STO: Actually... quite good!

[Doomsponge]

So, Aspera and I are fiddling around on the Open Beta to see what thegame's like. My initial starting opinions (whilst the beta's down for maintenance):

Initially, I found myself reluctant to do too much of the customisation features- the trap of being a canon nut. Then, since it's the beta anyway and none of it is permanent I just tried it and got hooked. Building your own kitbashes is fun. Interestingly, it's rather hard to get an ugly looking one wirth the three starting classes (you get one at random from Miranda, Centaur and Shirkahr (an uprated and redesigned Soyuz)) and my ship, the Oriskany, ended up being a sort of melange of the basics of the Akira and Akyazi classes. See below. A nice touch is that the ship name actually appears on the hull!

The game seems split rather evenly into people who prefer spaceborne action (It's a MMO, dear. It's considerably more action oriented than your average episode. If we wanted to really be like sommeone on the Enterprise we'd download SETI@home...) and people who prefer the ground based stuff. I've moved from the former camp to the latter camp myself, but I'm only a little in favour of it. Ship-to-ship action, whilst fun, does get a little repetitive at length (and yes, it does indeed have a Z axis, although it's a little tough to get used to the ship controls, especially if you've played Starfleet Command...) and is certainly more about maneuvering than weapons timing. Often it can be 'get into range and hammer the spacebar, although I'm sure once I get some different weaponry (tempting to swap out my aft phaser bank for a torpedo tube for hit-and-run)  it'll become more varied. A big initial problem was the camera angles used, but it seemed to be a bug they've since fixed with (a more welcome addition for SFC players) a 'lock camera on target' option. Seriously, go into options and set up your personal preferences as soon as possible, there's a lot of variety in how to do things from auto-lock onto next target to the ubiquitous inverted axes to whether to automatically lock onto anything that directly attacks you.

Where the repetitiveness doesn't stay, however, is in the fact that it has two entirely different combat systems. Ground action (I would say combat, but not every mission involves vapourising klingons/humans) is rather entertaining. I was initially troubled by some overzealous turn sensitivity (either gently brush the key for a 5 degree turn, or press it properly for 170 degrees...) but it turned out that was due to some mild lag and a quick fiddle with the options fixed it.

Missions are interesting. The ones I've done have, thank god, all been pretty different. No 'Go out and kill n gnolls (why are gnolls always evil?) and retrieve n trionkets from them to revieve gold'. For one thimg, it seems that actually killing stuff as a mission objective is very, very rare, which, if a conscious decision, is a very good one. Of course, chances are that there will be he occasional Gorn frigate or old K't'inga out there to get in the way of you recording a strange gravitational anomaly, but I think in that case the need for an entertaining and fast paced game won out there. You will need your phasers.

Hmm. One possible difficulty is a lack of 'sandbox' areas to hang out at. Hopefully there'll be a bar in a quiet instance of a quiet starbase to make the fleet's home but one never knows. At present, with IMs having to nestle amongst zonal chat, most of which is 'Where do I find the Vulcan Ambassador?' (The 'Stateroom' is actually a conference hall) it can be rather difficult to chat in IMs all the time.

Furries don't exist yet, but knowing Cryptic... In addition, I did notice a few people asking about it, so stay tuned. You can change your species, it appears!

Overall, it's not perfect. Space combat is repetitive, the camera can be fiddly, and social chat is a toughie. But, most importantly, it's actually good fun. It's not heavy Star Trek, but I honestly think that wouldn't work as a MMO.