“Cybertown was personal,” says CTR founder Lord Rayken. But for many others, it was an incredible discovery. ![]() A Orlando Sentinel The writer, for example, recounts being banned after going on a frustrated flying spree spurred by his fall into Cybertown’s virtual pool. There was even a prison for transgressors. Higher-level mods were given tasks such as cleaning housing, deactivating abandoned houses of former residents. They could then spend their time browsing cafes, stores, a town square and earning digital money called Cit圜ash by selling self-coded digital items or taking jobs like a community moderator “Block Deputy “. Once they “immigrated” to the city, Cytonians could choose the location of a virtual house that they could fill with virtual goods. But the city echoed real life in a way that many digital spaces of the time did not.Ĭybertown was a digital metropolis that players could experience through text descriptions but also by entering a 3D world inside their web browser. It followed a formula pioneered by Multi-User Dungeons, or MUDs: primarily text-based worlds of rooms, items, and avatars, designed as much for social interaction as structured gameplay. Your main combat abilities are dictated by your weapon, not your career, and any class is effective in man-to-man combat, while the careers apply slightly differently to ship skills than personal ones, where there is more scope for hybridisation.The original Cybertown was launched at the very beginning of massively multiplayer online games, a few years before Ultimate online and EverQuest have become second homes for millions of gamers. But as with many things in Star Trek Online, Cryptic is clearly thinking about Star Trek first and MMO convention second. All three classes can be further specialised later on. Otherwise, it's a simple matter of choosing your career specialisation: science, engineering and tactical.īroadly speaking, science is a buffing and healing class, engineering provides gadgets and crowd-control abilities, while tactical is straight combat and stealth. Inveterate slider-tweakers will enjoy creating their own race though, with Cryptic's peerless experience in character customisation allowing you to conjure up all kinds of unique, yet somehow inimitably Trek, blue-skinned and ridge-browed freaks. You can knock together an archetype for your Federation officer very simply and quickly, choosing from most of the famous (and some not-so-famous) Star Trek humanoid races. Hit the "randomise" button on the ship customisation screen to be amazed at how many variants Cryptic has coaxed out of the class Trek design.Ĭharacter creation is more straightforward than Champions'. It's a little rough, surprisingly simple, immediate and accessible - and it hangs together surprisingly well, despite having so many disjointed one-click jumps between starbases, sector space, space combat and beam-me-down rucks. Star Trek Online is essentially a series of short bursts of instanced action - either ship combat, or planet-side runabouts with the away team - hung on a framework of massively-multiplayer socialisation and novel, flexible RPG progression. Playing through the early stages on the beta, you're confronted with a game that's being assembled, almost before your eyes, out of multiple discrete parts - like a flat-pack MMO. It's great news that it sounds right - and, as we reported from the Eurogamer Expo, feels right - but what's next? The Californian developer hasn't got time for world-building on the scale of Azeroth or the Old Republic, but the Star Trek licence has raised interest and expectations for this game far beyond the niche. ![]() Not because of any shortfall in talent or ideas, but because this game has clearly been put together on a fairly limited budget and schedule by MMO standards - it is, after all, only 18 months since Cryptic announced it had the Star Trek licence, and four months since it launched Champions, with four weeks to go to Star Trek's release. It's just as well - the Champions Online developer needs all the help it can get. ![]() So, from the moment you hear that unmistakeable French horn fanfare on the character-select screen, Cryptic's Star Trek MMO is winning the immersion war without even having to try. It works even if you're not a particularly big fan, Gene Roddenberry's benign science-fiction now being so ubiquitous that everyone has absorbed it by a kind of cultural osmosis, whether they wanted to or not. The high-pitched warble of scanners and transponders, the hiss of phasers, the shimmering harmonics of the transporter: these sounds beam you directly to a universe which, you find, you already know by heart. It's amazing how far Star Trek Online gets just by having the right sound effects.
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