Talk nerdy to me: Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online has gone the way of every MMORPG out there that isn't WoW and finally went Free2Play, tempting lots of people to give it a first (or second) look. And it lures people with a pretty cool teaser:

Right. Discover strange new worlds, make first contact with freaky aliens, play something that looks and feels just like the tv show. Notice the guy sitting in his captain's chair, bits of his ship exploding everywhere around him while he's issuing orders, voice-acting and everything? That's a load of crap. If you're planning on trying out STO, you should lower your expectations to something like this:

I know what you're thinking, but this is not just another F2P rant. In fact, I love STO, warts and all. But those warts are hairy and the size of an average meat loaf. Allow me to elaborate:

Meeting exciting new life forms on STO means shooting them. Exploring strange new worlds means scanning 3 computer terminals. If you hate killing and scanning things, this game is not for you.


The F2P teaser video is, simply put, a very cruel form of false advertising. The actual game contains about 5 minutes worth of (lousy) voice acting - if that. And there's a war raging with the Klingons, at the Romulan front, with the Breen, the Undine and pretty much every other fucking alien species that has nothing to do with the Federation. And that's what this game is all about - War. This isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're in the mood for it, but the game is being advertised as something much bigger, much better. Don't believe any of that garbage.

'Sword-swinging night elf chick' is not in the race selection, but alien customization lets you go crazy.

But let's focus on the cool aspects of the game for a minute. You get your very own ship, you get your own crew and you can customize the crap out of everything. The selection of ships includes just about any vessel you have ever seen in the Star Trek films and tv shows, from a tiny Delta-flyer to the Enterprise D style Galaxy class starship seen in the final TNG episode, All Good Things. 
You get to tinker with the material of the hull plating, the windows, put a bit of a paint job on it, choose a bridge and, most importantly, put a shit-ton of weapons on it.

You get to customize everything, from the paintjob, to the looks of the bridge.

This is the bit where many players get confused, to say the least. There are single beam arrays, double beam arrays, single and dual cannons and heavy cannons, torpedo launchers, mine launchers and turrets. And all of them are available in various flavours such as phaser beam arrays, plasma cannons and transphasic mine launchers. While they all make perfect sense and are relatively easy to understand, you won't get the hang of it until you actually take the time to read up on their individual strengths and weaknesses. For instance, heavy cannons do a metric shitload of damage, but they only hit what's directly in front of your ship, meaning your vessel has to be very agile in order to hit stuff. Beam arrays, on the other hand, are considerably weaker in the damage department, but they hit pretty much everything around your ship, meaning it doesn't really matter how good you are at navigating your big, fat cruiser around a nimble enemy.

One of the best things about STO is shooting stuff in space with other players and the ships they create.

Same goes for the individual types of beams, cannons and what have you. Phaser weapons can disable enemy subsystems (weapons, engines etc.), plasma deals additional damage over time and so on. So if you want the perfect ship to match your individual play style, there are tons of means and ways to customize things to your liking. But to be perfectly realistic: If you don't give a shit about any of that stuff and just put on your ship whatever fits, you will still get all the way to the level cap with relative ease, unless you're a complete moron. There are no DPS meters, 95% of the game can be done solo and no one will notice whether your ship is highly optimized or just a flying collection of random junk.

Fleet Actions are chaotic, but lots of fun.

Same goes for your bridge officers. Those are the guys you put on your away team to accompany you during ground-based missions. And they come in all shapes and sizes, from Klingons to Ferengi to Andorians, Betazoids, Vulcans, Trill... you get the idea. You may even obtain rare officers like your very own Holo-Doc, an android, a Breen wearing a stylish space suit or your very own liberated Borg drone. You may choose your officers for their looks and for the sake of simply creating the kind of crew you had always imagined during your wet Trek dreams, where you get to captain your very own ship. After all, this particular part of STO makes that dream come true. Since each and every officer also gets their own individual abilities and skills, some players simply pick them for those, rather than looks. And once again, if you really don't give a crap about their looks or their abilities, you can still play STO just fine and without running into any trouble later on. All up to you.

Once your ship and crew are all set, you'll get to take them on awesome story missions, which the game refers to as 'episodes'. These episodes usually come with an interesting storyline, which unfolds as you hunt down all kinds of baddies in exciting space battles and awkward ground battles. Unfortunately, this applies to pretty much every mission in the entire game. Sometimes you may travel back in time and fight some "classic" Klingons as seen in the original series, sometimes you fight ethereal, ghost-like baddies, which will scare the shit out of you. But no matter how interesting the actual setting and the bad guys' appearance, you will always resolve conflict through violence.

Who are you people and what the fuck are you doing on my Sickbay?

For the most part, this is still a pretty rewarding experience. You get to play the whole thing all by yourself, using only your bridge officers to help you. You may, of course, team up with other people to tackle a mission, but the game never forces you to do so. If you want to do things at your own pace, enjoy the storyline all by yourself and not try to keep up with a bunch of hyperactive 12 year olds, who can't be bothered to say anything in chat apart from the occasional "ogog!1", then STO is probably worth a try.

Those who spend some time customizing, outfitting and training their crew members will get the most fun out of the game. It's awesome when my Klingon tactical officer rips Borg drones to shreds with his mighty Bat'leth and it's just as fun watching my insanely fat, bearded Andorian chief engineer as he places mines, shield generators and other gadgets everywhere around the away team to aid them in battle.

Claire

Unfortunately, this sums up about 90% of the stuff you'll ever do on STO. And there's another problem: There simply aren't enough missions to get you all the way from level 1 to level 50 without annoying, grind-heavy gaps in between. My partner is experiencing that problem right now: She has played every episode available to her, reached level 14 that way and the level requirement for the next episode is 20. To bridge the gap she is forced to play through the atrocious, auto-generated exploration missions. Those usually work in 3 or 4 different scenarios:

- You approach a planet and its inhabitants request food, water, bits of technology or some other random generic crap you can create using your replicator. You give them what they want, everyone is happy. End of mission.

- You discover a station/ship/anomaly in the middle of nowhere and once you approach it, random enemy ships will attack you. You blow them up. End of mission.

- You discover even more anomalies in space. You scan 5 of them. End of mission.

- Your away team beams down to some random planet or a space station and either kills 5 groups of random aliens or scans 5 random objects - or kills aliens and scans objects. Since everything in these missions is generated at random, you often end up getting weird glitches such as invisible enemies attacking you from inside rocks, trees and mountains.

A Borg clone, a cat, creepy guy in space suit... looks like my away team is good to go!

Above-mentioned occasional glitches aside, these missions work out okay and they can be mildly entertaining for a while. They simply aren't great, they're highly repetitive and you really don't want to do that sort of thing non-stop for several levels. Most of all, how the fuck is this Star Trek? I wanna be worshipped by random aliens like they did with "The Picard", learn about their customs and weird quirks, play dress up to fit in with them and get involved in their affairs. I wanna do the shit you see on the tv shows. I wanna do the stuff that stupid teaser makes you think you get to do. But it never happens!

Space battles with hundreds of ships kicking your ass? Yeah, we got those covered.

In fact, you never even meet any of the important characters of the show. You get to read about what Worf, Picard, Janeway and other popular folks do 35 years after Nemesis, but you never see them ingame, because they couldn't afford their licenses. Instead you get to meet Q's son, Tom Paris' daughter, William Riker's clone "brother"... okay, you get to travel back in time to hang out with Bones and Scotty. I'm sure you can figure out why.

Despite all my bitching about lack of content and proper Trek-feeling, there is at least one ray of hope here, coming from the community itself: The Foundry. This handy little tool allows people to create their own missions. And if you're at least slightly familiar with die-hard Trek nerds and their fanfiction, then you'll know they're capable of cranking out some high quality stuff.

You're not a real man until you fly a galaxy class cruiser

Many of the user-made missions feature really cool stories. There's that tiny, insignificant settlement in the middle of nowhere, which is suffering from frequent Borg raids. At first glance, this makes absolutely no sense until you figure out that the head of the settlement deliberately lures the Borg right there, hoping for assimilation. I won't spoil the story by explaining why the fuck he would want that sort of thing to happen, but let's just say it's a really cool plot-twist and the user creating this adventure has put a lot of love and effort into it.

Other user-generated missions feature lots of dialoge, requiring you to make decisions and solve problems through diplomacy rather than violence. While fighting one's way through the much-feared walls of text isn't everybody's cup of tea, this is the sort of thing many fans of the Franchise have wanted from the game and since Cryptic didn't deliver, they're doing their part to alleviate the problem. Way to go!

STO isn't the ultimate Trek experience. I'm not sure if people would even play it if it wasn't for the setting. That said, the setting makes it incredibly fun, despite the obvious flaws and shortcomings. It's fun toasting an enemy ship with your mighty Galaxy Class' phaser lance or sneaking up on an unsuspecting baddie using a Defiant-style cloaking device on a small escort vessel. All the coolest ships and their features are there, from the very first classical TOS-Enterprise to multivector-vessels, that split into three parts and attack enemies from every possible angle. They're all present and fully functional and they're awesome to behold in massive fleet action missions, where lots of people team up against large waves of enemy ships.

If you don't care for any of that, then this game won't hold your interest, even when it's free to play. Dedicated players can probably get through all the episodes and all the way to the level cap in just about one week and that's that. There is very little replay value here, seeing as gameplay and missions won't drastically change whether you're a human tactical officer or an Andorian science officer. You can repeat a very small amount of actual endgame missions, which require you to team up with four other people in order to farm some pretty powerful item sets, but since every other bit of content on STO is piss-easy even with random green items, there is very little reason to do so.

In fact, items hardly matter in this game. Sure, there is purple gear, but these items usually just come with (literally!) 2-3 extra DPS and some 2% added crit chance, but that's as exciting as it gets. The real long-term motivation comes from finding those incredibly rare, unique bridge officers, the perfect setup for your ship, getting as close to that nerdy Star Trek fantasy of yours as somehow possible.

The slightly more complex items and skill trees aside, STO is easily one of the most casual-friendly MMOs out there. You get to do almost everything all by yourself and without having to team up with other people, items don't really matter and nobody gives a crap about the quality of your gear. That said, if you're looking for challenging raids and badass items to show off to all those casual maggots around you, this is probably not the right game for you.

Now, let me add a final word about the F2P aspect - the game is indeed fucking free! You get all the missions, all the items, all the "raids", the whole fucking content including the user-generated stuff and you pay absolutely NOTHING. 99% of the stuff you can spend real money on is fluff - a new bridge, the TNG uniforms, a Deanna Troi outfit (who the fuck would even WANT one of those??). Okay, so when you reach level 50, you will have to cough up a shit ton of the game's new meta currentcy, Dilithium, or spend some small amount of real money if you want one of the really cool ships that feature a cloaking device, phaser lance, ablative hull plating and the likes of those. Once again, you don't *need* any of those to beat any of the endgame missions. You can obtain the currency to buy them without paying anything. Or you go the easy way and cough up a tenner. Big deal! There's a whole lot of freeloaders whining about how they are "being forced to pay." FUCK YOU ASSHOLES!

Aw boohoo, I can't get a free cloaking device!

And I mean that from the bottom of my heart. You pay absolutely nothing for the god damn client, the fleet actions, the episode updates or any other content. And then, when you've seen and done everything for free, you come to a point where you won't get an instant ship upgrade unless you pay a small amount of cash for the first and only time. Which is optional. And you're screaming ripoff. What the fuck is wrong with you?

Well then. Go and download the damn game already. Nothing to lose. And if you get stuck, just look around for my user handle (@Berserkerkitten) and ask for help. When I'm on there, I'm always happy to help noobs out with their missions. Live long and fucking prosper!

-Cat