[OOC: Star Trek Online]
Feb. 22nd, 2010 11:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kirktastic(OOC: So here's what this is. XD I got a free 5 day pass to Star Trek Online, so here's some pictures and a review of what it's about if you're at all curious. I'll be putting up more pictures as I get some neat ones!)
So, my good friend from a very old MUD called Clandestine gave me a 5 day free trial pass to Star Trek Online because he knew I was desperate to try it out before I bought it. I downloaded the game (holy, fucking, shit. It took about 18 hours to download!) and jumped right in.
First off: Character creation is excellent. I got to chose through a goodly number of things to make my character look like how I wanted. Not even little detail can be changed, but enough that I was pleased with myself.
This is my guy, [Captain] Shiikaar Karil of the U.S.S. Teresh-kah. I put Captain in brackets because ironically you start off as ensign and have to work up the ranks as a level system. My guy is a Trill with very hard to see markings. Shiikaar is 'Seeker' in Engrish (I dunno, its a thing I came up with years ago for a FFXI alt that I ended up loving) and Karil is Vulcan for "Winter". Teresh-kah is "silvery bird" in Vulcan as well. (XD Couldn't help it, sorry! It was such a good idea for a name!) I might not be Vulcan, lol, but my tactical and science officers are (THEY ARE RANDOMLY PICKED RACES!)
So some comments. Movement is a pain in the ass, specially at first, but you do get used to it. Movement on the ground is somewhat awkward, but it's movement in SPACE that's really hard. The why is easy - it's probably the first time in 99% of our lives that we've had to think in 3D while using a keyboard. By 3D, I mean you have to think about moving in every direction. Up, down, side to side, forward, reverse, every tilt... You have to use the WASD keys to move, which I hate, and you can't remap them to anything you way or they would have been remapped to the god damn numpad. The number keys are your weapons on ground or in space, and you can just tap your space bar to fire everything available in space (used: 99% of the time, lol).
You can customize your ship to a point to begin with, but later on you can really get down to customizing when you get your first real ship or so I've heard. I'm not that far yet. You put parts into it to change how it fires, how fast it is, etc... shields, engines, weapons, even what 'consoles' you have your officers working to improve your ship.
You get 3 main officers to start off with (tactical, engineering, science) that give you abilities to use in combat. There's about 8 billion abilities you can teach your bridge officers, holy crap. I'm still picking and choosing! I've settled on 3 for now but I think one's going to change. You get more officers (and more abilities) as you (and your officers) rank up.
Welcome to Sector Space. This is when you're in space, at warp. You can travel to different sectors, systems, have encounters, trade with trading ships... all sorts of things here. Nice feature: you can pick a known system/encounter/sector/etc and it'll autopilot you there. I'm in the Sirius Sector here, which contains things like Vulcan, Risa, and the Sol systems.
Here's me on ground, on Vulcan. Leonard Nimoy does voice overs in the game and teaches you some history (also: the loading screens have neat trivia about the history of the game and ST universe to read about). It seems that Nero didn't blow up Vulcan in this universe, but the thing that happened in the movie (Nimoy helping Nero try to save his planet, Romulus blowing up, etc) did happen - I can't quite figure out what's going on about Nero yet. I don't have my away team with me in this picture. Need to remember to do that.
This is me at the Spacedock above Earth. Just showing off how pretty it is.
This is me just about to go to warp after a successful mission. Yes, the game is generally this pretty. The graphics are honestly not the best, but the feel and look of the game is honestly very pretty and I gawk quite a bit at things.
I'm out of pictures, but I'll post more in the upcoming.
So just some other info: YOU CAN BREED TRIBBLES!
Let me say that this amuses me to no end. You breed tribbles by giving tribbles food you collect (which are healing items). And what do I mean by 'give food'? I mean... have a tribble and food ANYWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER and eventually the tribble will reproduce. Lawls. Seriously - I left a tribble and a food item in my inventory together and it reproduced. My friend who got me into the game says he left a buncha food and a tribble in his inventory and when he logged back on a few days later half the inventory were tribbles. Tribbles actually play a roll in the game, if you can believe it.
Tribbles give you buffs out of combat. My first tribble, named Mattson (you don't name 'em), is a 'rare' tribble (meaning it takes rarer food to get him and he gives 2x buffs instead of one). He's orange and blue. He adds to my damage and gives me regen. When you wanna use a tribble? You seriously just whip out the tribble and PET IT. Your character pets it right in front of your face. AND IT PURRS. AND COOS. If you give your officers other tribbles, they'll whip them out too and you'll just heal them all cooing and purring and GD IT IS CUTE. <3 my tribbles! (My other one is a heal-tribble, instantly heals me!)
Combat in space is fun, but dangerous. It kinda auto-scales to how many people are on your team. If you're alone, it scales to your level which is sweet. So do missions and what not, which can help a lot. Loot is your basic way to make money (credits) in the game, but it isn't easy to get money going in the beginning. My friend gave me a buncha credits which helped. A lot.
So all in all:
I doubt it's a 'play for years' type of MMO. I will be paying for it and playing for a while, because I feel its worth paying some cash to play for a while. (Least until FFXIV comes out!) I joined an 'RP fleet' but so far I don't actually see much RPing... so that's a bit of a bust. Trying to find one that really does have RP in it. Seems like it'd be fun to RP while flying about!
So, my good friend from a very old MUD called Clandestine gave me a 5 day free trial pass to Star Trek Online because he knew I was desperate to try it out before I bought it. I downloaded the game (holy, fucking, shit. It took about 18 hours to download!) and jumped right in.
First off: Character creation is excellent. I got to chose through a goodly number of things to make my character look like how I wanted. Not even little detail can be changed, but enough that I was pleased with myself.
This is my guy, [Captain] Shiikaar Karil of the U.S.S. Teresh-kah. I put Captain in brackets because ironically you start off as ensign and have to work up the ranks as a level system. My guy is a Trill with very hard to see markings. Shiikaar is 'Seeker' in Engrish (I dunno, its a thing I came up with years ago for a FFXI alt that I ended up loving) and Karil is Vulcan for "Winter". Teresh-kah is "silvery bird" in Vulcan as well. (XD Couldn't help it, sorry! It was such a good idea for a name!) I might not be Vulcan, lol, but my tactical and science officers are (THEY ARE RANDOMLY PICKED RACES!)
So some comments. Movement is a pain in the ass, specially at first, but you do get used to it. Movement on the ground is somewhat awkward, but it's movement in SPACE that's really hard. The why is easy - it's probably the first time in 99% of our lives that we've had to think in 3D while using a keyboard. By 3D, I mean you have to think about moving in every direction. Up, down, side to side, forward, reverse, every tilt... You have to use the WASD keys to move, which I hate, and you can't remap them to anything you way or they would have been remapped to the god damn numpad. The number keys are your weapons on ground or in space, and you can just tap your space bar to fire everything available in space (used: 99% of the time, lol).
You can customize your ship to a point to begin with, but later on you can really get down to customizing when you get your first real ship or so I've heard. I'm not that far yet. You put parts into it to change how it fires, how fast it is, etc... shields, engines, weapons, even what 'consoles' you have your officers working to improve your ship.
You get 3 main officers to start off with (tactical, engineering, science) that give you abilities to use in combat. There's about 8 billion abilities you can teach your bridge officers, holy crap. I'm still picking and choosing! I've settled on 3 for now but I think one's going to change. You get more officers (and more abilities) as you (and your officers) rank up.
Welcome to Sector Space. This is when you're in space, at warp. You can travel to different sectors, systems, have encounters, trade with trading ships... all sorts of things here. Nice feature: you can pick a known system/encounter/sector/etc and it'll autopilot you there. I'm in the Sirius Sector here, which contains things like Vulcan, Risa, and the Sol systems.
Here's me on ground, on Vulcan. Leonard Nimoy does voice overs in the game and teaches you some history (also: the loading screens have neat trivia about the history of the game and ST universe to read about). It seems that Nero didn't blow up Vulcan in this universe, but the thing that happened in the movie (Nimoy helping Nero try to save his planet, Romulus blowing up, etc) did happen - I can't quite figure out what's going on about Nero yet. I don't have my away team with me in this picture. Need to remember to do that.
This is me at the Spacedock above Earth. Just showing off how pretty it is.
This is me just about to go to warp after a successful mission. Yes, the game is generally this pretty. The graphics are honestly not the best, but the feel and look of the game is honestly very pretty and I gawk quite a bit at things.
I'm out of pictures, but I'll post more in the upcoming.
So just some other info: YOU CAN BREED TRIBBLES!
Let me say that this amuses me to no end. You breed tribbles by giving tribbles food you collect (which are healing items). And what do I mean by 'give food'? I mean... have a tribble and food ANYWHERE NEAR EACH OTHER and eventually the tribble will reproduce. Lawls. Seriously - I left a tribble and a food item in my inventory together and it reproduced. My friend who got me into the game says he left a buncha food and a tribble in his inventory and when he logged back on a few days later half the inventory were tribbles. Tribbles actually play a roll in the game, if you can believe it.
Tribbles give you buffs out of combat. My first tribble, named Mattson (you don't name 'em), is a 'rare' tribble (meaning it takes rarer food to get him and he gives 2x buffs instead of one). He's orange and blue. He adds to my damage and gives me regen. When you wanna use a tribble? You seriously just whip out the tribble and PET IT. Your character pets it right in front of your face. AND IT PURRS. AND COOS. If you give your officers other tribbles, they'll whip them out too and you'll just heal them all cooing and purring and GD IT IS CUTE. <3 my tribbles! (My other one is a heal-tribble, instantly heals me!)
Combat in space is fun, but dangerous. It kinda auto-scales to how many people are on your team. If you're alone, it scales to your level which is sweet. So do missions and what not, which can help a lot. Loot is your basic way to make money (credits) in the game, but it isn't easy to get money going in the beginning. My friend gave me a buncha credits which helped. A lot.
So all in all:
I doubt it's a 'play for years' type of MMO. I will be paying for it and playing for a while, because I feel its worth paying some cash to play for a while. (Least until FFXIV comes out!) I joined an 'RP fleet' but so far I don't actually see much RPing... so that's a bit of a bust. Trying to find one that really does have RP in it. Seems like it'd be fun to RP while flying about!
