Anyone play it? Do ya like it? I admit, I got hooked on Star Fleet Command I (not 3–it wasn’t close to the tabletop game I was used to), and I see there’s an element of that in STO.
Also, I see STO is going free-to-play this January. I don’t recall the pay-to-play charges, but is the game worth it? I just finished a correspondence course, so now I’ll have my Tuesday evenings from 1815 - 1837 for ‘free time’. That, and I get all sappy for scifi around the holidays.
Tripler
Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a phaser fight.
I played it after it launched for the free month that you got as part of some promotion, but I didn’t enjoy it enough to keep played past that. I found the game to be lacking anything particularly Trek, and the gameplay was pretty shallow and repetitive. The ground sections particularly were, at launch anyway, absolutely fucking dire.
I know they’ve made quite a few changes to the game, and there is a decent enough fan base to make it worth playing, but ultimately I found it pretty much a damp squib. That said I’m not much of a MMORPG so the fact that I found it boring and repetitive might just be down to the fact that it was in that genre and nothing to do with the game itself.
I think ultimately there’s only so much you can do with the game format. Either you’re attacking ships in your ship, or you’re on land doing stuff. I just felt like the missions and tasks were very very samey, and there was no major interesting story or plot pulling me along these samey tasks to want to make me keep bothering. Once you’ve fought a mass of Orion syndicate pirates for the umpteenth time you start to not care, even though the quest crafter probably spent time working out why it’s them AGAIN that you’re fighting, although the real reason is they’re a low level mob.
If you compare it to another MMORPG that I played (and liked, but not enough to play for that long) Warhammer Online, Warhammer has a lot of features and gameplay elements that make it interesting, like the shared quests, the way the lore is built into the game, the way the classes play very differently to each other, the battlegrounds etc. Maybe STO has that in spades, but it definitely made me play through a lot of dull mediocrity before I saw any.
STO had some good things going for it. The core gameplay was pretty well designed, both ship and ground. The AI was, like all MMOs, far too stupid to actually get any mileage out of that, but it made the PVP fairly complex and engaging (too much so for the player base, in fact). The Fleet Actions were also well done. Scattered evenly around the level ranges, they were pick-up raid events that would pit some large number of players against a large-scale involved scenario, and they felt like an epic Trek movie moment at times.
Aside from those, though, the game was universally generic and dreadful. Most of the solo content was bland and repetitive, and when I played it, there typically wasn’t enough of the hand-crafted mission arcs to suffice, so you were forced into the random mission template crap to get to the next mission arc range…or PVP, which worked for me, but if it was a slow time for PVP, you’d be up a creek. That situation just got worse and worse as you went up in levels, until you got to the virtually nonexistent endgame, some halfassed Borg group-only stuff that in WoW terms were easy but long 5-man dungeons. I could solo a fair bit of it, to put into perspective how badly tuned it was.
A Trek junkie could have some fun with it, but on the whole, it just doesn’t have much to recommend itself.
I disagree - the reason I picked it up at all is because I like Trek, not because I’m into MMORPGs. My interest in the subject matter wasn’t enough to make me want to keep playing.
That is a telling statement–I had planned on picking it up ‘cause I like Trek, but it sounds like it may be a waste. Or, I’ll just wait to see in January when it don’t cost nuthin’.
I’m not saying don’t try it, I’m just advising you not spend money on it if you can avoid it. Wait until it’s FTP and then if you dig it enough sink as much cash in it as you want. Like I said, I didn’t like it enough to play it free, let alone shell out real money for the experience.
I played it. It’s a well designed game, but it’s definitely not for everyone. The character and ship creator is superb (as should be expected from Cryptic). Character advancement is a little complicated. You have points to allocate for your character. You have training for your crew. You have equipment for your character and crew and ship. That’s a lot to handle if you want to keep everything up to level.
The missions are repetitive, but that’s a given for any MMO. Whether there’s enough variety depends on personal taste.
Wait for it to go free to play. You’ll want to try it, simply to play with the character and ship creator. I definitely get the Star Trek atmosphere from the game.
If you liked the space combat in SFB or Star Fleet Command, you might like STO. The MMO gets it’s lore from the TV and movie franchises, and not the Star Fleet Battles universe, though, so no kzinti, Hydra, Lyrans. (The Orions are Klingon allies.)
The space combat in this MMO is dumbed way down compared to those games, but there are ways to use abilities or manuevers to try and hasten your enemies introduction to the vacuum of space.
There are no drones or suicide shuttles, and combat in the MMO is slightly more faster paced. But you can manage power levels (to devote more power to shields, for example). Your character and NPC bridge crew have abilities that allow them to do special stuff (torpedo volleys, buff or restore the shields, etc.), which is what you’re going to spend the most time managing during combat.
Ground combat got an upgrade, and is now less of a chore than it used to be. They even have “first person shooter mode” for ground combat, which I haven’t tried out much yet, but they have it, if that suits your fancy.
The ship models are nice (and to some extent you can modify them), while the ground-side models fairly average looking. Still, I got my all-female bridge crew set up for maximum eye candy.
This weekend I went ahead and downloaded and started playing, now that it’s free.
I quite enjoy the space combat, even if the interface could be a bit better. Difficult to locate the baddies in space around you.
The landbased missions I’ve done so far have been more annoying than anything else, though I understand it’s easy to avoid them if I am so inclined. I’ll keep playing for a bit, especially if a friend of mine joins me.
I keymapped the backspace key to “target nearest enemy”. (It only works on enemies within your camera view field.) No more hunt and click with the mouse, thinking that some barely seen asteroid is an enemy ship.
I prefer my camera set to “chase”, instead of locked on the targeted enemy. But that’s me, and I’m weird.
You go into the “C-store” and use your cryptic points to buy keys to unlock them. I see server annoucments when people find a Cardassian Galor-cruiser in one.
Kinda cheesy, but that’s the price you pay for “free to play”, I guess.
I have decided not to bother unlocking the Cardassian boxes that have a green title as they are mostly a waste of time. I got a couple “gold” boxes with purple title-names. I got an uncommon duty officer out of the first one, and some console that disables a target ship’s movement for 15 seconds out of the second box.
They sure made leveling easier, it seems to me (Got through the Commander ranks in under ten hours.), compared to what it was 6 months ago. The main questline is now presented to you in the order they intended the episodes to be played. You don’t have to do those annoying “patrol these three systems” stuff anymore if you don’t want to.
The duty officer “off screen” missions is kinda amusing to tinker with.
