...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.