All the time that we’ve been podcasting I’ve been working towards making the process as painless and simple as possible. Gathering news, generating show notes and editing audio all take time and I think I’ve shaved them down to the least amount of effort that I can so far.

I’ve put together a rather wordy description of how I work here. I’ll be revising it over time and adding some pictures, but for now it’s a straight dump of how I work that might be useful to other podcasters. Please leave any comments about things you think should be expanded on, or anything that I can make simpler.

During the news show this week I said that Dust 514 will be the next important MMO release on consoles, and that everybody else is holding back to see how their competition does on the market before releasing. This is, of course, a gross simplification of the situation as there are things like the platform holders needing to approve the games and also dissagreements over pricing models, but I thought I’d expand on my thoughts as to why.

On the show I completely ignored Final Fantasy. This time it wasn’t a case of my mental blind spot for the game (original and the new one coming out this year), but the fact that I don’t think that the new Final Fantasy MMO matters.

It will however, sell a bazillion copies and be loved by all. It just doesn’t matter to anybody else.

Final Fantasy is a very big IP. The release of the latest single player game in Japan late last year resulted in every man, woman and child buying three copies on the day of launch. At midnight. This makes it useless for telling how big the market is for another game, if FF sells a million copies on PS3 then that doesn’t mean the market for MMOs on PS3 is a million, it means the market for a final fantasy MMO is that big. It’s the same principle as to why Warcraft is so big on the PC while the other western MMOs, to put it kindly, aren’t. When Warcraft exploded everybody thought that it would drag the subscription numbers for other games up with it as it expanded the market, but Warcraft seems to have warcraft players instead of MMO players for a large percentage of its population, these people aren’t actually going on to play other games that much.

We need a normal game to release on console, but the list of available games is getting short. The Agency is now so MIA I’m willing to bet you’d forgotten about it. Conan 360? Not likely. Champions? Free Realms? Nothing is coming out soon, or is even being talked about much any more.

That leaves us with Dust 514. CCPs attempt at a console first person shooter set in the EVE Online universe is the only console version of an existing game that I think I will see in the short term, and everybody else will hold off to see how well that does.

The problem with this is, of course, when is it coming out? I can tell you when it isn’t coming out with 100% accuracy. It is not coming out anytime from September to December this year. Why? There’s a new Halo game coming out on 360 and CCP aren’t idiots. There’s also a new Call of Duty game. We’re pretty much OK for FPS games next Christmas, you can’t release against those realistically.

Unfortunately this means that I think the release is at least a year away. I don’t think we’ll see it before September because they’d be hyping it a bit more by now. If it’s going to be ready for the end of the year then I can see them holding it back to January at the earliest and they’ll do the big reveal at fanfest and maybe announce a beta. I think there’s a good possibility that the game may be further away than that, but it’s still closer than any other large console MMO. If I were to be rash I’d bet that it would be out January-September next year (The same problem exists with that Christmas. Modern Warfare 3 and we’re probably due Gears of War 3).

So… Tell me how I’m wrong. What games have I forgotten? Do CCP dare go against Halo? Is Dust as much vapourware as Ambulation/Walking in Stations/Whatever it’s called this week?

I’ve now played Star Trek Online for a few days and I’ve come to some more concrete initial impressions. Please remember that is is the first few days of open beta, I am a massive Trek fan and all in all nothing here should be taken as a proper review of the game as everything may still change before launch.

The first thought is that I’m constantly comparing experiences in game to episodes and films of the show. For instance the space combat feels very much like the fight with the Borg cube in First Contact, right down to the poor ship that gets blown up by the cube’s explosion. Watch closely if you haven’t noticed, he’s too close and explodes. I’ve always thought he must be the worse captain ever to let that happen, but now that it’s happened to me in game I’m less judgemental.

Space combat is good, and although the lack of death penalty is fun I think it causes the game to lose a lot of its Trek-ness. If I’m throwing myself at a tough enemy because my group sucks and isn’t pulling their weight (more on that in a bit) it really doesn’t feel right.

The automatic grouping is good. Each game that implements it seems to get it a bit more polished, and STO is another step along that path. Small things like the rubbish chat system make them a bit more hassle than they should be, and as a console gamer the lack of inbuilt voice chat is really annoying since a lot of these missions seem to need coordination. You get rewards for just being in the zone and part of a group so you don’t really need to do anything. This does, as you can imagine, cause a problem with people not bothering but I’ve not seen it as much as others.

Ground based combat is still, well, MMO combat. I don’t mind the space combat because it has a positional element and recharging abilities seem to make more sense, but I don’t think that the STO ground combat is just as dull as in any other MMO. Really bad animations, no flow and the lack of death penalty makes for a very un-Federation style experience. I can put up with it though as, well, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to play many MMOs at all.

Mission design so far is pretty restrictive. The worse by far was the one where I had to beam down, talk to various miners and then answer a series of questions about what they had said to the mine foreman. The answers were all obvious, of course they didn’t want to work harsh hours, wanted their holodeck fixed and wanted a new shipment of real dolls. It was Next Gen at its worse and I just wanted to shoot them all from space for being incapable of sorting out their own problems. Anybody who wants more diplomatic missions in the game is wrong, they will not be fun.

Quite high up the list of issues I have is the design of the ground based sections. The scale is way off, for probably quite reasonable reasons, and so every corridor feels like a cathedral. My bridge also needs more potted plants. And possibly a couch.

I’m getting desperate for a new ship now, I love my Miranda (with the Centaur saucer and nacelles to make it look more modern) but I want something new because everybody is in the same basic ship. It’s like the federation didn’t bother chatting before going to a party and all turned up in the same ship.

Sector space has a place of hatred in my heart. It’s a zone that is effectively the map, and you fly between different star system either manually or by the worlds dumbest autopilot. You remember all that streaking stars business with travelling on the shows and films? Well this is basically trundling along the map in a way that reminds me of moving units in Civilisation. Only less turn based. And it’s got other players in there as well.

As the days progress I’ve realised that I’m not just fighting my inherent love of Trek with this game when it comes to bias. Sure, that’s making me let the game get away with a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t, but also my hatred of MMOs is having an effect too. I see bad things and let them slide because it’s an MMO. Mission design is boring, graphics and animation mediocre and gameplay repetitive. I was chatting about it last night and the perfect comparison sprang to mind. Playing the game is much like playing Assassins Creed 1, you have to do the same few things over and over again to get anywhere, but the world may be enough to keep you interested.

The massively multiplayer-ness of the game is something that’s worrying me as well. Everybody is always in an instance of between one and what seems to be about 50 players. We’re straying dangerously into the sort of multiplayer experience that console games such as Burnout Paradise, Test Drive Unlimited and Fable 2 are moving towards where we can drop into other people’s instance of the world to play with them. You drop into a mission and a couple of random internet types are grouped up with you automatically, and there’s not a lot of difference there between a hypothetical console game dropping you into a co-op mission with a couple of other random players when you start while retaining the ability to invite people from your friends list into the group as well.

To sum up my second review (day three, about 7 hours played probably). The game is about as deep as a puddle, but that space combat will excuse nearly everything that’s wrong for me at the moment. I still feel like I’m just out of the tutorial though, which either means I need to get a move on or I have a real problem…

You know that whole three month rule? Well a little known clause is that it doesn’t apply to any Star Trek game, so last night I found myself downloading and playing Star Trek Online in the open beta.

I wouldn’t dream of reviewing a game during the first day of its open beta, that would just be just as pointless as using a review of the closed beta to tell if the finished game is any good. I will give a few opening thoughts from my limited play time last night.

The first thing is server stability, which is not exactly stellar so far. I suspect you want server instability from the load to show up in your betas if you are a game dev, and in fact Eve gets punished every big patch because they don’t get the heavy loads of the real playerbase. Let me explain…

Imagine you are launching a new game/patch and at launch you’re expecting a total of 100 players per server (it’s a small game). You’re not going to get that many to help test, and you may well get 10% of that number if you’re really lucky (I expect that’s way over the real numbers). Open beta starts and 10 players log in and start playing in that unpredictable way that players play. The servers cope fine, you are happy and go to launch the game. On launch day you find that if you get over 50 players then the whole things falls to bits. Zoning takes too long, lag is too high and after a while the server runs out of memory and crashes. This is strange as you tested with 150 automated test bots, but they were all scripted to do a limited set of things and could never match real players. You would have picked this up if you’d had 50 beta testers, but you were never going to get that many.

Now consider if those 10 beta players cause the game to fall over. You’ve identified the bottlenecks, memory leaks and bugs during your beta, which means you can work flat out to fix those show stoppers and your launch becomes a lot smoother. You don’t find everything of course, but you’ve avoided the main things that would cause the problems on launch day. In fact if I was a game dev I would probably find a way to make the first days of the beta fall over by any means I could. That’s what they’re for, finding out how they break and you can mess with things far more in beta than you can after launch.

In other words I don’t think the stability is anything to worry about this far from launch. Now if it’s the last few days of the beta, then I might worry but it’s certainly not something I think anybody should mark the game down for yet.

The game starts you off (at the moment) with a nice set of quests that lead you along a path through a ship and introduce you to various parts of the ground game. Combat seems a bit better than the demo I played at the EUROGAMER expo, in fact I’d probably say that it’s pretty close to the feel of some of the DS9 episodes The Siege of AR-558 being one) so doesn’t seem totally out of place. When you think about star trek hand to hand combat it’s mainly been stand still and fire so the special effect isn’t too expensive to add on after so it feels reasonably trek like to me. I wasn’t expecting that.

After you’ve had some Borg fun (they’re a little weak, I blame Voyager for making the Borg go from scary to throw away) you go up into space and watch your ground based avatar sit amusingly in space until it finishes loading after a few minutes and gives you a ship based on the Miranda hull. This first had me beaming survivors from damaged ships (Wolf 359 ish), which was sort of spoilt by how many other players there were there, all in the same class of ship with minor cosmetic variations). It was at this time I missed the overview from Eve. I needed to find the correct ships and it would have been nice to just right click on a list and select approach You know, like saying “Ensign, approach the USS Cannon Fodder” would be on the show. Instead the best I could manage was to try and see the ship somewhere around me and fly towards it (using either the keyboard to turn or holding down both mouse buttons). Again, EVEs double click in space to set a course would have been welcome. Still, I soon had all the crew members rescued and was warping off to blow Borg stuff up. Space combat is little different than the ground, get within 10km of the target and hit Space and Ctrl+Space to fire phasers and torpedoes. My bridge crew guy I forgot to mention I was given gave me a torpedo bonus ability so I hit that before firing to do more damage. I like what I’ve seen of the space combat, but as soon as I’d cleared some rats from two areas I was beaming down to a planet which was full of ensigns who have all just found themselves acting captain on a ship milling around looking for a phaser rifle. It here that a round of being repeatedly kicked from the server made me consider bed instead. The Borg can wait.

Part of me really wishes the ground combat was a FPS. Or failing that 3rd person and more like Mass effect. I’m sure when I get beyond basic phasers the combat will feel less like Trek. Special abilities don’t really fit in my mind, but I’ll not pass judgement until I’ve actually played with them more.

My review of my first hour or so in Trek Online is therefore: Had fun, shot Borg, look forwards to shooting more of them tonight. I am a massive Trek fan though so I might as well add one of those FTC style messages that we’re apparently meant to add if we’ve received anything material that may influence us about the subject. I declare that Trek probably influenced my career choice, my view on the universe, my view on religion and most definitely my thing for women with green skin. I may be more than a little biased, but that’ll work both ways as it’ll make me hate as well as love.

It is of course way too early to make comments on if I think the game will be ready for launch or not, but in general I certainly wouldn’t recommend playing just because you can get in early through the beta unless you’re prepared to accept (and not moan) that it is a beta for their purposes, and not just for you to have an early play. Wait until launch, and then wait either a few days if you’re a hard core Trek fan or 3 months if you’re not.