Revisiting the Dúnedain

Volume 3 launched a few days ago. There’s lots of good info (and podcasts) at Casual Stroll to Mordor and LotRO Reporter as usual if you want details on the patch.

What I wanted to mention is how much more I enjoyed the new content than I expected to. When I first read how Volume 3: Book 1 was starting out, I was disappointed. It felt like a rehash of old content. Going back to old areas and talking to rangers that I had met before. In practice it was actually a good deal of fun. The quests were pretty quick for the most part. There were some interesting story tidbits which I won’t go into for spoiler reasons. Best of all several of the missions took place in pretty cool instances, one of the neatest was the ice cave in Forochel.

Book 1 was pretty quick, around three or four hours at most, and is entirely solo. There is one skirmish where you can group up but all of the instances are solo instances, and the rest is easy open world stuff.

I’m looking forward to continuing the story, although I could stand to wait a few months for the next book, I still haven’t finished Books 8 and 9 from Volume 2.

Obsess Much?

I saw this Twitter status earlier today from Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer for Star Trek Online:

As of 2/8 midnight PST: Most time spent in #STO by a player: 182.21 hours. Yeah, that’s right 7.58 DAYS of playtime.

That’s an incredible bit of trivia, and not a healthy achievement for whoever that player is.

Keep in mind that the headstart launch was 1/29 and the retail launch was 2/2. Just to make the math easy, ignore  the following:

  • the servers didn’t come up on 1/29 at midnight, so that was not a full 24 hours of playtime
  • the server have not had 99.9% uptime

So let’s just say that an absolute maximum amount of time a headstart player could have played is 11 days or 264 hours. That means someone has been playing for at least 69% of the time the game has been live.

Star Trek Miscellany

Some interesting reading from today, that I wanted to share.

Great STO Blog

The Engines Cannae’ Take It is still pretty new, but is already an excellent resource for any Starfleet captains interested in the details of how best to command their ships and plan their careers. An excellent example is BigBadB’s latest article about Skills, and some very detailed analysis of how to get the best use of your skill points.

Check out his blogroll for some other good STO focused blogs.

Van Hemlock STO Episode and Zink Interview

Randomessa mentions two things that I wanted to highlight.

First, Van Hemlock has an excellent episode about Star Trek and Star Trek Online. They talk about the different series and how each set a different tone, and some of the most popular episodes in the franchise and whether or not they would make good missions in the MMO. It is a good in-depth discussion of the IP and the different strengths of the mediums (television, movies, and games).

Second, there’s also an interesting interview up on Fidgit.com with Craig Zinkievich. These were some of the things I found most interesting in the interview:

  • The team is planning to add more exploration and non-combat activities (like diplomacy) over the next year, specifically mentioning first contact missions.
  • Some bridge officer AI quirks, “don’t give your bridge officers food, because right now they eat it right away. That’s disappointing if you’re trying to use them as extra storage bags.”
  • Acknowledgement that the skill system could use more in depth explanation.
  • Respecs should be out in the next one to two months and available through the C-store and earnable in-game.

Most of the interview is stuff I’ve already seen asked and answered other places, but this is the first interview where I’ve seen Craig talk about plans for non-combat missions.

Champions Expansion: New Name and Free Price

I mentioned yesterday that there was a new Ask Cryptic column where they started the process of fixing the mess caused by the Vibora Bay announcement. Well today Cryptic release a new State of the Game from Chronomancer as well as small news post from Rekhan with a bullet points summary of the coming expansion and two screen shots.

Here’s the highlights from the SotG message.

Kitchen Sink Patch

Roper starts off with a mea culpa regarding the all of the problems cause by the Kitchen Sink patch. Basically Cryptic admits to not having done sufficient testing, and has attempted to correct this by increasing the size of their QA team and instituting better internal controls to keep changes from STO and other projects from providing nasty surprises.

Communication Improvements

He also expands on what they stated in the previous day’s Ask Cryptic about how they’re intending to improve communication:

  • bi-weekly columns for Ask Cryptic and State of the Game
  • GM blog for a community channel to the support staff
  • monthly chat via IRC with the devs
  • an “all-company supergroup” to provide a more visible company presence in the game and additional PvP events
  • website overhaul and additional web content: monthly fiction releases, screenshots, fan art, wallpaper, and developer special features (intended to provide the dev’s point of view on the game)

There is a lot of good stuff here. Most of this is specific enough that the community will be able to easily grade Cryptic’s follow through in the coming months, and I can guarantee that there are some heavy forum users keeping a keen eye on how well Cryptic does fulfilling these promises.

Vibora Bay Revelation Expansion

They’ve changed the name of the upcoming expansion from Vibora Bay to Revelation, supposedly this reflects the change from working name to release name. There’s a short mention of a new arch-villain Therakiel (half-angel/demon) who is the focus of the expansion. Then Chronomancer gets into the part most of the Champions player community was waiting for: the expansion will be free. There’s not much additional details beyond general promises of new powers, new play areas, etc. He repeated that the content is designed for the 37-40 range with a new level 40 repeatable lair. Roper was also very careful to emphasize that the change from paid to free doesn’t reflect the quality or size of the expansion in anyway, and closes out the post by promising additional details “very soon.”

Rekhan’s News

Most of the information here is a summary of what Bill already posted in the SotG message, with one new and important detail. Champions Online – Revelation will be released in mid-March of 2010.

Forum Followup

There’s a Chronomancer followup post in the SotG forum thread where he addresses a couple of additional player concerns.

First, they are looking at some technical issues to tie the PTS and Live server accounts together to provide testers with in-game rewards for helping out.

Second, he provides a clarification of his mention about the quality level of the expansion having nothing to do with the pricing change:

What I am saying is that we didn’t consider the expansion to be sub-par and so we’re just giving it to you, or that in some way you’re getting less than we always intended because we’re not charging for it. I am ecstatic that we can provide this level of content to you for the low, low price of nothing! We’re having an internal play test right now and it’s been great to see people that haven’t been through the zone before be blown away at how it looks and plays.

Third, Roper tries to address the whole “STO stole our developers” idea that a lot of players have used as a reason why the game are languished the last few months in regards to patches and communication, saying they’ve been focused solely on the upcoming Revelation expansion and not losing resources to STO.

For me, the best part is the last sentence of his post:

We don’t expect one post to fix everything, but it’s our first step of many in the right direction!

I’m happy to see that they’ve reconsidered the idea of a paid expansion six months after launch, and I like what they’re promising regarding increased communication with the community from all levels of the Cryptic Champions team. Two days of announcements are a good start, but they are only a start.

So like I said yesterday, now we just need to see if  the Cryptic Champions team can deliver on their promises.

Captain’s Log

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87710.36

Lt. Cmdr. Bryn Aen, Captain of the U.S.S. Grace

I have returned to Sol and been promoted to Commander in recognition for my exemplary Starfleet service in the Pi Canis and Alpha Centauri sector blocks. In order to better perform my continuing duties in Alpha Centauri, I have been given command of the U.S.S. Lukas, an NX registered Akira class heavy escort.

After making a stop at Wolf 359 to pay our respects, the crew and I have returned to Alpha Centauri. We are continuing our standing mission is to patrol Federation systems threatened by the Romulans, as well as our on going investigation into –classified–.

I am looking forward to seeing what the new ship is capable of. (more…)

Ask Cryptic Returns

Questions?There was a new Ask Cryptic yesterday. I couldn’t find a link, but I think this is the first one since before the game launched. Cryptic picked seven questions out of a 32 page, 320 post forum thread, and while that seems like a very small percentage I do think they picked all of the questions that the general community was most interested in finding out answers to.

Because of the recent uproar regarding the last State of the Game message, a lot of the questions were regarding future plans for the game both in terms of design and communication:

Jackalope: …you can expect to see new adventures every other month (roughly). The content will be far more story based and focused on the background of the game.

Chronomancer: …we’re going to be focusing more on creating content to provide multiple paths of advancement within Champions Online. The plan is to create more of what you want in smaller bites so we can do them on shorter timelines.

Arkayne: …We’re stepping up the communication. We’re going to do more Ask Cryptics, more Dev Chats, we’re going to be in-game, playing with you more, Our GMs are going to start letting you know the status on the current bugs, and the entire development team is going to start being more active on the forums.

As someone who enjoys theme based characters, I was especially happy to see this:

IchbinVol: Will there be any reason to have a theme based character in the future? Perhaps a synergy bonus for having a certain set of skills?

BigOtter: That’s actually one of the goals of our Tier 4 powers being introduced in our upcoming expansion – to provide high-end thematic meta-powers for each of the power groups.

Cryptic does seem to be making a start on their forum promises from last week about more and better communication. They also seem to have a proper sense of urgency:

Arkayne: …Oh, and that “soon” we’re talking about up there, that’s not a “soon(tm)” that’s a soon, as in as soon as humanly possible soon.

I do want to say, that I’m still enjoying the game. I’ve not yet reached the level cap and I’ve been leveling slowly enough that all of the content holes in the late game seem to be getting filled before I get there. My main hero, Silver Hunter, is level 35 and still has a full mission log. I’d not really been concerned about direction and communication issues, except peripherally, until the SotG announcement of Vibora Bay. While it is too soon to say for sure, it does seem that Cryptic is now genuinely aware of their PR issues and is starting to address them.

So now we just need to see if  Cryptic’s Champions team can follow through.

Trekking Online

After having a productive posting month in January, I’ve been pretty quiet so far in February. Partly because I was taking care of my son, who got strep throat, but mostly because I’ve been spending my evenings in the Star Trek Online headstart and then launch.

Basically, I’ve either been working, parenting, or captaining (with a little sleep and food occasionally). So this is a little later than I’d luck, but better than never right?

Headstart

I know lots of people had a pretty rough headstart, but I wasn’t one of them.

My playtime runs starts around 7 pm and runs until midnight (GMT-5), once my son is asleep and my wife is occupied with a book or television. So I didn’t get into STO on the Friday headstart launch until late. Which is good since I wasn’t part of the initial rush of players when the server went live in the afternoon. I bought the digital delux edition from Direct2Drive, so I also managed to dodge the Steam issues with re-downloading the whole client. All in all, I ended up playing 9 hours Friday night (until 4 am) and don’t remember having any issues.

Saturday was a little rougher, I did experience some longer loading screens and rubberbanding right up until late Saturday night when the server crashed, but I figured better get some sleep anyway since it was 2 am.

In total I put in about 20 hours of play time (according to my Raptr profile) from Friday to Sunday. I had one server crash, but I was busy with other stuff during most of the queues, hanging loading character lists, and other problems.

Even better, I met my goals for the headstart by reaching Lieutenant Commander as a science officer and requisitioning a Nova class science vessel. Here’s my alien Bryn Aen, a Kae from Nalyl-6, at his promotion ceremony and his ship the U.S.S. Grace.

Lt. Commander Promotion Ceremony
U.S.S. Grace, Nova class science vessel

Launch

Launch day seems to have been pretty smooth for everyone, it definitely was for me.

My one complaint getting started was that D2D didn’t bother to email me that my key was available until nearly 6pm, by which time I’d already checked my D2D account page, registered the retail key, and was in the game playing. I had no problems logging into the website and registering my key from the link on the home page, although it is odd that the same link isn’t on the account page. The redemption method through the in-game store is a bit odd, but I was already used to this from playing Champions.

Bryn in his Original Series era uniform.

The whole week has been pretty smooth up until Friday and the weekend. While I still haven’t seen any queues, I did get some pretty frequent disconnects during missions (mostly Sunday for myself), and there were several unscheduled maintenances (which means the server crashed). All in all a typical MMO launch, although definitely toward the LotRO end of the scale and not the Anarchy Online end.

Hopefully the hardware upgrade Cryptic has been promising is in place before this coming weekend and resolves their stability issues.

Second Impressions

While definitely not a review, these really aren’t first impressions either since I was in the closed and open betas. That said, I have started to get into content I hadn’t experienced in the betas including spending more time with the Tier 2 ships. The game really starts to get more interesting once you upgrade from the light cruiser everyone starts with. The episode missions also start to develop more story. Of course if you just click through dialogs looking for the objective, you’re missing out on a good portion of the experience.

In the end, I’m having fun. When I sit down to play, I always seem to end up in Star Trek before any other game. Of course this is pretty regular for my during the honeymoon period for any game. Long term I can easily see spending time popping in to play some fleet missions or deep space encounters just for the fun of blowing some ships up.

TGIF

Couldn’t come up with a witty title, especially since this is a real ramble of a post. Lemme know if you have a title suggestion. So…

Lord of the Rings

Turbine has announced their next book release, Volume 3 Book 1: Oath of the Rangers. Aside from the advancement of the epic story quests, it seems to be all skirmishes and crafting recipes. I don’t know what I was hoping for but that wasn’t it. I did read a rumor that Volume 1 will be completely solo-able though which is nice, I only wish I remember where I’d heard that or how reliable the source was.

Star Trek and Champions

Despite what my Twitter says I didn’t actually play STO last night. If you look at my Raptr profile you’ll see I spent 3 minutes in the game because I launched the patcher last night and decided to click on Engage since the launcher said the server was up. I did get the game to launch to a “No logins authorized at this time,” which was enough for Raptr to think I was playing. The best part was a message I got from Blamefulgecko wanting to know how I got in so soon, was accidental but very funny.

No real news on the Champions front as far as the expansion controversy. I played a bit last night and had one disconnect early on but that was it. Crafting still seems to be a problem but only for some specific items (can’t remember which, sorry). The only major irritation from my play session was the camera spin bug. I’m not sure what causes it, but occasionally the camera would start to rotate wildly around my hero. It seemed to happen most often when I was flying. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to stop it by using the mouse look, but still I will be glad when it gets fixed.

Last thing I wanted to mention is there’s a follow up from the STO team regarding upcoming features. Lots of interesting stuff there, especially for Klingon players. For me, the IP location additions are the most interesting. All of the high level stuff is something I won’t be ready to see for quite a while. The most interesting bit though is the last paragraph under the Engage heading.

These updates are entirely free to Star Trek Online subscribers.

Obviously this was included in response to the Champions drama going on. I wonder how much communication is going on between the two teams, because PR-wise they don’t seem to be on the same page. I’m imagining Craig having a little hallway conversation with Bill about his timing.

Champions Patch, Lag, and Controversy

I took the day off from work yesterday because it was my birthday and played video games all day. With a wife, a 16 month old son, a job, a home, and two dogs, this was a big deal to get a whole day (guilt free) and was very very fun. It isn’t often that you can give yourself time, but that’s what it feels like I did yesterday. I played a about 2 hours of of LotRO and and hour of EVE, but most of my time (nearly 7 hours) was in Champions Online. There also happened to be a big patch yesterday in Champions and it caused some issues.

Lag? Lag. Lag!

I started in Monster Island and was having a lot of problems with rubber banding, freezes, and stutters. I found Millennium City to be a lot smoother (which is counter to some peoples experiences based on the forums). I also did a little crafting and didn’t have any of the item loss some people were complaining about. I don’t remember the client patching anything, but the lag issues did seem to be mostly solved by yesterday evening. I’m planning to pop in tonight and see if Monster Island is still having issues.

As a side note, even in the middle of the day on a week day there were plenty of players on the server. I was able to group up several times for missions within minutes of asking in zone chat.

Paid Expansion Already?

Besides the patch and lag issues, there was also a State of the Game released two days ago. Most of it was interesting to me but not exciting until I got to the part about a new zone, Vibora Bay. I’m not at the cap yet, my main is at level 34, and I’m still doing Monster Island content. I haven’t done the crisis mission for Lemuria yet. Still, new content is always a good thing. The expansion wording that Roper used didn’t even click for me until I was reading through the forum follow-ups and say this one from Daeke. Paid expansion before the game has been out a full year?

Of course the nerd rage on the forums has gone super nova.

My initial reaction was disappointment. When I read the SoG message I assumed that this was a free update. I think partly because Champions now occupies the same position in my mind that City of Heroes used to and CoH always had a lot of free content updates. After some thought though, I’ve gone from disappointment to wait and see. First, I realized that I just paid $20 for a mini-expansion from Turbine. Second, I had skimmed Daeke’s post the first time and missed  a very important not that he used. This expansion is not going to be full box price. Third, there are way too many details still missing to have any kind of valid opinion. All we know right now is Vibora Bay has content for levels 37-40 and that it will cost some amount of money.

So, I’m just going to wait and see. The only thing I’ve really decided in the last few days is I need to not read forums for MMO’s, with the exception of the Dev Tracker, in order to preserver my sanity and positive outlook on life.

Maximum Warp

The Star Trek Online beta is done, the head-start is tomorrow, and I can’t wait to enlist in Starfleet. I think I remember a forum post saying that the final retail patch would be posted today, so I’m going to run the client tonight and hopefully avoid any long waits for tomorrow. Hey I can dream right?

My previous thoughts on the game haven’t changed. I wasn’t expecting a virtual world sandbox game. I wasn’t expecting Mass Effect style dialog trees. All I wanted was an emotional response when firing a photon torpedo or sending my ship into warp, and I got that. The game has improved a lot since I first started testing in late November. There are still bugs and rough edges to things, but Cryptic has been able to show a lot of improvement in two and a half months. My only disappointment with the game is the linearity of the non-combat missions, I would like to see a little bit in the way of options instead of just: read, click, read, go here, read, click, read, beam out.

I had already decided in December that I was going to play at least the first six months, but based on my open beta experiences I’ve decided to go all in, as they say in poker, and I bought a lifetime account (my third, the others being LotRO and Champions).

Is it a risk? Oh yeah. Will I regret it? Maybe, but not as much as I would regret it if I was still playing in a year and hadn’t bought one. Of course I could have taken the one year sub and then switched to a lifetime next year, but then I would miss out on the playable Borg captain and be paying $60 more for the lifetime plus the $120 for the first year sub. So I’m taking a gamble that I’ll still be playing this time next year. That is a pretty safe bet for me. I’m still not at max level on my first hero in Champions and I didn’t get my first max level in LotRO until a month before Moria came out, so I don’t chew through content that fast.

So, I’m in it for the long haul and if Cryptic can make good on Zinc’s State of the Game from yesterday, then I’ll be a happy player for quite a while.