Cryptic has a friend in Netflix. The Internet movie streaming giant recently obtained a two year license to offer every episode of every incarnation of Star Trek (aside from the animated series) for instant viewing by folks in the United States.
There’s not one Trek fan who isn’t gonna watch a few episodes and not want to get into the bridge of a starship of their own and mix it up with some Klinks and Rommies. Star Trek Online absolutely delivers on that. With their Foundry, you can even potentially create some episodes of your own. I was watching a Voyager episode, “Message in a Bottle“, which features a fight where a Nebula-class starship is chasing a stolen experimental assault ship when Romulan battleships decloak and start firing and then Federation starships catch up and then there’s a grand old battle. If STO wasn’t down for maintenance right now, I could have whipped up that exact encounter in about half an hour.
Cryptic dropped their Season Four: Crossfire update yesterday. Ground combat has been significantly updated; there’s now a mode that gives you a mouselook reticule for aiming, but I have to admit I didn’t find it a huge game-changer. That could be because I was playing a low level character and the fights just weren’t that tactically difficult. Gorn are pretty big, slow targets on the ground.
Klinks (er, Klingons) get a redesigned homeworld, which was much needed. You know when your best option to sell off your trash loot is to head to Defera because you can’t find anyone to buy it in the Great Hall, there’s something wrong. Perhaps signalling recent victories in the long conflict with the Federation, Klingons have new sectors with new Patrol missions. Those Klingon-only Patrol missions are experience gold mines for horseshoe crab-heads.
The game itself has gotten a huge graphical update; the animated loading screens as you move into and out of missions or across sectors are so awesome that I was wanting to see the entire UI look more like THAT. With meaningless numbers scrolling all over the place and flashy stuff, can’t get enough of that.
Still to come for Season Four: The new Feature Episodes. This is Star Trek Online’s ace in the hole; but perhaps unfortunately, the FEs are of such high quality that the rest of the game really just seems like stuff to do when I don’t have a new FE to do.
While we wait for the Feature Episodes to start rolling out, STO will be upgrading our onboard personnel with Duty Officers and Department Heads.
Duty Officers give those excess crew that aren’t being used in away missions or on the bridge something to do, namely, to beam down on dangerous missions so they can be killed by rocks/strange plants/hostile natives/space anomalies/hangnails and be mourned by the series regulars for forty three minutes until they are forgotten forever.
That’s right. Season Four is going to give you redshirts of your very own. If your redshirts manage to survive their missions, you can get valuable resources, crafting and other nice things. Or you can make a bit of change selling off the possessions they left behind in their quarters before you sent them to their doom.
It could be worse. Much worse. Your department heads could eat them. So, you know, there’s that.
You’ll be able to assign crew members to be Department Heads for the various bridge stations — engineering, science, tactical and so on. By assigning a duty officer to a department, the Department Head “swallows” the officer and gains some of their abilities, and are then able to provide extra abilities when they are slotted into bridge crews or away missions. If one of them is promoted to First Officer, then they can give your character a new ability of their very own.
That’s yet to come. Cryptic has also been revamping their older missions to bring them more in line with their new tech. It’s all good stuff, and combined with Cryptic’s recent acquisition by free-to-play titans Perfect World Entertainment which will almost certainly make the game also free-to-play in coming months, there’s no reason not to find a quiet Jeffries tube, set the replicators on “snack” and head into the Alpha Quadrant for some cinematic space action in Star Trek Online.
4 thoughts on “Star Trek Online: Perfect Timing”
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In Germany TNG is running all day on Tele5. I recently tried getting into Voyager (again), but I only like Captain Janeway and the Doctor and occasionally Seven.
Regarding Season 4: Marauding is to come. That’s basically the Klingon Answer to the Diplomacy system. Can’t wait to raid Federation transports even in the Sirius Block. This will be some kind of mini Ker’rat. Open PvPvE – Feds can join and try to screw up your transporter raid.
Something that not even Cryptic mentions but adds quite some detail (literally) to the game:
Compressed Texture technology allowed them to increase the detail level of starship hulls. Check your saucer section for extra detail, I got a more detailed base texture, phaser strips and some extra ventilation shafts or whatever they are.
Seems the era of Split Beams is over. Pulse Wave are much better at close range (Shotgun style) and Miniguns and Auto Rifles (M16/AK47 style) seem to be much better, but I’m still testing this. In general it seems that “expose” weapons are now more powerful and “exploit” weapons should mainly be used exactly for that, to capitalize on enemies exposed by Miniguns e.g.. This seems to be an answer to 2x Split Beam or 2x Sniper rifle setups. People who used all Engineers and Turrets with Miniguns will like the change as well. I am not sure how well the new drones work, they look like “Exocomps” from TNG.
The new C-Store looks awesome, but they should finally drop the sub – completely. No dual model sub+shop anymore. They started selling much needed inventory slots (12 slots, you can buy the package 3x) and 3×12 cost 10 EUR – per character.
I don’t pretend to know their numbers, but I would guarantee a huge influx of players when it goes F2P and if some of them shell out 5-10 bucks every 2-3 months they are probably better served than overcharging fewer subscribers who pay sub+shop+extra stuff.
This said, I did B’Tran missions yesterday. Even if they are not sophisticated, they are always random which doesn’t bore me as does doing the highly lucrative but always the same Klingon sorties over and over.
Season 4 also started with a slew of bugs. Some Exchange (auction house) related bugs got fixed but caused other bugs and if you enter the Warrior’s Hall on Qo’noS you might be unable to leave it or beam out. This said, most changes are working out nicely, I especially like the new shuttle cockpits/bridges and being able to change to shuttle via the bridge (go to the transporter pad of the engineering section).
Never really read up on the game…didn’t realize they were in “seasons.” Interesting.
“they should finally drop the sub – completely”
Indeed. I bought the game when Steam had it for $3ish, so I took Longasc up on his recruiting offer and jumped in. This morning my thirty days with the “box” ran out, so I got charged for the subscription (that you *must* set up to start an account… that still pisses me off… a lot). Turns out I like the game so another 30 days will be fun, but I absolutely loathe paying for time. If they convert to F2P, I’d be happy to toss them some cash for content. It’s a solid game, and it scratches my Trek itch nicely.
…the FPS ground combat doesn’t do much for me, though. I keep wanting to shoot bad guys I can see from long range like I could with pretty much any “real” FPS game, but I’m still limited by the cooldowns and short range of STO guns. It’s not bad, it just doesn’t work like I think a FPS sort of game should, so I switched back to normal mode.