You can make earl grey anytime you want in the replicator.
Dejin
1602
I didn’t check for that. How appropriate!
How does that work? I thought the replicator was only for selling things, not making items.
And don’t you get a substance that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?
Dejin
1604
There’s a bunch of preset items that you can buy at the replicator. IIRC mostly items which give small buffs and heals for ground combat.
Took me about five minutes of fighting borg in the station, and another five minutes of getting dragged into borg space encounters, before I managed to escape and get back to exploring. No borg in Delta Valonis!
I’ve done enough fleet actions already that I didn’t need these very much and the all but impossible to kill borg at Sol Starbase were just an annoyance. Nobody was coordinating any kind of defense at all in there so it felt a little pointless.
Though I did manage to kill one before I split. Somebody hit him with an expose attack and I snuck an exploit in on him.
In the zone i was in for the 5 minutes i checked it out, there was a bunch of people in the starting place near the door to the admiral area making what looked like a last stand against the borg. It was actually pretty cool, a large number of players bunched up, beams flying everywhere, people falling left and right and through out it all, the constant cheer…
“Don’t let them take sulu, if he becomes a borg nobody will be able to find him!”
I was too low to really do anything, but my split beam rifle was pretty damn good. It was an uncommon split beam rifle mk VI with radiation damage. While i hugely prefer a high damage low cooldown single target exploit attack with 6s cd, a high damage dual exploit attack with a 8-10s cd isn’t that bad either.
Rant: why does every weapon except a very small number of pistols have to have an area effect special. Variety cryptic, variety and i don’t want to be forced to use a pistol for a good special. Sniper rifles aren’t bad either, but not as good, although probably my favorite weapon type for my player.
JM1
1607
Well you did all decide to go to Sol, for the worst possible odds you could face!
So now that OB is over, who is gonna play in Headstart?
Benhur
1612
How is that going to work? Can those of us who were in the beta just log in on Friday as usual or do we have to do anything else to log in? How long do we have to purchase the full game before our account is no good?
Dejin
1613
AIUI if you have a pre-order code entered you’ll login on Friday as usual starting at 10am PST. I’m assuming there will be a lengthy patch you’ll need to download (or at least I’m hoping there will be!), and you’ll need to create a new character.
You need to have purchased the full game and have entered in a pre-order code for the head start. There is a grace period before you’ll need to enter in your retail code from the actual box, in case you’re buying hardcopy, not digital, but you must have already received a pre-order code and entered it. So in other words, if you pre-order through say Amazon, and the actual box doesn’t show up for 2-3 days after February 2, they won’t cut you off. But if you don’t enter the retail code in a week or so, they may cut off access.
I think they’ve actually given specific dates by which time the retail code needs to be entered, but I don’t see them off-hand.
I think they’ve extended the headstart to 8 days or so in the EU, where our games come out on the friday.
Release day patch is supposed to be in the region of 300mb, according to a post by the patcher/launcher dev on the STO forums. And it should be up in advance of the headstart, probably some time on thursday.
Benhur
1615
Ok, great, from what I remember this is what they did for City of Heroes. I got my preorder box from Target so I should be good to go on Friday, and I have to say I’m pretty excited.
In many ways it is unlike any MMO I’ve played before, which is a good thing. I was very “meh” about the game until very recently and just started the open beta last Friday, which gave me about two days to play around with it. I spent more time with it than I have with a game in quite a loing time, and I was sorry the beta had to end. Yes, the game needs a lot of fixes (server stability was pretty bad those few days, and there were some really weird bugs) and even the UI needs some tweaking, but I know those porblems will eventually be addressed and the game was very playable and very fun (yes, fun). I actually like the low difficulty since I’m only a casual player and I don’t want to have to play the game for a year before I get a decent ship - though I really liked my light cruiser. I also liked the ground combat which was a nice change of pace and felt very much like Star Trek to me. In fact, most missions took about an hour to complete and included a nice balance of space and ground stuff, making each mission feel like an episode of Star Trek. That is the game’s biggest appeal to me; I really feel like I’m playing a Star Trek game rather than some generic MMO.
Yeah, they really nailed that. I did a few story mission chains in the few days that I was on, and stuff like the Undine chain played out just like a Star Trek episode. I like a lot of the more random missions too, though–exploration missions, or generic patrols where they send you to a system and anything could happen.
I was expecting this game to be terrible, but I have to say, I’m mildly impressed. Enough to give it a whirl for the first month, anyway.
I’m in with both feet. I think I’ll be settling into the missions forum. I’ve got shelves of RPG stuff I can dig through to come up with suggestions and ideas for missions and that’s what I care most about so far, especially Exploration.
That’s got so much potential but it would be so easy to screw up. There needs to be more variety but they really need to keep the breezy pace to it rather than getting too bogged down in various plot devices or narrative. I was all along hoping this would work, Genesis and the NPC crew aspects were always what had me most excited (along with the potential for multiplayer ships but I’m less convinced than I was that those are essential - ask me why!), and they seem to have built up a great framework that only will get exponentially better as they add to it. Each new thing (whether mission type or graphical planetary/system element, planetary ambient audio, or original alien faction) makes each existing element less common and, thus, inherently more interesting.
I just hope to God they don’t lose focus. Everything else, except for the crews angle, has been done before to one extent or another in some other MMO. Nobody’s done anything like Genesis before and made it work. Even Cryptic. This is such a leap from their old City of Heroes radio missions. I’d almost have not thought it possible as much as I wanted it to be.
This quote definitely needs to be on the box.
Aki
1620
I’m in for sure. I am hoping Brian Rucker or somebody else with the knowledge can post a link or an “executive summary” of the Star Trek plotline at the time this game is set. I’m a fairly casual Star Trek fan, in that I used to watch TOS when I was a kid, probably saw about 2/3 of TNG and DS9, and have seen all of the movies. I never watched Voyager.
While it’s not my primary reason for playing, I would like to have the ability to rp my federation character while playing the game. I’ve never been too interested in MMO rp that consists of hanging out emoting plotlines or whatever. The most fun I’ve ever had with rp in an MMO was back in the good old days of Guardians of the Golden Age in City of Heroes. We ran around and played the game in character… I’m hoping to be able to do the same thing in STO: but currently have no idea (despite playing about 1.5 weeks of the open beta) the precise setting of this game.
