Apparently you link multiple PC’s together and each PC is a station on the bridge, kind of like a multiplayer I-War or Bridge Commander.
Looks neat, though there doesn’t appear to be any single player at all, and I’m not sure if multiplayer is restricted to local PC’s only, or can be done over the intertubes. It also looks like it’s combat only, like Starfleet back in the day.
I’m gonna contact these folks and see if this can be played over the net. If so, I’m highly interested.
And I’m not sure about PvE at all. I just wrote the guys on the website to ask about the Internet thing and if missions are combat only or if there’s more variety? I’ll let y’all know what I hear back.
Very interesting. Watched the videos. As it stands right now, the game is more of a team exercise. Each station is relatively simple and the challenge of the game is working together and in a command structure.
(This is a nice thing. Dangerous Waters was fun in a similar way, but Sonar and Targeting torps both required some book reading and skill, which meant I usually ended up on the sonar station, as I owned the game and knew the most about identifying vessels. I typically didn’t mind, but it got tedious at times.)
I wonder what his long term plans are for the sim, and how long of an update period the 60.00 will get us.
On that memory, RoE2 had one of my “favorite” bizarre bugs: if your extended/expanded memory settings (or maybe it was IRQ settings, or similar early PC-gaming black magic) weren’t right, enemy ships could only be targeted when they were at dead 00 degrees from you; otherwise the weapons station refused to track.
Oh yeah, the RoE games, wonderfully fun and details capital ship sims. How could I forget about those? I still load up RoE2 every now and again because few other games captured flying a capital ship in such detail. Maybe Klingon Academy comes closest, come to think of it. (Not mentioning the Battlecruiser games…blech…)
Oh, come on. We all know multiplayer bridge sims can’t work! Or so the grumpniks on the Star Trek Online forums would have you believe.
This reminds me more of the old Star Trek roleplaying game multiplayer system. Except that instead of tracking with sheets and chits you’ve got monitors. And that’s always been one of my examples (along with SWG and Hspace) of how this works.
Still, the stations do seem pretty basic to me. I don’t think I’d want to play comms. Now if that was also a sensor station and you had some kind of ECM/ECCM minigame to play it might be more interesting. In fact, all the stations could use more stuff to do or at least seem like it.
I definitely do think having the captain focus on coordinating the players at each station is definitely the right way to go though.
IIRC, the old bomber sim Megafortress had some sort of ECM/ECCM functionality built into one of the stations, if not a station of its own. Maybe it’d be similar here. If I hear back from these folks, should I ask 'em to put more info like this on their website? It seems pretty info-light.
This is really cool, thanks for sharing this. Mentioned it to a friend and his first reaction after ‘wow, cool!’ was ‘ipad client with networking for this would make millions’
