So yeah, those explosions… they kinda hurt.

I was in a mission with a bunch of people, and that meant there were a BUNCH of enemy ships, as difficulty seems to scale with the number of people present. I flew in first, and I was getting so hammered that my shields dropped just as we took down one of them — it exploded and reduced my health to 5%. As I was flying away, I noticed that my ship was on fire.

Luckily, I took advantage of the powers of my brand new engineering officer to do some emergency repairs on the shield, and all was well again.

No, I haven’t been playing since my last post, this is just another of the random screenshots that I had from last time, that I totally forgot about before.

Now, I’m going to be busy with non-gaming stuff for a while — for my birthday, dad got me the DS9 model kit (with fiber optic lighting system!) that hasn’t been in production for many years. I had the non-fiber-optic version of it when I was a kid, and though I never really watched DS9 much, the opening music never failed to bring a tear to my eye, and the beautiful design of the spacestation itself made that my favorite model. I don’t know what happened to that one (it was lost years ago, my memory fails when trying to figure out when), but now I shall go enjoy some nostalgia by building a new one. I’m going to need some model glue and a soldering iron….

So I played a bit more tonight, and didn’t have any further issues with crashing and whatnot, this time being very careful to shut down any other programs running in the background — like I said, WoW handles me running firefox, mediamonkey and skype in the background at the same time and alt-tabbing between them at will, but STO is in open beta and is considerably more unstable. Which makes me a little sad. The music in this game tends to be rather ignorable, and I was having more fun playing my own MP3s in the background.

Anyway, I zipped around, completing that mission I had crashed out of twice before, and the one after it, and then going on to complete my patrol of various star systems nearby.

Here’s a pic of the first mission’s system:

On the left side, a ship that’s being attacked by space pirates. On the right side, an anomaly that I can loot. Ooh, sparklies. Ship under attack can wait — for science!! *charges towards the anomaly*

And of course, they did wait, and here’s a pic of the space combat:

Blow up the ship and it makes a HUGE explosion, with shockwaves and everything:

Though that pic is technically from a later mission, it took me a while before I could get a good shot with the shockwave in it.

I found a tribble in the ship I beamed over to, and found a creepy bug when I tried to let my best buddy Zara the Tactical Ensign use it:

Then we finish the mission, warp back to Sector Space, which is basically a galaxy map that you can fly around in, with exaggerated models of the various systems. Each system is an instanced mission, and I found the instanced nature of a number of these to be rather annoying.

In one, I flew in, was auto-joined with a group of other players, started flying around and shooting the enemies, and then the leader of the team booted me for no reason… I had to leave and rejoin in order to finish my mission.

Another mission had me flying around destroying pirate spacedocks all by myself — it was a little time-consuming to do without any other ships to help.

A third mission had me and three other people escorting a mining ship that got lost in an asteroid belt back to the mining outpost. I’ve really got no clue why this required four people, since the freighter would only follow one person, and no enemy ships attacked. It was pretty much a quest of “wait around as the guy the ship randomly chose figures out how to use his map and flies in the right direction.”

A fourth mission, which I enjoyed quite a bit, had me running around talking to several different people, and then the game basically quizzed me on what they had said, in order to prove that the federation cares about the problems facing the people of this world. I’m hoping to see more of those non-combat missions here. Blowing up ships is fun and all, but when I remember Star Trek, I remember them trying to AVOID conflict as much as possible.

I find myself wishing that instead of being an MMO, this could be a single-player game that takes place in a time period where flying around, exploring the galaxy and making friends with new, unknown races could actually work. But for the meantime, I don’t think I’ll be playing much more of the Star Trek beta. There’s a ton of things to explore here, and while I do love testing it and helping them make the game better, I’d rather save the rest of the exploration for later, so that I’m not burned out on it when the game actually releases.

I’ll leave you with one other picture. I got a third crewmember (I let him be Science just to be well-rounded) and he turned out to be a Male Of Unknown Species named Zar. This will not do, I say. My Tactical officer is already named Zara, I need to rename this guy. I was flipping through the Random name generator, cringing at the completely unpronounceable names it was giving me, trying to figure out who programmed these things. I mean, I know that he’s an unknown species, but does his name have to be completely incomprehensible? One of the few that I could actually pronounce:

That’s right. Ensign Gayer Coed, the Science Officer.

I was trying to figure out how to take screenshots that included the UI. Again, another failing that STO shares with Champions — Sometimes I WANT to take a screenshot with the UI visible, did you ever think of THAT, Cryptic?? Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot of this, and I didn’t want to lose the name, so… apparently, you can only rename your Bridge Officers once? It wouldn’t let me rename him again afterwards, and didn’t really explain why. I mean, why even let me open up that window if everything’s just going to be grayed out? Why not just gray out the “Rename” button entirely? So… my Science Officer in the Open Beta shall forever be named Gayercoed.

Just skimming through Blue posts, and Daelo cheered me up:

“The incorrectly flipped levels on the two colors of Maraudon will be addressed in a future patch. I also fixed the maggot generator in Orange. Thanks for the reports.”

Good to see that he isn’t ignoring annoying bugs just because they’re for low-level content.

…But when I tried to log in (last night I had crashed in the middle of the first mission they sent me out of stardock, to rescue some ship) the whole game froze immediately, disconnected me soon after, and then I probably spent a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to get the program to shut down, while my music player kept playing the same 15-second piece of “Different People” by No Doubt over and over and OVER again. I’m rather surprised that it didn’t blue-screen. It made the noise it sometimes makes when it’s about to, but it managed to hold together. *pats computer lovingly*

So, let me talk about my thoughts through the tutorial parts.

Firstly, the game DOES NOT take place in the timeline of the recent reboot movie, as I had originally assumed. It does take place in that same alternate universe, but instead it occurs in the future, about 30 years after the last Next Generation movie, at some point in the 25th century. I only discovered this when I asked Commander Akira Sulu who the hell he was, and he told me that his great-grandfather served with Kirk on the Enterprise. And then some people on General Chat started discussing stuff they read from the forums about the timeline of this game.

So the ship combat, as everyone else is saying, is quite fun and extremely different from any other MMO I’ve played. You basically have four shield sections (forward, left, right, and back, ignoring the fact that this is three-dimensional combat and you should really have an upper and lower shield too) and your weapons align rather nicely with these zones. Photon torpedos can only be fired at targets in front of you. The front phasers can be fired at targets in the front and sides, and back phasers can be fired at targets in the back and sides — allowing you to overlap your two phasers by putting your side to the enemy. However, phasers are more effective against shields, while photon torpedoes are more effective against the ship after the shields fall — and it’s not so easy to turn your ship towards the enemy in time to finish them off with photon torpedoes after you’ve weakened their shields.

I thought ship combat was rather slow at first, but that’s before they told me about Full Impulse power that let me zip around at high speed out of combat by diverting more power to the engines.

Now ground combat, I can see why people are saying the animations aren’t that great, but it does FEEL rather fitting. The mechanics reward you for ducking down behind cover, for rolling to the side (flashbacks of Galaxy Quest, the rolling helps) and the combat throws the idea of having a resource out the window. Your attacks are only limited by their cooldowns, not by any kind of mana or energy you have to manage in the meantime. You have a health bar and a forcefield bar that acts like a second health bar, and regenerates quickly when you hide behind cover.

You also have a whole party of NPCs following you around. In the tutorial I just had the one officer following me around, but once I got out and on to the next mission (where I froze soon after) I had that officer plus several people labeled only as “Security” who exist only to fill out the group. In any other games, these “Bridge Officers” would be considered Pets. You can buy and sell them on the auction house (there’s something vaguely disturbing about buying and selling people, even if they are just virtual people) and give them promotions and level up their skills, rename them (they come with randomized names) and give them their own backstories if you so desire. I am my own 5-man party, with little pet controls to get them to assist me, and ways to command them to walk somewhere specific if I’d like to get flanking bonuses for shooting at an enemy from multiple directions at once. All of your pets have special attacks based on whether they are engineering, science or tactical, and different strengths and weaknesses based on what species they are and what gear they have equipped.

I found a couple of anomalies, and they’re apparently nothing more than gathering nodes — you see it flashing, go over to it and press F, and you loot it for an item that you take back to starbase to use in some kind of crafting system to improve your gear. But I haven’t actually explored that part, because my game crashed =(

Hopefully I’ll be able to get back into the game soon. I’m hoping my issues are just being caused by my attempts to burn DVDs in the background while I play. WoW wouldn’t have a problem with that, but STO is still rather unstable.

I’ll probably talk later about the ship/ground combat in STO, but I wanted to take a moment now to mention something I meant to include when I was talking about the character creator last night: it is ANNOYING AS HELL to try to change anything, because my character is turning her head back and forth every couple of seconds.

I’m trying to adjust something like the width of her head, so I want to look at her head from the front. But no, she’s turning her head back and forth like there’s something fascinating moving around off in the distance that she has to watch. Forcing me to CONSTANTLY turn the model around to keep her oriented properly. The reason for this is that the character creator uses the same idle animations. I went through all of them in the body editor (thankfully there were more poses to choose from than there were in Champions) but in every single one of them, the character was constantly scanning the horizon, and my ability to edit minute details on her head was suffering because of it.

They need to either tweak the idle animations for the character creator, or give me a little pause button somewhere. The character creator has a lot of options, yes, but it pisses me the hell off because of this stupid animation issue.

Okay, that’s all. It’s out of my system now.