Yeah, let me see one of those boring ugly new ships so I’m not tempted to log back in.
They actually are boring and ugly. You’re missing nothing. Also, having a lifetime sub precludes me from the nice email, which I wouldn’t have used anyway. The Delta expansion was too much cash grabbing for me, I never looked back.
Admiral Slug-Nutty of the USS Gordon (Boring and Ugly)
Not one of the new ships, but my rather pretty T5 fleet sci ship, USS Challenger (and captain, with her trusty crew, who she’s been through many adventures with :) ):-
T5-U Tactical Odyssey. USS Brooklyn. Original, ain’t it?
Well, you guys suckered me into logging back in to see what’s up, and I realized that I have completely forgotten how to play this game. Like, at all. I can barely fly the ship and forgot what all those hot keys do. Back to remedial video gaming for me I guess.
Last time I fired up STO, that’s exactly how I felt. I started a new character, played through the tutorial and first half-dozen or so missions like a complete newb, and then felt up to trying my main guy again.
Yeah, I’m still getting my space legs back. Happily they appear to have made it so that once you set up your hot keys you can lock the panel. I wanted to spend some time playing today, but Marvel Heroes just updated…
Hmm, yeah, that’s some pretty disappointing space porn so far.
-Tom
So guess what? I switch sectors and the presets are all gone. Just like always. Locking the tray does nothing. Fuck this shit.
Tom wants Space Porn. Tom gets Space Porn.
Apologies, but I’m having to play on my i3 Surface Pro 3, which explains the graphics. Still, considering it’s a very lower-power i3 with integrated graphics, the game runs fairly well at the SP3’s native resolution of 2560x1440. But when you get in some of these insane battles, the frame rates can die, especially if there are dozens of player starships unloading into a giant dreadnought.
This was during a battlespace with at least 20-30 other players going up against AI. USS Fearless in action around the Dyson Sphere.
I haven’t played much since my character hit 50, but I did participate in some of the seasonal events. So, apart from the freebie ships that everyone gets while leveling up, all I have are some of the event ships.
Breen heavy raider. When I started playing again over the summer, this was the ship I used. Hard to tell from the screenshot, but this ship is quite small, on par with the smaller escorts.
Ferengi warship. This was the ship I just picked up during the summer event. The fore side is on the left; to my eyes, the ship looks like it’s flying backwards.
The bridge has access to banking and trading consoles, and even has a Dabo table. Those ferengi really know how to kit out a warship.
Breen carrier. I haven’t used this ship at all. It’s probably very nice, but I’m not sure my tac captain can use its potential the way an eng or sci captain would.
edit Images are 1920x1080, open an image in a new tab if you want to get a better look at a ship.
At the risk of boring Tom further with non-space-porn-related STO trivia, I got another email with another code the other day. Apparently the reason my previous one didn’t work was because they’d cocked something up. I’ve now got the treats. Yay!
As always, it’s enjoyable to dip into this again for a while. Enjoying the Delta story at the moment - real Voyager crew voice acting!!! Makes a change from the truly lamentable VO that the Cryptic games all suffer from, it’s like night and day, and actually quite cool to hear all Tuvok, Neelix, Kim, the Doctor, etc., etc. talking specially to you!
In fact, for my money, apart from the annoying PWI lockbox shit and what it’s done to this game (which you just have to blank out if you want to enjoy it at all) the things that have always let this game down are the terrible VO and the blocky, cartoonish character models with their jerky animation (including the awful head animations you get when people come up on comms). The jerky animation shows up particularly badly in the cutscenes. However, if you can get past that, the storylines and the combat (both space and ground) are actually … well, quite good fun. Even the cutscenes, although they suffer from the bad animation and (normally) atrocious voice-acting, they’re cinematically well done within those limitations.
Cryptic have made another cool change - on the star map zones (where you travel between stars) they’ve implemented actual mini solar systems, which look quite good, and are much more immersive to travel between (quite varied-looking too).
I’d be fine with the lockboxes if Cryptic didn’t flash on your screen every time some sucker unlocked one. This isn’t a Vegas casino.
By the way, apparently the players did the math and the odds of actually unlocking one of those lockbox ships is something like 1.25%. Which means you can easily blow $80-$100 on keys (1 key = $1) for one of those ships. Yeah, fuck that.
With that said, yeah, this game is really bordering on pretty damn good game otherwise. The space battle mechanics are excellent, and there are no so many variables that can go into a starship build that it opens the doors to a lot of customization.
The animations do suck, though. Ground is otherwise forgettable, but the space pew pew is where it’s at.
It is annoying that the game is unplayable at the moment due to severe lag. Something somewhere broke.
I’m totally on board with the stupidness of the on screen lockbox announcements. However, you can very simply turn them off.
other good tips: Quality of Life Tips in STO
“Fly In Messages: Under notification settings in the chat options wheel and from below the minimap using the triangle dropdown, you can uncheck Gameplay announcements for both chat and fly-in. Among other things, this removes the lockbox ship spam.”
It’s little things like that that make me think warmly of the Cryptic crew - even though they’re under the thumb of their chicken overlords, they do seem to try their best, within the limitations undoubtedly imposed on them, to keep some element of classic MMO immersion in the game, for those who want it.
This is the mmo I really regret never got to play well, the rest can burn, but this was a fun one
Turns out that I had ancient Zen burning a hole on my wallet. So I got a Tier 6 Alita Heavy Escort Carrier. Seems to have fixed my settings issue, somehow. Fun to fly with the right equipment.
Between a massive windstorm that knocked out power yesterday in Seattle and the Level 3 outage that’s wreaking havoc on Internet traffic, it was almost impossible to play this weekend. Sigh.
If you’re used to any of the heavy escort class I can’t recommend the escort carrier enough. I’ve been in a lot of battles where I just forget to deploy the fighters and win due to sheer firepower from multiple dual tetryon cannons and a chroniton torpedo forward. As well, I have 3 360 turrets in the rear spot and one 250 degree beam. Great firepower for jousting