre-Season 4, most of the DoT’s in Science Kits seemed more like bonus damage than actual attacks. Often, I would just use the roots and shield debuffs and that was it. Now though, using EIF or Hyperonic Radiation, has a noticeable effect. There were several instances where DoTs killed Borg that were down to a quarter of their life who had adapted their shields before I was able to remodulate my weapon.

I know there are issues with Season 4, especially for the Foundry, but I’m still really happy with the update. I’m really looking forward to leveling up my alts now that I can look forward to both types of combat in the game.

No Thanks EA

I think EA’s trying to convince me to stop being a PC gamer.

Thankfully I started playing Mass Effect on the Xbox because I didn’t want to hope or wait for a PC release. Usually if a game is available for PC and console, I’ll get the PC version. Since Mass Effect 2 built on the previous game’s save file, I’ve been locked into the console version of the series, so this news really doesn’t affect me too much. Still, this as a glimpse into the future and it doesn’t look good.

I don’t need another online store to buy games from. I don’t want another username to keep track of (even if Keepass makes it easy). There’s already Amazon, Direct 2 Drive, Good Old Games, Impulse, and Steam just to name the one’s I’ve used recently. I have no interest in buying games from EA’s store or Activision’s store or Ubisoft’s store. Especially not given how poorly they seem to handle data security. Having my name and email address is one thing. Having my credit card number? No.

I certainly don’t need or want a social network tied into it either. I’m already in one too many and it especially doesn’t make sense to participate in one tied to a publisher.

Here’s a tip for EA and the other publishers. I rarely identify games with publishers unless it because of awful DRM or some other screwup. I identify games with the developers. When I heard there was a Batman sequel coming, my only interest was would Rocksteady be developing it. Without resorting to Google, I can’t tell you who the publisher is. Honestly, half the time I get EA and Activision confused. Ubisoft is the one publisher I can keep straight, but that’s because of their colossally stupid always online DRM. That’s not good company to be in.

Origin is a bad idea. Having games with Origin exclusive versions is a worse idea. If you really want to shoot off a toe, I recommend going all in and making all of your games Origin exclusive. I might miss out on some fun gameplay, but you’ll save me a lot of money.

Season 4 Tomorrow!

Star Trek Online is coming down for maintenance tomorrow morning:

We will be bringing down Holodeck on 7.7.2011 from 6:30 AM to 9:00 AM PDT (2330 – 0200 UTC) in order to perform maintenance and apply the Season 4 patch. We will provide an update once the maintenance has been completed.

Patch notes for Season 4 are significant. There’s a few surprises on there too (my comments in blue):

  • Whenever you join a team or fleet, you will automatically be added to a voice chat channel. I didn’t realize we’d be able to use voice for fleet chatting, I just assumed it was for teams like in LotRO.
  • All existing characters will get a free respec token due to the significant changes to ground combat. I still have some saved from ranking up, but one more won’t hurt.
  • An auto loot option has been added to the options screen. This will be nice to have, I always seem to fly to far from loot and have to make a second pass to get it after the battle.
  • A ship selector has been added to all ship/shuttle transporter rooms. Players can now swap ships without having to fly to a starbase. This will be nice to have. No more having to go back to a starbase to switch to a shuttle for doing sampling missions.

There’s a lot more in Season 4 and I highly recommend checking out the section on ground combat changes so you understand what the new keybindings are. Even if you don’t intend to use shooter mode, you’ll want to know how to toggle it off if you accidentally engage it (press B).

I’ve actually been holding off on doing anything with my two alts since I saw the ground combat upgrades on Tribble, and I’ve been itching lately to get back to them. Hopefully I get a chance to check in with them tomorrow.

Peaceful

With the 1.7 patch of Minecraft out, I decided to start a new single player map. The one that I’ve been playing on was generated before dyes were added to the game or sandstone started to occur naturally, and I really wanted to find some lapis lazuli blocks. I’m sure you can guess why.

I did decide to do something different this time, I set the difficulty level on peacefully. While playing survival is fun, it causes me to play much much more conservatively. So much so that I very rarely die from monsters (falling in lava is another story). Still having monsters turned on makes exploring caves nerve wracking, and this time around I just want to focus on building and checking out the new features.

It’s been very strange not worrying about building a secure base, or placing torches every half dozen blocks, or keeping an eye on the sun so I don’t get caught outside at night.

Strange but liberating.

I don’t plan to play like this all the time. I’m sure at some point I’ll get bored of building and exploring the world and decide to turn the difficulty back up to normal, but for now it’s a nice change of pace. When I break into a new cavern, I’m just excited for what resources I might find and not worried of what might be lurking in the dark.

City of F2P

I just saw the news via PC Gamer that City of Heroes is going free-to-play. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m sure that NCSoft and Paragon Studios have been looking for ways to renew interest in the game and saw Champions Online’s renewed success. I’m just glad that NCSoft didn’t shutdown the game as they’ve never been shy about that before, although admittedly for much younger games.

Free or not, I’m not planning on going to go back to the game. Just like with Age of Conan, the subscription isn’t what keeps me from playing. It’s time.

Unlike Conan though, I do like the Paragon City setting and lore. I played back when a comic came in the mail every month and I enjoyed the two books that were released. But the lore doesn’t offset the aging character models and combat system. I prefer the combat pacing and mechanics better in Champions Online, as well as the open power system and newer graphics. The only reasons I’ve gone back to CoH in recent months have been for nostalgia during free reactivation weekends.

The F2P plan itself is a pretty standard hybrid subscription model with an in-game store, VIP members getting point stipends monthly, and separate tiers for free players, those who’ve spent some money in the store and subscribers. The most interesting feature is that they are creating a VIP only server and giving VIPs one free transfer a month.

Hopefully the new model works just as well for Paragon Studios and NCSoft as it has for Cryptic and Turbine.

Distracted

I seem to have taken an extended, unintentional break from gaming. I did get some time in STO last Tuesday to check out the coming Season 4 changes on Tribble, but that’s been it.

Instead, I’ve been up to my eye-balls learning the Android OS. I finally got tired of waiting on the Bionic to come out and instead picked up the Thunderbolt. I’m actually pretty impressed with my self-control as my contract was up in early April and I managed to wait until mid-June. In the end, I realized that specs aside I’d rather patronize HTC than Motorola. HTC’s shown more willingness recently to serve their customers, plus I realized I preferred the HTC’s Sense UI over Moto’s Blur and I can lock in an unlimited 4G LTE data plan now, just in case.

So instead of logging into any MMO’s or firing up the Xbox 360, I’ve been playing with my newest toy. Learning the OS, checking out tons of apps, and learning the programming APIs. I’m still working up the courage to root it, but seeing half a dozen apps I can’t uninstall is helping.

It may seem odd, since I’m a Java developer professionally, to also spend my time doing the same thing all weekend. But after working on ten year old websites all week, getting to play around with a brand new platform is pretty fun. Besides, I have a couple of utilities I wrote for my old BlackBerry Storm that I want to have on the new phone.

Regardless, I’m sure my odd combination of OCD/ADD will have me back in Telara and the Alpha Quadrant soon.

Ground Combat Video

As promised yesterday, I’ve uploaded a couple of videos to Youtube.

Not ground combat related, but here’s a quick peek at the new animated loading screen. It’s a minor thing, but I like that it adds a bit more Trek feel of the game.

Next, here’s two quick snippets and one longer one of the new ground combat. The first is from Stranded in Space, the remastered mission where you rescue the crew of the Azura. The second and third are from Collateral Damage,a Borg mission on Hotep IV in Gamma Orionis.

Finally, I cut together a series of clips showing the new FX for the different weapon types. I didn’t try to rotate through all of the different damage types, so most of the clips are for Tetryon and there’s two Antiproton, but it does show all of the new primary and secondary attacks.

Ground Combat Feedback

Something I don’t think I was clear about yesterday is that the new aiming mode is not the reason for the change in pacing of the combat. It just makes ground combat more engaging. The speed of fights is from the revamp of weapon damages as well as a change to how shielding and health works. From Daniel Stahl on the forums:

Also note that we have changed the difficulty of all enemies in the game. Most basic mobs are 2 shot simple now. Lieutenants and above get more challenging. A captain is expected to be a challenging encounter that can take tactics to deal with. A captain + sub lieutenants is expected to be difficult.

If you are one shotting Captains – then that is a bug and we want to adjust – so post details if you run into this situation.

This is also the very first build of the ground combat upgrade on Tribble, and the STO team is looking for as much feedback as possible on the new mechanics. So take a little time and try it out. Directions for signing up for Tribble and copying your character over are on the forums.

Ground Combat Update is on Tribble

The first Season 4 build is up on Tribble (see the patch notes here and here). There are a lot of improvements, but the biggest one is the new ground combat update.

My expectations for ground combat have gone through a complete cycle from apathy to excitement. At first, I didn’t really care that it was being revamped. I’ve preferred space combat since the very first time I played the game and always treated ground combat as just a delay before getting back to my ship. As I started to get an idea of what Cryptic was doing from listening to interviews, reading the forums, and seeing sneak peaks on Twitter, I started to get more and more excited. The duty roster is still the main feature I’m looking forward to in Season 4, but ground combat has become a close second.

So I’ve spent a couple of hours playing on Tribble tonight, and I have to say that ground combat is a lot of fun now. Switching from RPG mode to FPS mode is smooth and easy to do. Opening my crew screen automatically switches to RPG mode so I can use my mouse to switch equipment around, I can tell this is a beta feature though since opening the map doesn’t do the same. The FPS aiming takes a little bit to adjust to, and it’s a little weird that your beam doesn’t hit exactly where you point since really what the aiming is doing is selecting a target not actually pinpointing where you’re firing. But it is a vast improvement over the current system.

Combat is much much faster and more exciting. Changes to shield and health stats as well as weapons, mean that battles are over in one or two minutes instead of five or ten. There’s also much less of the goofy backpedaling to deal with melee enemies.

The guns are also much more interesting and varied. In taking my main to Vice Admiral 1, I only ever used two weapons: a stun pistol and a sniper rifle. The only variation was what beam type I used. The new weapons are really fun though and I forsee a lot of swapping between the different rilfes, pistols, and assault weapons.

The only downside is, I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate ground combat on the live server anymore.

Besides the big combat update, there’s also a neat new animated loading screen as well as a really cool new interface for ship requisition (not the C-store).

I took a few Fraps videos while playing tonight, I should have some up tomorrow to share for anyone who doesn’t have an active sub right now or doesn’t like to mess with the test server.