A Bar That Won’t Lead You Astray: The Stray Sheep
D(LC)elightful Treats 05-20-12: Pinball, Supervillains, & Robots
Mother 3 on Consumerism, Art, and Death: “Strange. Funny. Heartrending.”
Kusoge Club – Deadliest Warrior Legends
Hard Corner: BERSERK special
Posted By ChaosD1 about 3 months ago
To boldly go where no reviewer has gone before, except for every other person who’s reviewed a Star Trek property and made that joke, Chaos looks into an old impulse buy that recently went Free-To-Play, “Star Trek Online”.
Follow ChaosD1 or MMO Grinder on Twitter.
Look for MMO Grinder on Facebook.
Also, Visit MMOGrinder.net for episode suggestions, updates and polls.
Cardassian Box: Isn’t cheap, nothing good is on the inside and there’s way more than anyone can deal with…Yup. Makes sense to me!
My money’s on World of Tanks for the next review.
Holy Cow…ya spent 100 bucks on it back then and played it only for a day? o.o;
And wow this is quite a complex game. The options are massive, but wow…the ship battles look like the best part of the game.
Cardassian Box….oh man oh man….. -__-;;
They should sell the keys far cheaper, so a lot more people would buy them instead of making it over a dollar for a 80-90% chance of getting something crappy.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you can try a F2P MMO called Realm of the Mad God. That game has perma death. o.o;
I want to play this
Passing on this one. I’ve forgotten all of my ST lore over the past 15 years & I having grown up in a barren desert has given me a distaste for playing games that don’t have fucktons of plant life in them.
It’s fun for about a month, after that you’ve probably maxed out a character and done everything there is to do.
3 months actually. That’s assuming you can find everything there is to do.
There sticking you with only one character slot now? Ouch. Great review. You covered quite a lot in a short time. Still a lot you didn’t cover but given the size and level requirements that’s understandable. Now if the game will only give me a Science ship that doesn’t look slightly…special.
Actually due to several comments I received from various sources, you actually start with 2 character slots, but you only get the second one for your Klingon character once you reach level 25. I still feel that 2 slots is pretty stifling, though.
I’ve amended the video proper now.
Agreed. The “at lvl 25″ part make even more so. Blame it on one of the few things perfect would could implement i suppose. Cryptic and Atari already had covered most ways to get you to pay more when it was still subscription.
Cheers on making the update. I don’t know many reviewers who take the time to do that.
Just a few clarifications:
The shaking is an option.
You can delete the federation character, and make a new Klingon, but I could also do this, I think because I had a character on my cryptic account.
In space, you can customize the power load-outs with the button that looks like a bunch of cards.
The crafting uses the bank too so you can just stick the stuff in there.
The Klingons dont use the “Cruiser/Escort/Science vessel” system of ships, but I cant decipher what it was replaced with as I haven’t put much time into my Klingon alt.
Also I loved this episode, because I’ve been addicted to this game.
You know I always start a new account just to approach the game from the freshest experience possible if I’ve already played it, but I just checked to see if my old Cryptic account was still active.
It is. …wow, I never made it past level 4.
As saintnicster below me also stated, I still have my Red Matter Capicator… and I somehow managed to score a second one. I might take this character to level 10 just so see if I have any major differences.
I was also told on Blip that the second character slot unlocks once you reach level 25, but I have yet to confirm this. If I find out this is true, I’ll amend the video proper.
Not sure if anyone has told you yet, but you do get a free character slot for the Klingon character at lvl 25 and it can only be used for a Klingon character.
I don’t know about other players, but I’ve found it very easy to lvl up fast. Back when I played WoW, It took me about 4-5 months to reach the lvl 70 cap (this was before WotLK) and in STO it me took me about 3-4 weeks to hit the lvl. 50 cap. Those Mirror universe events that appear daily give out an insane amount of EXP and ther’re pretty easy to do. Since you can complete the PVE instance as many times as you can before times up (the event stays open for 1 hour each time) you can gain close to 3 lvls before the event closes.
One thing that bothers me a little bit about the cryptic points system is that unless you’re a gold member (subscriber) you need to pay(forgot how much) in order to reset your skill points (re-spec) and I think that even gold member only get one free re-spec token per rank. Now this isn’t bad say the first three times, but if you are someone that re-specs a lot then those costs can easily pile up.
A “few” comments (as someone who also bought the collector’s edition, then quit after a few months)
The collector’s edition came with a couple of in-game items, as well as the box stuff. TNG and DS9 uniforms, and a “red matter capacitor” that allows to dump extra power into all systems. Obtainable through the “Legacy Unlocks” tab of the C-Store if you still have that old account.
Screen shaking can be turned off in the options. It is very annoying, but easy to disable.
Power levels can be manually tweaked to different levels. You click the little “double box”y icon next to enable a different UI style with more sliders. You can also save these values into one of the original presets, if you’d like.
360 combat styles – yeah, it’s best to think of it more as a
“Turning around” in sector space. My biggest piece of advice that you should drop your speed momentarily if you want to turn. Sometimes, it’s even better to drop into reverse, back up a little, then go at it. Woo, 3 point turns
Long missions – though they don’t always look like it, you can often exit out of a mission if you are in the second or third part, and revisit.
Anomaly scanning – you can use the arrow keys to move the waves up and down a heck of a lot faster than just using the UI. It’s something that they explain to you in the Memory Alpha tutorial (available after level 10, iirc)
Inventory – you get banks spaces available to you at the star base (and from other various places). I always store the commodities and crafting mats there. Your missions (and crafting tables) are smart enough to pull from the bank, so you don’t have to worry about always carrying everything with you. Also, I believe you
Selling at the replicator will give you back a percentage less than if you were to take it to an NPC, as an FYI
Kits will give you more abilities once you are higher in level.
Slow travel – Space is big. Really big
Your ships do get a bit faster as you level up, and there are engineering skill point abilities that can augment your speed as well.
I think that the Duty Officer system is what really was able to keep my interest in the game.
You get dilithium,self skill points, BOff Skill points, and energy credits. Also, the occasional buff for critical successes on shipboard engineering feats. You also can get get items, too. Some officers can be assigned to “active duty” where they are permanently buffing you (or giving a chance for a buff). There really isn’t a down side to using the system.
Heck, on my character that just got to cap, the last few levels were almost purely from the DOff stuff. I didn’t really have time to invest into missions, but I did have 10 or 20 minutes here and there over a week to drop in and fiddle with stuff.
herp derp, incomplete thoughts -.-
360 degree combat styles – yeah, it’s best to think of it more as a battle between capital ships, as opposed to the various fighters. yeah, not really an excuse, but the best that I’ve got. Probably why I stopped typing
Inventory – don’t remember what the last sentence was supposed to be, so best to drop it -.-
There’s a few solutions to slow travel… but they come fairly late-game.
First, there’s the Transwarp system. If you progress your Diplomacy rank, you’ll get options to Transwarp to more places than just Earth. Unfortunately, Diplomacy takes a while to progress, and all Transwarp locations share the same four-minute cooldown timer (which only recharges while you’re playing and on your ship).
At Commander (level 20), you can purchase the Excelsior-class (from Search for Spock) from the store, and that ship lets you use the Transwarp system to jump to different sector blocks instead of different space stations. There’s an Admiral-grade version as well, if you like it better than the other late-game ships. However, this costs money and (like in Search for Spock) may fail on you.
At Admiral (the last 10 levels of the game), several more options become available. Besides the Admiral-level Excelsior refit, by completing the Special Task Force raids, you can eventually trade in reward tokens for Borg-tech engines, which remove the Warp we’re-rounding-it-to-10 speed cap. At the final level (Vice Admiral), you get access to a special skill wherein you use the slipstream drive from Voyager, which bumps you up to Warp 20 for half a minute, but kills your turn rate while active (obviously, use it to cross sectors after you set your heading). Both of these have the advantage that if you bothered to put points into an otherwise mostly-useless skill (Driver Coil), these speed boosters stack with that skill, pushing you to Warp 20 with Borg engines and Warp 30 with the slipstream drive (the engines and the slipstream don’t stack, however). The obvious main drawback with this, however, is that this is high level gear. STO levels fairly quickly, especially if you use the duty officers, but you’re still going to be spending quite a while staring at your Warp 10 drive wondering why infinite speed isn’t so infinite.