Star Trek Online goes live in production … tomorrow?! Yeesh, how the months have sped.
I haven’t been on STO since the closed beta, for a variety of reasons. Even there, we didn’t devote endless hours — I really didn’t want to invest a lot of hours creating characters I wouldn’t be able carry on later.
Here are some thoughts on the game, and where we (Margie and I) are headed on it.
- The game is nicely immersive. It feels like you are in the world of Star Trek (despite the efforts of some players). The writing is pretty solid.
- A nice mixture of “Away Team,” admin/base busy-work, and ship-to-ship combat activity, each of which provides a different flavor.
- Ship combat is … fun. Felt very war-gamy.
- Away Team activities are more complex, but managing an actual away team is a nice feature.
- The idea of growing yourself, your crew, and your ship adds complexity to the gameplay — but is also pretty cool.
- It’s less “role-playing” in some ways — yes, you have a race, and a history, and so forth — but, essentially, it remains a tactical game that is not focused just on your toon but on your team.
- It’s nice that not everything is about combat — but that will be an ongoing challenge (war in the Alpha Quadrant or not). Star Trek is not, basically, Star Wars, DS9 notwithstanding.
Overall, it feels well-balanced, well written, and potentially a lot of fun. I think (formal discussion pending) we’re going to subscribe, and stick with it for some period of time.
That would make three MMOs we’re subscribed to, which may be too many. More on that to come …
Actually it went live, mostly, since Friday (the servers were down for fixes about as often as they were up).
The ground combat is fun, a nice combo of FPS and MMO styles.
Ship combat is a lot of fun, especially once you get past your beginning ship.
While there are some Diplomatic missions, there really needs to be more of them, especially for planets in the expanses areas (but then again, I never got past like LTC 3, so it may be there for higher levels).
There were a ton of fixes/changes during OB that really made things better (every couple of days there were huge patches) for both the Feds and Klingons.
We’ve gone ahead and ordered our copies, so we’re in for now.
When I first played STO in closed beta I loved it. Felt instantly like I was in Star Trek, felt like a captain of my own Star Fleet ship and generally had a blast.
Then I got wiped and had to start again. Still really liked it and, without going mad, was ploughing steadily on to the mystical Level 11 when you get to choose a new ship!
Sadly, I started to find levelling a lot harder around lvl 7 or 8. It started feeling a little samey and got a lot slower. Frustratingly I made it to lvl 9 in the last weekend of open beta and realised I wasn’t going to get to 11, so stopped playing.
I’ve pre-ordered, but aren’t going to go for any of the ‘value subscription packs’ this time as I just want to see how it goes.
Playing over the last couple of days a little (Mass Effect 2 has stolen the rest of my free time) it’s felt nice knowing it’s for real this time. I’m not going to get wiped, so even if it takes a while, I know I’ll eventually get to 11 and get to try out the new ships. At that point I think I’ll be able to make my mind up on how I feel about it. If nothing really changes once I get the new ship, I’m not sure how long I’ll stick with this one.
Fun while it lasts though.
What is amusing for me has been, since I finally got my CB invite the last weekend, and was only able to get to level 11 an hour before it was over, and then for the OB run I was able to make it to level 16 on the Fed and KDF sides, all the improvements in that very short time.
Between the two time periods I had 60 plus bugs reported, and most all of them were addressed (not sure about the things in the higher levels yet), and I expect a patch today as well from the things over the weekend (there were 3 tiny patches since friday).
But is it the Trek game I have always wanted? No, but that would be impossible outside of a Single Player RP/Sim/FPS style game. Is it better than most of the Trek games since the 80s? Yeppers.
In the CB/OB I had many squee worthy moments:
-Anytime Nimoy is doing voice overs.
-Finding Capt. Mackenzie Calhoun at K7.
-Tribbles! Especially Tribbles as combat buff/healing devices. =P
-The Lt. Paris episode missions.
-The City on the Edge of Forever mission! ~Squeeeeeeee~ Especially since I got to do it days after seeing it again on the DVD.
-Coming across NPC ships Kirk (Lt. Paris serves on the Kirk), Spock, McCoy, and Archer.
Oh, another amusing aside.
If you leave a Tribble in your inventory with food, you will find that food replaced with Tribbles.
I laughed much over this feature.
1. Stuart: Yeah, we eschewed the bonus packs. Fact is, if we like the game enough, we know all the goodies will be available eventually via micro-transaction. 😛
2. BD: See, that’s a good use of levity to add a sparkle to the game. Vs. making the whole thing a series of running gags. I did enjoy, in what CB I did, all the various ties back to canonical Trek (OMGSULU!). Good stuff.
Looking forward to playing.
Also, Darth GM has a Fleet going on the Fed Side if you and Margie are interested.
Hmmm. Not that our gameplaying is consistent enough to make us good candidates for active members of much of anything. 🙂 Still, good to know.