Reilly2040's Blog

Well, the NDA got lifted in time for this weekend’s big stress test inviting on pretty much anyone who was interested in getting a beta code, so I can finally talk about how much I’ve been loving Star Wars The Old Republic.

Being a huge fan of the previous Knights of the Old Republic games, I’ll be honest,the news that Knights of the Old Republic 3 had been canned in favour of a new MMO that wouldn’t be continuing that story was a bit disappointing.  Set 300 years later though, there’s still nods to the previous games (specifically the leader of the Jedi Council Satele Shan being a direct descendant of Bastilla, and rumours that Revan’s eventual fate will be revealed by the game), and it retains the same kind of strong story telling that you’d expect from a Bioware RPG.   Truthfully, I think they’ve done a great job of taking the gameplay of the first two games, and turning it into an MMO.

Its reported that the game may be the most expensive ever made, and to be honest it shows.  The environments are rich, with my character recently arriving on Coruscant to some brilliant visuals of its impressive skyline, filled with traffic, and the appearance of the familiar Senate Hall imposing.

Of course, a lot has been said about the fact that all dialogue has been recorded as voice over, and again its brilliantly done.  The voice acting is top notch, and it really helps to immerse you in the world.  The cutscenes whenever you pick up or hand in a mission serve to move the story along and involve you more fully in events than the usual basic text would’ve done.   By the end of it, you really start investing in the characters and it breathes life into the world.  Again providing a great balance between a single player RPG and an MMO.

I’ve also been incredibly impressed with the amount of content on offer.  In the game there are the two factions (Republic and Sith Empire) as you’d expect, and 4 classes within each of these, including all those you’d expect with Jedi, Bounty Hunters, Smugglers and Sith.  However each of these 8 classes has its own unique storyline, just begging you to roll alts in order to get the full story of what’s going on.  For example, one thing I loved is that something you stumble across in the opening mission as a Jedi Knight actually forms the main story if you’re playing a Jedi Consular.  And likewise a throwaway detour to a Twi’lek village as a Consular forms a big part of the Knight’s storyline.  And each of the areas is filled with side quests, so you’re never short of something to do, and that’s before you get into group events like Flashpoints, or PvP.  Neither of which I’ve actually tried yet, as I’ve been so engrossed in the main stories and trying out different classes.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have been playing for a few weeks now, and I’m totally hooked.   I’ve been at a point  where my game time in Star Trek Online has been decreasing due to the lack of updates over this last year.  and there just seems to be so much more to do in Old Republic.  I can see me being hooked in a big way once it properly goes live.

Or, why I cancelled my Star Trek Online Subscription…

My intention here is not to have some kind of “Wahhh!  Rage Quit!” post.  Indeed the opposite is very true.  I fully intend to keep playing the game and making purchases from the C-Store, as I still really enjoy playing Star Trek Online.  Neither is this a post about how clearly the game has failed, as its going free to play.  Nope.  Figures from various other MMOs that have done the same have shown the games are far more profitable when they lose the subscription model and rely on microtransactions, including Cryptic’s own Champions Online which has enjoyed a whole new lease of life since going free to play.  I wholeheartedly expect Star Trek Online to continue to be around for years to come, and continue to grow as a game with the new income this will generate.

So why the cancellation?  Well, some background.

Without meaning to be overly harsh, I think its fair to say this hasn’t been the best year for the game.  After enjoying its fortunes turning around with the featured episodes, and the promise of a restructure to allow those featured episodes to become a permanent feature in the second half of the year, the game was the strongest it had ever been, with loads of players turning up every Saturday to play the new missions.  Then  everything went a bit wrong.  Atari decided to sell off Cryptic, and suddenly all the hope of new staff dried up.  With no new staff, and the future of the company in doubt, suddenly the new mission content dried up as well.

I would hope its fair to say, that most of the community were pretty understanding of this at the time.  Once it was clear that there was some sort of sale of the company going on, most seemed to respect that the staff were signed to NDAs.    Eventually word came through that Cryptic had been purchased by Perfect World, and everyone was hopefull that we’d now start to see the promised Featured Episodes, the launch of the Enterprise-F, and the long-in-development Duty Officer System (something I was especially looking forward to) all start to appear on Tribble for testing.

Then the news leaked out, via a conference call that STO was going free to play.  While the game going free to play had been expected (following the success of Champions Online), I think its fair to say that most hadn’t expected it until next year sometime. However, again I think all-in-all the forums were largely understanding of the benefits that going free to play would bring to the game for everyone.

And then Cryptic released their “Free to Play Matrix“.  Now to those who don’t play the game, the differences between the Silver and Gold accounts may look reasonable, but there’s an issue.  Practically speaking for players, there’s very little benefit to having a gold account.  Sure, you get extra inventory and Bridge Officer slots, and you get a C-Store points stipend, however quickly players realised that this wasn’t really promising a lot.   As a silver player, according to some of the maths done by various people, if you invest 2 months worth of subscription costs into C-Store points, you can buy replacement inventory, bank and bridge officer slots for those lost by downgrading.  Yes, you lose Foundry access, but Silver members can still buy one slot to create a mission in, and as someone who’s played with the Foundry, but has never really released anything, I can say that this isn’t a big problem.  Sure, if you really get into writing and publishing missions, you’ll have to subscribe, but for most casual players of the game, this isn’t something they’ll particularly miss.

You do lose access to your Veteran Rewards, but again, Character and Ship slots can be purchased to make up anything you lose, other than a few things (a couple of nice veteran uniforms, a ship firework device, and a Captain’s Yacht shuttlecraft).

Then, came what seemed to be the final straw for the forums.  The announcement that the Featured Episodes were being further delayed, as was the Duty Officer System.  Now rather than see a release to the live server, they were to be held back, and only available via the Free to Play beta server.  No new content would go live until after the Free to Play launch.  So now, the only way players would get any new mission content would be to beta test the Free to Play release. To say players were unhappy would be generous.

The forums as they stand are probably the most hostile I can ever remember them being. Even the die hard fans of the game (which I would count myself among) are struggling to defend Cryptic’s current track record of undelivered content with all the delays, and promises that such-and-such will go live once feature X is done.  Only for feature X to be released, then that same content to be delayed for feature Y.

There are also the interviews with staff. The forums are pretty much united in feeling there isn’t enough between silver (free) and gold accounts to justify the cost of the ongoing subscription. Yet the responses to this seem to make clear that the current direction favours focusing on securing a large number of free players, all buying items via microtransaction versus looking after those players who have subscribed over the last year and a half/two years. From a financial standpoint there’s no denying it makes sense, however it does feel wrong that after sticking with the game and the company throughout the troubles this year has brought, we’re being ignored. At the very least it would be nice to feel that someone was listening to the concerns of the community, but questions about the gold/silver split are quickly deflected by talk of how much money free players will bring into the game.  Ignoring the fact that the current model will see the benefits of that money go to both types of account equally.  Surely courting those players that will pay a monthly subscription in addition to buying C-Store points for extra vanity items (as many of us have been doing since the start of the game) makes sense?

And so today, after a brief discussion with my in game fleet, I came to the decision that makes the most sense to me. My account is currently paid up through to the end of December, which means I’ll enjoy and participate in the free to play beta, and in all likelyhood also enjoy at least a month of gold access once the game goes free. However beyond that, for the sake of some uniforms I just couldn’t justify staying gold financially.

Of course, when my account goes free I’ll incur an initial cost in C-store points to equip my character with the bank and inventory they’ve lost, but all my other purchased ships and uniforms will remain. Sadly my intention over the next couple of months had been to use money I’d been putting aside to buy a lifetime subscription, but that doesn’t currently make sense any more, when a fraction of that money will keep me in C-store points for a good while.

This is not me stopping to support the game. I have no doubt that it’ll continue to be one of my main games, and I fully intend to continue purchasing new ships and other goodies as they become available. However at the moment it doesn’t really feel like I’m valued as a monthly subscriber, so I’ll become one of the silver account players instead. I do hope though, that eventually things change and prior to free to play launch there’s something added to the gold accounts that make them feel more worthwhile. It wouldn’t even have to be much. The occasional ship skin or uniform for subscribers for example.  If something like that was to happen, I’d resubscribe in a heartbeat.  However, at this point, it’d be nice to at least have devs properly acknowledge the unhappiness of the community and complaints about the free to play matrix.  But they seem intent on following through on this course of action, despite whatever feedback they get.  Which seems a shame, to attempt a relaunch of the game, with a community that’s pretty hostile.

Of course, I’ll still continue to recommend the game to my friends.  After all, it is a fun game, and once the weekly missions restart, I expect to have a great time playing through whatever new storylines come our way.  But would I recommend anyone subscribe to the game?  No.  Unless you’ve already bought a lifetime, I think it makes more sense to just go free to play, and occasionally invest in some C-Store points whenever something cool comes out that catches your eye.  Which is a sad state of affairs, as I genuinely believe there’s a good team behind this game that cares about it.  But somewhere at the moment, it definitely feels like there’s a disconnect between this game and its community.

To finish with a side thought, with Cryptic currently in development of the new Neverwinter game, it’ll be interesting to see if it goes straight to free to play on its release.

Better late than never, I thought I’d better maintain the tradition, and talk about the big season update that came out for Star Trek Online a month or so back: Crossfire.  Unlike a lot of other MMOs, this doesn’t include new mission content, since Star Trek Online has its Featured Episodes to cover that.  Instead their current direction is for seasons to bring in changes to the technology of the game, that the content will then build on.

So what did they change for season 4?  well, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.  New texture compression technology has increased the detail in the game for no extra hardware requirements, while micro-patching cuts down on the need to download massive game updates.  Instead the game will only patch files as they’re needed.

All of which may not sound as immediately exciting as a swanky new plot arc, but the quality of life it brings to the game is immediately noticeable.

However, the season is called Crossfire, and that’s because of its main event: a complete revamp to the ground combat system in the game.  Values have been tweaked to make the combat faster paced, control responsiveness has been improved and weapons have been redesigned.

And then there’s the new shooter mode.  The traditional ground combat has been retained, and now dubbed the RPG mode, however the devs have implemented a whole alternative combat mode, which gives an FPS style to the game.   Switching to shooter mode allows you to select targets via a targetting cursor on the fly, rather than locking onto a target as is normal in RPG mode.  This allows you to spread out your fire across multiple targets, throw grenades into an area (rather than to a specific target) and brings a more intense experience to the combat.

Ground combat has long been taken as one of the weaker aspects of the game, so to see it receive such a massive overhaul has been a big thing for the game.  It really can’t be understated just how much faster and more immediate ground combat feels, whether you’re playing in shooter mode or not.

It doesn’t end there however.  At the same time as ground combat has been upgraded, so have the Borg.  In preparation for a Borg event, due to start later in the month, the Borg have been brought more in line with the capabilities of their onscreen incarnation.  No longer can you continue to fire at them blindly, as the Borg will now adapt to your weapon after a few shots.  They also now have had their assimilation ability boosted.  Whereas before this simply worked as a hold and slow debuff, now players can be properly assimilated.  If the Borg get their nanoprobes on you, then if you’re not cured quickly by a healer on your away team, then you’ll find yourself assimilated, turning into a drone and attacking your teammates for a short while before being allowed to respawn.

All these changes have made the Borg a much bigger threat than before.  From your ship, you can (and must if you want to survive) replicate a remodulator device that you can use to reset your weapons to make them usable against the Borg once again, and by equipping a second, different weapon type in your second weapon slot, you do give yourself a few more shots before remodulation becomes a must, but if you’re remodulating, that means your weapons won’t work for about 10 seconds (not that they were getting past those Borg shields anyway).  The end result is that the Borg are not only closer to their onscreen abilities, but they’re also a heck of a lot tougher and scarier to face.  Very appropriate for the baddies that take centre stage for the end game content.

The last major change worth talking about, is the Klingon homeworld.  Following the updating of Earth Space Dock back with season 3, Quo’noS has long been in the frame for a similar revamp, and to be honest, it needed it much more than the Starfleet home base.  The previous council chambers frequently felt like wide open rooms, and finding your way around was frequently a pain until you learned where everything was.  For me, the worst part was the high council chamber.  A necessary stop for each major rank, it was a cavernous hall with just a few Klingons standing around.  And that was only after you realised you had to go upstairs to find it.

With season 4, that’s all gone, to be replaced by the First City.  Gone are the empty chambers, and instead there’s now a bustling city for the Klingons to base themselves out of.

Here, the revamped texture compression really shines.  The city is incredibly detailed, and the devs have done a great job making it feel alive.  It perhaps still retains the old issues, of it being a bit tricky to find your way around, however there’s a quest to introduce you to the map, and if you run through that, it shows you where everything is, and since doing it, I’ve found I’ve not struggled nearly as much as I did in the old Qo’noS when it comes to finding stuff.

Its all about the nice little touches in the new map.  I love the street signs, which are in Klingon, but flick to English as you approach them.  A nice combination of usability, while still making it all feel Klingon.  The bank, is a building being run by Ferengi, which I loved, and when you go in, you can look down onto the massive warehouse floor where presumably everyone’s stuff is actually being kept.  The High Council’s chamber finally seems a lot more appropriate too, with its reduced scale and moody lighting.

To be honest, while the Klingon players were jealous of the Earth Spacedock revamp, I now think the Federation player have something to be jealous about.  The developers are just improving things all the time, and while Earth Spacedock is a brilliant base map, the new First City just shows how much the devs keep improving with the tools behind this game.

But, they weren’t just finished with the first city.  Of course, the crowning jewel of Earth Spacedock was its revamped ship requisitions area, and now the Klingons have one of their own.   If you return to the transporter room in the city, you also get an option to beam to the orbital shipyards.

Once there, you see the devs took a leaf out of Earth Spacedock, to give the Klingons their own equivalent.  While it might be a bit of a pain that you need to beam up to it, rather than it being housed in the same area, there’s no doubt that visually, its worth it.  Once you arrive in the shipyard, all the usual NPCs are available for you to buy, equip and customise your ships, however its all about the view.  If you head over to the windows, you get a brilliant view of some Birds of Prey currently docked at the shipyards.   Like the view of the Galaxy Class in Earth Spacedock, its brilliant to see these ships from this perspective, and its really something you need to check out for yourself to see just how good those ships look.

As a final nice touch, as the shipyards are orbital, once you zone into Qo’noS space in your ship, you can ignore the planet, and just fly straight to the ship yards.   A really nice touch.

Of course, all this is just the start of season 4, with lots still to come.  The revamped Borg will be getting highlighted in the upcoming Borg invasion event, as well as the remastered STFs.  And then we’ve got not only the return of the Featured Episodes, but the introduction of the new Duty Officer System, which promises to be a game within itself, and something I’m really looking forward to.  As always, the game is coming forward in leaps and bounds.

One aspect of the game which I finally completed the other week, and is also due for a revamp in the near future, are the three Borg STFs (Special Task Forces).  These form a large portion of the endgame content for players who make it to Rear and Vice Admiral, presenting a harder challenge than the normal gameplay.  These are missions targeting the organised players and require a full team of five to complete, with all five people needing to have some idea of what they’re doing, and the ability to listen to orders from those in the team who know their way around the missions.  Having decent high-end gear is also pretty much a requirement, especially once you get past the initial STF, Infected.   But, as these missions will shortly be getting a make over, I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at them as they stand.  What I liked, and what I disliked.  And then compare this review with the new versions once they come out.

I’ll start with the first of the STFs, Infected.

To be honest, my first few attempts at Infected weren’t overly favourable.  I found it took too long to get through, and the final boss room, which requires platform game style jumping in order to access various force field controls (miss and you fall into instant-death plasma and you’ll have to restart the entire room if the team can’t rez you), just caused a lot of frustration.

That said when broken into parts and done over a couple of nights I found it was much better, and it comes back to what I said about needing to know what you’re doing. Once my fleet had a few successful runs under their belts, strategies were figured out and now we can run Infected at around an hour and its a lot of fun. I think Infected is probably a great introduction to the STFs in that regard. It’s by far the shortest and also has much simpler puzzles. It gets players used to working together in an organised fashion, and gets you used to the idea that these missions are going to require more patience and thought (and failed runs to figure things out).  The mission splits nicely into different parts, with a fun, but not overly difficult space battle to start things out, before beaming down to a Starfleet base under siege by the Borg.  You then have to work your way down into the bowels of the station, fighting through assimilated bosses, before coming face to face with the Borg’s new Locutus-style spokesperson.   When nicely dealt with in stages, this mission becomes a lot of fun, as an expanded version of the kinds of missions you’ve been used to dealing with solo in the game already.

The second STF however, The Cure, remains one of my least favourite missions in the game. I really hate running this STF.

Unlike Infected it doesn’t break down as well into sections and for the most part is one giant ground map with no breaks. I just find it overly long and repetitive with no real fun to be had. Sadly however you need to complete it if you want to play Khitomer Accord.

Most of the action takes place around a series of gates that are controlled by various generators, which must be powered up in sequence, with each generator requiring about 30 seconds to power up, before the next can be triggered.  In the meantime Borg spawns will appear who will attempt to deactivate the generators, and bring with them various tougher Tactical drones who, if they spot you, will cause you no end of grief as you try and stop the worker drones switching off your precious generators.

While I definitely appreciated the attempt to bring a puzzle with a high level of strategy into the game, it just becomes annoying.  The number of failed attempts I ran through in order to try and get past the first few gates really got tiring after a while, and with the length of the whole mission, you need to ensure you’ve put aside about 3 hours to do this all in.  The constant grind of managing to get a couple of the generators activated, only to draw agro from the tactical drones, or fail to kill the workers fast enough can easily become wearing.

The mission also seems to lack the polish of the other STFs, specifically in terms of nice touches like voice overs (which in fairness were rare in the game when these were developed, but did add to the feeling you were running special high-end missions).  In Infected for example you get Manus of Borg taunting you as you work your way through the levels of the station, or there are various computer announcements that tie into the puzzles in Khitomer Accord.  The Cure comes across much less involving in comparison.

Out of all the Borg STFs this is the one most clearly needing the upcoming revamp, and I can’t wait to see what Gozer (the developer in charge of the STFs) has done to it.  I have no real problem with these endgame missions being longer, or trickier, but when they just get repetitive and frustrating I lose interest, and only the promise of the Khitomer Accord, and all the good things I’d heard about it, along with the support of my fleet who managed to get a few successful runs done, kept me going with this mission other than just giving up on it entirely.

The final STF, Khitomer Accord, is without a doubt the most complex.  Again, its a very long mission, requiring several hours to complete, and contains several tricky puzzles that require you to have an organised team and good equipment.  However, unlike The Cure, I found all this fun rather than dull and frustrating.  Like Infected, Khitomer Accord has a much better split between space and ground combat with neither element outstaying its welcome.  And like Infected, if things are dragging on, there’s a few good points where you can all agree to stop, and resume the mission the next evening.

This STF probably also benefits from having the strongest story.  While a danger of any team mission is that dialogues get quickly skipped to keep things moving (a reason I tend to prefer to solo the featured episodes first), I still managed to pick up the gist of what was going on, with you intercepting another Borg attempt to alter the past, which leads to the discovery of a massive deactivated Borg base that the present-day Borg attempt to bring back online.  This also gives you the fun of having the two different types of Borg in the mission, the current Cryptic-design Borg, and the more familiar TV/Movie era design.  The time-travel shenanigans in the mission also relate directly to the events in the tutorial, which found you facing off against these old Borg, who were all underpowered, with no proper link to the Collective, and many of their ships disabled.  After the events of the Khitomer Accord, you get no prizes for guessing who it turns out was responsible for the Borg’s poor state of repair in the tutorial

Variety and a strong storyline are without a doubt the key to Khitomer Accord’s success.  While some of the puzzles are tricky (specifically a puzzle which involves one of your team dropping forcefields surrounding various generators to give you only the briefest of windows in which to destroy them), there’s a clear feeling of progression.  You may get stuck on one of the generators, but once its destroyed, its done.  No need to reset the room and do it all again because you got stuck.  None of the elements in the mission outstay their welcome, instead just moving you along to the next confrontation.

While there’s no doubt in my mind that the Cure isn’t a great mission, if you can get a good team together to get you through it, its worth it to play the Khitomer Accord.  And of course, as you complete each of the Borg STFs, you get a new piece of the Borg equipment for your ship, which gives your ship a great distinctive look, as well as supplying various bonuses which are well worth the work.

That’s just a quick glimpse at some of my thoughts on the STFs as they stand.  Obviously its going to be very interesting to see how they develop over the next couple of months.  The revamped ground combat, and Borg adapting will have had an immediate impact on how easy these are to run, but shortly we should start seeing Gozer’s redesigned versions of these missions appearing.  Some of the teases he’s posted on Twitter look very interesting, with him obviously paying a lot of attention to the areas of the missions that have drawn the most criticism or feedback generally (such as Infected’s platform jumping), and the way he’s also making use of the difficulty levels (which weren’t present when these were first designed) to change things at higher difficulty looks very interesting.   I can’t wait to see what they’re like

With the Iconian involvement behind the Tal Shiar now revealed, Starfleet decides its time to deal with Hakeev before things get out of hand.  You’re sent to the Tal Shiar base in the Brea system, and its not long before you’re running around the Tal Shiar-controlled city, with Obisek and his Reman forces seeing their chance for freedom.

Much like last week, the scope of this mission is what really sells it.  After a brief space battle to clear the way for transport to the surface, you find yourself in probably the best city map Cryptic have designed yet, running around gantries and rooftops planting charges and signalling for orbital bombardments.  There’s no real puzzles this week, as its all about the final battle against Hakeev’s forces.

Instead the developers have littered the map with great little set-pieces.  Whether its calling on your ship for orbital bombardments on Romulan artillery positions, or being pinned down by a low-flying Scorpion fighter, this mission is a lot of fun, and you really appreciate the work that’s gone into the map, culminating in the reveal of a giant Iconian Gateway that was a great moment.  The space scenes as well, were very welcome.  The featured episodes tend towards a lot of ground-based action, and this series has been especially heavy on it, so the initial moments of clearing the defences around the planet, followed by the final fights against the Romulans were very welcome.  However, saying that, the developers have done such a great job on this series keeping the ground portions varied with puzzles and the like, that I wasn’t particularly aware of how space-light this series had been until I actually thought about it.  These Romulan episodes have doubtless been the strongest Featured Episodes yet, and quite possibly the best missions in the game.

The story with the Romulans also leaps forward in a major way this series.   After defeating the remaining Tal Shiar ships, Sela herself (sadly no Denise Crosby voiceover, but understandable given its just one line) turns up in her Scimitar-class flagship, striking back against you for the incursion into Romulan space.  You then get a pretty fun and challenging fight against her ship, which is pretty tough, and also possesses the thalaron radiation attack that can near-cripple your ship if you don’t get out of its way.  Its more of a traditional STO boss fight than last week’s, but was still just as fun.

Once you get Sela’s ship down to a certain damage level, another Gateway opens up and an Iconian ship grabs Sela’s ship in a tractor beam and they vanish off.  This leaves things very open for the progression of the storyline.  What will be the Iconians next move?  Was Sela working with the Romulans, or was she ignorant to their plans, in which case why have they kidnapped her?  Its worth also noting that Sela’s flagship was one of the transport locations mentioned in Hakeev’s Gateway during the Coliseum mission, so even if Sela herself hasn’t been working with the Iconians, certainly someone on her ship has been, unless its a clue that she has been working with them.   Its a great little mystery that’s suddenly opened up, and I’m massively pleased by the developers ramping up this storyline.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how the developers drive this storyline forward in future missions.

So overall, I have to say this Cloaked Intentions series has been the most satisfying yet.  While some missions have suffered from bugs that’ve affected them early on, those issues have quickly been resolved, and the constant improvement we’ve seen in the Featured Episodes is never more obvious than in this series with its frequent cut scenes, voice acting, and experimental missions like the shuttle-based The Vault.  The move from more standalone plots, to going back and pushing forward the main story in the game was undoubtedly a highlight for me, and while I wouldn’t want to see it in every series, as it would dilute the impact and run the risk of becoming stale, it does help make things that bit more memorable.

So, going by the logic I mentioned previously, about balancing short and long missions, you might expect Coliseum to be a bit longer.  But you’d be wrong.

Coliseum is a lot longer.  Its potentially the longest of the featured episodes to date, and enjoys an attention to detail that means its going to stick in players minds, with many varied sections to the mission from mathematics puzzles, to combat, to stealth.  There’s something for everyone this week, and while the mission isn’t without a couple of problems, there’s a heck of a lot to love.

Firstly, I’m going to touch on the big update this mission brought in.  Mele combat.

Now to be fair, mele combat has existed in the game since launch.  Klingons have had bat’leths for a long time, and Federation players could either unequip all their weapons to use martial arts, or ask a friendly Klingon for a bat’leth.   However it always seemed to pale in comparison to the array of pistols and rifles available, and there wasn’t really any incentive to try out mele combat, unless you were a Klingon, who have an excellent mission that sees you take part in a bat’leth tournament.  For me, this mission is the equivalent of that mission for Federation characters (or I guess provides the same role at a lower level for Klingons).  You’re finally handed a mele weapon and encouraged to try it out as, through a nice game mechanic, all your other devices and weapons get deactivated when you are captured and sent to the Coliseum, leaving you reliant on mele combat.  This mission also sees the developers bump up the available mele weapons in the game by including various swords and the Vulcan Lirpa seen in Amok Time, so I love having a variety of weapons available, and I’ve found mele combat a lot of fun, despite being something I barely touched before.   Of course, this is all aided by the developers sneaking in that classic Trek fight music for the main Coliseum battles.  Its hard not to play that part of the mission without a big grin on your face.

Variety is the name of the game in this mission.  Whether its beaming across to a satellite and solving various puzzles to rescue your ship, mele fighting in the Coliseum, or escaping across the Desert, there’s a really epic feel to the mission, again aided a lot by the new cutscenes, with the one that closes out the mission probably being the best yet, and really capturing that great “last minute beam-out” that’s long been a stalwart of Star Trek.

The other thing I really enjoyed, was the fight against the giant Aehallh worm.  For the first time in the game it felt like a real boss fight.  Which is not to say there haven’t been boss fight’s previously in the game.  There are many, but they all entail an enemy who has his stats/abilities ramped up, and you keep attacking them until they die from it.  This boss required a certain strategy and sequence of events to beat, first taking care of the smaller worms, before activating the Coliseum defenses to weaken it.  I love this kind of encounter against a single enemy as it makes the fight a bit more interesting and adds variety to the boss encounters.

The only part of the mission that went a bit wrong for me was the escape through the desert.  Now, I love the idea behind it, and its mostly well executed, with you hiding from low-flying scorpion fighters, and then making your way through the desert, finding food and shelter (which alters slightly depending on your class).  The only problem was that an issue with the map markers meant I missed the first checkpoint, and then none of the rest of the mission triggered properly.   Eventually after wandering through the desert for half an hour, I gave up, bailed out of the mission and tried it again later, this time paying close attention.   Hopefully the devs will address this issue and make the waypoints more obvious (it was a common problem that sparked a fair amount of debate on the forums and podcasts, so I suspect they’ll be looking at it).   Map issue aside though, the entire concept of the escape is slick and well executed, culminating in the cutscene I mentioned earlier.

Overall, this was probably the longest Featured Episode yet in the game, and delivers possibly the most complete and satisfying experience yet.  If you take your time, doing everything properly, this would probably fill out an entire 45 minute Star Trek episode on its own.  Next up is the finale, and with Hakeev admitting he’s working for the Iconians, it builds nicely towards Starfleet now being freed of the Prime Directive restrictions and can take action against Hakeev.

Having decrypted the records retrieved from the Tal Shiar base in the previous mission, you discover an attack is imminent on a Reman base hidden in the Dera System. So you must not only locate the base but then attempt to communicate with their leaders.

I’ve talked during previous featured episodes about how there seemed to be a trade off with longer, more detailed missions being paired with a shorter mission which might focus more on dialogue that moves the plot forward, and how I’ve always assumed this was a necessity in order to balance developer time and allow those more detailed missions. And so after the previous missions and their cut scenes, I’d read a few comments on the forums complaining about the length of Frozen, and prepared myself for this series’ equivalent to “Spin the Wheel”.

However, I ended up having to disagree.  Certainly Frozen is by no means the longest episode in the series, but neither did I get that feeling of shortness that Spin the Wheel gave, I think aided by having distinct space and ground sections, whereas Spin the Wheel took place entirely on Drozana Station.

For me, there’s a couple of main areas where this mission really excels.  Like last week, the cutscene technology now present in the game is well used.  Not only when you finally meet Obisek, the Reman leader, face-to-face, but also during the space section when you’re trying to trick a Reman ship that you want to follow to their base.  Its impressive, especially since the devs have been on record saying space-based cutscenes are a pain in the neck with the existing tools, so I wasn’t expecting to see any space cutscenes in the missions already.

I also loved how the end of the mission plays out differently depending on the dialogue options you choose.  While I doubt that choice will have much impact in future missions, it was nice to feel like your actions had consequences within the bounds of this mission, as you can either side with Obisek or condemn him, which shapes the final battle and whether you must escape the enraged Remans, or deal with a Romulan assault on the base.

However for me, the big thing in this episode were the revelations Obisek starts throwing around.  Several plot lines exist within the main game that are developed as you level up.   You discover the Undine have manipulated the Klingon/Federation conflict fairly early on for example, while some Rear Admiral missions shed further light on how the Undine may have been provoked.

One of my favourite plot threads though, was based on the Romulan sectors, and built on the events from the most recent movie.   The game sees you actively investigating the Hobus explosion that resulted in the destruction of Romulus, and you quickly start to discover that it wasn’t the random accident that many assumed.  This all builds up to the reveal that Praetor Taris has unknown “masters”, and she attempts to escape through an Iconian Gateway.

With Obisek revealing that the Tal Shiar are working for the “Demons of Air and Darkness”, the developers are directly following up that earlier storyline, as well as advancing the larger story of the return of the Iconians that several missions (including those Romulan ones) touch upon in the game.  There’s a real feeling that the return of the Iconians is building up to something massive in the game  and its nice to see it being built on after the previous Featured Episodes told their own side stories.  Not to play those side stories down though, but its nice to see that the new direction with Featured Episodes isn’t forgetting those plots that already exist in the game, and I can’t wait to see what the devs have up their sleeves with the Iconians.

This mission was great for showcasing the cutscenes and voice work once again, and while it was more focused on moving storylines along than an extended gameplay experience, its a massively atmospheric mission, with the Reman base well realised in its ice cave surrounding, and some of the dialogue from your Bridge Officers really brought character to them.

Its also worth finally commenting on the shift in the mission rewards as well.  Previous Featured Episodes have relied on “levelless” items whose stats slowly improve with your character’s level.  With this mission though, the rewards (new Romulan weapons) are scaled towards the level you run the mission at.  I quite like this idea, as it pushes the idea of replaying the missions more, since you’ll have to play through them at each main rank if you want to improve the rewards, while also giving you rewards with better stats, due to the mechanics of how those stats are calculated, invariably appropriately levelled equipment will always be more powerful than equipment which matches your exact level (since “levelled” equipment usually sits just above your character level).  It strikes me as a win for the player.  It means more work, sure, but for better equipment, and from levelling up some alt characters since these featured episodes were first introduced, I can certainly attest to the usefulness of being able to get this equipment early in the game.

Things are hotting up in the Romulan Sector.  After events at the Vault, Starfleet assigns you to investigate one of the Remans’ targets, a mining colony in the Hfihar system which came under the control of the Ferengi Madran after the destruction of Romulus.  With a mining colony seeming an unlikely target your orders are to gain access to the mine itself to discover what secrets its hiding.

This mission evoked the first Deferi mission to me in one major aspect.  The richness of the environment.  After a quick space sequence where you must determine which moon houses the mine, you beam down to the mining camp.   The mining camp itself stands apart with the Deferi city for one of the most immersive maps in the game.  Its a busy, grimy place.  Romulan citizens litter the camp, wandering around or performing tasks.  There’s new ambient wildlife, as tame wrrigul also wander around the camp.  There’s a mining cart that moves along an upper rail, and a spotlight shining down from a guard tower above.  Meanwhile various Ferengi run around, delivering padds and reports to their boss Madran.  Its a brilliant map, that captures the grungy, downtrodden feeling fantastically.

Its not just visually that this map pulls you into the situation.  The mission also finds you questioning various miners around the camp, which nicely builds a picture of their hard life, between the poor conditions, Madran’s exploitation, and the dangers that lurk in the mine itself.

Again, class-specific objectives are well used in this mission, with the developers obviously realising they’re onto a good thing with this new mechanic.  Being on a team with a science character leads to you performing a geological survey which I found good fun, scanning various parts of the map before finding a rich, new vein of ore for the mine, while playing as an engineer finds you searching for the various components for a broken drill.  This has been a great addition to the game, and despite only being a fairly recent development, its great to see the developers being able to produce interesting new side quests, which also encourage both teaming (to get all the side quests and their accolades) and replaying the missions on other characters.

Once you’re in the mine itself, again the game finds itself borrowing from Classic Trek.  The love the developers have for the original series is obvious, and the fact it remains the most iconic incarnation of Star Trek is born out as obviously the classic Trek elements in the game get a lot of attention from the players in the forums.   This time, with miners going mysteriously missing, the developers siezed upon the opportunity to borrow from that classic episode, the Devil in the Dark, as your explorations eventually lead you to stumble upon the tunnels where the miners have been going missing.  The sight of Romulan guards facing off against a Horta (not not coming out of it too well) was great, and the fact that the mission offers your own Horta pet as a reward is a great treat for fans of the original series.

The mission also features more of the new cutscenes that’ve been brought into the game recently alongside the new voice acting.  While the quality of some of the voice acting is admittedly variable, it still adds a lot to the main characters in the series and makes them more memorable.  I’m also loving the new Romulan uniforms.  The detailed uniform worn by Tal Shiar Boss Hakeev is a really nice piece of work.  The cut scenes also provide a more effective way of playing out a conversation between NPCs than just reading their dialogue in the normal interactions screens.  I’m a big fan, and while they’re apparently a bit of a pain to do with the current developer tools, I’m really enjoying how much they add to missions.

Classic Trek references, one of the best-designed, immersive maps in the game, cut scenes and voice acting.  This mission is a great example of how these featured episodes are about more than just adding new storylines into the game, and how they showcase new technology.

After a few months off for the release of season 3 and the Christmas holidays, Star Trek Online’s featured episodes have returned for a new five-part story set in the Romulan sector.

Borrowing from the prequel comics to the latest Star Trek movie, this first installment revolves around the mysterious Romulan space station, The Vault.  A station famous for housing many of the Romulans’ weapon development programmes, including the Borg technology used to refit Nero’s mining vessel, the Narada.  Sensors have detected a mysterious energy reading coming from the station, leaving them to suspect its been reactivated and someone may be after whatever technology still lurks within.

The featured episodes have always been about more than just giving the users new storylines to enjoy in STO.  They also provide the developers with an opportunity to develop new technologies for the game, and showcase them through these missions.  In the past we’ve had elements such as the slingshot mechanics from the previous Devidian series or simple effects like the new bridge officer popups.

The Valt brings an entirely new style of gameplay to Star Trek Online.  That of shuttles.  Previously in the game, Runabouts could be purchased from Deep Space Nine, however it didn’t really serve much use in the game beyond being a vanity ship you could choose to collect anomalies or run diplomatic missions in.  Flying it into combat soon resulted in your death.

With the release of the Delta Flyer for the first anniversary, a new tier of shuttles was introduced, and with this mission you gain the ability to requistion a free Mark 8 shuttle if you have not previously purchased a Runabout (energy credits) or Delta Flyer (C-Store) and these shuttles come into their own in this mission.  The Valt is massive by normal space station standards, so rather than being a typical ground map, once you manage to avoid the tachyon detection grid surrounding it (a nice little part of the mission with class-specific objectives, another mechanic brought in during the previous series), instead you find yourself flying around the station’s interior in your shuttle.

Visually, its breathtaking.  The scale of the station has been excellently realised by the graphics team both in its exterior on approach, or internally as you explore the station’s interior.  While the actual gameplay elements of the mission are fairly straight forward, and you can fly through the mission pretty quickly once you know what you’re doing, the fun here is in just appreciating the scale of what’s been developed.

There’s also been some development with voice overs in the game.  Previously they’re only something that’s appeared sparingly, in the tutorial, or with Leonard Nimoy congratulating you on promotion or introducing a new sector.  The STFs featured some voice over (the boss in Infected is particularly effective), and the Devidian series featured one of the most memorable voice-overs in the game with the scary malfunctioning hologram.

This mission continues to add them into the new content, with Admiral T’Nae speaking for the first time, and the mission’s villain (a Reman called Obisek) enjoying spoken dialogue.  Its a nice addition that really adds to the immersion factor of a mission and I’m pleased to see the developers trying to make them more of a feature in the game.

Outside of the mission, I’m pleased to see the developers focusing on the Romulans with this series.  The Romulan Empire underwent a lot of upheaval with the destruction of Romulus, and given some of the dangling plot threads from the existing missions in the game, there’s obviously a lot of ground to be explored.   I’m happy to see that this is now being developed and this particular storyline being moved forward. Also its always nice to see events from the new movie being used in the game, especially as they represent the most recent “canon” of the Prime Star Trek universe, and the previous series focused more heavily on classic Trek.

I counted myself pretty lucky today, as I’d managed to apply online for tickets to the launch event in Glasgow for Nintendo’s newest portable console: the 3DS.

An update to the current DS line, this new console adds, you guessed it, that latest fad sweeping home entertainment, 3D.   Now, I’m pretty cynical about 3D as a whole.  The majority of movies I’ve seen that used it, it added nothing too, other than upping the ticket price and forcing me to wear a silly pair of glasses.  It also required me to sit in an optimal (bang on centre, back from the front) seating position in the cinema.  As for 3D TV, seriously?  The need to go through finding the best position, and wearing the glasses at home, for the same “doesn’t add much to the quality of the film” effect?  Sorry, I’m not impressed.

However, unlike all of these, the 3DS boasts the ability to view the 3D effect in games without the need for the silly glasses.  Interesting.  And obviously, as a handheld, needing to find the right position to appreciate the effect should be less of an issue.  So I went along, hoping Nintendo would impress me in the same way they did with the Wii’s motion control.

On entering, the event was split into a variety of rooms, each designed to sell the immersive experience before you actually got your hands on the console.  The first room offered a visualisation of the data transfer capabilities, allowing you to share items between games and the like, but to be honest, I was standing up the back of the crowd and couldn’t really see much.  The next room however was much more entertaining.

Going through, they started to sell the immersion aspect, with two actors playing the roles of Ryu and Ken in a live action round of Street Fighter.  This was definitely one of the high points of the event, with both actors looking the part, and managing to mimic the styles and postures of their computer game counterparts.  The part when Ken managed to hit Ryu with the Shoryuken got a big round of applause, and the round timing out just as both went to launch the hadoken got a chuckle

From there, there was a more survival-horror type environment, where actors in military costumes ushered you out of a village as other actors played the part of monsters, snarling from the sidelines, rattling the scenery and occasionally grabbing those poor souls that start to lag behind a little (like yours truely).

From there the action switched to the console itself.  A large video was played showcasing the launch range of games (which seems pretty extensive, with many familiar names like Zelda, Pilot Wings, Mario Kart, DOA, Ridge Racer), before a brief segment with Jonathan Ross where he talked about how impressed he was with the new handheld.  However, after that it was the main event, as we were all ushered into a room with loads of podiums, all with a 3DS on them running a different game, and we were invited to wander around, trying them all out.

I played a variety of games while I was there, Kid Icarus, DOA, Street Fighter, Ridge Racer, Lego Star Wars, and I have to say I was blown away.  The console itself has the same small form factor we’re used to in the later iterations of the DS, and retains the twin screen appearance.  The lower screen is still a touchscreen for use in games, however the upper screen is where the 3D happens.  My first game was Lego Star Wars III: Clone Wars, and with even a brief time trying the game out, I was really blown away by how well the 3D worked.   As I said above, I’m pretty sceptical about 3D as a whole, but here, without the glasses, and in a neat handheld, it really worked wonderfully and grabbed me from the outset.

The emphasis, unlike a lot of 3D film, is not in things flying out of the screen towards you.  Instead, the 3D simply adds depth to the game.  So while your character remains at the front of the screen, the scenery and other characters all get pushed away from you.  Its very effective in adding a feeling on depth to the graphics, and worked especially well in games like DOA, and Kid Icarus.  I didn’t see the effect as much in Ridge Racer, but overall I was impressed at how well it worked without the need for the (sometimes expensive) glasses needed by 3D cinema and TV.  I think this has definitely helped sell me on the idea of 3D gaming in the home.  A really nice addition though is a 3D slider to the right of the screen.  This allows the gamer to increase or decrease the 3D effect until they find a level they’re comfortable with, right down to traditional 2D, a feature I can see being a big help for those who usually find themselves getting headaches from 3D films.

Another nice little addition to the hardware, is a new thumbstick on the left hand side as an alternative to the usual D-pad (which is still there).  The worked well and felt quite natural (although I admit I reverted to the faithful D-pad when playing Street Fighter).

The graphics as well (3D aside) are great.  Playing DOA for example, didn’t feel any different to playing it on my old PS2 or X-Box.  The games were all nippy and responsive with no sign of any lag, so I safely assume the 3DS’s hardware is more than up to the kinds of game its being asked to run.

The final room, after all the game demos, allowed you to ask some questions, and also demo the console’s various AR (augmented reality) features.  The console is going to come with various AR games, and again I was very impressed.  Face Raiders for example was a fun little game that allowed you to take a picture of one of your friends.  Their face would then be mapped to targets, which float around the room you’re in (with the backdrop being provided by a real time feed from the console’s cameras).  Its necessary to physically turn around with the console in your hand to find where the targets are, and then you can shoot them for points.  Another series of games involved AR cards, which would be detected by the console, so the picture would change to show a monster bursting out of whatever surface the card was sitting on that you’d have to shoot, again sometimes having to walk around the table to get the right angle to hit the monster’s weak spots.  This was a great demonstration of immersive technology, using the real world in games and I was very impressed.

So, unsurprisingly for Nintendo, I was really blown away by the console.  Despite being a 3D sceptic the new effect works very well, and being freed from glasses, or correct places to sit, opens up 3D while on the move, be it in a cafe or on the train or wherever.  The various AR features built into the console were a big surprise and really impressed me and the friend I was with.  To be honest, that kind of thing could sell a console on its own, even without the 3D stuff, and its nice to see Nintendo’s usual thought going into the hardware to offer the gamer something new to their gaming experience and a genuine leap forward in what to expect from games.

Overall the console and the event itself really impressed.  The whole thing showed a nice attention to detail, and the various live action portions with the actors were a nice surprise.  However its all about the console, and even ignoring all the current buzz around 3D, Nintendo have a great little piece of hardware on their hands here, and I’m especially curious to see how the AR functionality gets explored once the console is released.