The trekkiness just provides context and terminology. It could be a Bab5, BSG, or SW game and it would still be fun.
Anyone else do the shapeshifter mission at the vulcan monastery and move to to intercept the ship and once you get close enough for a good look say "Shit! Vorlons! I am so screwed!
I decided to get a decent sense of this game before beta ends, so I focused and grinded my way to level ten, to find out… You need to be level 11 to get the promotion :smack:
Not like one more level is really gonna be all that hard before Tuesday, but a bit disappointing still.
You can do that now. “Visit the Bridge” is an option on the down arrow menu up by the minimap.
Well Early start is tommorow morning. I decided to give it a go and subscribe, at least for a little while. Seems like a good casual MMO which is how I like to play.
Ultimately it would have been nice if the had had another 6 months to flesh out a few things, but I understand you gotta get money sometime… The Crafting system is pretty weak, and obviously put in that way just because they wanted to check Crafting off the list, but I figure they will work it up once the do the major extermination phase. A few other things are pretty much a shallow skeleton of a feature lacking depth, but they will be busy adding depth and variety as they go along. Plus I really haven’t run into any huge bugs, just a few annoyances, and down time.
Big picture wise, I was hoping they would make the game more based on your ship, with actual commanding and decision making rather than arcady twitch button shooting, but that is damn hard to create procedurally, and would require a huge team of mission scripters.
I’m ready to go when I get out of work today. I made it to Lieutenant 7 at the end of Open Beta.
I spent a while wandering around the Neutral Zone cause everyone said the big end of beta event would be there, but it ended up being in the Sirius Sector Block mostly. I fought off waves of Klingon players who died within seconds to tons of phaser blasters. Then I quit for a while after trying out the Klingon side and getting owned.
I came back later to fight the Borg. I got into a huge group and we tried to take down the Borg but I died a lot. The best fight in Open beta was when we took down a Borg cube. We fought that thing for like 5 minutes before it finally went down. The big borg ships seem to be able to drop your shields and tractor you into close range.
Even the probes were dangerous 1 on 1. I think the borg will be one of the main raid level opponents in STO considering how tough they were.
I’m ready to start my character for real though. I created a Betazed named Nikarus for open beta but I may keep the name and go Vulcan this time or maybe even make my own race.
In some ways STO has similar flaws and advantages compared to City of Heroes. Combat is exciting and its easy and quick to get into a team and smash things to bits. But it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot beyond combat. The fact that we can fight on land or in space does give more variety, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of depth to the game beyond fighting. The only non-combat things I can think of are hanging out in Starbase lounges or looking for anomalies.
I’ll be purchasing it next week to give it a shot for at least a couple of months.
I really wanna try this out… but…
Damn. I have to admit I’m disheartened by some of the chat here.
“Drops from mobs”?
“Tanking/healing”?
It’s all about combat?
That’s World of Warcraft. Or EverQuest. Or Asheron’s Call. They created a ship-based Star Trek MMO, and the ships act like paladins in a sword-and-sorcery MMO? Aw, come on. Can’t we have something new? Something faithful to the sense of Star Trek?
There is a limited gap of how much newnewss you can cram into a game before you lose the play value. If you can describe it, maybe you can help Cryptic figure out ways to put it in.
That said, there are noncombat missions… but even Trek has a good ship fight an episode or so.
(Note for STO players: 1997, the Miranda that swings towards the camera to explode, I believe is the Shi’Kar. Also, I think you can see a Centaur in that fight or in 1998)
MMO lingo is not exclusive to wow, its just where it has become most pervasive. Give it a shot, you don’t hear people talkinging about “tanking a mob” in game. If anything its alot less role oriented. Enemy ships tend to target multiple players anyway making tanking a little less relevant. Also unlike WoW, you don’t have people getting one shotted by bosses. Between bridge office abilities and player manipulation of power and position it takes a bit to get killed.
Ok so I cracked and bought the pre-order so I could get on the early start program. I’ve only played a few hours so far but I’m enjoying it.
My question. I completed one of the early missions (rescue some ship from Orion raiders) and the Admiral said he would send me a new officer as soon as possible. I can’t find the bugger though? Where would she be, or should I just be more patient.
If you look under personnel screen under the assignments tab he should be there. If not make sure you have completed the quest. You can completed them from anywhere by hailing Starfleet.
That’s not quite true. There are still issues with Alpha strikes, but it is getting better. (When a large fleet attacks an NPC large fleet the Bad guys all lock target on the lead ship and blow it way the fuck up as soon as he is in range)
Thank you for the help. It appears I’m a victim of a rather common bug. I definitely hailed Starfleet and selected a tactical officer but they don’t appear in my assignments tab. A lot of people are complaining about it on the forums and it’s apparently a known (and very annoying!) bug. Oh well.
I hope they get their system stable soon. There are Klingons who need to be dieing about now :(.
Have you seen the thread on the forums about the downtime? It’s at 400 pages and it was only created a few hours ago!
Well the players tend to do that too…
A bit of expansion on this, one of the biggest causes of this is popping out of full impulse inside 10km. A cluster of enemy ships often has .5-1km distance between members and if you come right up to the 10km line and cut hard right or left to bring both front and aft phasers to bear you will often be able to seriously damage the point ship without having to face the wrath of 8 enemy ships at once. Even then between emergency power to shields skill, shield batteries, and repair skills, you can drag out an epic wailing on for 30 seconds or so, more than enough time for your bakers dozen teammates to light up on their lead ships.
If the server goes down while you’re in the middle of a mission, is all progress lost? They did give us a 10 minute warning but I was already 30mins in to a mission…
If it’s a multi-system mission(it tells you to warp somewhere in the middle), then you seem get to start as of the last time you warped in. But just changing from ground to space doesn’t seem to mark a save point.
Have a look in your inventory. A couple of times in beta new officers would appear as a coloured badge there. Right click on the badge and select “comission officer”.