I don't think that would work in STO, I mean, in WoW everyone is on the same plane, in STO we kind of have spaceships.

Though, we could do something with the sector space encounters. That could be interesting.

The thing about WoW is, it mercilessly steals what works from other games, down to including a plants vs. zombies game and Pokemon pet battles now.

It's not that everything needs to be like WoW. It's just a convenient place to go, in order to point to things, because anything successful in MMOs is something that they've tried a version of and put a layer of polish on.

They're not a bad game. They may be unremarkable in some respects and their age is REALLY showing but I think they probably deserve to be considered on the high end of average as an MMO in general and 10 out of 10 both for polish and NUMBER of features/systems. (And pretty low when it comes to customization.) The more infuriating aspects are probably raiding and PvP (particularly arena and Warsong Gulch) but it's actually a pretty fulfilling game if you ignore that those things even exist. I suppose it depends on your threshold for grinding but I ADORE grinding and they do have art teams who do lovely stuff with an 8 year old MMO engine. I think it's stylized nature has caused it to age better visually than City of Heroes, for example.

That's another complaint I would like to bring up. STO's art direction is incredibly inconsistent. The ships and characters look really realistic, but the plants, environments and building interiors look so comical.

I mean, you go to Hathon, and once you get past the annoying mission there, I realised it is a very beautiful place. It has nice textures, it's colourful, but not too much, it has nice lighting, but you go to Star Fleet Academy and I half expect bug-eyed anime characters to start popping out of the trees.

Yes. A similar statement was in a draft of my original post.

Exactly. WoW is an extraordinarily unoriginal game, no part of it is innovative in any way. The only thing they did differently when they stole all those systems was to polish it to a glimmering shine. WoW is a testament to how successful you can be by simply making sure everything is user friendly and extremely polished. Why other developers have not followed this formula is beyond me. In general, if someone clones WoW, they clone the unimportant parts.. such as the game systems or the way quests work, and ignore what made the game remarkable in the first place: Its level of polish.

*sighs sadly*

I would argue against the characters looking realistic. They look nice at first.. but things quickly deteriorate. There are only two "age 20-40" facial textures for females for example, and as a result, almost every woman looks the same. No amount of tweaking the scalers will prevent that, it all comes down to skin color and hair choice.

Speaking of hair, STO has probably the worst hair I have EVER seen in an MMO (relative to the year it was released and the technology being employed). The hair is AWFUL. There are very, VERY few selections that are even passable as something I would ever wear IRL, and the ones that do look flat and plastic. This game needs to throw all its hair out and start from scratch. It's a freakin' travesty.

Even in the series, the Academy is a very bright and cheery looking place, with a vibrance bordering on eye-bleeding. I think the only thing that looks bad is the water... speaking of which..

Cryptic engine water is easily the worst water I have seen in a modern game. It looks COMPLETELY unreal. The water is TERRIBLE. It's like this thick, gelatinous mass that slowly moves around with a mind of its own. I see the water out in the bay and I'm like, why can't the rest of the game's water look like that? The stuff in the ponds may as well be the Great Link.

Actually, I've always thought that the water looked rather pretty.

Maybe I should have said "realistic for an MMO". Cause... yeah... I think the only problem is the fact that there are only two eye shapes. If they made more eye shapes than "Asian" and "European Descent" then people would start looking a whole lot different.

...I will not disagree with you on this however. Cryptic just needs to hire Apachii and never need to worry about cool hairstyles ever again.

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It is pretty, but it also doesn't look like water. The rises in the "waves and ripples" are too high, too slow, and too large. Gelatin.

I do love my apachii hair, I would edit the first link just to be safe though.