Well, this final Choose My Adventure for this year has certainly been a journey. For a couple of reasons. First, I’ve gotten through the other side of the Victory is Life story missions in Star Trek Online. Second, I’ve had some time to get to know a new kind of starship in the game.
In terms of how I feel at the end of it all, I can summarize by saying that I still don’t know how this game is meant to work, but at least I have a bit more appreciation for it now, and most of that is focused on the game’s storyline beats.
I’ll begin with the ship that I picked up, which ended up being one of the two carriers that were available to me for my requisition token. After some consultation with a very intelligent, kind, helpful, and magnificent member of the MOP team, I elected to go for the Orion Marauder flight deck carrier because it sounded like it would be a playstyle that I would jive with. Also it was the least ugly of the two choices in its class.
Prior to this point, the most unique ship I’ve ever had my hands on was the Cnidarian Defender. The other times I’ve played STO, it was always the bog standard ships that you were given access to as you leveled up. Granted, the Orion was also pretty standard, but it was the gameplay style of summoning and supporting attack craft that felt new.
So obviously I was blown up almost immediately in my first engagement commanding her.
There were a few hurdles I had to clear before I started to get something vaguely resembling competency with this ship. The first was once again puzzling my way through the variety of ship abilities and arranging them on my hotbar in such a way that it made some sort of logical sense. The second was figuring out what these little fighters were all about and how I was meant to interplay with them.
Near as I could figure, this ship was kind of like playing a Mastermind in City of Heroes with even less command input. There were general orders that they would follow, but all I ended up primarily doing was setting them to attack mode, usually because they were turning into explosions before I could call them back to repair. I didn’t feel the need to do that anyway considering the two bays to summon more had a pretty fast cooldown. Kill ’em all you want, Hur’q ships; I’ll just make more.
Over time I started to kind of understand how the carrier gameplay was meant to work, at least in the ship that I chose. Sure, I was also laying fire into my targets, but a lot of what I was doing was sort of trying to provide wide buffs or debuffs to support my little fleet of dummies. Especially considering the fact that my ship felt like it was made of tissue paper once enemies were focusing fire on my space potato.
I started to get my head around it all, but just as I feel about the aforementioned Mastermind, I don’t know that I’m a huge fan of this either. Maybe it would have been better if I’d gone for the hideous carrier instead, but there’s something about pet classes in MMOs that just feel really bad to me, and STO’s version of it wasn’t enough to change my mind. I didn’t necessarily hate my time with the Orion, but I also wasn’t enjoying what’s otherwise a far more entertaining part of this game’s combat experience. Still, it was good that I at least gave it a nice fair shake.
While the carrier ship didn’t really delight me too much, the Victory is Life story missions did. I’m genuinely glad that I was asked to stick it out by the polls because things started to get a lot more interesting and entertaining once I got over the hump that it felt like I was at in my last write-up. I was not really expecting the turns it took and found it reached a pretty satisfying close. I also was not expecting a Ferengi heist caper. What a delightful surprise that was!
I suppose I have to thank the additional context I was starting to get from watching episodes of Deep Space Nine proper. I haven’t gotten too far into the point when the Dominion was being introduced, but I do think I got far enough to where a little more backstory was provided that helped me appreciate the events of this series of missions more. I believe I’m at the point when Odo is going to be told he’s one of the Founders.
There are a few things that I still dislike about STO as a game. Most of those are fixated on the ground combat, but also some of those are related to the shoddy-feeling engine it uses for its in-game cutscenes. STO is not a particularly pretty game, and Cryptic seems to be in love with forcing garbage game engines to do things they were never meant to do because they’re the cheapest thing off of the shelf. When there were dramatic moments in the story, they fell to absolute pieces because of the game’s inability to create facial expressions that didn’t look like they were made by old Gumby animators – if they animated at all.
Still, in spite of the… that, I was enjoying myself and I’m glad that I got through Victory is Life. It was fun. I had a good time and I thank you fine readers for encouraging me to see it all through.
Will I be sticking it out after this goes to print? I’m not so sure. Again, STO doesn’t come off as a really bad MMORPG, but I also contend that it’s kind of worse than middling (and y’all know how I appreciate middling games). I think the missing puzzle piece is having people to play alongside – as is understanding half of what the hell it is I’m doing in combat. I can just never shake the sense that I’m sort of reaching understanding but not quite, like the game is changing the answers to the questions as I go along.
It culminates in a sense of confusion and slight disappointment. I’m not angry, nor am I discouraged. I just am lost, and nothing in the game is telling me what I’m looking at. It was sort of like mentioning that I liked the look of a Warhammer figurine, and somebody reading me a novel about how to use it in tabletop battle scenarios under the assumption I know anything about that.
Ah well. We’re moving on. Next week I’ll be doing the customary look back at all of the CMAs we took together, but for now it’s time to decide where we’re going at the start of 2025.
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Polling ends at the usual time of 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, December 27th. For now, I’m going to take a break. This week has felt like a month. Until then, I hope you all have some happy holiday time, or if you’re unable to celebrate, then I hope the next few days are kind to you.
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.
