STO: Freak show with relaxing, casual-friendly endgame

I really didn't want to come back. I swore to never touch Star Trek Online again and I've been clean for over a year. When they introduced premium ships, which you had to buy three times in order to unlock all their abilities (50 bucks total), I got fed up. And things didn't get better in the pay2win department during my absence: In order to use ships like the ultra-rare Jem'Hadar lockbox carriers at their full potential (as in, set bonuses + unique hangar fighters), you need to own a set of three ships, which can cost you anything from 80 to 300 USD to obtain. Per ship. You absolutely don't need any of this stuff and 99% of the content is so easy, you can beat the whole thing blindfolded with stock ships and f2p items you find along the way. It's about the e-peen, the feelgood-factor, the tiny edge over an opponent during those rare moments where you're fighting another player 1vs1. Which is also completely optional.

Whether this makes such ludicrous prices okay or even fair is down to personal opinion. I'd be happy to own a set of super rare ships to get all the goodies and extras, but there's no way in hell I'd shell out triple-digit amounts or more to be slightly more powerful in a casual MMO. To my great surprise, you see more of those incredibly pricy ships than regular ones, which shows that Perfect World Entertainment must be rather successful with their alien price range. And that makes me want to grab each one of those premium players and shake them around a bit for supporting this kind of crap. If it wasn't for so many idiots shelling out near-infinite amounts of money on pretend starships, then maybe the price tags would become a little more reasonable. Ahh... capitalism.

And why do they have to look so awesome?

But enough whining about money. There is one other unfortunate side-effect to all of the popular, unusual, "rare" stuff: It completely changes the overall look and feel of STO.

And it looks like this in-game.

This is probably not what comes to mind when you picture 'Starfleet'

Okay, the holographic doctor in the above pic of my crew is pretty canon, but Jem'Hadar ships in Starfleet? A Gorn, a Breen and an Orion chick? Okay, the fucking night elf is my fault, because I'm a huge troll. But it's not just the freaky aliens and weird new ships.

The prime directive: Meet strange new aliens and blast them to bits!

This is my away team. They're carrying an assortment of gatling guns, akimbo pistols and even a fucking Klingon Bat'Leth. Whatever happened to diplomacy? Can you set a minigun to stun?
Okay, sure. In this game, Starfleet is at war with just about everyone. The Klingons, some angry Romulans and Remans, the Borg, Dominion time travelers, the Mirror Universe, as well as assorted obscure aliens such as the Breen, the Elachi and god knows what else. You're not gonna leave home bringing only a standard-issue phaser in that scenario. And it makes sense to form alliances with as many aliens as possible, use their technology, yada, yada, yada. Just - when a game says Star Trek Online on the box, you'd probably expect a little more of this:

Those recognizable ships and uniforms are still there. They're just hard to notice with all of the crazy new stuff everywhere.

They've also added another season's worth of content (takes about 2 hours to finish) since I've left about a year ago, which is fun, high quality and comes with strange cutscenes like this one:

He's a doctor and a Starfleet officer. And he threatens to kill people.

The new missions ('episodes') and ships are fun, it's good stuff and the game badly needs every last bit of content it can get. However, if you're a newcomer or a potential returning user, you may have a bit of a hard time getting used to how these things affect the overall look and feel of the game.

If you're a very dedicated gamer and you've quit playing STO because there wasn't enough to do, well... you're still not gonna miss much. Yes, the game has seven sets of missions now - or seven 'seasons' as STO calls them. You can easily beat a whole season in a single playthrough, which usually won't take more than 3 or so hours total. Multiply that by seven and you can realistically experience the biggest chunk of this game's content in under a week's worth of play time. There's also some basic pvp, which doesn't reward you with any special item sets or anything you could not obtain by any other means, so the motivation to go there, if any, lies within the pvp itself. There are the user-generated foundry missions, some of which feature excellent storytelling and great adventures. You may not care about them all that much if you're progress-orientated, as none of these missions reward anything useful once you get past the leveling stage.
One nice new addition on top of the Federation and Klingon storylines is the new Romulan story. Romulan players experience a whole new tutorial and background story and, upon reaching level 10, choose to side with Starfleet or the Klingons. Again, that's not a huge amount of playable content, but their story is exciting, there's a lot of great voice acting and cutscenes and the new Warbirds are pretty damn awesome.

Okay. So after about a week of moderate play you reach the level cap. And that's where you start farming tokens and grinding faction reputation. Sounds boring, I know, but it's actually pretty damn fun. It's easy and straightforward, too!
All you have to do is fire up a queue system that lists you all the available reputation missions. They come in all sizes, flavours and difficulty levels.

Wanna board a shuttle and blow shit up on a planetary surface? They've got you covered.

Shuttles have nice, new interiours, too.

There are ground-based missions, space missions, shuttle missions, elite difficulty missions with extra crispy rewards and everything in between. Successfully completing one of them nets you a small amount of marks, which you hand in to the corresponding faction in order to raise your reputation. As reputation goes up, you unlock new abilities and passive bonuses (higher crit rate, shield boosts and so forth) and you gain access to special set items, such as the cool-looking armor on the character in my screenshots.

You can also fight the Crystalline Entity, which has been made enjoyable for the first time since launch.

Obtaining enough tokens to gain your daily reputation boost doesn't take more than 20-30 minutes per faction. You can repeat your favourite missions and gain as many tokens as you like (mission cooldown is 30-60 minutes each), but you may only hand in a fixed amount every 20 hours. This can be a bit frustrating, because in theory, you could farm marks all day long and max out your reputation within just a few days. With the enforced cooldown timers, maxing out your reputation will take several weeks.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you demand instant gratification. Every day you can play a quick mission or two, raise your reputation a bit and then focus on something else. Rather than playing 12+ hours a day, you do it in small, enjoyable sessions, which don't feel like a frustrating, repetitive chore. Speaking of repetition: With various ground-, space- and shuttle-based mission types for all factions to choose from, you won't have to do the exact same stuff again and again every single day if you don't want to. It's pretty neat.

You still need to join elite STF missions for the top tier items, but they've become a lot easier.

STO also no longer forces you into certain missions in order to obtain certain items. A while back, you had to play some insanely difficult elite level missions for a chance to grab some ultra rare items, which could be traded in for the absolute best tier of endgame gear. Not only were many of them nearly impossible to beat for pick up groups, but the drop rate for these precious tokens was so insanely low, it would often require dozens of successful runs in order to obtain them. Not fun.
Said missions since had their difficulty adjusted and all of them are guaranteed to reward you with a token upon successful completion. You get to hand-pick your favourite missions and get to ignore the rest if you're not interested. Nice!

I actually quite like this casual-style endgame stuff. Sure, without the artificial reputation timers I could probably get all the goodies I want in just a day or two, but then what do I do? Right now I can log on, play just a quick mission or two or pull an all nighter, unlock a new passive ability here and there, slowly work my way towards the rep cap and all the cool items I want. And anticipation is half the fun.

Much unlike Neverwinter's "buy all endgame gear on the auction house" nonsense, this is endgame done right. I also prefer this to being forced into the exact same raid, heroic dungeon, arena or some other repetitive thing for countless hours every week. That stuff was awesome when it was still new, I loved it when WoW and all of its clones were still fresh and innovative, but over the years, the urge to prove myself and "work" towards virtual gear has died down a bit.

And during those moments where I can't resist flashing my e-peen, well...

First place in competitive PvE guarantees two purple items.

Plenty of competitive missions to go around. Do a better job than everybody else and be rewarded with items, which may sell for millions on the exchange. It has never been so easy to get rich in an MMO!

STO is easily one of the most casual-friendly MMOs out there, which makes perfect sense. A huge part of the player base consists of trekkies. Or trekkers. Or whatever the fuck you elitist bastards like to call yourselves. And many of them have never played any other MMO before, they don't know shit about class and build roles in groups, about need or greed, about optimising their gear and specs. You'll end up with level-capped folks in your pick up group, who show up in a level 20 starship, because they don't care about stats and just like the damn ship. They just want to play Star Trek and they don't care about your DPS or tanking or completing the optional mission objective or the difference between an EPS flow regulator and an RCS accelerator. And STO's content, the difficulty of which, everything you can do on there, is aimed first and foremost at those players. Which is fine, they're paying customers after all.

STO has an overwhelming amount of abilities, skills, ship components, weapons and bridge officers to let you fine-tune your setup to perfection, if you so desire. Tweaking your ship and crew can make a big difference and chances are, neglecting to do so will get you eaten alive in pvp. However, if you just want to board your favourite ship and play, without wanting to figure out whether plasma beam arrays are better than antiproton cannons, whether you should use ablative hull plating or warhead prefire chambers, then the game won't punish you too hard. There are some pretty powerful items out there if you care to quest for them, but none of STO's content is difficult enough to require any of them. And when you look at it this way, then maybe the insanely expensive premium stuff isn't such a big deal anymore, however morally questionable.

-Cat