So, first thing’s first: I wasn’t really able to spend excessive time in Star Trek Online this weekend. It was not just a holiday weekend but also my birthday weekend, and that kind of left me with bare time to dig into this MMO like I really wanted to. Regardless, I was still able to follow the will of the polls and start a new character as ordered, and boy did I go with the new-new. Or at least new-new to me.
Back in 2018, the MMO put out the Victory is Life update, which included the playable Jem’Hadar, which… I vaguely recall? I certainly think they were a thing with the Kilrathi and the Hur’q but I’m also very likely misremembering things because made-up dumb names are swirling together in the toilet of my mind. Still, it was new to me, and since this was a very new character, that’s what I went with.
Once I got through the extremely underwhelming character creation portion of my rubber head makeup-wearing friend (all the better to get through this game’s crappy music faster), I was thrust into a pretty interesting little opening mission that had me facing off against everyone’s favorite buggy friends. Turns out, it was all a simulation, though, and I was given the rank of First – what I presume to be Captain in Jem’Hadar society – and told to do stuff by Odo and some other fella with a giant head.
I’ll pause here and perhaps apologize in advance if all of this reads as extremely reductive. I don’t mean to toss cold water on this whole narrative thing, but it is all deeply silly. Which is really the point of Star Trek; this series has always been a balancing act between hopeful looks to the future and extremely goofy episodic plotlines, even when they were trying to skew serious. I promise I was having a good time.
Anyway, once I got through the rigmarole of reassigning my keybinds, arranging my hotbars, and trying to understand just what in the actual hell any of my abilities actually do by reading the tooltips, I pressed forward with my mission steps. Overall this whole opening sequence really seemed geared more for established STO players than for neophytes, and fortunately, I’m more of the former. I have played this game several times before and more or less knew what I was doing.
So I knew to switch to the mouselook control scheme to try to make ground missions more engaging and came to grips with my chosen ship type. This time around I went with engineering, which is a captaincy style I have never experienced before, but at this early stage I’m not sure that there’s a lot to its flavor – especially with the weapons my starter ship was fielding. I had turrets, photon torpedoes, and somewhere on my ship’s hull were fitted a pair of cannons that fired gigantic lighting bolts like some sort of Korean MMO’s version of a Wizard.
By the end of the mission series, I was pretty much feeling like I was back in the saddle. The confusing, esoteric, weird saddle. STO has never done a good job of explaining what its damage types, debuffs, buffs, or other underlying systems actually do, and that’s a feeling that has pervaded my experience with the game even though I’ve made a max level Federation character. But whatever. It’s still pretty early days. And I have wizard cannon.
At the end of the opening mission series, I was told to either align with the Federation or the Klingon Defense Force. Since I hadn’t really dug in to the KDF side of things, I elected to go with that side, if only to see something possibly new. Otherwise, I’m mostly dealing with stuff spawning from Deep Space Nine, particularly the quadrant-wide threat that the Hur’q poses. Which meant I was naturally drawn into that most fun of narrative events: a summit of NPCs.
Yippee.
I promise that I’m not just being vinegary here. I do really like to play STO, and I am curious to see where this whole story segment of the game goes. I just wish I didn’t feel as if I were managing to fumble my way through a mirror maze on pure dumb luck. At some point or another, I have got to learn how to read this messy LCARS interface and learn what these buttons freaking do. Who knows… maybe this time will be different? But I’m not sure it will. Doesn’t hurt to try, though!
If all of this reads like I’m kind of moving on rails, well, you’d be right, but then that’s not a surprise considering STO is a themepark MMORPG. That said, there is at least an option that I can provide in the polls for this week, and it’s all about internet spaceships.
As you fine folks have no doubt noticed, STO has been handing out a T6 battlecruiser for a limited time, which means that I’ve got access to another ship in the line. On top of that, I figured out (through a lot of Googling and bulling my way through this game’s stupid UI) that I can bring my Space Jelly to this character as well. So that means I’ve got to figure out what spacecraft to field. And by that I mean you all have to decide for me. Because that’s how polls work.
Loading ...
Polling will wrap up at 1:00 p.m. EST as usual on Friday, December 6th, also as usual. Until then I’m going to spend some more time with my family. They’re not nearly as confusing as STO’s stat sheets and UI can be, that’s for sure.
Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.
