I got into this game after being disappointed by Star Trek Into Darkness this summer. I’ve had a great time with it and take a certain amount of pride that to date I have not spent a dime on it. The setting feels very “Star Trek”, if a Star Trek set so far in the future, decades after (ech) Voyager, that all the Federation citizens feel like the TOS and TNG era were a golden age. Now, the utopian ideals of the Federation have eroded to the point where there’s a constant war with the Klingons, there are incursions from the Borg and those Mirror Universe weirdos all the time, and most encounters end with the enemy getting exploded.
Which is a pretty good setting for an MMO.
The Duty Officer game almost feels like I was leveling my character too quickly, but here he is, the chubby little admiral, in his latest ship, the Most Infrangible. (The earlier ships all were the Infrangible. As I earned each new ship the previous one was renamed to The Old Infrangible, The Older Infrangible, the Eldest Infrangible, and so on. No doubt this will give military historians the fits.)
Spoiler for the vastness of space
After I got to level 40 or so I started diving into the Foundry system. It is more complex than the old Adventure Game Creator I had for the Apple IIe back in the day. The missions you can create are still bound by the objectives “kill enemies”, “interact with object”, and “dialog with character”, but some fan creators can wring out some really great missions under those parameters. The learning curve was steep and mostly officially undocumented, but again fans have put together some great tutorials. It took me about two months to put the finishing touches on my first mission, “Nausicaans in the Valley of Wind”. I thought I was showing great restraint by not including any Kirk/Spock slash fic, but there’s always the next mission for that. Unfortunately, finishing the mission put me in the position of an awkward LARPer. That is, you finish a mission and you are in the same spot as an unpublished author in the real world. Yes, there’s a new mission, but with so many missions of bad, dubious, or great content, who gives a shit? Even to get your mission easily searchable in the Foundry database, it needs to be played and reviewed by five strangers. That’s what I mean by LARPing; suddenly this MMORPG has become some kind of social game. “Bring back [0/5] reviews to win this quest.” This system is good to help weed out subliterate trash and outright spam, but it’s difficult to get casual players to review untested missions. For a third time, fans come to the rescue. The official game forum has threads where folks can trade reviews, scratching each others’ backs so their missions can get reviewed and improved. Some fan missions win the coveted Foundry Spotlight award, which gives regular players even more experience for playing them.
It’s been a fun ride, and it’s nice to play around at being an authorized fanfic author. The Duty Officer minigame and Foundry alone are enough to keep me interested in it. If I had to subscribe to the game, I’d probably drop it, but as long as it’s Free To Play, I’ll stick around. Maybe eventually they’ll get me to throw in a few dollars.