Overall, I like the game. It MIGHT just be related to the fact that I've been spending the past couple of months watching old Star Trek episodes.

Firstly, the menus etc. are obviously just copied from Champions, I recognize many things including the sucky auction house and the keybindings dialogue. Which obviously means that it has many of the same issues right off the bat -- you can't save keybindings between one character and the next; playing at higher resolutions makes the UI painfully small, but increasing the UI scale breaks a number of parts of the interface (the buttons that control my away team didn't scale properly, and overlapped each other); the button to cancel your target is the same one that brings up the game menu (though to be fair, that's a failing that even WoW still has), and I still have not figured out if there even is a way to use emotes that doesn't involve navigating several menus (there's an emote menu that lets you choose from a list, but trying to type that emote in chat just resulted in an "unknown command" error).

I do like the character creator quite a bit, though after all the hype I've heard, there was not as much customization as I was expecting. Sure, there are several dozen different types of ears to choose from, but what does it matter when the vast majority of them are horrifically ugly? I smirked to myself about the ease at which you can create night elves in STO, since there are long, pointy ears as well as extra-long eyebrows and face tattoos.

I rather like the character I made. You see, when I was a child, I considered myself quite an artist, because I favored the romantic notions associated with such people. But I have since discovered that in truth, I am a scientist, discovered that I am not so much creative as precise. Even though my career is not traditionally science-based, being able to use the scientific method to narrow down my understanding of some elusive glitch fills me with great joy. Combine this with the fact that my most cherished times in WoW were playing as a healer, and I feel a certain amount of serendipity that the Science Officer class in Star Trek Online is the healing class. I mean, it makes sense, because they're the doctors as well, but the way this concept meshes with game mechanics feels very harmonious. The fact that I identify this strongly with the class probably means I'm never even going to THINK about creating one of the others, despite my strong altoholic tendencies.

Meet Lieutenant Kiryn Silverwing, though technically when I took this picture she was still only an Ensign a few minutes in to the tutorial.

I'll finish this tomorrow. I'm tired and I wanna go to sleep =P