So for anyone who's been away from the game, Season 4 (Crossfire) hit just over a week ago. There were many fundamental changes to the game’s engine which did introduce a few bugs. Well, a lot of bugs, which the dev team are busy munching through like a Tribble through a grain store. Also, some of the features like the Duty Officer system and Starfleet Academy have been put back a few weeks. However, ground combat got a total overhaul. Everything's been rebalanced to make combat faster with the choices of traditional RPG mode and the new (third person) shooter mode. You can switch modes on the fly by hitting the B key. Shooter mode uses the mouse buttons to fire and alt fire your weapons much like a traditional thrid person shooter. Weapon sounds received an overhaul, texture resolution on your captain and ship have been increased and the ground kits saw a revamp (engineer drones are now Exocomps.) The Borg also received an update so that they're more inline with the Star Trek IP. Borg will now adapt after a few shots and you'll be required to re-modulate your weapon frequency, which makes for some hairy moments when everyone in your away team is re-modulating all at once.
Is the game actually decent now? Everything i've read on it has been rather negative and it put me off buying it when it was stupidly cheap on Steam (was like £2.50 i think). Examples include that it's not a good MMO, nor a good use of the Star Trek license. You seem to enjoy it however, so what's your take?
In short; it's fun to play, fairly casual and has a friendly player base. The game didn't have an easy beginning. Basically, Perpetual Entertainment spent four years developing the game before going bankrupt. Cryptic were asked to take over but with no game code, only art assets and a short release window, which meant that it's release was functional but incomplete. Most reviews are from the time of launch and don't really reflect the game in it's current state a year and a half later. To Cryptic's credit, they've put a lot of energy into reworking game, introducing new mechanics, content and correcting elements which were just plain wrong (such as Earth Space Dock which was changed to Starbase 1 in line with the IP.) They've also taken onboard a lot of feedback from the community (the Devs are active on the forums) and introduced stuff asked for by the players, such as a difficulty slider. There's still a lot of stuff to add (the Star Trek IP is massive,) but it's getting there. Exocomps and the Horta combat pet being some of the latest additions. (I'm telling everyone about the Exocomps!) There's also Feature Episodes (a series of 5 interlinked faction agnostic missions released periodically) and the Foundry, a built-in mission editor which allows you to author new missions for the community to play (and earn XP from.) It's actually one of the things S4 broke, but I believe missions are back online as of the 15th. The community is great too, with people on the whole being polite in general chat and answering questions without a lot of the smack-talk from other MMOs. I think it's true for most other MMOs, but if you can get into a fleet (guild,) of like minded people, it'll enhance the experience. There is, however, an elephant in the room in the shape of the C-Store. Extra ship and costume varients can be bought from the store, and while it's mostly cosmetic, not everyone likes the idea of microtransactions. Ships (with the exception of the Galaxy X) can be bought for Emblems which can be ground in-game without having to play. There's no 'paying for power' though, and the ship variants are different but not more powerful than the ships already available in-game. Unfortunately they've taken the demo offline for a bit (probably to hook up the new tutorial and Starfleet Academy,) but if it turns up cheap on Steam, and you're into Star Trek, it's well worth a shot. Also; huge ship charts linked in the fisrt post here.
Now with more Starfleet Academy. They haven't hooked the missions up to it yet, but it makes a nice alternative to SB1 (bank, exchange etc.) Also, thread with stuff the devs are woking on, with Borg updates and Enterprise-F screenie.
Usually, but they took down the demo accounts to make some changes. It might be something to do with the new tutorial coming to SFA, but either way, it'll be on the STO front page when they're back up.
Well I caved in. I'm stuck away from home with a not great work laptop, but saw on the requirements that it would work with Intel HD graphics and sure it does. So far I'm up to level 8 and enjoying it!
