STO Suggestions

So STO launched about 2 weeks ago, I was going to write a review but I don't think it's really possible to fully review a game which is never meant to end, so instead of that, I'm going to give my suggestions to make the game better.

Ditch the Memory Alpha Crafting System
I hate to come off like I'm being mean for no reason, but whoever thought that Memory Alpha was a good idea needs a good kick up the arse. Cryptic have never been very good with crafting, Champions Online has suffered the same fate and City of Heroes/Villains is no better off either.

One thing that people have been begging for pretty much since Cryptic took over development was a full and interesting crafting system and while there is Tribble breeding for the Federation, what we really want is to craft consoles and weapons.

More Scripted Episodes
Right now I'm only a second grade Captain in-game and I've heard that content can get very thin towards the Admiral rank, my experiences as a Commander were pretty bad, I found myself with no missions other than the repeatable Cluster and Deep Space Encounter ones. While procedurally generated content is good for filling in gaps, it is in no way a replacement for scripted missions. Some of the "Episodes" have been amazing, it really did feel like being in an episode of Star Trek, while the procedural content is fairly boring. (Does anyone else notice that the Galaxy seems to be overrun by lava bleeding trees??)

Raid Groups and Missions!
I can only speak for myself, but I'm sure there are a lot of other people out there who hate the Crystalline Entity with a passion thanks to being grouped with morons who don't pay attention. Cryptic really need to implement raid grouping, so that Fleets can group together and take on Fleet Actions privately. So far, the only real benefit to joining a Fleet has been to use a Fleet Bank and have the use of a fleet channel. It seems that the new "Raidisodes" being released soon are still only 5-man instances which is very disappointing.

Speed Ground Combat up again!
During Beta, Ground Combat was fast and furious, until they decided to try and slow it down to keep with more traditional MMO pace. I personally prefer it faster, for a sci-fi MMO I think it needs to feel like everything is happening quickly, as it would in a real gun-fight, having to wait for a 1 second cooldown between shots just feels wrong.

Tweak Exchange
I'd like to see more options on the exchange. I think they need to add sub-sections to the weapons tab so that we can search for turrets, cannons, phasers, distrupters individually. As it stands now you need to know the name of an item to search for it. New players specifically aren't going to know whats going on (I know I didn't anyway)

Conclusion
I can't think of any MMO that hasn't suffered from problems during launch (Yes, even World of Warcraft!) so it would be unfair to say that STO isn't living up to my expectations. I plan on giving Cryptic another month or two before I make any final decisions on whether I'll renew my subscription, if they were to implement some of my suggestions above, I think it'd go a long way to making the game as popular as it deserves to be.

Mass Effect 2 Review

I could literally sum this up in a sentence, actually in a word. Epic. Bioware are blessed to have such a great writing staff on hand because their last few games have been amazingly pieced together with great stories and Mass Effect 2 is no different.

I don't want to spoil the game for anyone so I'll try my best to keep them out.

The Good

• Amazing Storyline

The story was mind blowing to me, it's so much darker than the first and basically begs for the sequel without leaving the player not satisfied.

• Improved Game Mechanics

Bioware have been saying from the beginning that they went back and retooled everything based on player feedback from the first game and it's hard not to see their work. The aiming and guns feel a lot better and more responsive and accurate.

The conversation system has been completely upgraded now to include Paragon/Renegade actions as well as good guy/bad guy conversations. Some of them are really amazing. I think this is the closest they've come to morality and hopefully they can only improve on it for the next game.

• More interesting characters

While Mass Effect 1 had a good crew, the crew of the 2nd are 10x better. They feel more real and I found myself actually wanting to hear what they all had to say instead of just trying to chat up the women (which I did too naturally :P)

• Better side quests

I didn't do a lot of side quests in Mass Effect 1 because they weren't really all that interesting, I guess it's something that Bioware worked on too because they are a lot more impressive in this and some of them could have been a main story in itself.

The Bad
Unfortunately there are some bad parts to the game, most of which isn't really the fault of Bioware but more a platform issue. I can only speak for the Xbox 360 version which is what I played.

• RPG elements are gone

I wonder if EA had anything to do with this. A lot of the RPG elements that made up the first game have either been removed or extremely toned down. Less abilities to level up, health system changed to rechargeable shield system and no visible stats for weapons and only minimal stats on armor.

• Bring back the old UI!

Along with removing the RPG stuff, they've also changed the UI. I can only speak for myself but the I found it nearly impossible to keep track of my teams health. They were either getting hit or dead and I usually only noticed they were dead if they let out a scream. The mail system was a nightmare to go through, sometimes it would skip over buttons, or sometimes it'd be impossible to read the mail since the right stick was too sensitive to scroll through them.

• Loading times

A lot of people were very frustrated by extremely long elevator rides from the first game so Bioware decided to take them out, now instead of looking at extremely long elevator rides, we just get extremely long animated wallpapers. At one point in the game I was having trouble and kept dying which would have been fine except that the game had to load for 40-60 seconds each time it happened which was a nightmare.

• Framerate issues

Thankfully Bioware managed to get rid of the Unreal Engines mascot aka texture popping for this one but there was one major problem towards the end of the game. The framerate of the game goes to 15-17 frames a second at certain sections of the last boss. There was also a problem with the ending cutscene. It switches between pre-rendered and in-game scenes every few seconds which made the pre-rendered scenes stutter when they started.

The Verdict
There are very little problems with Mass Effect and the problems I listed really were only an Xbox problem (I never thought to install the game at the time so next playthrough I'll be doing that to test if those framerate issues are still there) but the game itself storywise and gameplay-wise make it a must have game. I simply can't wait for the third game which is hopefully not that far away. I just hope they take another stab at the UI and maybe add back some of the RPG elements.

Score: 9.5/10