I have been playing an app game set in the Star Trek universe, Star Trek Fleet Command, for a few weeks. It's a typical empire building game where you start with a few resources and a basic ship and gather resources, invest in research and building, accomplish missions, build more and better ships, and gradually become more powerful. Despite using imagery from the J.J. Abrams movies, it's not very Star Trek-y. There's a lot of combat with the non-player "hostiles" in order to get points and resources, and once you get big enough, the conflict expands so that you can fight with other players.
That's where the game starts to suck. Because it's a pay to play game, to get really big and powerful, you either need to play for a LONG time or spend money to get bigger and better ships. And once you get big, it's very easy to bully other players and take their hard earned resources. I haven't spent any money on the game, don't have any really powerful ships, and my resources have been raided a few times now. It's somewhat annoying.
(All that being said, I realize that I have gotten hours and hours of enjoyment for free, so I'm not begrudging the need for an income stream for the developers.)
When you start the game, you're assigned to a group on a single "server" and you play with that group of hundreds (thousands?) of players. You do not interact with the other servers, each of which hosts it's own game. A couple of weeks ago, one of the players on my server, in his early forties, died of cancer. Word spread through the Group Chat within the app, and the players decided to make a tribute to screenshot and send to his family.
For several hours on a Saturday night, and then again a couple of nights later, players sent their ships to that player's home system to "keep a watch" on his space station. Then, at midnight, everyone warped out simultaneously. Typically, a system will have anywhere from none to a few dozen player ships present. Before midnight, there were hundreds of ships present; so many the game kept crashing. This is what it looked like AFTER the majority warped out (when it finally occurred to me to take a picture).
And here's a closer shot, before the warp out, on the second night.
It was very moving and a nice tribute.
Sometimes, people don't suck.
2 comments:
A lovely tribute.
As for Trek phone games, you should check out Trexels. It's one of those builder games, like Mini Tower, where you gather resources and build up your ship, all while going on quests. Like most resource farming games, it gets a bit old after a while. HOWEVER, while the UI is Next Gen, the graphics and characters, sound effects and music, are all from the original series! It's a hoot!
That sounds very similar. I'll take a look. Thanks.
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