My New STO Blog

For those who are interested, I've started a new Star Trek Online Blog, which can be found here. It was an interesting open beta, and STO is a game with a lot of promise. Please join me there if you have an interest!

More From the Void

No, I'm not dead, but my life is just insane right now.

Instead of calming down as I expected, things have heated up like never before. There's just been no way to think about anything else for the last few weeks. I haven't even had the time (or needed access) to change skills. Now, it looks like I may finally get a weekend to myself for the first time in a while.

Eve time, right? Um, well, no. Y'see, I have this Star Trek Online closed beta key I just got and, well, seems like kind of a shame to, um...oh who the fuck am I kidding? I can't wait to see what STO looks like! Eve can totally wait a while, this is new, it's exciting, and above all, it's Star Trek! I need to see what this is all about. I'm sure the gods of New Eden will forgive me.

Right now, I have the time to sit here and write because it's taking a while for STO to patch, going on a couple of hours of downloading and it's only about half-done. Oh well...I'm from a generation that's used to waiting on line. I waited six hours on line in the rain just to see my favorite band, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, and that was just a couple of years ago. Of course, that may not be the best example because there's a lot I'd put up with to be front row center for Joan Jett.

Compared to that, this is a cakewalk, sitting here in my comfy chair, waiting for STO to finish patching so I can log in. Is this what all those people who signed up for AION felt like?

Sad thing is, come Monday it may all start all over again, right now I have no clue. Tonight, though, we explore the Federation.

"Space, the Final Frontier..."

Greetings From The Void

Um, hiya.

Yeah, I know it's been a few weeks, but RL is still kicking my butt right now. This is totally unanticipated, by the way. In fact, this is usually a slow time of year for me in RL. Now it's like I don't have time to do much more than pop in-game occasionally to chat with corpmates and change skills. I want to do more, a lot more, but I just don't have the time right now. I think I've written more in the last three weeks than I did in the six months previous. Un-frakkin'-believable. I thought this was going to be over by the middle of the week, but it just isn't. It's finally slowing though, so maybe I was just off by a few days. I hope so.

I also did something else. I preordered the Collector's Edition of Star Trek Online from Amazon with the Borg Officer bonus. I had to do it. I love Star Trek too much not to at least give it a shot. Because of my preorder purchase, I get to participate in open beta next month. I'm assuming that by then I'll be long since back to my normal, boring winter life with much more time to play MMO's, but if I do like STO I may eventually face a decision like I did with Fallen Earth. EvE won that one, but STO is still basically an unknown quantity. STO would have to be pretty damned amazing to tempt me away from EvE, and thus far I haven't seen enough of STO to convince me that would be the case. It does look interesting and engaging with is why I preordered, but I'm not yet convinced it's a long-term keeper. I liked Champions at first glance too, but the reality of playing it wasn't enough to keep me interested long-term. STO will have to prove itself to me. The Star Trek franchise is a great start but it's not enough.

Right now, I don't see myself leaving EvE for STO, but then I also didn't see myself leaving Fallen Earth to come back to EvE, so who knows?

A Fine and Lovely Morning...

I finished Empyrean Age this morning over coffee. I enjoyed it a lot and now that I'm done with it, I'll be reading those news stories I haven't read yet and probably going to check out some of the results. I must admit that I find this really interesting, perhaps even a completely new way of telling a story. It's fascinating to me that the results of what I just read in a novel can be actually traveled to and seen for oneself in the game.

A novel, a self-contained sci-fi story, that actually happens in "reality" in an MMO, with events you can actually witness for yourself as they happen and which carry lasting changes for that world. This, my fellow capsuleers, is truly the cutting edge of fiction storytelling and of sci-fi in particular (where readers/players/viewers are generally much more receptive overall to such innovations than the average media consumer).

This might not seem like such a big deal to some, but consider this: Until now, virtually all fictional media has been, generally speaking, originally presented in one format or another, with almost all of the crossover coming between print and film or television. In sci-fi, and particularly in media based on well-established franchises such as Star Trek, there is always the issue of which stories are considered "canon", part of the established "official" history of the franchise. These are generally arguments for the fanboy faithful, but the rule until now seems to have always been that if the story was told on television or in film then it's considered canon, but if the story appears solely in print or in a videogame, it's generally not.

What makes EvE: Empyrean Age so innovative and groundbreaking is that it actually eliminates the fourth wall and brings EvE players actually into the story itself. The events of the book are indeed canon and the results of those events are physically manifest within the game. In this way, even players who were not playing at the time these events occurred within the game (like me) are drawn into the scenario as well as they must deal with the repercussions of the events in the book just as every player must.

More than just breaking down the fourth wall, though, CCP goes even further here and gives the events and results of the novel a 3-D existence within the game that players can visit and interact with. I know of no other sci-fi franchise that's ever done this (and no, I'm not counting Lord of the Rings, which has been done and redone to death, to the point of torturous boredom).

From a player/media consumer perspective, this is the first sci-fi novel I've ever read that "matters" in a significant way to the universe it presents beyond its own pages. It changes the way I perceive the book, and it might even influence how I play the game in the future in some way.

I think a big part of why this could be done with EvE but not with a media monolith like Star Trek is that there's just too much Star Trek media already out there in every format to keep it all coordinated to start adding additional canon in more than just dribs and drabs.

EvE, first and foremost, is the game. Other media comes from and is based on the game, not the other way around as with LotRO. In addition, there's a lot less canon established in EvE than in a 44-year-old franchise like Star Trek, and so there's a lot more they can do in terms of shaking things up and taking risks with the overall story arc.

What I'm now most interested in seeing is not only the physical results of Empyrean Age, but also how/if the next novel (now apparently due out in March) will play out within the game. One thing is for certain, I won't miss this one.

Oh and hey, in another hour or so I'll be heading to Best Buy to pick up my PC. As you might imagine, I'm very much looking forward to that. Hmmm, I've been writing this post for so long that it's not even morning any more.

Soon, soon...online life will return to normal. Eight days without my PC (and without EvE) is just too freaking long.