Star Trek Online – Away Missions
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Data: “Lal, I am unable to correct the system failure.”
Lal: “I know.”
Data: “We must say goodbye now.”
Lal: “I feel …”
Data: “What do you feel, Lal?”
Lal: “I love you, Father.”
Data: “I wish I could feel it with you.”
Lal: “I will feel it for both of us … Thank you for my life …”
Three days ago Star Trek Online – Open Beta was closed. If you didn’t get into it and you still want to try the game, you will have to wait until Feb. 2nd when, so they say, Star Trek Online will open for general public.
As promised, we did take some footage and screen shots of ground action for you. It all starts when you you complete the space part of a mission. You will have to beam down to the planet or on the another ship/space station/whatever. Hardcore trekkies will notice that Starfleet protocols have changed again; captain is leading the away team, taking his bridge crew with him. Just like the good old Kirk times, who is running the ship in the meantime is unknown and really not important.
Every woman, every man join the caravan
Movement on the ground is similar to your average First Person Shooter1 with a few exceptions. Keys A and D are used for turning your view to the left and to the right while Q and E are used for moving from side to side. This can be quite annoying and disturbing at times. The mouse is used for moving the mouse cursor and not for turning around. With cursor you will select targets. You can use mouse for moving the character too but it is rather cumbersome since it involves holding both mode buttons. While you move, your team will follow and when you stop they will form a W formation behind you if there is enough room for it. You can speed up your movement by holding the shift key. Your away team will follow as fast as they can, they will get lost occasionally and they will need some time to find their way back to you.
We had an impression that moving around the terrain is still a little bit rough on the edges and there are very little limitations on how and where can player move. No matter how steep the hill was, you were able to run uphill. You can also jump, but we didn’t really find it all that useful. Here and there you will run into an anomaly of some kind. You can scan it and you will usually get an item to pick up, keep in mind that Tribbles are cute but they do breed quite quickly.
SkeetKlingon shooting
Selecting a target can be done with clicking on it with your mouse or by pressing the TAB key which will cycle the available targets. This can also be configured in the settings menu2, TAB key can cycle through targets currently on screen or through all targets in range. When you selected your target it is time to shoot. Different weapons deal different kinds of damage and have different secondary attacks.
Each crew member can be quiped with two weapons, personal shield, body armor and four other devices which can be anything from various battery packs and shield recharger’s to medical hypo sprays. Your character can also equip so called kit, which will grant you various special abilities depending on the type of the kit you choose.
Personal shield is something that will get recharged by itself after some time, you can also help with various shield recharger batteries. Your hit points can be cured with medi-kits or hypo sprays. Make sure that you have a science officer in your away team because they will automatically heal other party members.
All the enemies on the map are marked with red circles and you can quickly locate them. If your character is killed you can respawn at the last discovered spawn point and continue with your mission. Optionally if you are in a team with another human player you can call for help and they can use medical tricoder to revive you.
Depending on your skills, weapons and other affects you will deal some amount of damage to your enemy. If you are flanking them then more damage will be done. Most of the enemies are without shields and are not very hard to kill, do keep in mind that Klingons like their combat up close and personal and they will run towards you. You can try and hit them with the phaser rifle and knock them off their feet but that is really not a match for the Bat’leth.
Put more O in the STO
We suspect that this is because of Beta testing, but there was very little cooperative play that we noticed. Most of the missions were single person missions and we encountered fleet missions on rare occasions. Fleet missions are sort of fun but in the same way strange. When you enter the system with fleet mission you will get a countdown on when the mission starts. It usually takes up to five minutes for the mission to restart. Meanwhile you can fight with the enemy ships that are still present in the area and will constantly spawn so you don’t get bored too much.
The problem with fleet missions is mostly lack of coordination. Everyone wants to get their own share in killing so everyone scurries to the nearest enemy. The enemy then turns into five or six Klingon Vor’Cha class ships3 and you are pretty much dead and re-spawning. After some smack talking in the zone chat you are finally able to coordinate people and things go better in the next round. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to try things more thoroughly and this is something we will be getting into right after STO comes back.
A little bit of PvP that we did was not really enough to call it testing but we managed to gather two things from it. First, PvP seems to be consensual and you don’t have to accept it if you are not up to it. Which means no grieving and ganking like in EVE-Online. Second, when you accept the fight a large number of ships can jump on you and blow you to pieces pretty quickly. Getting away from this kind of ganking can be a bit tricky, but still manageable and it appears you don’t lose anything in the process.
And now, the conclusion
All in all Star Trek Online is not a bad product. It has enough star trek elements for an average trekkie and it isn’t too hard core for other people. Beta had its quirks and problems, it also had a very good bug fixing team. We reported couple of bugs and they all got fixed in a matter of days. If you know that Orion slave girls have green complexion, that Andorians can’t turn blue if you choke them and if you know what Gagh is, then Star Trek Online is a must. You will be able to distinguish Federation phasers from Klingon disruptors just by listening to the sound, you will meet few familiar characters in-game and the immersion that the game is offering is the closest thing to the Star Trek universe that you will ever get.
Qapla’!
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