Category: Star Trek Online

STO: To Boldly Go … where 1 million other subscribers have gone before

Well, the STO discs arrived today, so after Kitten was to bed we fired things up and had at it.

I’m Lt. Rho Nyn, Bajoran, commanding the USS Audacious. Margie is Lt. Terry Chestnut, human, commanding the USS Rembrandt. Together, we fight crime! Um … if Star Fleet asks us to.

We’ve gone through the intro tutorial adventures, wandered around the Earth Starbase, and now are ready for adventure. And, ah, Starfleet Credits.

I have my account set up to shoot Accolade notices out to Twitter (for here). I need to set up Margie’s for same.

The only problem we’re having at the moment is that Margie’s sound isn’t working. Which is weird because it works for everything else, including Champions Online. But for Star Trek Online purposes, her computer is deaf. Or mute. Irksome, in any case.

At any rate — expect some Star Trek adventures over the weekend. Make it so!

UPDATE: To fix the problem, go into (on the login screen), go to Options, Advanced, and then indicate “Ignore X64 Check” … and it works.  Of course! It’s obvious! “A child could do it!”

STO: Shall we “engage”?

Star Trek OnlineStar 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.

  1. 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.
  2. A nice mixture of “Away Team,” admin/base busy-work, and ship-to-ship combat activity, each of which provides a different flavor.
  3. Ship combat is … fun.  Felt very war-gamy.
  4. Away Team activities are more complex, but managing an actual away team is a nice feature.
  5. The idea of growing yourself, your crew, and your ship adds complexity to the gameplay — but is also pretty cool.
  6. 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.
  7. 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 …

I’m baaaaack …

After (1) illness, (2) job brouhaha, (3) NaNoWriMo, and (4) a week-long business trip …

… I’m actually back in the game (so to speak).  Just in time, of course, for (5) Christmas shopping, (6) Christmas carding, and (7) Christmas vacationing.  So we’ll see.

Meantime, I haven’t gotten onto CoX or CO yet … but if I were at liberty to describe what I’m doing … which, in theory, I’m not … since hypothetically anything I might say about things I can’t say anything about might violate an NDA that, of course, I can’t confirm that I’ve agreed to, even though it’s regarding something where no man has ever gamed before.

Ahem.

It’s all Margie’s fault.  But I had a lot of fun for the 15 minutes I was on until the hypothetical event limit was reached.  We’ll see.  (And since I saw a lot of folks logging in and out, we’ll see you, too.)