Star Trek Online Beta Impressions (by SpoonyOne)
I had a Chat about STO with The Spoony One from thespoonyexperiment.com and we feel pretty much the same way about the game right now. =(
Watch his Vlog about it Here:
*Update*
We played the Beta a bit more today. A new Patch Rolled out that Opened up all Sectors and Removed the Level Cap. We tried to do some grinding and made more of an effort to seek out Exploration Content but were cut short by constant disconnects (it’s still beta). Ultimately Spoony ended the session with, “I’m trying to convince myself I like this game and I’m just not.” While I was doing my best to be a bit more optimistic.
The Good News? There will be a certain parody video coming soon from two guys that may or may not be Angry Joe and TheSpoonyOne Regarding Star Trek Online.
Oh yea and there was much laughs to be had by Beta glitches we found like these:
Click to Embiggen!
Hanging out on the Beach....With my STARSHIP! LOL! Now THATS Shore Leave.
Click to Embiggen!
Angry Joe is so powerful he traverses the galaxy on his Flying Cloud Destroying WORLDS! FEAR MEEE!
Hype Meter went from Top 3 most anticipated games of 2010 (10/10) to just a meager (6/10) currently.
You should really grab the $25 free chip at Saturn Casino. It’s a great place to play.
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I am a huge fan! Thanks for offering this
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Great post! I like the blog and love watching Supernatural on TV.
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I have found 1 “gathering” quest. (not done with game yet.) (fetch quest)
There are missions where you “aid planets and have to bring them different stuff”
Paroling can be soloed, you properly just sucking
If you don’t like getting your ass kicked, go play wow or whatever games are to be the same, to be hard sometimes…
There are exploration stuff but you need to chose what you want to do.
But yes it is mostly fighting…
Try playing pvp thats where the combat is really fun …
my 2 cents
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Something I forgot to mention, I keep hearing the space combat is amazing and by far the best thing in the game. Has nobody else played Pirates Of The Burning Sea? Combat is a carbon copy just in space with lasers instead of on the sea with cannons. Even the moves the bridge crew uses are identical to those in PotBS
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I played this for a long time during beta and agree with 95% of the video. The game is aweful, very disapointing and just goes to show Cryptic cant stretch past the tights and capes. ( I wont get started on CO). STO License should have gone to Bioware, then we may have actually seen something worth playing.
Game is going nowhere fast, Cryptic have never been great at addressing issues and this game has plenty. I really feel sorry for the people that have wasted money on this poor excuse for a game, hopefully Cryptic pull out their finger and dont let you all down.
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I THINK ITS OK,ITS A BETA SO THEY GOT BUGS TO WORK OUT BUT EVERY THING WILL BE OK!!!
THE ONLY THING THAT BUGS ME IS THE FACT THAT U CANT BE NUTRAL IN THE GAME,
LIKE WHAT IF I WANNA BE A “SMUGGLER” LOL……BUT REALY I WOULD LIKE TO BE PART OF NO FACTION OR AT LEAST MAKE MY OWN……………LUNIC ARMADA!!!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
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I have to say I did agree with Spoony when I played the Beta but now the game seems working to me. Of course in the beginning there are many missions that repeat themself a bit to much but nobody is forced to simply stay in that area. I am now lvl 5 and I did my own deep space exploration and went to the Eridan Belt (most northern part of the game) in the Beta Quadrant where I discovered my first Planet where I boldly went where noeone has gone before ^^. It is in my opinion possible to get a real Star Trek expierience but you shouldn’t expect this already at the first part of the game. Give it a bit more time.
I still have 1 big minus about the game and that is the bad instruction’s. Not all the functions and options are explained but when you figure them out the game becomes so much more interesting.
In my opinion this game is atm not played long enough to give a fair judgement so let’s just try to play it longer and see what else we will find.
(btw sorry for my terrible english but I hope you understand what I wanted to say)
brg Lt. Kahra Commanding Oficer of the USS Mercury NC 93759
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It sort of reminds me of Eve online, just with ground combat. That isn’t saying much though, the graphics are like on par with Star Wars Galaxies and yet there are reports of people’s computers crashing?! Seriously thats just sad, but I’ve been a fan of the new Star Wars MMO and I have confidence that it will emerge the winner. Not saying that it might be good or the perfect MMO but it does seem like Bioware is putting a lot of time effort and love into this project, having it fully voiced, having such a big story in it, the classes and combat look epic. I mean I can just imagine right now being a smuggler with my own light freighter and a companion character like Chewbacca sitting next to me as we escape Imperial blockades. Again though its just a hope…..perhaps a New Hope. The only minor complaints I have is that we haven’t seen anything about space combat, I mean Star Wars is set in space, and the movies are filled with dog fights and aerial fighting so I think that if they don’t fit that in somewhere it could cripple the game a bit. Also there’s been talk that the story would be so in depth that you may not need the help of other players and you might not interact with them as much, which raises the question “Why have it as an MMO?” All in all though these are minor complaints on what seems to be a solid game. Again though I really hope for space combat, I think I would just cry if I can’t shoot down Imperials in my starfighter.
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I’d be amazed if the released game had any changes to fix glitches in the beta, since the discs would have been in full production before the open beta even started. I’m guessing there will be at least one big release day patch.
The guys at Giant Bomb did a ten-hour video series of beta footage people on the fence might want to check out, at least a bit of it. It looks solid to me, but I would sick of the same repetitive fights I know I wouldn’t make it through the first month. I thought the same about WOW for the brief time I played it too, so YMMV.
I still feel an irrational desire to get this game. It looks like it would be a decent sandbox game if you only had to buy it once, but not worth paying a monthly fee for.
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After spoonys review I do agree and disagree a lot with what he saids, though during beta as you get higher tier you do see more of the story plot then early on which is nothing more then grind missions. Combat on the ground did surprise me, come from SWG pre combat upgrade I though hiding behind rocks or panels would help in my modifers, same as kneeling, but I did not see the differece as much as I hope. It would been nice to even SEE what the modifer is (like SWG pre-combat). But space combat I actual very much enjoy, it reminds me of the starfleet command series and also feels a bit of a balence between arcade an simulator.
I even allow my friend to play it, an he is not much in trying new MMO’s but he eat up more time playing it then I was with the space combat, but the same problems with ground combat. Though the end beta game raid with the borg suprised me very much, after helping killed a GM borg sphere (6 of 13) went to DS9 and had a dance party with many players, both fed and klingon, until the 5 mins to 6pm came around, anyone can say bar fight with phasers…
Anyway, I can see the points on lower lvls that it was bland, but you are just a Lnt. you exepct to get the big seat mission at your rank.
Any that care, seeya later.
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I just love the picture of the starship on the beach. “That’s some floaty you got there!”. I know betas are full of bugs and glitches, but this looks like they were barely trying. It’s sad that all I have to look forward to with a Star Trek game is a parody. Granted, it’ll probably be from two of the funniest guys online, But I’d rather laugh at that and then play an awesome game, than just laugh at you guys and be bored level grinding.
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I’ve been in a lot of betas and betas of this nature are NOT full of bugs and glitches.
What are commonly refered to as Betas are actually demos or in the context of MMOs, stress tests. The games are content complete and have already been QA’d by the Alpha and closed/private betas.
Public betas such as this are pretty much the release candidate, all they are doing from a QA perspective is testing the servers, looking at balancing and throwing the game out to a wider audience to try and catch configuration issues that weren’t thought of.
Its main goal though is of advertising. You give a large handful of gamers a few months free content to get them hooked, they will also tell their friends of their experience and get them on board. They call them Betas as opposd to Demos because it makes it sound more exclusive, like you are special because you’ve had a sneak peak at the product and that your feedback has shaped the release game. Well it doesn’t. Any comments you make about the game will first have to go back to the developers, they’ll need to look at the issue, they’ll need to look at how to fix it on paper, it will then be passed to the coders who will need to implement it, it will then have to go through all the standard levels of QA before it goes live and I’ve left out numerous steps.
I’ve been been doing public betas since before WoWs stress test ( Ienjoyed the game so much I did it for the US and European releases) and I’ve interviewed a few Alpha and Beta testers so trust me, unless they delay the game this is the game we’ll see come release day give or take a few tweaks.
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I agree with spoony, I wanted to like this game so much.
The whole star trek theme should do so well as an MMO.
But after playing the beta I just felt as spoony did.
It just wasn’t very good. I kept playing it thinking it’s going to be good, it’s going to be good.
But in the end, it was just bad. I’m looking for a new MMO and I was hoping this was going to be it.
For some mad reason I still feel like I want to buy this and see what the real product is like.
Maybe I should just forgot about it and read some of the full reviews when it’s offically launched.
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Its a shame that this game became just another fighting game. I feel StarTrek has alot of potential as an rpg and mmo. For me StarTrek is exploring the universe and discovery. I’ll stick to my World of Warcraft.
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Is the Genesis system implemented in the beta?
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Would it make difference? Having randomly generated contented is pointless if its all boring and generic.
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Well, my faith in this game has been severly shaken. I even pre-ordered it and was gonna play as soon as it came out. I’ll just wait and see what people think of the final product.
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Star Trek Online is a game that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now, and I have to agree and disagree with Spoony on a few things. The ground combat is as Spoony said it was, pretty much crap. You up your rank just so you can get more armor and do more damage, and the animations are pretty choppy. You’re either spraying, sniping, or just blasting in the same way while Klingons can come up and beat the shit out of you, and their animations are just as he described. And the variation for ground missions isn’t all that great either, even in the later areas.
Now the next great issue is all about space combat. Space combat has been changed a little bit since this review was actually made, and for the better. The issue of not being able to solo space missions has been fixed where lower tier ships have a less difficult time of fighting. Also, an issue that you, Spoony, may have had was about the shield regeneration. There’s a bug still in the system to this moment that if you have one area of your shields at full, the rest won’t recover. But that’s hopefully a bug that will fixed. As for higher tier on space equipment, yes, it can make the difference, and there is no difference between each type beyond the officer slots you can fill for extra powers. Now when you’re in a higher ship, it can make the difference in what can happen, but beyond that, your extra officers are nothing but cannon fodder on the ground that can be ressurected infinetly. The only issue that stands out the most really about the next tier of ships is that the Escort batch, DPS ships, are really just poorly armored Cruisers, tanks. There’s no real difference beyond more forward weapons and maybe a little bit more manuverable.
Finally, there’s just the fact that the exploration missions are kinda bland so far. It’s either investigate signal/deal with the trap, investigate why the base was abandoned and get repetative exposition, or give aid to a random colony out in the middle of nowhere. As for the music, that’s all really music that was carried over from Cryptic’s other game of Champions Online.
Now the one point that I feel the need to argue against Spoony is that this game was taken over by Cryptic and they kept the game release date the same, but that’s sadly the only thing I can argue for this game. It’s an incredibly rushed project. I really hope that this game will improve, but I’m going to keep with it for a while and see what happens.
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hey guys what are your guys screennames so i can add you guys?!?!?!?!??!?!
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No point I wont be there playing this pile of unfinished unmittigated IP rip off trash.
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Star Trek Online?
The game horrendously buggy 2 days before release but ok its a beta (Which is for fixing technical issues not writing the game they neglected over the last 18 months)
The game space feels claustrophobic (the first 10 minutes of reinstancing will have you banging your head on the monitor)
The graphics are 2000 not 2010 (Take a look at Star trek elite force interior designs for ther star ship and compare that which was released in 2003 with STO)
There is little or no content for the federation (goto planet X find 5 Y’s return to quest giver) Or (Goto SYtem X kill 5 Y’s)
There is no content for the Klingons at all (PvP only it feels like the Klingons were added at the last moment to appease the fans))
The core game design is more Champions online like Star Trek in Spandex (Same engine same boring play)
The game doesnt impliment any of the things that make Star trek different (Diplomacy et al)
The game play is hugely linear (I wanna teleport onto that planet. No you cant its not in the script!)
It’s not Massive (as in massively multiplayer infact a lot of server games have more poeple in one instance that STO does) This game could have been implimented just like guildwars, infact playing it it feels like guildwars with spaceships.
So….
Who won’t play this?
Real Star Trek fans will get bored with it in a few hours play or anyone with half a brain.
Who will play this?
Honeymoon syndrome players who really want a Star trek MMO
Newbies who have never played an MMO before (I pity those players if this is their first taste in MMO’s)
People who were deluded enough to waste their money buying into the pay to test thing.
Prediction.
This game is destined for a slow lingering death until the investment capitol runs out. Then it will join the ranks of Tabla Rasa and friends. They can’t & won’t want to change the whole game concept to save it and based on the CO/COH engine they are using theres not much they can do. Sure there will be little tweeks and sweetners but that’s not going to change the game play.
So if Conan can loose 2/3s of it subscription base in the first 3 months then this one is a Titanic waiting to happen.This is not the game which the forums and beta testers 18 months ago told Cryptic would fly, so they deserve everything they get. I think that more than a few people won’t invest in their products again.
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I don’t think its a sci-fi curse per say. Fantasy games always seem easier because of D&D (the game not the computer game). It set out a template which is very static in nature but people can get to grips with very quickly. WoW, D&D, Warhammer, etc all essentially revolve around dice roles or an equivalent behind the scenes and that works for fantasy games but sci-fi is different to fantasy in its settings and pacing which makes D&D dice rolls less effective.
You also have to take into consideration that most sci-fi games are either FPS or gun-n-run action shooters. Solo space combat is also epitomised by the flight sim or the side-scrolling/on-rails arcade shooter and this history of sci-fi games needs to come through for it really to be accessible. A lot of sci-fi MMOs don’t get that, thery probably used to sticik with D&D style from lag issues but thats not a reason anymore.
The thing thats get me though, uness your are in a one man air-craft you should not be able to directly control your space ship. On a few occasions you saw Picard take the flight controls but never really in battle, for the most part he sat in his seat and issued commands and it would have been brilliant if you could do the same. The episodes are always full of attack patterns and flight patters and these should be translated into the game, treat them like tactics from Dragon Age: Origins. Have your standard Star Fleet patterns so attack pattern delta would be to try and circle your foe and hit them in the aft. Then have your personal ones which are blank templates, as your commander levels up you get more slots, as your officers level up you get more options. Have the option of mapping a certain number of them to hotkeys for quick selections, have all the sensory feedback provided to you by your officers as well as a mini HUD showing your status and do this from the viewpoint of the captains chair. You then move away from a unrealistic arcade shooter to a tactical real-time game of chesswhere as well as acting out your strategy you are also trying to counter your opponents. Now that would be sci-fi, trekkie and cool.
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With that said. I still wish Star Trek the best of luck. I’m pushing for them if only because “Gosh darnit!” (censors at work) I want this friggin Sci-fi MMO curse to end!! And I want in on it!
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Interesting impressions and replies. I think one of the biggest issues, or gaping holes in the MMO world, is the total lack of
good Sci-fi based MMOs. They almost alll die out, or leave a lot to be desired. Eve Online seems to be the only one that can actually survive more than a year before going belly up. The problem is that it seems more like it’s Elite/Frontier online. You’re just the ship. You don’t leave it and get to use all kinds of nice technology that an individual person has to use.
I keep thinking, and being on the waiting list of, maybe, just maybe a full-blown Sci-fi MMO will come out and actually stay around to be still called an MMO a year later. I even was in the Tabula Rasa Crowd. A game, in which suffered by not delivering all of its features at launch, and the damage was done by the time they put more into it. Months later, they had a game that got pretty nice, but not nice enough fast enough and it died off. Potential lost. And no way anybody can pick it up to run private servers like what was done for SEGA’s Phantasy Star Online.
I think Sci-fi has the same curse, for MMOs, that Robotech had for many years, in gaming. Remember when it seemed that any team who took on Robotech would either not finish the game, or not finish the game and go bankrupt? Make a Sci-fi MMO and suffer the same fate.
It took many years and multiple console generations, before we finally got a decent Robotech game.
Of course, not ragging on the Beta review here. I’m sure Spoony made good points and I hear them. But when he mentioned there are better alternatives, I’m guessing all those alternatives are single-player or non-MMO affairs, correct? Because if there are MMO ones, I’d sure love to know. Finding a great Sci-fi MMO, where you can do stuff on the planet, still running is like trying to find gas for $1 a gallon no matter how many search engines you enter into.
So far, only one company actually made something like that (though it isn’t an MMO, but it at least has the online part and everything else in there kind of like Guild Wars with instanced combat locales) and it’s Sega. Though more of an Action RPG online hybrid, at least you can find Phantasy Star playable online. It’s not the same as what some maybe looking for, and it’s a bit different of a universe than some other established sci-fi series; but it has something the others don’t have. You can actually PLAY it and go online with them. Probably the longest lasting series without the final cord being pulled on all servers. But if you want an MMO. No dice.
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I agree and disagree with Spoony. Having played the Beta for about a week now, what bugs me more than anything else is the sense as I’m playing that there’s so much wasted potential.
The space combat is actually okay to me, intense even if you get a group going in some of the tougher missions. You can’t simply float in place and keep firing, you have to change facing or your shields will get hammered down. Frankly it’s the only part of the game I actually enjoy. Maybe I’ve just been lucky to encounter some really great teams in some challenging missions. But for me this is where the game actually took a shine.
The ground combat is just…bad. I mean really bad. I mean, wow…just….really? -Really-!? No, seriously, really? That took two years? If you aren’t going to have real stats and your abilities are centered solely on what weapon you use, why bother with this f’ing hotkey crap? Just let me play a bad FPS or a bland third-person game and not an assbackwards, badly programed, bare to the bones MMO combat game of hitting the 1 key every so often. I never ever thought I would play an MMO that had worst combat than CrimeCraft and yet…here it is.
However it’s the missions themselves that just hurt so much. So. Much. Why can’t they play up the Star Trek angle? Why do I have to get a text box with Admiral No-one-cares-or-loves-me blandly stating that there’s doing and I have to float over to blow them up. Why can’t I get a dynamic Star Trek like intro of the ship floating passed while a narrator intros the mission like on the shows? Why can’t each mission (which they insultingly call episodes) be more dynamic, interactive and even oh I don’t know, offer a f’ing player choice.
You have a game here that doesn’t have much of an overarching story and each mission is instanced. It’s my own private little f’ing world for me or a small group only. Nothing I do is going to affect anything outside this little bubble the game has placed me in. Why then, would you not make each “episode” epi-fucking-sodic. Let me encounter a situation that offers me a choice and depending on what I choose branches the mission one direction or another. I encountered a mission last night that had me run around solving a mystery on Starbase 114. Okay. I run around, I scan junk, I do nothing but listen to Ensign AlreadyForgotten and the day is solved. Ya-hoo. Why couldn’t I choose how to deal with the situation? Why couldn’t figuring out what happened have been an actual puzzle? Give me suspects and clues, let me try to solve it with some actual brainpower with EXP rewards scaling to how well I do.
Why must every single MMO be so god damned simplistic it hurts the frontal lobes of my brain? There are literally millions of things you could do on these missions to make them dynamic and fun. Why can’t there be missions that are like their own little point-and-click mini adventure where you have to solve a puzzle/problem using your brain without the game making everything flash for you? Why can’t there be missions where say, the warp core is about to go on a damaged freighter and you have the option of either trying to stop it via some mini-game or take the leg-it through combat route? Why must every single godforsaken MMO fall into this pit of generic crap? STO is built to appeal to Star Trek fans, a group of people that are generally known to be huge f’ing nerdy dorks. Yet the game built for them is built specifically not to require any brain power. Does that make sense?
That turned into a huge rant, and there’s reason for that. I want to like STO, I really do. But playing it is like getting a box of store-brand generic cereal. Every bite of Frosty Flakes you take just makes you wish you had some of that Tony the Tiger greatness. Where’s my Tony Cryptic, where’s my Tony!?
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I agroo 100% with spoony, its all the same. Played it for a week and the game is boring as hell.
I could forgive the repeating space combat IF there was something skill based, but you just need to bind all your weapons to the key space and spam it and spin your ship around, thats how you beat/loose every single fight in pve & pvp.
Ground combat is reallllllly sucky, if they did the skills & battle like mass effect that would kick ass! But no… it doesent work.
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So it looks like Spoony is saying it just sounds like a generic MMO with a Star Trek skin applied which has defnitely made me lose interest in playing this game and strangely enough has made me look forward to the Star Wars MMO even more.
I’m not a trekkie but I do enjoy all of the series bar DS9 and Voyager and I can understand Spoony’s point about it not being trekkie. In the vast majority of episodes you wouldn’t have a spaceship battle and only a minor skirmish. The series was essentially a sci-fi soap opera with the problems being of a diplomatic nature and that should be the crux of a Star Trek game. Bioware have constantly shown that you can make a game where violence isn’t always the answer and that words and diplomacy can be your best weapon. Also you’re Star Fleet for crying out loud you should be rewarded for peaceful negotiations above violence.
And thats why I’m looking forward to the Star Wars MMO. Bioware is making a risky and brave decision by going for a narrative heavy MMO but that will set it apart from other combat heavy MMOs. It was in one of IGNs preview videos but there was core dialogue scene that made a significant difference to your game depending on what option you took and it also rewarded you for how in character the choice was.
Looking at the beta videos and what little time I spent playing before my machine crashed (and in fairness this was the lowest settings which were below WoWs standard! If it looked better than Dragon Age and WoW at those settings and had more going on then I could understand it crashing but it didn’t and my machine can play both of those titles!) the game needed a better functioning dialogue system…and a better narative. Honestly, the Borg almost wipe out an entire Starship crew and your captain sends you…on your OWN to sort things out?!? Isn’t that like sending a shuttle bring down a Klingon warfleet?
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Yup, I’m afraid to say that this is a fairly accurate state of the game.
For me the most depressing part is that it appears as if the game is fundamentally wrong. :/
Its just not there.
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hey joe whats the chance you’re into guys I’d love to spend a while working your hot ass lips
oh and maybe your ass 
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Looking forward to the parody video guys. ^_^
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Being a gamer of all sorts of different game type, and being a Star Trek Fan (not a trekkie) I to was looking forward to this, the concept sounded great.
My biggest problem was the ONLY mmo I enjoy is Guild Wars, and many say it’s not an MMO. Every other MMO I tried I hated for a reason or another, mostly tediousness.
I got my beta key, DL 7,7 gigs and started playing. At first I to was telling myself it’s a beta, it’s gonna be good, now it’s not perfect. But clearly you can see the design choices and the way it’s going. Major disappointment’s, I would have preferred more instance based area’s like GW, the fighting does feel dull, the world just looks like a doubled size, everything is to big for the characters (open world is the reason).
But over all it doesn’t feel like star trek, I could go on, but this is your site, :p I felt no sense of progression, sadly you can see potential in the game, but it just doesn’t cut it. I deleted my game after 2 days, figured it wasn’t going to get any better, all my hype died within a few hours, it’s to much of a MMO, and it doesn’t even have the best parts of them.
I feel your pain Joe, maybe someday Star Trek will get a good game (that’s new Gen.)
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I was really looking forward to this one, especially since Angry Joe was going to be online and I wanted to get into a new MMO. It’s too bad that there probably won’t be any game play changes this late into development.
I have no doubt that most, if not all the bugs will be fixed either before release or shortly after but I doubt there will be time for any major core game play mechanic changes. Beta tests are for bugs first and game play second.
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Well I’d wish I could give my humble opinion on it but my meagre PC can’t even play it at low settings. I’ll go back to playing Dragon Age.
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Hope you guys play SW:TOR
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