Star Trek Online First Impressions pt. 1

So finally Star Trek Online has gone into open Beta, followed very shortly with a Live release date of the 2nd February 2010 in the US and apparently 5th February 2010 for the EU release. The Open Beta began on 12th January 2010 and is due to finish on 26th January 2010.

Those that have pre-ordered the game will be able to get a head start on the 29th January 2010, giving them a few days before general release to be able to mission up and get out of the starting zones before they are inundated with people.

I have only managed to play the game for a total of 4 hours, 2 hours on Wednesday night this week and 2 hours on Thursday night this week. Wednesday night was absolutely painful and very nearly put me off the game before I had even really got into it.

The basics are pretty easy to get to grips with and without spoiling it for those who have not played the game yet but are going to, lets just say the mission structure is pretty much the same missions structure than the original TV series had. So you on a ship, you have to shoot some other ships, beam down to a planet or onto another ship shoot some enemies, save the day and beam back to your own ship then shoot some more enemies from your ship. Space flight is pretty simple to get to grips with and I found that very laggy on the Wednesday night, when I beamed down to the first missions planet surface this is where it all went very wrong for me. With a mixture of Lag and just incredible jittering graphics, I actually had to stop playing us the game became unplayable.

After scouring the internet for people with the same issues it turned out not to be an issue as such with STO but an issue with the latest Nvidia driver set. So be warned if you are like me and update your drivers regularly then you will probably have the same problems. The fix is simple enough and that is download the 190.26 version of the Nvidia drivers or I believe they are soon to release a new set of drivers that fixes the issue. Either way revert or wait for a new set.

So on Thursday night I finally got the old Nvidia drivers installed and began to play the game again. The lag and the pausing screen has now gone and the game has started to actually look good.

I finished the starter quests and was handed the captaincy of my ship, picked up a few missions and off I set to boldly go where a lot of people playing the beta had already gone before me.

First main mission was to find the USS Azure and aid in its rescue, which involved fighting about 4 ships to get them out of the USS Azures way, quitting the mission because an enemy vessel was stuck in an asteroid therefore I could to proceed to the next part of the mission. So starting the mission again, killing all the ships this time, then guess what? I had to beam aboard the USS Azure and rescue the crew and then beam off the ship and the game kicked me off the server because it was too busy.

From what I saw I liked, I appreciate this is a BETA and expect things like this to happen, but I am scared that the game is about a week and a bit away from release, and it does still seem full of bugs.

The one bug I did find which put a smile on my face, was that when I entered a space port my player character stayed as a ship for a while before turning into my avatar character, amusing as this was the next is even better on leaving a space port and going back into space my character stayed as a man and basically just fell through space.

So that is it so far… more to come when I get some more time and of course I am able to get passed the message telling me the server is full.