Department of Temporal Investigations: Watching the Clock

I recently started buying and reading a lot of Kindle Star Trek novels (on my Nexus One incidentally – I don’t have a Kindle). Although a part of me is mildy worried and annoyed at the closed DRM’d nature of Kindle eBooks (and often the price) the ease and convenience has won out.

Star Trek novels have a improved a lot since I read them previously many years ago. Not necessarily the stories themselves but that there seems to a serious concerted effort to maintain continuity between, but without requiring too much knowledge of other books to read any given book (although there are more series now which obviously do require you to read them all for it to make sense).

With that in mind, before reading DTI: Watching the Clock you should definitely read the Destiny series and possibly the Typhon Pact series and the Titan series. Everything you need to know about them is explained in the book but it does spoil them a little if you do intend to read them at some point.

Amazon UK	Amazon US
DTI: Watching the Clock	DTI: Watching the Clock
Destiny #1: Gods of Night	Destiny #1: Gods of Night
Typhon Pact #1: Zero Sum Game	Typhon Pact #1: Zero Sum Game

Improving sector space in Star Trek Online

Perhaps I should just go ahead and rename my blog “Star Trek Online Forum Highlights”…

Pendra37 on the STO forums has come up with the first idea to improve sector space in Star Trek Online that actually seems it could be done without majorly overhauling the game engine.

The coolness basically boils down to one change: “If you hit the Drop out of warp button, you drop out of warp. A random deep space instance map loads up. The map may be completely random.” For more detail, read the post Sector space makes sense.

This reminds me of the fantasy RPG Rings of Power on the Genesis/Megadrive. In that game, for most of the time you controlled and oversized character walking through the landscape. At any time you could press B and the map essentially zoomed in showing you were you “really” were (and that the oversized character was just you represented on a map). Most of the time there was nothing interesting around, but there were things hidden in places that you could find and some quests required you to go to specific places.

The Voyage Home and BOff Story Arcs in STO

Another pair of interesting ideas for STO I found on the forums.

The first is “The Voyage Home“, a framework around exploration type missions based on the story of Voyager.

The second is Bridge Officer Story Arcs, missions based around your bridge officers, after you set up some personality options (most importantly, sympathies to certain factions and vendettas against certain factions).

Some cool ideas for Star Trek Online

I’ve been playing Star Trek Online since the open beta at the end of January and my opinion of it is generally positive. That isn’t to say there aren’t problems, in fact I agree with most of the complaints about it (and the forums have a lot). The difference with me is I still think it’s fun to play in the mean time (I still think the space combat is the best any Star Trek game has ever had).

I recently came across a series of ideas to improve the game posted on the forums by the player Daren Kitlor (although many others were involved in developing the ideas). This is my attempt to make a few more people read them and hopefully support them (since they are all really good).

Here they are, in my order of liking:

1. Iconic Worlds Proposal : “Create large, exterior world maps for various factions. These maps would be populated with many short missions”
2. Explore the System Proposal : “Creating new challeges to add variety to existing exploration missions.”
3. Intel Missions and Urban Settings : “Urban Environments, Espionage Mission Archetypes (to include Co-Op and Solo)”
4. Memory Alpha Tweaks : “Most items have an attribute in [blocks] for each level of rarity it gains. Why not let us select what attributes we’re looking for, based on the tier we have unlocked?”
5. Territory Control Proposal : “Help create persistent, PvP territory control without drastically changing the PvP Queues themselves”
6. Fleet Starbases and Fleet PVP : “The construction of Fleet-constructed starbases or space stations. Sieges of Fleet-constructed starbases.”
7. Ground Combat Proposal : “Star Trek Online has some great space combat. However, the ground combat is often criticized as being lackluster.”
8. Socialization Content Proposal : “Enhance the game experience through role-playing or to enhance the role-playing through a game experience.”

And remember, if you’re not yet a player you can play a limited demo for free (sadly without the cool ideas above yet).

Play Star Trek Online for free (for a bit)

Cryptic Studios have just launched the Star Trek Online referral program. They encourage old players to bring in new players by giving them free in game stuff (specifically the future Enterprise from All Good Things with three warp nacelles as a ship option).

To make it easier to persuade people, referred players get to try a demo of the game for free. It does seem the demo will be made freely available in the near future anyway though.

The demo has the following restrictions:

• Cannot trade player-to-player, send items via mail or use the Exchange.
• Cannot send in-game tells except those on the friends list (but can receive all tells)
• Cannot participate in zone chat
• Cannot send a friend request, or team/fleet invites (but can receive and accept them)
• Cannot play beyond level 3, or access missions other than “Stranded in Space,” once outside of the tutorial Episode

The last is the important one really.

Anyway, if anyone wants an invite, send me an email (each player can only have five pending invites).