Posts tagged STO
Star Trek Online First Impressions Pt.2
Jan 28th
The Open Beta for Star Trek Online has now finished and we are only 3 day away from the head start that is available for people how have pre-ordered the game.
My initial experience was one of frustration and revelation. I liked what I saw however due to connection errors, piss poor graphic driver support and server downtime I was left wondering what the game really involved.
Well after my initial teething issues and a heft 900mb patch from Cryptic, the game suddenly came alive for me. Finally I was able to log in, finally the graphic driver issues were gone and I could really have a go at the opening part of this game.
The player creation I found to be pretty good, the detail in which you can alter your Star Trek character is pretty good and I found myself playing and tweaking with this for a good half hour before I finally decided to play the game proper.
The opening missions are pretty standard in terms of getting you familiar with the controls and guiding you to your destiny of getting your own ship.
Once you have your own ship you are sent to the SOL system, for those who don’t know that would be our galaxy. You are stationed around Earth Base. This is the player hub that allows you to get to walk around talk to people, buy items, sell items, the usual really. Picking up quests from people is pretty simple too, just go to someone who has a “Q” over the head and hey presto they will have something for you to do.
Skipping forwards and beyond the initial quests, I managed to experience space travel which I have to say the mechanics take some getting used to as sector space is like a big map that you move your ship over to reach the next galaxy. This allows for player encounters, trading ships and random missions to interrupt your journey. If you look at the Star Trek Online forums you will see a lot of fans hate this sector space approach and wanted more of a Bridge View travel and warp system. I am sitting on the fence at the moment as what is there works and serves a purpose.
The missions structure seems to be pretty much the same and I am hoping in full release to see some more variation from the what I have seen. You essentially have a space battle, then beam to a ship or a planets surface, kill some people then beam back to you ship and warp out of the galaxy. Turning in quests is pretty easy seeing as we are in the age of Star Trek we can just simply hail Starfleet and talk to the quest giver and hand it in. Saves having to fly back to the person in question and hand it in that way.
So I know this is brief as was my time in the Beta due to the hassle of getting in. However I can say right at the end it seemed to all slot into place. Now I need to play the game for real, I want to boldly go and discover new worlds and races. I hope Cryptic keep adding to this game, refining it and I hope for a real experience soon. Will let you know how get on after my first week of play, I will be in the Head Start which starts on Friday of this week.
Star Trek Online First Impressions pt. 1
Jan 22nd
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.
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