Star Trek Online Going Free-To-Play

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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According to Gamasutra, that's the direction that Cryptic Studios will be operating under, as their new China-based parent company Perfect World pushes to move the popular sci-fi MMO in line with its other free-to-play properties. "Cryptic is working on the free-to-play model for Star Trek Online, this is going to be launched by the end of this year as well. So I think with the free-to-play model, we have bigger potential in the U.S."
 
Seems to be a popular trend these days, taking popular franchise and make a F2P out of them.

Recently I've heard that Codemaster will be doing the same too, with a F2P version of their Formula 1 racing series
 
Essentially they HAD to do this.

STO has

  • An interesting ship combat system
  • Ridiculous lack of content

As such, it's been losing subscribers, even HARDCORE trekkies, almost since day 1.

This, like Champions Online, was released a couple months too early, before there was even enough content to go from minimum to maximum level. And, like Champions Online, has been infected with Emmert's "What's wrong with grinding huge numbers of random mobs?" mentality.

Think of the "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of South park, and you've pretty much got it.
 
Free to play... so you get to have a shuttle craft to fly around with, however for 100 space bucks (which are purchasable with credit card and paypal) you can have the NCC-1701E!
 
I was SO stoked for this when it came out. I had preordered and was in the beta. But, ultimately, I quit before my free first month was up.

Ship combat was awesome, but that was it. Same 3 or 4 away missions all the time.
 
Anyone know where a hi resolution of this pic might be for my desktop.
 
Perfect world has the nasty habit of selling power to its customers in its f2p games. They break the cardinal rule on f2p games because it works in Asia, it doesn't go down well in western markets.

It's going to fail harder than it did when it was a subscription based service just for the above reasons.
 
Well, at least I'm willing to try it under the free model. If it's lousy, I haven't lost anything other than a little time.
 
Chas said:
Essentially they HAD to do this.

STO has

  • An interesting ship combat system
  • Ridiculous lack of content

As such, it's been losing subscribers, even HARDCORE trekkies, almost since day 1.

This, like Champions Online, was released a couple months too early, before there was even enough content to go from minimum to maximum level. And, like Champions Online, has been infected with Emmert's "What's wrong with grinding huge numbers of random mobs?" mentality.

Think of the "Make Love, Not Warcraft" episode of South park, and you've pretty much got it.
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Reminds me of the other Star * franchise MMO, SWG.
Giant worlds, brilliant crafting, minimal level grind, great cityscapes...And less than 1 dungeon per giant world, and that <1 dungeon wasn't instanced.
 
sweet can't wait to play the worst MMO ever made. I've been damn curious.
 
Its fun, got a live time, like to hope on every now and again.
 
Calling STO repetitive would be a MASSIVE understatement. There is only so many things you can do with starship combat! Two missions. Go here, kill everything or go here, scan something THEN kill everything. They even had an FPS section sometimes that had NPC's that were dumb as dirt. If you looked at the AI code it would look like this. "If enemy spotted, run to enemy shooting till dead". I really REALLY wanted to like it since I want a space MMO other then the spread sheet simulator called EVE.
 
Yeah, I was bored one day so I picked this up on Steam. Ugh. Space combat looks and plays sweet, away missions suck ass though. My included month is almost up and I am going to cancel. I will leave it on my hard drive in anticipation of the f2p, but am not very hopeful that it will be any better.
 
piscian18 said:
WTF?
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I bought the game on release, with Life Time subscription (as in I don't pay monthly fee). I enjoy going back now and again and questing a bit. Do you not understand the English language.
 
Bought a copy a year ago and played for the free month before canceling...boring as shit then. Tried it again recently and saw they had done more with it. Still repetitive, but at least there's some more content. I enjoyed the Devidian missions.
 
RangerXML said:
I bought the game on release, with Life Time subscription (as in I don't pay monthly fee). I enjoy going back now and again and questing a bit. Do you not understand the English language.
Click to expand...

I think he understands it fine. But I had to use my universal translator on your words too.

RangerXML said:
Its fun, got a live time, like to hope on every now and again.
Click to expand...

I think you meant that you "got a lifetime" (as in, a lifetime subscription) and that you "like to hop on every now and again".
 
Coffee, its an addiction, do not function without it. I think anyone with half a understanding of the Engrish (intentional) language can understand what I said. Everyone's a grammar nazi, anyways I realized my mistakes right after it posted, but there is no edit anyways, so I didn't give a flying...

Ships look pretty, space looks pretty and lots of things to blow up; what more could you want?

K'pla!
 
I have to agree that the perfect world thing was a horrible idea. They've yet to do anything that I haven't dropped in a couple days, at most.

Fallen Earth, a post apocalyptic game, is the one I'm kinda looking forward to. It's going f2p, as well.
 
I'm curious about this one, I tried the demo... which was ridiculously short. Maybe I'll play it while I wait for the Old Republic to come out.
 
Offering a lifetime subscription basically tells me that they weren't going to be able to sustain the playerbase anyway, otherwise they wouldn't have offered it in the first place. Feel sorry for those who bought it, but they'll learn eventually.
 
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