Star Trek Online F2P Tomorrow
Star Trek Online is going Free to Play tomorrow. I have been looking forward to playing this game for a while now. There is only so much World of Warcraft I can take in a given year, and other MMOs like The Old Republic are not different enough from WoW to give me the break I am looking for. Star Trek Online looks to be significantly different, and they have been updating it for months to get the game ready for the F2P crowd.
What really has me interested in the game is how it has the standard ground combat and character building of most MMOs, but then also has a really deep space combat system that is pretty tactical. So in addition to your standard character building, you are also customizing a ship and crew – way more variety then most MMOs.
While combat in most MMOs comes down to mashing on buttons (in the correct rotation for whatever your fighting), STO’s ship combat is a bit different and much more tactical. One really simple example is that all of the ships have shield segments. The simple tactic is to target a single point on an enemy ship with energy weapons to drop that section of their shields. At that point you can hit the exposed hull with torpedoes. So positing actually matters in Star Trek Online, you need to keep your ship facing weakened points of the enemy’s shields while trying to keep your weak points out of their line of fire.
Check out some of the videos below to see how space and ground combat work:
Irrational Interviews
Irrational Games has a launched a new podcast series called Irrational Interviews. Irrational Interviews features Ken Levine and Shawn Elliott sitting down with members of the entertainment industry and having a frank and open discussion on a wide variety of topics. For the pilot episode they are interviewing Todd Howard, Executive Producer and Game Director from Bethesda Softworks. Howard has been at Bethesda since 1994, with countless classics under his belt including The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and most recently Fallout 3. Howard is well known for his sense of humor and his drive to make great games.
Download Options:
Does it Count Towards My Gamerscore?
I sure hope so.
Giantbomb “Famous Friends” Quest: The Most Important Man in the Video Game Industry
Giantbomb has create a somewhat cool quest system where you have to visit certain pages on the website to complete various quests. One of them, called Famous Friends, tasks you with visiting the profile pages of famous people in the game industry. The last question in the series was “He’s the most important man in the video game industry. No debate, he just is.”
Apparently it is Matt Atwood. What a bunch of crap. Way to put an inside joke from one episode of your podcast at the end of a series of legit questions. If this is going to be the trend for your “quest system”, I don’t think I will participate. I don’t mind legitimate challenges that test my game industry knowledge and deductive reasoning. I also don’t mind if you create quests full of inside jokes. What annoyed me was putting in time to figure out the other legit answers only to get stumped by the last fake one. I didn’t even know it was fake at first. I spent a good amount of time trying legitimate people. Please don’t waste my time again.
Since this quest is full of crap anyway, here are the rest of the answers:
Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, Ed Boon, Richard Garriott, J Allard
Server Storage Upgraded, Higher Quality Videos
Over the past week or so I have been attempting to upload videos to GameTrailers, but their user movie service is terrible. Videos take ages to compress, often times not compressing correctly or at all. Sometimes it takes days and multiple attempts to get videos up on their service correctly. This is a nightmare and I am tired of dealing with it. So instead of posting the videos there, I am going to start posting them here. The storage space on the web server has been upgraded, and as such you can expect higher quality videos now on as well.
On another note, the website recently turned 4 years old. Hopefully this next year will bring a lot more content. I really need to start reviewing games more often. I am actually playing one right now that has a good chance of being reviewed. Cross your fingers!
