Star Trek Online

[Vindik8or]

It looks pretty awesome. Someone convince me not to buy this.

[Readman]

I didn't realise it was out yet.

Can I play as a Cardassian?

[dinopoke]

Someone convince me not to buy this.
Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but all MMOs are grinds.
?????

[Ashmaran]

I'm guessing he wants someone else to convince him.

I'd recommend playing the open beta and becoming sick of it before release.

[Vindik8or]

I didn't realise it was out yet.

Can I play as a Cardassian?

It comes out at the start of next month I believe. You might be able to play as a Cardassian, they were admitted to the Federation after the war with the Dominion, weren't they? That is to say I think it's Starfleet only. Scratch that - Starfleet or the Klingons.

I'm guessing he wants someone else to convince him.

I'd recommend playing the open beta and becoming sick of it before release.

Good idea!

[Azzaman]

I'm over mmo's. This one does look interesting though so I would like to try the open beta, we should form a hyper-fleet or something.

[Readman]

I really want to try out Darkfall or Mortal Online, but my computer is too shit and I'm studying at the moment so no money for a new one. When I get a job and can afford to buy a new computer, I'm not going to have the time.

:(

[Vindik8or]

Turns out you need to pre-order to get in on the open beta. Doesn't seem all that open to me.

[Azzaman]

well I'll wait until there's a free trial then. I suppose I was going to treat it as a demo anyway...

[drzaius]

i WISH they had this sort of thing when i was 14... as it is now, i wouldn't touch an MMO.
(but if i did touch one, this would be it)

[Readman]

Ultima Online came out when I was 15 (I think) but my internet connection was too shitty to really enjoy it.

But I don't think the time thing is that much of a problem, if you don't have any other hobbies. Plenty of people come home and watch TV for a couple of hours a night, so you might as well use that time to play an MMO.

Edit: that is obviously directed generally, not at drzaius in particular, as I obviously don't know his schedule.

[drzaius]

from my limited experience with world of warcraft i'd say it would be pretty hard to limit yourself to a few hours a night!

Also, what separates MMO time wasting from other forms of time wasting is that it involves other people. I always felt like i was letting the group down when i had to log off.

but ****... star trek... so so sweet.

[dinopoke]

Not sure if it is useful but they are giving away beta keys here: http://www.tentonhammer.com/giveaways/sto_beta

EDIT: You have to register to the site first. >_>

[Vindik8or]

I will take one for the team and buy a pre-order let you all know.

EDIT: I was going to have Captain's Log (and then a poo for my avatar) for my handle, but it doesn't allow spaces or apostrophes, and while I could deal with an underscore, no apostrophe is unconscionable. In conclusion I need a suggestion, that is both relevant and witty.

[Lazlow]

Jefferies_Pubes >_>

[Vindik8or]

That's pretty awesome man. I think I'll go with that.

So I've done the pre-order through steam, but I don't seem to have an open beta key... Need help getting on that, guys!

[Azzaman]

that ten ton hammer site gave me a key lickedy split
downloading the client now

[Vindik8or]

Seams the key is part of the client I'm downloading from Steam atm. 10gb! See how it goes when it all arrives.

EDIT: Waiting for the client to patch now. Readman, it seems that you can play a Cardassian, but not allied directly with Cardassia or the Union.

[Azzaman]

Man, mmo's have a way of getting me sucked in with backstory and promises of being "the next big thing". I was reading some of the back story to this last night and I'm getting hyped up to play it. Hopefully the client downloads today so I can give it a good seeing to tonight.

[tau]

Seams the key is...

*boom*

[Vindik8or]

No beer and no TV make Homer something something.

The character creator is really spiffy, and you'd expect it to, but I haven't had much of a chance to play with beta servers being what they are on the first day of open testing. I'm looking forward to customising my starship.

[Azzaman]

great someone turned my pc off today, still have 5gb to download....

Managed to get it going last night before I went to bed. Seems ok, the controls and feel of the interface is very much Champions online. I got up to space flight in the tutorial and logged off. From the 2 seconds I had in that mode it seems interesting. Ground combat is very same ol same ol mmo stuff.

[Vindik8or]

Okay here's an update of my summary and analysis of the experience so far.

As I said before, the character creation is bloody outstanding. The amount of customisation is perfect, there is a lot to fiddle with there, but it doesn't get tedious or nonsensical like, say, the Oblivion adjustments. You can even create your own uniform, within reason: there are about 10 uniform bases (with more to come in the full release), plus pants and boots variations, and then you can adjust the stripes on all of those. The best bit, though, is that when you recruit bridge officers you can outfit them with matching uniforms. Unfortunately at this stage it's a bit problematic, you get one free change of the uniform and then you have to pay to change it again. I had the forethought to right down the cartesian position of the 9 different colours you need to choose as well as the styles of each clothing piece so I can adjust all of my new officers from reference and have everyone matching. But all of this uniform adjustment is for nought when you get some body armour and it covers it up. I cannot find a setting for "show uniform at all times" but if there was one, I'd use it, especially since when you outfit your bridge officers with the same armour they still show their uniforms.

Here's my captain and her crew:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v192/AlmightyBean/CaptainCrew.jpg

My captain is in the middle, she is a blue alien babe following the Prime Directive of teaching aliens how to love. You can see two of my bridge officers in the matching uniforms and some placeholder dreg that the developers saw fit to stink up my bridge with crap that I cannot adjust.

The uniforms are inspired a little by the uniforms from the movies of the original crew, a little by the newer series with the colours used (I've used the colours to denote the class of the crew - yellow for engineering, blue for science, red for tactical (even though my character is an engineer, red is also for captains, and looking sexy)), and a lot by the British Royal Navy (think Hornblower).

Customising your ship is at this point a much more underwhelming experience than customising your character. You get to mix and match the saucer section, pylons, nacelles and mid-section from three Miranda class type ships, change some patterns and colours and that's about it. I'd assume you get to do a lot more swapping when you get access to more ship types later on.

The ship combat is a lot of fun. It works generally on a system of knocking out the opponents shields with energy weapons (phasers and disruptors) and then punching through their structural armour with torpedoes to destroy them. You also need to manage where you're directing power (shields and repairs, weapons, or engines), the way you're facing (each weapon has firing arcs and are mounted on different parts of the ship), and which shield you have facing your enemy and which shield you reinforce with extra power. A few quibbles, though, sometimes it is really difficult to tell which arc of yours is facing the enemy and which of theirs is facing you, you can see your weapon arcs one at a time when you mouse over them, but a button to turn them all on and off would be useful, maybe some indicator needle showing where on your arc exactly your enemy is, and which of your shields is facing them. Also in the tougher encounters where it takes several allies to take them on, the first person to engage combat is more like than not going to get their front shields hammered down and then destroyed with a perfectly timed volley of torpedoes as all the enemy AIs turn instantly on the first thing to aggro them. You can switch defensive, reinforce your front shields, and be ready with an engineering Bridge Officer to activate emergency power to shields at the right moment, and also try and turn away so the torpedoes hit a side shield, but you're still most likely to just die in the first 3 seconds of the fight. After that when the AI has several targets to choose from, things get a lot more fun and exciting, but it certainly makes moving to engage an enemy a nervous time, and I've seen bunches of people sitting at the edge of combat range hoping for the other next to them to fly in first and take the lead salvo.

Which leads me to my next point, instancing and grouping up. I can't figure this thing out. Sometimes it automatically shoves you in a group on entering a zone and I can't find any setting that stops that from happening, often it's for content that could be soloed easily, and in fact I'd rather solo most of it at this stage because all the lootable stuff will be available to only me, but if you leave the group you'll be kicked from the instance. Other times I go into places that certainly need a group to defeat, but I'm completely on my lonesome, and I go on suicide runs hoping to bring down one ship each time before I respawn. It takes some pretty special effort to make it so that there is no incentive for me to want to multi-play in an MMO.

When you go on away missions, these are the most problematic parts of the game. Again, it's better to do this stuff solo as you get to pick your own away team from your own officers, plus you get all the loot, but you don't have a choice in the matter if you enter some place that deems you must be in a group or else. There's only really three buttons two worry about in away mission combat, anyway: shoot, shoot slightly differently, shoot with your fists. I chose for myself the engineering class, so I can give myself extra stuff to do right at the start by setting up mines, phaser turrets, or shields, but really I can't see much differentiation between the classes in either this part or the space combat. Everyone pretty much just shoots, and if you've got AI science officers and engineers on your away team then they take care of the healing and shield regen automatically. Also this is the buggiest part of the game, at this stage of development anyway, and I've had a lot of weird and frustrating things happen on away missions.

All in all though, the missions - or episodes as they call them - feel just like that, a Star Trek episode. You go through them maybe starting out scanning a region of space, and then you get a distress call and have to beam down to a space station and rescue the scientists from some Orion pirates, and then when they're safely out you beam back aboard and an Orion squadron has arrived and you beat up on them. It's all very exciting and swashbuckling and it rarely gets boring. I just don't often feel that I ever want to be in a group to do it all is the thing.

This just leaves me with the miscellaneous gripes. There doesn't seem to be any real distinction between the classes, and the skill tree and skill points are an abortion. It's tough to tell what skills do, what you want to get, and then when you get them you can't tell if they've had any effect on the game. It's all good though, because you can play the game anyway, and it all remains fun, but there's no incentive to character progression through getting better skills and new abilities like there is in say WoW. You've got no idea what's coming, and if you did it's hard to tell how to get there.

The chat system is similarly useless and nasty. They've got a nifty idea of linking all characters to one account handle (mine is Jefferies_Pubes), but just sending a tell to someone is a friggin mission on its own, there is no simple way to do it, unlike (again comparing to WoW) the seamless and functional chat system in WoW. More things against ever multiplaying in this game, it's just too hard.

Anyway, overall, it's a load of fun for at least this part of the game, and worth it for that alone, but it needs more polish in a lot of places to be a functional MMO, and I'm a bit leery about this micro-transactions bit, but I haven't had any experience with it yet, so I don't know how integral it is. Oh and I've also read a lot of rumours about the opposing faction, the Klingons, being a bit of a stinker. Stuff about it being PvP only, having no content or episodes like the Federation, which could be another barrier to this being a proper multiplayer game.

[REQUIEM]

Looks sweet indeed. I have just stopped playing WOW (again) so another MMO might be bad for me. Will check it out though.

[Ashmaran]

I can't believe how much it looks like a reskin of City of Heroes/Villains (and I guess by extension Champions Online). Although to be fair the space combat looks decent.

[Vindik8or]

I've never played either, so I'm good on that part. The Klingon stuff is slipshod and stinky - they haven't even changed the name or the symbol of the Starfleet Merit Points currency for the Klingons! The interface is all dark reds and browns on blacks and it's nasty, and the missions have nowhere near the depth of the Federation missions.

[Araenel]

Heh that's pretty surprising to hear given the game is supposed to come out in 2 weeks.

[Readman]

Vin didn't include a numerical score, so I didn't bother reading.

[tau]

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

[V²]

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/9294/uhura.jpg
There's Klingons on the starboard bow

[AranchineD]

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/2630/spock1.jpg

It's life Jim, but not as we know it

[V²]

http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/5530/leonardmccoy.jpg
It's worse than that, he's dead, Jim

[AranchineD]

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/3849/captainkirk2i.jpg

We come in peace.

Shoot to kill.

[V²]

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/7863/scottyms2804468x591.jpg
Ye cannot change the laws of physics

[AranchineD]

FCARADb9asE

[V²]

http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/5343/ogrenerds.jpg
Neeeeeerds!

[Sytadel]

they haven't even changed the name or the symbol of the Starfleet Merit Points currency for the Klingons!

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/598/192280-comic_book_guy_13018_large.jpg
I don't mean to be derivative, it was just so delicious.

[Vindik8or]

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/598/192280-comic_book_guy_13018_large.jpg
I don't mean to be derivative, it was just so delicious.

Well I guess it comes off like that but it's like you're playing as the enemy and earning kudos with the Federation. The symbol for the currency is still the Federation Starfleet icon. It is just pretty sloppy and gives the Klingon content the feeling of being cobbled together for no better reason than the trope that MMOs must include opposing player factions and PvP. Really though, I don't think the game needs anything more than the Federation, it's not like Star Trek has ever really been about the other guys - it has always been about how the other guys are overcome by ideals and precocious and talented people.

Vin didn't include a numerical score, so I didn't bother reading.

That's what I'd do too.

Also, there seems to be a preponderance of currencies in STO. Putting aside the two types of experience, there's Merit Points (earned mainly from quests), Energy Credits (mostly from selling stuff), about 10 types of resources that you get randomly from this game's equivalent of 'mining' (scanning anomalies) that are used only in one place to buy stuff, some strange currency that I haven't found a way to earn yet that comes in 4 levels called Exploration Commendations (or something like that - 1st Level Exploration Commendations, 2nd Level Exploration Commendations etc). This doesn't bode well for the grind-ho. Unless they're tradable (which I doubt), in which case I think Energy Credits will be stuff no one wants much of.

[Zace]

Well I guess it comes off like that but it's like you're playing as the enemy and earning kudos with the Federation. The symbol for the currency is still the Federation Starfleet icon. It is just pretty sloppy and gives the Klingon content the feeling of being cobbled together for no better reason than the trope that MMOs must include opposing player factions and PvP. Really though, I don't think the game needs anything more than the Federation, it's not like Star Trek has ever really been about the other guys - it has always been about how the other guys are overcome by ideals and precocious and talented people.



That's what I'd do too.

Also, there seems to be a preponderance of currencies in STO. Putting aside the two types of experience, there's Merit Points (earned mainly from quests), Energy Credits (mostly from selling stuff), about 10 types of resources that you get randomly from this game's equivalent of 'mining' (scanning anomalies) that are used only in one place to buy stuff, some strange currency that I haven't found a way to earn yet that comes in 4 levels called Exploration Commendations (or something like that - 1st Level Exploration Commendations, 2nd Level Exploration Commendations etc). This doesn't bode well for the grind-ho. Unless they're tradable (which I doubt), in which case I think Energy Credits will be stuff no one wants much of.

Perhaps you should set your phaser to FUN instead of reviewing a game that isn't even out yet. Nerd.

[drzaius]

I'm sure they will change that before release.

[Vindik8or]

Well with the Open Beta all wrapped up and the headstart coming up on Saturday my final thoughts are this:

A slang term for Klingons has popped up, that being "Klinks" and there is already a thread on the official forums (http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=85420) bemoaning how racist and butthurting it is. Thus I will be definitely be playing this game and dropping the term as often as possible. I may even create a Klingon character (perish the thought) and name him Colonel Klink. If I can cause an online Klingon race riot I will be the happiest nerd in the world.

[Azzaman]

racist? lmao, is it racist if the race is fictional?

[Vindik8or]

Is it racist if the race is not a race but a species?

[Azzaman]

bah, I thought ST:Voyager made all the races genetically similar.

Stop being so Speciest!

SHUT UP THATS WHY!

[Vindik8or]

Well the headstart is supposed to be kicking off right now, instead all of the Cryptic servers (website and and game loader is down). It's hard not to feel hoodwinked, especially when it seems like the bonus items I paid for in pre-ordering the game won't be available during the headstart (they are all items that are useful at low levels, not four days later after launch).

[Readman]

bah, I thought ST:Voyager made all the races genetically similar.

All of the humanoid races in Star Trek are the genetic descendants of a single race that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, and seeded their own genetic material throughout the galaxy. That's why they all look so similar.

[Azzaman]

That's what I thought, stop being so racist Vin!

[sausage]

http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/9294/uhura.jpg
There's Klingons on the starboard bow


Phwoaar there's my dick on the port bow.



http://img130.imageshack.us/img130/7863/scottyms2804468x591.jpg
Ye cannot change the laws of physics

It's 'cannae'.

[Vindik8or]

What a f*** up! Not only is the crap I've already paid for in Cryptic's/Steam's dodgy pre-order promotion (who should I complain to about this? ACCC? That'll get 'em going), but Steam has decided that I need to re-download the 10GB worth of game client files that I'd already got. More then that, it decided that it needed to delete them first and re-download, all without asking me.

[sausage]

Ye cannae change the laws of physics vin.

[Ashmaran]

Hang on so you paid extra for some special edition stuff and now it's available to anyone with the regular preorder?

[Vindik8or]

Hang on so you paid extra for some special edition stuff and now it's available to anyone with the regular preorder?

It's advertised in different places variously as deluxe editions and pre-order bonuses. But pretty much it's only available if you pay extra AND pre-order. What I'm dirty about is they have this early start scheme available as part of it, but none of the extras (one of them being an exclusive playable race) are available during this early start. So if you wanted to make use of any of the stuff then you have to now wait until the full launch, what with most of the bonuses only really affecting the start of the game it's turned out as cross purposes defeating eachother.

[Cubby]

The space combat is pretty much just Starfleet Command.

[Vindik8or]

I've not played Starfleet Command, but the space combat is probably the best part of this game, so take that as you will.

[Cubby]

Yeah, I actually liked the SFC games, this is just a much prettier version, which is always welcome.

I also like the character customisation, but I only played with it for about 20mins, my brother is the one that was in the beta.

[REQUIEM]

Couldnt get a key so I will have to wait. Karma for getting the WOW beta's I guess.