I’ve never been a huge Trekkie. I’ve liked some of the movies over the years, some episodes of the various shows from time to time, and really loved the most recent reboot. With that in mind, I had been watching Star Trek Online game-play trailers, and I was impressed.
So when the game came out yesterday, I decided to go out and pick it up. After an unfortunate experience at Best Buy where they only had Collector Edition’s of the game for sale in what seemed like some sort of scheme, I finally got a copy somewhere else. Now, over 12 hours later, I’ve finally exited my cave with a few thoughts. 
The game’s character creation system is top-notch. Cryptic knows there way around character creation, that’s for sure. You can choose from multiple different Trek races, or even create your own alien race. No matter the race, you get a total of 4 racial abilities including preset abilities for the known Trek races. They’re pretty straight forward bonus to resistances, certain skills, etc. After that, you can get to create your looks which is as diverse as it needs to be.
Quickly after that, you’re really in the game and ready for action. There’s 2 factions currently, the Federation or the Klingons. You start as the Federation (with little choice) and after level 6, you can start on the Klingon faction. From what I’ve come to understand so far, the Federation will be more PvE base and the Klingon’s more PvP based, for right now anyways. You come equipped and at level six when you begin with those Klingon fellas.
I can’t say that running around with phasers is the most exciting thing you’ll ever do, admittedly the combat certainly does start slow, which is true for most MMOs. But STO is a slightly different type of MMO, I see it taking a lot from Guild Wars in terms of fast-past action and not taking long to get into small instanced action. Once you get past the beginning slow phaser-battles, things do get more exciting, especially once you get your ship.
Yes, of course it’s all about space-combat. Once you get a buddy or some allies to fight with, you’ll quickly find yourself in epic space battles shooting out torpedoes and flying around massive battles that J.J. Abrams himself may have produced for his film. Space combat is seriously where it’s at. Flying a ship around, barraging enemies, and finally seeing an enemy ship explode when your Torpedoes make contact is VERY liberating to any Sci-Fi nerd.
I’m still working on getting all the specific mechanics down and getting to know that game, so for right now I’m soaked in the feelings of a new game. So far, it seems very solid. For playing a game on launch, it went smooth. There hasn’t been very many errors, I haven’t had any crashes, and for the most part I haven’t noticed too many glitches other then some problems with camera angles during space flight & combat. Overall, it seems like it will be a very valuable life time-sink, at least for awhile.
Once I push on further…. I’ll be back with more thoughts!
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I thought it was worth noting that RIGHT after this post, I ran into some errors respawning, but nothing other then that yet.