Delta Rising: My £0.02

Spoiler warning: They're quoting me up there. I like it.

It's been 32 years since the return of Voyager - or 13 in tv years - and people still want to bone Seven of Nine. Actually, I wanted to bone Kes before they turned her into a whiny bitch, but I'm just special like that. Ahem...

So, Tuvok is getting the band back together and most of the old crew is back, with some exceptions such as Captain Janeway, who is now in prison. Well, more or less, since she's part of Orange is the new Black. She's mentioned once as "Admiral Janeway", so I guess that whole thing about her becoming the new borg queen and/or dying (in the novels) is no longer part of the canon. Because everything happening on Star Trek Online is considered soft canon, meaning it's "official" and part of the Trek story, but they may undo and change details in possible future tv shows and movies.

Nobody had the guts to make Jeri Ryan look older.

More than three decades after the events of the tv show, both Tuvok and Harry Kim look older, they have grey(ish) hair when you encounter them ingame, the doctor looks more or less the same, what with him being a hologram and even Neelix has a few more wrinkles here and there and looks a bit more chubby around the edges. Then there's Seven of Nine, who looks exactly the way she did on tv and not a day older. I assume the good people at Cryptic didn't want to offend her and nobody wanted to make her look old. Or maybe they wanted to be sure she's just as young and hot as people remember her in order to attract players. Whatever the reason, it turns out that assimilation is good for your health and makes you immortal.
For those familiar with the show, the expansion also arranges a few surprise meetings with side characters you might remember from Voyager or shows like TNG.

I see what Hugh did there.

What really impresses me about Delta Rising is how it gets me interested in the Delta Quadrant - something that Voyager never managed to pull off. To me, Voyager had this huge, annoying flaw that you see all over sci-fi and fantasy. All the exotic races, aliens, species, dwarves, elves, kazon, malon, what the fuck ever - they're walking stereotypes of themselves.

It's so fucking lame, dull, boring and predictable. Klingons are always angry and they're crazy about honour. They're basically space orcs. Dwarves are always bearded and they like gold, booze and fighting. All vulcans are dicks. And the delta quadrant is exactly like that. The kazon are lame-ass klingon ripoffs, who are chaotic and angry and pissed off, because reasons. The malon dump their toxic garbage wherever the fuck they want and this is the one and only trait, which defines them as a species. The Hierarchy are a bunch of potato-headed space accountants.

But human characters can be anything. Heroes, villains, anything in between, they experience character growth, they have demons and inner conflicts, they're unpredictable. 99 percent of the kazon are evil, you'll never meet a member of the hierarchy with no financial interest, who wants to be a rockstar or a badass warrior and there are no gay, pacifist, vegetarian dwarves with an allergy to beer.

And then there's this race of sentient fish people, who are delicious with chips.

The problem with the story in Star Trek Online is how it has always simplified things even further, painted everything in black and white. In the early years, most of the story was "federation good, klingon empire/romulans/remans/borg/[insert random faction] bad". The bad guys would show up and nuke earth spacedock - seriously, the fucking thing has been destroyed so many times since the end of the closed beta, I don't know why they even bother rebuild it all the time.

You know, they show up, they do something bad, their motivation is to be evil, then you show up and kick ass. And that's okay for an action game, it works for Star Wars, but not in a Trek game. There's no sense of morale, no negative consequences for your actions, no tough decisions. You go in and save the day. People die, but they're just nameless redshirts or random klingons, they all look the same, anyway. Fuck it, it's all XP.

Sorry, Harry. You're worth 25 XP and I just can't let you live.

Delta Rising changes things up a bit. It's not exactly Mass Effect, but for the first time whilst playing STO I cared about the characters and the lore. And sometimes I paused for a moment and thought about certain decisions instead of blindly clicking my way through walls of text.

On the one side of the expansion's major conflict you have the kobali, a species, which is technically a bunch of zombies. They don't reproduce by shagging each other. Instead, they use the corpses of various deceased humanoid species and bring them back to life as a kobali. This only works once, so they can't just resurrect each other over and over again. And then they lucked out when they tripped upon a cryo-chamber full of vaadwaur, whose corpses make awesome new Kobali.

Naturally, the vaadwaur aren't too keen on having their dearly departed brought back to life as freaky aliens without their consent. There is no black or white here, no clearly good or evil party. The kobali don't want to go extinct and they consider the resurrection of dead guys into fresh kobali the highest honour. On the other hand, would you like it if somebody started digging up all your dead friends and relatives to bring them back to life without asking you? Mind you, they turn into something completely different and remember nothing about who or what they used to be.

Since STO is an MMO, there's no branching storyline with multiple endings where you decide to help one or the other side. They tried things like that in Elder Scrolls Online and people hated it, because the game and each quest had been instanced to bits. So, you won't get the same possiblilities and levels of choice you may get in a singleplayer RPG, but the story draws you in, it's exciting, there is no obvious good vs evil here. I like it!

Some talaxians die, but fuck those guys.

Delta Rising also takes power away from you in certain situations. There is one mission where you are supposed to save a bunch of helpless civilians from their attackers, but there isn't enough time to save everyone. Saving one group dooms the other and vice versa. There is no right decision here, it's impossible to save everyone and you don't get any special tokens or rewards for saving the right bunch of guys. You have to act, help some of them and watch others die.

This is pretty dark for Star Trek, but it makes things more believable. You're no longer the superhero, who rushes in, guns blazing, saving everyone's day. You can only do so much. You can't prevent bad things from happening just by showing up and being awesome. It's good storytelling.

Delta Rising can be very dark and creepy at times.

One of my biggest concerns with the expansion was that they could have just used the names, voices and appearances of the voyager crew to get some attention and leave it at that. But they've captured the characters' personalities incredibly well. They act and talk exactly the way you'd expect them to, all the way up to surprise side characters you may remember from the tv shows. I recognized Hugh from TNG before he even introduced himself and it made my day, because that was one of my all time favourite episodes.

Most importantly, they're not just mindless drones, who only speak to you when they want you to know you're awesome and all your decisions are fantastic and you're the coolest kid around. They'll let you know exactly how they feel about the conflict and about your decisions. And there's one instance in particular, in the final mission, where poor choices can make winning a lot more difficult.

Voyager's bridge is absolutely spot-on.

It's a bit annoying how the new content is stretched with relatively boring patrol missions. And even if you play absolutely every last bit of new content, you will be forced to re-play some old missions or join some pve queues and other activities (read: grind) in order to keep leveling up to qualify for each of the new missions. It would have been great if Cryptic had managed to present the entire story without the need to grind, possibly by making it a little more difficult to unite most of the species of the delta quadrant against a common threat.

Because that's the one weakness in the new expansion's plot. You're gathering allies against one overwhelmingly powerful enemy (coughcoughMassEffectcoughcough) and while you have to face some initial difficulty, it all gets wrapped up way too quickly and easily in the end. I would have liked to dive into some of these alien cultures some more, get to know them, win them over. Again, like in fucking Mass Effect. If that's where you're getting your inspiration from, at least go all the way and don't cut the story short after an admittedly amazing build up.

Pictured: Most things I hate about Voyager.

Delta Rising also adds some entertaining content on the side. For instance, there's this shuttle race track in the middle of nowhere, which lets you compete against Tom Paris' lap times. Which I've totally eradicated, of course, but I'll admit it took me a few runs to get the hang of it and it was a really cool idea to add it in the first place.

There are new traits, specializations and upgrades for competitive players to get even better performance out of their ships than ever before. New ship types and bridge officer abilities allow for more play styles than before and most of the new T6 ships are surprisingly fun to use. Of course, if you're into hardcore pvp or you're absolutely desperate to win at every last bit of competitive content, then you can also sink an infinite amount of money into upgrade tech and power-ups. None of this is required to see every last bit of the new story, of course. But I'll admit it's pretty fun to utterly destroy the competition in a beefed-up vessel.

You will never kick as much ass on STO as I do.

Delta Rising adds a ton of great new content to the game, there are more ways to play and customize your ships than before and the new story made me care about the Voyager universe for the first time since... no, no since. For the first time. I never liked Voyager.

- Cat