No offense but isn't that kind of a trivial reason for not trying it out? Seems kind of nit-picky to be honest *ducks*. I can personally hate the interior sizes too, but that's just MMO's, it's not exclusive to STO.
On this point I agree with JimmyB76 100%. While yes, it's true that the "oversized interiors" are not limited to STO, in most MMOs involving a "ground-based" avatar and interiors, they do make the two actually seem to fit each other. In certain angles on the new "Gen Galaxy" type bridge in STO, it looks fine (such as when viewing the bridge from the viewscreen towards the Captains chair. Whereas in other areas, the bridge looks grossly oversized. Such as seeing the "tactical officer" behind the tactical console. Looks to be a good 10-20 meters to get around the "arch".
In general, Star Trek fans have always been very picky about something i'd like to call,
DETAILS. Since the developers decided that "Gosh darnit, maybe we should have playable interiors since it seems to be a big part of Star Trek", the least they can strive for is to actually adhere to canon and make stuff actually LOOK canon. I'm surprised that CBS hasn't stepped in yet and made Cryptic fix the glaring errors with alot of the canon materials.
Case in point:
If Cryptic had set the game 30-40 years past canon (post-Nemesis), and went with 100% NEW content, in the form of characters, locales, ship designs etc, there would be very little if any complaints about such minutae as "DETAILS". But since they decided to INCLUDE canon materials such as the Galaxy class, Intrepid class etc, they should actually try and make them as CANON as possible.
Just look at the various mods the BC community has been putting out over the years, and you'll see that the creative efforts of this community far outweighs the efforts of the Cryptic development staff. Ofcourse, i'm sure someone will mention "Well this is an MMO, so you have to use lower detail models yaddah yaddah..."
My point being: NO YOU DONT. In any decently programmed game these days, you have a system known as "Level of detail" which should be able to automatically use lower/higher detailed models and textures and even effects depending on the distance from the players camera. You should easily be able to have "super high" detailed models and textures when you are seeing objects up close and personal, and "super low" detailed models and textures at greater distances.
Every single version of the "Unreal Engine" (currently Unreal Engine 3), has been very thoroughly optimized to support a wide range of computer setups (sound familiar to the MMO high detail nay-sayers?). And still able to run at a nice framerate and nice detail.
EDIT: Sticking within the topic of STO and MMOs in general: The closest comparison one can make, is to the MMO Eve Online. While Eve currently doesn't have playable interiors (will change in the future), Eve's space graphics are FAR superior to STO. When I still played Eve Online, I was running on medium/high graphics and it looked REALLY nice. These days, I have a better computer setup, and when trying to play STO at any higher than Medium, will result in very low framerate and sometimes even "skipping" graphics. Neither STO or ChO (Champions Online) are particularly well optimized at current, and I believe this to be a flaw in the engine itself, and thus very hard to remedy.
In short:
- Eve Online has dozens if not hundreds of ships onscreen and looks super-detailed, and runs fine on a wide range of hardware setups.
- Star Trek Online has dozens if not hundreds of ships onscreen and looks alot less detailed, and has issues running on higher graphic details.
