I'm aware that the Dauntless class was a trick conjured by a Delta Quadrant alien during Voyager, but the Dauntless was used again during the Battle of Procyon V in the Enterprise series.

I'm just wondering if the forum thinks that this would be an interesting ship to bring to the world of Star Trek Online .

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Dauntless_class

The Dauntless was only used in Enterprise because they were recycling CGI designs for the background. It's likely that the person who tossed that ship in wasn't aware (or didn't remember) that it wasn't a Starfleet ship.

That said, I've given up on this game trying to be anything except a playground for players to do whatever they want. Most of my STFs have at least 2-3 people flying some kind of alien starship -- Jem'hadar, Tholian, Breen, whatever. The Devs clearly don't care about keeping any kind of unifying design aesthetic for players anymore, or any real story reasons for anything.

I actually do agree...while STO has fun space battles and huge amounts of customization, it doesn't really have any storyline point to it...

That's where The Old Republic succeeds (along with the music and ground combat...).

Tell that to the masses upon masses of dual-wielding lightsaber junkies wearing copies of Leia's slave-girl costume.


The challenge of keeping this "unified aesthetic" while allowing for players to customize themselves to the extent they want is exponentially harder for a Star Trek-based game than for a Star Wars game.

Why?

(For TL;DR: People, go to the bottom)

1.) Everything in Trek is Starfleet

Nearly all Star Trek material takes place from the perspective of the Federation, specifically the perspective of a Starfleet officer, and almost always from a limited pool of available sources. Canonically, the vast majority of sources for information on the state of the world comes from the crews of several military vessels.

Imagine you were an alien trying to find out what Earth is like, except the only sources you had at hand were official video records retrieved from American aircraft carriers, or recordings of sessions of the US Congress retrieved from C-Span. It's that hard!

Side note: That's why Deep Space 9 was so interesting, and why it more or less forms the backbone of STO's Galaxy, rather than the TV series or films. Of all the series it did the most "world-building" that MMOs rely on.

2.) Star Trek has only ONE story. Star Wars has many.

OK, dismiss for a second that you're a hardcore Star Trek fanboy (I'll assume you are, since you're here) who's invested in Trek lore, and imagine you're a fairly normal nerd who knows a bit about Trek. Maybe you've seen a series or two, or just watched the Abrams movie or something.

Ask yourself then: "Who do I want to be in Star Trek?"

By far the most common answers are: "I wanna be Kirk/Picard/Janeway/Sisko/Spock"

Guess what? All of those people are in one way or another..Starfleet officers.

That's the central fantasy of Star Trek: To be a captain of a starfleet ship. Sadly, that makes for a less diverse line of content that's available to translate into game-relevant mechanics.

Compare to Star Wars and answer the same question: "Who do I wanna be in Star Wars?"

"Han Solo! Boba Fett! Darth Vader! Luke Skywalker! A Stormtrooper!"

All of the above answers are VERY diverse. Smuggler, Jedi, Bounty Hunter, Sith Lord, regular-ass Army Man, and then a cool spy (Imperial Agents rule!).

It's not that Trek has LESS potential, but in various ways the potential for a wide range of stories was strangled a bit by the harsher restrictions on canon.

To use an internet example:

Cryptic's sources were limited to parts of the Memory Alpha wiki, and they've had to fight tooth and nail to take bits of Memory Beta.

BioWare's sources are almost EVERYTHING in Wookiepedia. AND they were allowed to create NEW gaps to fill in.

3. Star Wars is pure fantasy. Star Trek is not

Star Wars may have spaceships in it, but there's no science in its fiction. It has more in common with Dungeons & Dragons.

Star Trek has in comparison a fairly restricted bracket with which to work, as well as a modicum of "realism".

Make a Star Wars game set 3000 years before any official canon? Sure, and then you can maintain the Star Wars feel still.

But if you dare make a Star Trek game that takes place far outside the realm of any contemporary references to existing canon, watch out.


TL;DR: Cryptic's hands were tied for a number of reasons not entirely within their control, not least because Trek fiction in the way most folks want it is less suitable to MMO style games. They also had a lot less money and freedom compared to BioWare with SWTOR. Were opportunities lost/squandered with STO? Yes. Would it be better if it were more like TOR? I doubt it.

Also I'd trade away TOR's ground combat any day to make its space combat more like STO's

That was the biggest disappointment for me. I was hoping for SWG-style sandbox space flight, and got an arcade mini-game.

Anyway, my point pertaining to the Dauntless itself was this:

A year ago, I would have (and did) say no, no, no, no, no to this idea. The Dauntless was an alien ship disguised as Starfleet, and like I said, its presence on screen in Enterprise is either a special effects gaffe, or the VFX people didn't care/didn't think people would look that closely at it.

However, in this day when most ESTFs have at least one Breen cruiser, as well as Jem'hadar, Cardassian, Ferengi, or Tholian ships... I just gave up. The idea behind these ships being lockbox ships is that they would be rare, but there are so many of them now that I easily see as many non-Starfleet ships as I do Starfleet ships.

There's really no point anymore in arguing against the Dauntless when half of Starfleet is already made up of non-Federation member ships.

I don't know how it was where you played...but once someone mastered their piloting they pretty much did nothing else in space...space sectors were usually ghost towns except for the npcs.

On the Duantless I would say please no...I always thought it was a ugly ship if its Starfleet or not.

Well to be honest, flying a Dauntless in the game is no less absurd as to flying the Temporal ships or Dominion ships, take your pic

In a sense it is, because there was never more than 1 Dauntless and it was taken in by the Borg.