Reilly2040's Blog

Oops, playing catchup a little here, since I never got the chance to blog about the last few week’s missions in the new Devidian series in Star Trek Online.

Spin the Wheel was pretty short, but none-the-less a good setup episode, that set the scene nicely for what came next.   After being directed to Drozana Station to check in on a Section 31 informant, you find yourself having to fix the power grid for the station manager to get information on where to find her, and then you must play some Dabo to avoid raising suspicion when making contact.

As I say, on the surface, very short.  And was sure to disappoint some players with its complete lack of combat, but as I’ve said before I enjoy the change of pace they provide, and I feel this mission was an important stage, not necessarily for the storyline, but for introducing the setting of Drozana Station.

Existing in the Neutral Zone, it acts as a neutral trading station where both Federation and Klingon characters can stop off to access the Exchange, pick up some supplies, and play some Dabo.  And for the purpose of this storyline, its also a central point of activity for the Devidians.   For Klingon players, I imagine Drozana Station is a familiar haunt, however as a Federation player I must admit I’d never had the cause to visit there before, especially with Deep Space K7 so close by.  Drozana Station, by this mission is established as a 200+ year old station that’s not kept in particularly great state of repair, with many systems patched together.  This all becomes important in the next mission.

So, a short mission, but I think an important one.   The power grid puzzle was fun and, like the station, it also introduces the Dabo mini-game to those players who may not have been aware of it.  A nice way of advertising some of the non-mission content in the game I thought, as well as making use of existing game assets to help them meet the weekly deadline, which must be tough going sometimes.

However, with Drozana Station now introduced to the players, the next mission, What Lies Beneath, sees you heading back to it to investigate the Devidian’s appearances.  Specifically to search the lower maintenance decks for sign of where they might be gathering.

Now, to truly appreciate what Cryptic did here, you must remember this mission was released over Halloween weekend.  As you descend in the maintenance elevator, you get stopped on another deck part way down, and that’s where the fun really begins, as there’s more than Devidians hiding in the lower decks.

Atmosphere is key to this mission.  The idea of a centuries old station, kept in pretty poor repair is captured brilliantly.  The lighting is low and flickers constantly.  There are cables and debris scattered all over the place.  The setting is perfect as the spooky old space station, and its augmented nicely by the temporary torchlight drone you pick up (a great little power that).  The tension then is ratcheted up a notch when a maintenance technician is killed, and the comm channels fill up with the killer’s messages to you.

And what impact those messages have.  Voice overs are something not heavily employed by the game.  Outside of the tutorial they’re pretty rare, consisting mainly of Leonard Nimoy introducing new sectors and congratulating you on levelling up.  The STF I played also featured a little audio for the main villain, but throughout the majority of the game, voice overs are absent.  It just means that when they do appear, it really adds to the experience, and that was certainly the case here.  As the voice overs are so rare, you’re not expecting them, so when this haunting, menacing voice suddenly came through the speakers, it was a “jump out of your seat” moment.

The mission also starts to set the scene for the following week’s mission.  By the time you find the Devidian’s “nest”, you’ve encountered various Starfleet personnel in 23rd century (Classic Trek) uniforms, so the appearance of a time portal isn’t much of a surprise.  Next stop, the 23rd century.

A great pair of missions when taken together.  There’s some fun puzzles, and the atmosphere in What Lies Beneath really does make the mission.   There’s a lot of love and attention gone into this mission to make it, honestly, one of the best in the entire game.  These missions also demonstrate an element of trade off.  The shorter Spin the Wheel probably allowed the development team the time required to come up with all the textures and environmental effects necessary to make What Lies Beneath as good as it was.   I mentioned this before during the Breen missions, but these weeklies really do show off a strong new direction for the game, and I hope, as new weekly series are planned, we get even more great missions with the kind of immersion and detail as we’re seeing here.

Now that the Breen series of weekly missions have been finished for a couple of weeks (giving players a chance to get that nice Breen Bridge Officer before he went away), now Cryptic have launched the next set of weeklies, starting with Skirmish.

Immediately different from the Defera missions, this series is taking place in the existing Eta Eradani sector that forms the border between Federation and Klingon space.  The devs have mentioned this was deliberate, as they wanted to work the new content into existing sectors, rather than be continually creating new sectors, as they’ve tended to do thus far.  I must say, I think its a great idea, as there’s a lot of sectors in the game that there’s pretty much no reason to visit once your character has out levelled its missions.  Adding in new content to those sectors will help give them a more populated feeling once again, and draw attention to features you may not previously have visited (for example I never really knew about Drozana Station before).   Hopefully the user generated missions that are going to be coming up soon will also help in this regard, as my understanding is the devs intend for user missions to take place in the main game universe (rather than some kind of simulation, like the Mission Architect in City of Heroes).  As well as populating the older sectors, it also gives the developers the excuse (and resources) to go back and revamp aspects of those older sectors, like the revamp Drozana Station has received ahead of this set of weeklies.

This time, the action focuses around the Devidians.  Fans of The Next Generation will recognise them from the two-parter Time’s Arrow, and indeed they already appeared in game, in the mission Ghost Ship, although as part of these weeklies, that mission is due to be revamped slightly to include the redesigned Devidians to make it more consistent with the newer content (and may already have been, I admit I’m not sure).

Skirmish finds you heading to the Federation/Klingon Neutral Zone, after being directed there by Section 31 operative Franklin Drake.   A True Way (Cardassian/Jem Hadar) fleet has been detected in conflict with Klingons in the area.  Its well out of their way, so Drake is suspicious and wants it investigated.

On arriving, you quickly get caught up in the fight, but once its over, one of the Cardassian ships is left disabled, allowing you to board it to look for clues.  However once on board, you find something spooky is going on.

With us now on the run up to Halloween, the Devidians were a great choice for this new series of weeklies.  They provide a nice opportunity for some ghostly goings on, as the environment slips in an out of phase with the Devidians, and you see them in battle with the Cardassians, and floating through the ship.   They were similarly well used in the mission Ghost Ship, so its nice to see that idea expanded upon, and the spooky atmosphere definitely suits the time of year.

In terms of the mission itself, its the high quality we’ve come to expect from this newer content.  From the big fleet battle at the beginning, to the more familiar combat with various Cardassian stragglers onboard the ship, we also get a little puzzle similar to the Deferi medical aid mission.  On completing the mission, there’s the unique reward of a new ship device.  I confess I’ve not tried it yet, but I none the less appreciate that the devs are trying to make each mission reward something new and interesting, rather than just “here’s a slightly different set of impulse engines”.

All in all, another winner by the developers, and this content still has people amassing at the zone come Saturday, and talking about it in the forums, so the weeklies are still a really strong offering in the game.  I’m really looking forward to seeing how the plot of this series develops, since the teases about upcoming missions point to an old Starbase (should be a really atmospheric setting) and some time travel (with a shot that looks suspiciously like a classic Trek interior).  Roll on Saturday

This is it.  The starmap has been completed and the race is on to discover the Preserver legacy hidden within the Deferi sector.

And what a great finale this mission was.   I was fortunate that I was online at the time it became active, and so it became one of the few that my first run through was with other members of my fleet.  Working together as we ran through the mission was great fun, and with us all being pretty reasonably kitted out Admirals, the Breen didn’t have much of a chance.

If I was going to have a complaint about this mission (just to get it out of the way) its that the final boss, Thot Trel, who had been built up throughout the series, was actually a bit of a pushover.  I’ve now completed the mission on all three of my Federation characters, and each time he goes down pretty easily.  The boss from the week before was a much tougher fight, and so it would perhaps be nice to see Thot Trel given a bit of a power boost to make a more fitting final confrontation.

However, that’s the only negative I can say about a brilliant finale.  Most of the mission takes place on the ground, and there’s some very nice classic Trek imagery.  My whole fleet were squeeing when we went round a corner in the map only to be confronted by a replica of the Preserver obelisk that Kirk found in the episode The Paradise Syndrome.

The revamped caves get another airing as you descend into the area hidden underneath the Obelisk, and again the devs have put together a nice puzzle to unlock the Preserver Archive.  Sound-based this time, its a simple puzzle compared to, say, the starchart puzzle on Defera however its still fun, and nicely broke up the combat.

The really great thing about this mission, is the sense of the impact the events will have for the unfolding universe in Star Trek Online.  The reveal of exactly what the Archive is, will surely come back to the fore in future missions as it represents a major resource that galactic powers are going to squabble over.  And not to mention, with the continual threat of the Iconians lurking somewhere in the background, I can’t help but think the Archive will become a pivotal piece of that conflict when they finally make their move.

The rewards are again inventive, and a testiment to the devs.  The main quest completion reward being a special Breen freeze rifle which I’ve found myself using quite a bit as it provides a good main attack and a devastating secondary fire (neatly counterbalanced by quite a long build up which can be interrupted).

However, this being the finale to the series, there’s a a special reward in the form of a Breen bridge officer.  He’s a purple officer and comes with some neat ground abilities.  Of course, the devs have stated that this reward will only be available prior to the release of series 2, but to me it helps make the weeklies a bit more special, as well as providing a nice incentive to make sure people are checking in on the new missions regularly.   To be honest, knowing the game, I imagine the Breen bridge officer will turn up in the C-store in some form in a few months time, but since we get him for free for completing this set of weeklies, if it does happen, I won’t be complaining.

There’s a couple of weeks until the second series of weeklies, this time featuring the Devidians from Time’s Arrow and promising spooky old Space Stations and some time travel.  This first series of missions has certainly proven to be a massive success, with a lot of love and attention evident on the mission design, so I really can’t wait to see what this second series brings.   If nothing else, its nice to see a really positive buzz about the game following its very rocky first six months and I look forward to it continuing.

Saturday’s been and gone, and with it part 4 of the 5 part Breen storyline.

Things have hotted up now, with the ruins on Defera coming back into focus.  As you return to investigate the possibility of some ancient information being left there.

Of course, the puzzle relating to this episode has actually been in the game since this weekly series launched, so many players had previously discovered the star map fragment earlier, but it was nice to see how it actually worked in with the plot.

The rest of the mission then brings to mind the Next Generation episode, The Chase, as you run from system to system across the sector trying to find the other pieces of the star map before the Breen can get to them. As with previous missions there’s some nice visuals in these systems, especially the system with the ringed planet and all the asteroid debris.

My only real complaint with this week’s mission is that I didn’t find all the running around that involving. There’s some nice stuff in the previously mentioned system with the stellar debris for example, but it was crying out for another puzzle or bit of thought, rather than my bridge officers always telling me where to go and what to shoot. The opening puzzle was great, but slightly spoiled by being found in the first mission, so with that in mind a second, similar puzzle would’ve been the icing on the cake.

I guess I was slightly spoiled by last week’s episode really getting me to stop, read things properly and think, and having already completed the opening puzzle didn’t help.

There is some nice combat though.  The devs have nicely balanced the encounters out, so that some of them are actually pretty easy, whereas others provide more of a challenge.  And it all builds up to a confrontation on an ice planet against a pretty tough Breen boss.

The weekly reward is quite amusing too.   Its a freeze grenade, but unlike the previous ones, this one is more for the role players, as it only targets friendlies and doesn’t do anything beyond a visual “freezing” effect (so if you get hit, it doesn’t stop you moving or getting on with your gaming).  I daresay though there’ll be a few people complaining about it being used a lot around the Sol starbase, but I don’t mind it as some harmless fun

Next Saturday, its the final part, wherein we’ll finally face off against Thot Trel and discover the secret the Preservers have hidden away.  I can’t wait

This week’s weekly episode in Star Trek Online provided an interesting change of pace from what’s come before.

Following on from last week’s Breen attacks on the Deferi, you retrieve a distress signal from another ship that’s being attacked.  By the time you arrive, the ship has been driven off, and the crew are tending to repairs and injured crew members, not to mention prisoners taken from a Breen boarding party.

And that’s the big difference between this and the previous weekly episodes.  This time, there’s absolutely no combat in the mission, and its much more the format of a diplomatic mission.

There’s two main parts to the adventure, with the first finding you helping out, treating the wounded.  This involves questioning the patients, and then determining the correct drug to administer.  This was great fun, and I loved having to pay attention to what was being said, so as to be sure I picked up the right treatment.

The second patient though leads into the next part of the mission, as you must interrogate the Breen prisoners about an implant you discover in the patient.

Its a pleasant change of pace from the combat of the previous episodes, and serves to drive the plot along in a couple of interesting ways, as you discover the Breen are using the implants to examine the Deferi’s childhood memories, but also that there’s a splinter faction in the Breen that are not happy with the way they’re constantly being driven to attack civilians.

The only real complaint I can make about the mission is that its much too short.  As long as you pay attention, and pick dialogue options carefully, you can work through this mission quite rapidly, and it really feels like the mission could’ve used a third section (perhaps helping to fix the ship).

Also debuting this week was the addition of another mission to the Deferi sector.  There’s now a Breen Patrol added to the map, that if you intercept, you can discover they have Deferi onboard, and you have to figure out the best way to help them escape the Breen.  There’s a few different ways to complete this, but the way I went for felt suitably “Star Trek” to me.  Again this was probably a bit too short, but as a nice extra to the weekly mission, I enjoyed it.

While there are doubtless going to be those players who were unhappy with the lack of combat in this week’s episode, for me it helps highlight how the developers are trying to add to the gameplay mechanics, making the game feel more like the Star Trek TV show we all watched and loved, and add variety into the game.

Last week saw the second of the new Star Trek Online weekly episodes released, and after the huge success of the first episode, could this one live up to expectations?

Well, yes and no. From a plot perspective, this is very much in the middle of the story. Too early for any major plot revelations, so instead things are just moved on a little, with the revelations that the Breen are now not only attacking Deferi vessels in space, but have also been capturing their people alive for some unknown reason.

The rich level design from the previous episode is here in force as well. The space combats are set against what looks like several giant meteor fragments and the ground segment brings a much needed revamp to the “underground cave base” style of map to make it look like a much more realistic base.  Hopefully we’ll see this style of map added to the star cluster missions to revamp their cave bases as well.

Its slightly harder to talk much about this mission.  It was definitely a lot of fun to play, and the time and care being spent on the level design on these missions to my mind helps show the developers dedication to make these episodes into more of an event, and help turn around some of the bad press the game has gotten since launch.

And that feeling of an event is a great thing in game.  With so many players spread across the game, its really nice on a Saturday to log in, and see things buzzing.   Having seen a lot of negativity in the past, its great to see the player base enthusiastic about these missions, and its a lot of fun, logging in on a Saturday at 6, and seeing the sector filled with players all waiting on the new content.   Certainly the weekly episodes seem to be a big hit, and I look forward to seeing them continue for some time.

This Saturday debuted a new kind of content for Star Trek Online, and I think, possibly a turning point for the game.

That content was the first of the new weekly episodes.  These episodes are released once a week, and each builds on the last to tell a specific story.  In this case, you find yourself escorting a Deferi Ambassador back home.  Things start to go pear-shaped when the Breen transport into the city and its up to your away team to clear them out.

Broken down, its not that much that much different to the gameplay in other missions.  You escort a ship to a planet, beam down, clear out various spawns of enemies, then beam back up for some ship combat.  There’s dozens of missions throughout the game that have this same structure.

Where it differs greatly though is in presentation.  There’s obviously a lot of love gone into the design of this mission.  Firstly, the new area of sector space for the Defera System uses the new style seen in season 2 where the traditional grid markers and lighting are turned right down, creating a more atmospheric system.  However once you get into the mission, its not all run-and-gun.  The escort itself is largely uneventful, save for an unidentified (later revealed as Breen) ship, warping in and out.  There could have been the temptation here for the developers to make this a ship battle, but instead they wisely left it a mystery, with the ship warping back out before it can be identified.  This nicely builds suspense that something is going to happen later on.

When you beam down to the planet, the attention to detail at atmosphere is similarly evident.  The area you beam into is well designed with buildings, giant sculptures, and is bustling with people.  There’s a real feeling that this is a busy part of the city you’ve beamed into.   It really had the feel of an episode of Star Trek more than just some mission in an MMO, thanks to the pacing.  If this had been a combat mission from the outset it would’ve felt more generic, but the slow build up really had the feeling of getting you to know characters and a race that are going to be part of a larger story, rather than a 20 minute mission.

Another nice thing was how this mission drew on the diplomatic mission at Starbase Sierra 7.  When I found the Trade Discussion mission I had no idea it tied into this weekly series, but it was nice to bump into an Ambassador I recognised, who then referenced the trade discussions.   It added to the feeling that this was an evolving universe, and its a nice idea having these little prequels in the game prior to the main event.

I can’t wait for the next instalment come Saturday.  But I mentioned a turning point above.  Perhaps a rash statement?

And in some ways I do really think this mission has the potential to be.  If the further weekly episodes hold the same quality and atmosphere as this one, then we’ve got some really nice new locations and detailed storylines to look forward to.  But I’m also talking in terms of the community.

The official forums have been a fairly downbeat place for a long time, with the mood verging on outright hostile  at times, especially with some of the big bugs that have been in the game more recently (like the Star Cluster issues I mentioned in a previous post).   However last Saturday, that all changed.   The release of this high quality episode brought a real positive buzz to the forums, as people congratulated the developers on the release and praised the new content.  For the first time in quite a while the forums were actually quite a pleasant place to be as the whole community came across as quite upbeat.

I’m really hoping this mission shows off the kind of thing the developers are now looking to produce.  There’s an interesting tease to future missions hidden away, and it shows that there’s a storyline that’s been thought about as well as a nicely designed area map.   With the likes of ship interiors, a new style of sector space etc now in place, and season 3 promising to bring more polish to the game, Cold Call really shows the kind of thing we could look forward to seeing in the future updates.   And if that’s the case, I think a lot of the people who have been complaining about the game will turn around, and then hopefully the positive “yeah, it had a shaky start, but then they really turned things around and have some really nice content” buzz can start to build.  Its not a short-term hope, but it strikes me as something definitely achievable over the next year.

I’ve always quite liked my MMOs, although surprisingly when its come to fantasy RPGs I’ve tended to play more of the single player games in the form of the likes of Oblivion.

I had previously dabbled with World of Warcraft, but new seasons of The Guild always make me want to give it another go.  On top of that, other members of my Star Trek Online fleet are into it, so that pushed me to reinstall and resubscribe.  Not to mention, with millions of subscribers, its got to be worth a shot.

So having reinstalled, I immediately rolled a new Night Elf Hunter, just to rerun a couple of early tutorials to remind myself of the game.  That done and feeling suitably reminded of the basic game mechanics, I’ve now switched by to my original human mage character to try and just focus on him

I have to admit, playing the game is still pretty slow work.  When I’d last left the character I’d just moved to getting new quests in Westfall, and quickly found almost every spawn in the zone totally out of my league.  Since coming back I’ve been slowly picking my way through the quests, but its very slow and repetitive.   Most groups are only a level above me, but anything other than carefully isolating a single target and zapping them from a distance quickly results in death.

Which means, when most of my quests involve killing endless arrays of creatures trying to get a certain item to drop, it can get a bit tedious.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a ranged damage dealer.  I’m supposed to be squishy.  That I understand.  However, I can’t help but feel underpowered when any combination of 2 creatures will kill me within seconds and there’s pretty much nothing I can do to try and survive.  While I’m slowly making progress, I still can’t help but be slightly frustrated by the sheer amount of time I’ve spent dead and running back to my corpse.

I have to wonder if this is down to me.  I seem to have a reasonable combat strategy now, so my main deaths tend to come from another creature coming round a corner at the wrong moment, or sneaking up behind me while I’m distracted by what I’m attacking.  But I have to wonder if the Mage was maybe a poor choice for a starting character.

The minute you get in a team though, things improve immensely.  Granted I’ve not yet managed to get into a proper Guild or anything, but I did manage to team up with a fellow mage in Westfall and between us we started getting through the quests a lot faster.  We were still limited to only 1 or 2 targets at once but dealing twice the damage made a big difference to the pace.  I can really see how if I could get into a Guild, these early levels would start sailing past.

However, for now I’m still solo.  But I’m also not hating the game as much as it may sound.  Certainly at the moment its coming across a major time sink to get anywhere, but there’s still a lot that I like about the game and want to give a chance.

For example, there’s not just my main mage skills. I’m also working on my tailoring skills, which have let me quickly get extra bags for my inventory, as well as varying my character’s look to keep me amused.

There’s also the world itself. While the simple, cartoony graphics may put some people off, they’ve also allowed the developers to save on performance which means a lot of the world is seemless with no loading screens, which is really immersive. I’ve recently used the Griffin service for the first time to get quickly between locations and the flying system is fun to see in action, as you soar across the areas that would’ve taken some time to walk through.  From the point of view of an immersive world that’s fun to explore, World of Warcraft is great.

My main hope is that at somepoint I’ll exit the early levels of the game, and start getting to a point where I’m more comfortable with my character.  In City of Heroes for example, around the middle of the 20s, your character gets to a stage whereby they’re reasonably well kitted out with powers and enhancements and you start to genuinely feel like a superhero, and so I would hope something similar will click into place with Warcraft, wherein I’ll have not just a decent array of spells, but enough upgraded equipment that I can explore areas without getting into too much trouble as long as I’m reasonably careful.  I know, for example, that around level 20 I should get my first mount, which will greatly speed up travel, and that’s something I’m looking forward to.

So, for now I’ll continue to chip away at the quests, and see if some more meaningful ones start to come my way.  I’m enjoying exploring the world, so hopefully the quests will become more interesting, and I’ll start getting rewards that will make that exploring a little easier, without having to rely on constantly dying and running around as a ghost.

One of the really nice things about Star Trek Online is that the developers try and do monthly Engineering Reports, which detail upcoming changes and content that are in testing, development, design or on hold.  They’re a really great source of information, and its nice for the community to know exactly what’s being worked on.

The August Engineering report went live the other day, and includes some nice updates.

There’s a few things due to come out in the next few weeks that I’m quite excited about.  The new weekly episodes sounds like they’ll be excellent for adding much-needed new storyline missions to the game.  Since hitting Vice Admiral I’ve been replaying the game with a new character, and doing strong story-based missions like City on the Edge of Never (time travelling, genetically augmented Klingons who try to change history) and the missions in the Romulan sector that deal with the Hobus explosion and the Romulan’s research into Borg technology are very satisfying, so more missions with that kind of attention to moving the plot of the wider universe along will be very welcome.

The upcoming addition of the two Excelsior ships is also welcome, as the Excelsior is one of my favourite starship designs.  And I do appreciate how the developers are trying to find a compromise between the game and the C-Store, putting the original style Excelsior in the game at tier 3 (Commander level) available for purchase with energy credits, while the Admiral level tier 5 version must be bought in the C-Store.  I appreciate how the devs are trying to listen to the community’s unrest with the C-Store exclusive items in this way.

Talking of which, while I assume they’ll end up C-Store exclusive, its also nice to see Enterprise get some love, as the NX-01 Enterprise and that show’s uniforms are also in development, along with the uniforms from Star Trek The Motion Picture (won’t excite that many, but I’ve always liked Kirk’s Admiral uniform from that film that recently got nicely referenced in last year’s movie).  Finally the fact they’re working on new minigames is welcome, as they’ll nicely beef up some of the social areas, like the new ship interiors.  Dabo has been a really nice addition to Deep Space Nine.

However, aside from the new missions and vanity items, the thing that’s been best I think, is the change in focus for the developers over the coming months, moving away from a lot of this new content, to give more focus towards polish and bug fixes.

Its been a widely held assumption by the player base that the game was rushed out the door early, and that’s shown in terms of the lack of content, and the bugs and stability issues that the game has.    With the last 6 months or so seeing the advent of more missions and game content, the time seems right for the development team to start stomping on some of the issues that have been plaguing the game recently.

In fairness, a lot of the game is playable, so I don’t mean to cast a bad picture here, but there are some issues that have been dragging the game down.  The recently revamped PvP interface will hopefully help address the issues with that side, however one of the big sticking points for me has been the issues in the star clusters.

Star clusters take the shape of dynamically generated missions, and they’ve been one of my favourite tasks when levelling up, as they grant you badges of exploration that can be used to purchase green-level equipment at the Sol Starbase, and so are a nice way of quickly beefing up the weapons on a new ship.  These also form a large part of the end game content, offering Vice Admirals the chance to earn merits they can spend on new equipment and ships.  However, since season 2 debuted , there’s been a few issues with them.  They no longer seem to support teaming, so you can only solo your cluster missions, and the ability to exit a mission and continue it at a later date is also broken.

Now, this is only one aspect of the game.  Normal systems, task forces, fleet actions etc all still work fine, but a lot of players rely on the cluster missions, which means there’s been a lot of heated discussion generated in the forums, and that doesn’t really help the game.

The good news is that over the last couple of days, the devs have managed to get in some forum time, and are reassuring players that these issues (which have found to be complex, hence the time being taken to fix them) are being resolved.   Their own frustration with these bugs is evident, but from a player point of view, its just nice to know that the player base’s concerns are not going unnoticed and fixes are in the works.   And its for these reasons that I think switching the development focus to polish is a good thing.  Content-wise the game’s got a good platform now for further additions, so taking this point to stop, and make sure the worst of the kinks are worked out means the developers can then go onto focus on producing new quality content on a stable base.   This makes a lot of sense, and while the atmosphere in the forums is a little disgruntled at the moment, I think in the long term this is definitely the strategy that will pay off the best, rather than just continuing to provide new content while the bugs just linger around.

Communication is really the key to all of this.  Part of the reason the forums got so heated was the lack of developer response.  Now, I don’t blame the developers for this, as presumably they didn’t have the time to post on the forums as they were busy trying to actually fix the issues, but the shift in tone on the forums over the last couple of days has been obvious to me.   The engineering reports are a great tool for not only generating excitement over new content in the works, but also reassuring the playerbase and, to an extent humanising the developers.  Its easy for forums to rail on a group of faceless developers, but when you’ve got dstahl (the chief developer) posting on the forums about being so frustrated with bugs that he started re-coding things from scratch, it really helps to underline that these are real people, working hard to give the fans of the game the fun experience they’re after.   I really think Star Trek Online has been one of the best games I’ve seen for this kind of direct developer interaction, and I really hope it continues, as to me, it really adds to the experience of being a player in this game.

As is customary for MMOs, Star Trek Online is currently near to releasing its next major free content expansion.  However prior to its release on the live server (Holodeck), much of the content is currently on the test server (Tribble) so that the userbase can beta test the new content and find any critical bugs.

So I’ve installed the test server and had a sneaky peak at what to expect from season 2, and I’m really excited.

I’ve avoided playing the new storyline missions so as not to spoil everything, and I don’t actually have a Klingon character, so I can’t try that side of things (I really should start a new Klingon and slowly level them up although I’m already juggling my Tactical and Science alts).

However I have checked out the much-anticipated ship interiors and diplomacy missions.

The ship interiors are something players (especially the role players) have been after for a while.  Since the game launched, ships have always had bridges that you could visit, acting as a social area for you to interact with your friends in a private space.   Several variant bridges were available for you to choose from, and this customisation was later added to by adding more bridge packs into the C-Store.

However, now they’ve been revamped.  The bridges themselves remain largely unchanged, however now, where doors would be static, you have the option to visit the Captain’s ready room off to the side of the bridge.  A nice office area where you can display some of your gained accolades on the wall.  Head out and to the turbolift, and the doors again open, and you’re presented with the option to head to either Engineering or the crew deck.

These decks were great fun to explore.  The corridors looked spot on for a Federation starship, and from them you can visit various key areas of the ship including the engine room, sick bay, the lounge (a la Ten Forward) or even the Captain’s quarters.  At the moment they seem to be purely social areas to be explored for fun, but like a lot of the stuff early in the game, its easy to see where they’ll provide the basis for further functionality.   I know that various mini-games are being discussed, so you’ll be able to help research something in the science lab, or fix an issue in engineering.   I really hope these minigames do make it in, as they sound like a great idea.  And obviously once the interiors are in place, they can easily be used in missions, should you get boarded by Hirogen or someone.

Also expanded the game’s non-combat aspects are the new diplomacy missions.  These take two forms.  The first is First Contact missions, assigned by an Ambassador that appears in your contacts, they involve you meeting up with representatives who then beam to your ship’s conference lounge.  Once there, your job is to talk to the various representatives to gain an insight to their culture, before talking to their ambassador and trying to cement a good relationship with them based on that knowledge.

The second type of diplomacy mission can be found on the various social planets.  So far I’ve only tried the mission on Vulcan, but it involves a Romulan delegation arriving on the planet only to have the Romulan Ambassador’s life threatened and you must investigate and find the guilty party.

Both these types of missions involve quite a bit of reading, but they do break up the constant combat missions quite a bit.  They’re also a nice use of the social areas which until now have generally sat empty, and will give people a reason to visit planets like Vulcan and Risa that they might’ve ignored up until now.  Completing these missions gives diplomacy XP and will allow you to rise through the ranks of the Diplomacy Corps separate to the main ranks, with special perks unlocked as you go, so it provides nice alternative content.

There’s also a nice atmosphere to the new missions.  Seeing the ship’s observation lounge being used for the first contact missions worked well, and a nice touch was seeing your own bridge officers interacting with the visiting diplomats.

Both the interiors and diplomacy missions seem really well done to me.  I’ve had a quick play around with them, and I can’t wait until season 2 goes live and I explore them properly.  Obviously, with the test server I’m wary of trying out too much, as I still want some surprises for the proper release