So I'm mentally writing this post about how I think people are unfairly allowing their experiences with Cryptic's last MMO to color their opinions about the current one, and how I don't think STO is suffering from any of the problems that made me give up on Champions, but I don't have time to actually write it at the moment. I'll distract you with some screenshots. I've been taking a lot of them, as I'm still in the phase of "oooh what's that? Ooh so pretty!" so I'm hitting that PrtSc button quite often, looking through the pics I took later on.

My ship on my first open beta character was named the Genesis, because a random ship-name generator came up with "The Genesis Spider" as its first option, and I thought it was awesome. My second Open Beta ship (when I made a new character, I still haven't made it to Lieutenant Commander) was named the Antares. I've always felt a connection to Antares because it was the name of my group at Space Camp when I was a kid (I named my draenei hunter's red wasp pet Antares, felt it was the most fitting pet name I've ever had and couldn't get myself to replace her pet after that). But my ship upon release is the U.S.S. Silverwing. Rather than naming my captain Kiryn Silverwing like I did in Beta, I took the more direct Re'Vek translation and named her Kiryn Ka'dae.

I still haven't gotten the hang of actually using the Expose/Exploit system as it's meant to be used, I'm sure. My special attack button starts flashing sometimes, and I haven't yet quite figured out why it does so, but I've figured out that when it does, and my sniper-shot special attack is not on cooldown, I can hit somebody for like 5 times as much damage as the shot would normally do and it makes them disintegrate instantly. Cool, huh? I spent some time trying to get a good shot of this, kinda like the ship-explosion shockwaves, which I now know are the warp core going critical.

I've been doing lots of things in-game. Like fighting things in space. It hasn't gotten old yet, and I keep getting new abilities and more awesome gear and that just makes it more interesting.

Like trying to scan for anomalies, and no matter what I climb on or what angle I approach it, I just have to accept that some of them are inside places I can't get into. =(

Speaking of bugs... I can apparently see inside of people's heads by positioning my camera just right. I have another that shows the inside of someone's teeth, but I don't think I'll creep you out twice in one post.

And I've been visiting all kinds of crazy planets with my crew. I scan things with my tricorder, my officers stand around looking threatening.

(You can tell which two are expendable red-shirts because their uniforms don't match) I won't lie, I took a lot of pictures of this place the first time I went in. All of the bright shiny objects, the mathematical formulas and star charts hovering holographically on every surface...

The hallways with ceilings made of stars... Then I explored some more systems and realized that pretty much every "laboratory" type place uses pretty much the same graphics.

But they're pretty graphics!