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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For both factions, Q offers a couple of events.  The main one being a Star Trek trivia quiz.  Get five questions right, and he’ll reward you with an exclusive party popper device and an 8 hour XP boost.  However if you get any wrong, he’ll transform you as punishment into any one of a number of creatures, including Undine (Species 8472), a Sehlat or even a Horta.  Get transformed five times, and you’ll at least be rewarded with an accolade though, so its not all bad

Q also offers up a new daily mission, in which he invites you to go play in the Fountain by Admiral Quinn’s office.  Do this, and you’ll be rewarded with a variety of items, which can be anything from a common food item, to exclusive unlocks like pets or bridge officers.  Its an incredibly generous mission, although sadly has been since revealed to be open to exploiting, as the rewards are taken from a pool shared amongst the players.

However, even with all this, Q’s not quite finished, bringing in possibly the biggest thing in this anniversary event.  Basically he decided that Earth Space Dock was too drab and boring (perhaps a bit of meta-commentary from the dev team there)?  So he’s decided to change it back to the older (and more recognisable) space dock.

Its been no secret that dstahl, the lead developer had been championing the original space dock, and that it was being brought into the game.  For the last few weeks, sneak peaks of the new interior were released on the Tribble test server, but to finally see the finished work is just breath-taking.  Its not just a matter of restoring the old Space Dock.  There’s a lot of love and attention gone into its design in the game, aided by the fact that it is so recognisable, that you can’t help grinning when you see it.

I love the way they’ve tweaking docking as well.  As before, once you’re in range you can trigger the docking button and you’ll automatically load into the interior, however as a really nice touch, with the new space dock, you can instead fly up to the doors, which will open up revealing the interior.  Just as you’re about to cross the threshold it loads as before, but the end result does give you more of a “flying in to dock” feeling.

The revamped interior remains a lot in common with the previous layout, but most of the rooms have been updated to at least some degree.  The most notable being Admiral Quinn’s new office, which is now in the same instance as the rest of the interior, so you can just walk into it without loading screens, and the new design seems much more detailed than his old office.    Club 47 has received a major facelift as well, now being much more of a club than just a bar, with a dance floor and DJ present for social events.

The highpoint has to be the ship requisitions room though, which now looks on into the interior of the space dock itself, so as you exit the turbolift, you’re immediately grabbed by the view across the docking bay, currently dominated by a Galaxy class starship parked right beside the requistions room.  The great thing is that the devs are planning periodic tweaks to this room to keep that interior changing.  For example, for its live release there’s now an Excelsior class ship also docked, which wasn’t present in the Tribble testing version.

And for the duration of the event, the developers have also decorated this new interior with one year anniversary holograms, which really add to the feel of the celebration and make the release of this new space dock feel that bit more special.

The final thing that’s been added to the game (via a C-Store purchase), is the Delta Flyer, the famous shuttlecraft from Voyager.  The developers have big plans for shuttles in the new weekly missions that are due to start on Saturday, so have been revamping them a little, with the existing runabouts getting tweaked, and the Delta Flyer and a basic Mk 8 shuttle being added to the game.  But as well as being a premier shuttle, the Delta Flyer also comes with a bonus device that you can keep in your inventory which will launch a Delta Flyer shuttle pet from your starship.  Very cool, and a nice unexpected extra

But wait, there’s even more  The first of the new “remastered” missions has also been released.  Stranded in Space, the first mission you do after the tutorial has been completely reworked using new technology that was developed during the weekly missions and while I enjoyed the original version of the mission, this new revamp with its level scaling, optional objects based on class and cut scenes is really superb.  I can’t wait to see what future remastered missions end up looking like.  And there’s also the release of the first five Foundry missions onto the live server.  While the Foundry itself has been delayed while more work is done on it, the developer team decided to take some of the real fan-favourite user-created missions and put them on the live server as a demo of what’s possible using the toolset.  I’ve played a couple of them on Tribble and they were excellent, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the other missions are like.  Especially as one of them has been designed for the Klingon faction.

Overall, I’m loving this event.  I only had a very brief time in it last night, so tonight I’m hoping to invest more time in exploring everything properly, and making sure all four of my current characters take full advantage of Q’s prescence, the various items you can get from his missions and all the new missions.

So here’s to Star Trek Online on its one year anniversary

Here’s a great tribute video put together by RachelGarrett on the STO forums.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I am, of course, talking about the new user generated content toolset, dubbed The Foundry.

To be honest I still am, to an extent, surprised that UGC is coming to Star Trek Online so quickly. However having played with the beta, I’ve been impressed with the tools as they are and look forward to their live release. One of the complaints levelled against the game (rightly or wrongly) is about the lack of content (and in fairness its true of the Klingons) and these tools are obviously going to help resolve that in a major way.

The obvious comparison, for me, is with the Mission Architect in City of Heroes. That was a superb, easy-to-use toolset that also came with its own downside in the form of the farming missions that all surfaced after its release.  The Foundry is a very different toolset to the Mission Architect. I would definitely argue that its not as easy to use, but this has advantages to my eyes.

Mission Architect was great for quickly throwing together a mission or series of missions, whereas the Foundry definitely requires a bit more patience and practice. In both you select the map you want the mission to take place in, however the Foundry then lets you go in to that map to customize it with extra scenery. You also define enemy groups in greater detail, and while Mission Architect definitely (currently) has the edge in customizing the look of the enemy mobs, the ability to define exactly what and how many enemy groups are in a map, and their locations within that map strikes me as a great tool for building a distinct feel for a mission, whether you want it to be combat-heavy or more dialogue driven.  Whether you want swarms of easy-to-kill enemies or just a couple that are hard-as-nails, that level of customisation, and the ability to tailor each individual member of a mob’s appearance is very nice indeed.  Likewise the ability to drop items onto maps.  Going by some of the missions currently available on Tribble, some people have clearly spent many hours designing their maps, placing NPCs and scenery and plot-specific items quite carefully.  Indeed, my only complaint about this aspect of the current build, is that placing items on a map requires a lot of patience and testing, as its not always completely clear from the design view the exact position of an object and its orientation, so when crafting your missions, there’s a lot of switching between playing the map to see how items look, switching back to edit mode to tweak them, and then testing again.  This part of the toolset could do with some streamlining I think.

One aspect I really love about the Foundry though is the way the missions integrate into the main game universe.  In City of Heroes, all the Mission Architect stuff took place within a single building.  From in there you could access consoles to run the mission editor, or enter a holodeck-style version of your mission.  In City of Heroes all the missions that people designed were just presented as simulations.  With the Foundry, missions are selected from a separate tab on the main “Hail Starfleet” screen, but once you’ve selected the mission, it then plays out in the main game area, with you flying to systems, talking to contacts in Earth Space Dock and the like, just as you would for any other in-game mission.   To me, this is a great aspect of the system.  It really allows you to feel like you’re adding content to the game as a whole, rather than just a special section that’s tucked away from the larger world.

The rewards for running these user-generated missions still remain to be announced, but it seems likely that running user missions will generate skill points the same as any “official” mission (although I’d be surprised if some kind of modifier wasn’t implemented).  The idea that you’ll be able to run these missions rather than getting stuck in some patrol/exploration cluster grind is hugely appealing (again, especially for the Klingon players).  I’m currently levelling up a Science character, and the idea of having proper (user generated) storylines to help that late-Commander part of the game tick along is very appealing.

I mentioned before that the tools require a degree of patience and familiarisation and, strange as it may seem, this is something I definitely see as a plus.  City of Heroes suffered from a deluge of simple missions with large groups of mobs designed for farming.  The fact that the Foundry requires an element of learning the toolset to me encourages more quality content.  And from what we’ve already seen, there’s some great missions being designed by players.  So much so, a selection of them are being ported over to the live Holodeck server, as a teaser for the Foundry, and to show those players who haven’t tested it, the kind of thing that will be possible once the tools go live.

That live release is coming up fast now, but before it does, there’s one final update to be made to the test version, which promises to bring in more options for the structure of missions, with branching dialogue one of the main additions.   I’m very excited to see what kind of new Foundry options are opened up in this update, as the current iteration of the Foundry is a brilliant start, with some obvious downsides that can sometimes force you to compromise the mission you intended in order to work around the tools.  The fact that the developers have listened to that feedback from the testers and are now adding this extra functionality before it goes live I find hugely encouraging that they’re trying to ensure the release of the Foundry is the best it can be.

Hopefully sometime in February (testing all going well on the update) we’ll see the Foundry finally make it out onto the live server.  And once its there I really can’t wait to see what kinds of missions get added to the game.  I think its going to be a huge moment for the game.