Code of Honor

[Worffan101]

What Lies Beneath, isn't that the third of the Devidian featured series from the first year? If so I love that one, I always play it with the Ghostbusters theme playing on my playlist.

"Bonnie-Kin, Bonnie-Kin..."

That one's good creepy fun.

[Worffan101]

Because licensed MMOs are rarely built to utilize the license, but instead use existing design elements or outright use existing MMO engines and slap the license on top. In this case, they used Champions Online and tossed a very thin veneer of Star Trek on top. This was painfully apparent at release. It's gotten "better" over the years, but that foundation is still ultimately flawed. They've even removed the exploration missions, because making compelling content that isn't just a combat grind is (A) hard and (B) not what World of Warcraft has trained players and designers alike to expect from the genre. Also, it's run by Ferengi, making the parts which might have been fun in a world where the company had ethics just a cash-grab instead.

It has a wonderful character customization system, thanks to its pre-WoW heritage from City of Heroes by way of Champions Online, but that's about it. The writing for most missions makes Voyager look sophisticated, and despite their constant stunt-casting of Trek veterans, their voice director is so awful that they can make anyone sound like they're reading a script on a first pass.

To be fair, Cryptic had like a year to build the game after the previous developer fumbled it completely. The fact that it functioned at all after launch is a damn miracle.

Those "exploration" missions were random bits tied together that rarely made sense (31st Borg Dynasty, for example) and weren't fun, like at all. At least shooting things is interesting. Exploration missions never were.

Their voice direction is pretty bad some days, but they have gotten better. And it's not nearly as bad as it could be for the money grabbing, you can play the entire game without ever spending a dime, they don't lock content behind a paywall, just ships and costumes really.

This.

While many of the story arcs (Iconian War, Temporal War, anything involving Neelix, the Kobali mess, the Discovery expansion so far) are horribly written and annoying, there's some legitimately good stuff (Spectres, the Vault series, the Romulan story if you can tolerate Tovan Khev, the parts of Delta Rising that don't involve Neelix, Victory is Life), and the FTP model is, while certainly somewhat eye-raising in terms of the prices, at least realistically possible to grind for the stuff you want without paying a cent.

Plus, playing space Barbie is fun.

if you play STO you are playing a Star Trek online theme park, where your character, Admiral Awesomename, is simply the bestest badass ever and goes from Cadet to Captain in like a week. Klingons start as a seasoned officer, as do TOS Feds, but 2409 and Discovery Feds start as Cadets and Romulans start out as farmers. Yeah, it's a thing. It's not supposed to tell a DS9-caliber story (with one exception), it's an MMO that does a great job of being a Star Trek-themed fantasy playground.

And then there's the Victory is Life expansion, where your character is basically a spectator with a gun watching a remarkably decent DS9 story featuring Odo and Kira's relationship drama, a shuffling of who's Kai like a fucking shell game, the Seekrit Origins of the evil demon monsters from some early Klingon missions, Salome Jens's Founder getting what's coming to her, Weyoun because fans love to hate Weyoun and they ran out of ideas, Bashir somehow still flirting with Garak despite every effort by the writers to pretend that Bashir is married to Ezri Dax, which is quite patently absurd because we all know that Bashir and Garak are soul mates because Garak has great taste in men and Bashir has really, really dangerous tastes in men, and where was I oh right they have a legitimately excellent horror segment that I had a lot of fun with.

Basically, good things about STO:
Victory is Life
Romulans (excluding Tovan Khev)
Tuvok and his trilogy
Delta Rising (excluding Neelix)
CAPTAIN Harry Kim, HERO OF THE DELTA QUADRANT and legitimate badass
the TOS parts of Agents of Yesterday
The old Featured Episodes of the Breen, Tal Shiar, and Devidian arcs. Dominion is merely OK but has some standout moments.

Bad things about STO:
The goofy part where you start as a green cadet and go straight to your own spaceship.
Temporal Agent Daniels
Tovan Khev
Neelix
the Kobali (AKA space rapists)
the non-TOS parts of Agents of Yesterday
Age of Discovershit (solid 4/10 so far, not as bad as the show but not good at all)
The Iconian War
the fucking Kobali
the way Cryptic have basically stopped making real content for Klingons and Romulans and are working under such a time crunch what with the CBS-mandated STD expansion that they couldn't even patch all the early Fed missions in time for the expansion
the motherfucking sanctimonious hypocritical Kobali and the way I'm not allowed to shoot their lying, cowardly, hypocritical corpse-rapist of a leader in the face and instead am forced to be an accessory to war crimes and crimes against sentient life if I want to finish the story or get the sweet loot.

[Nealithi]

What Lies Beneath, isn't that the third of the Devidian featured series from the first year? If so I love that one, I always play it with the Ghostbusters theme playing on my playlist.

Yup! Enterprise uniforms in tan, Big backpack. Sadly you only get one of the proton guns. Because I would so just take three away team members if we could.

[Nealithi]

Because licensed MMOs are rarely built to utilize the license, but instead use existing design elements or outright use existing MMO engines and slap the license on top. In this case, they used Champions Online and tossed a very thin veneer of Star Trek on top. This was painfully apparent at release. It's gotten "better" over the years, but that foundation is still ultimately flawed. They've even removed the exploration missions, because making compelling content that isn't just a combat grind is (A) hard and (B) not what World of Warcraft has trained players and designers alike to expect from the genre. Also, it's run by Ferengi, making the parts which might have been fun in a world where the company had ethics just a cash-grab instead.

It has a wonderful character customization system, thanks to its pre-WoW heritage from City of Heroes by way of Champions Online, but that's about it. The writing for most missions makes Voyager look sophisticated, and despite their constant stunt-casting of Trek veterans, their voice director is so awful that they can make anyone sound like they're reading a script on a first pass.

To be fair, Cryptic had like a year to build the game after the previous developer fumbled it completely. The fact that it functioned at all after launch is a damn miracle.

Those "exploration" missions were random bits tied together that rarely made sense (31st Borg Dynasty, for example) and weren't fun, like at all. At least shooting things is interesting. Exploration missions never were.

Their voice direction is pretty bad some days, but they have gotten better. And it's not nearly as bad as it could be for the money grabbing, you can play the entire game without ever spending a dime, they don't lock content behind a paywall, just ships and costumes really.

This.

While many of the story arcs (Iconian War, Temporal War, anything involving Neelix, the Kobali mess, the Discovery expansion so far) are horribly written and annoying, there's some legitimately good stuff (Spectres, the Vault series, the Romulan story if you can tolerate Tovan Khev, the parts of Delta Rising that don't involve Neelix, Victory is Life), and the FTP model is, while certainly somewhat eye-raising in terms of the prices, at least realistically possible to grind for the stuff you want without paying a cent.

Plus, playing space Barbie is fun.

if you play STO you are playing a Star Trek online theme park, where your character, Admiral Awesomename, is simply the bestest badass ever and goes from Cadet to Captain in like a week. Klingons start as a seasoned officer, as do TOS Feds, but 2409 and Discovery Feds start as Cadets and Romulans start out as farmers. Yeah, it's a thing. It's not supposed to tell a DS9-caliber story (with one exception), it's an MMO that does a great job of being a Star Trek-themed fantasy playground.

And then there's the Victory is Life expansion, where your character is basically a spectator with a gun watching a remarkably decent DS9 story featuring Odo and Kira's relationship drama, a shuffling of who's Kai like a fucking shell game, the Seekrit Origins of the evil demon monsters from some early Klingon missions, Salome Jens's Founder getting what's coming to her, Weyoun because fans love to hate Weyoun and they ran out of ideas, Bashir somehow still flirting with Garak despite every effort by the writers to pretend that Bashir is married to Ezri Dax, which is quite patently absurd because we all know that Bashir and Garak are soul mates because Garak has great taste in men and Bashir has really, really dangerous tastes in men, and where was I oh right they have a legitimately excellent horror segment that I had a lot of fun with.

Basically, good things about STO:
Victory is Life
Romulans (excluding Tovan Khev)
Tuvok and his trilogy
Delta Rising (excluding Neelix)
CAPTAIN Harry Kim, HERO OF THE DELTA QUADRANT and legitimate badass
the TOS parts of Agents of Yesterday
The old Featured Episodes of the Breen, Tal Shiar, and Devidian arcs. Dominion is merely OK but has some standout moments.

Bad things about STO:
The goofy part where you start as a green cadet and go straight to your own spaceship.
Temporal Agent Daniels
Tovan Khev
Neelix
the Kobali (AKA space rapists)
the non-TOS parts of Agents of Yesterday
Age of Discovershit (solid 4/10 so far, not as bad as the show but not good at all)
The Iconian War
the fucking Kobali
the way Cryptic have basically stopped making real content for Klingons and Romulans and are working under such a time crunch what with the CBS-mandated STD expansion that they couldn't even patch all the early Fed missions in time for the expansion
the motherfucking sanctimonious hypocritical Kobali and the way I'm not allowed to shoot their lying, cowardly, hypocritical corpse-rapist of a leader in the face and instead am forced to be an accessory to war crimes and crimes against sentient life if I want to finish the story or get the sweet loot.

Heh. I think we need an STO thread instead of using the thread for a dreck episode of TNG.

[Yukaphile]

I hear they also expanded on Species 8472, which hey, is welcome. You certainly can't assassinate them any worse than the Borg. I mean, once they introduced the Queen, it was game over, because Ron Moore and Brannon Braga clearly failed to understand the concept of the Borg as a whole. But I could have forgiven that if they hadn't kept showing up and getting nerfed and nerfed hard.

[Steve]

The last content I played was the big TOS expansion in 2016. Back in 2015 I just burned out hard on the game, so I rarely touch it save to use the uniforms to illustrate uniforms I use for a series of written SF stories (i made screenshots to demonstrate to my readers).

I may have to try out the DS9 content at some point.

Also, when it comes to starting as a green cadet in Starfleet, that's only from the revamped UFP tutorial. At game launch you were at least a commissioned ensign, and you got command of your starting ship because the Borg wiped out the officers of your ship while you were helping in saving the Khitomer from the Borg. So you take command in an ongoing combat scenario, and at the end of it Starfleet just leaves the Miranda/Centaur/Shi'Kahr-class ship in your command, with a promotion to Lieutenant, because the fleet's desperate for ships and captains due to the losses to the Klingons and now the Borg.

[Worffan101]

The last content I played was the big TOS expansion in 2016. Back in 2015 I just burned out hard on the game, so I rarely touch it save to use the uniforms to illustrate uniforms I use for a series of written SF stories (i made screenshots to demonstrate to my readers).

I may have to try out the DS9 content at some point.

Also, when it comes to starting as a green cadet in Starfleet, that's only from the revamped UFP tutorial. At game launch you were at least a commissioned ensign, and you got command of your starting ship because the Borg wiped out the officers of your ship while you were helping in saving the Khitomer from the Borg. So you take command in an ongoing combat scenario, and at the end of it Starfleet just leaves the Miranda/Centaur/Shi'Kahr-class ship in your command, with a promotion to Lieutenant, because the fleet's desperate for ships and captains due to the losses to the Klingons and now the Borg.

Yeah, the new tutorial plays better than the original but it sucks that they removed what realism there was.

Ah well. At least "Victory is Life" is a fun story. They turned Quark's Ferengi team into a freaking heist movie.

[BunBun299]

Because licensed MMOs are rarely built to utilize the license, but instead use existing design elements or outright use existing MMO engines and slap the license on top. In this case, they used Champions Online and tossed a very thin veneer of Star Trek on top. This was painfully apparent at release. It's gotten "better" over the years, but that foundation is still ultimately flawed. They've even removed the exploration missions, because making compelling content that isn't just a combat grind is (A) hard and (B) not what World of Warcraft has trained players and designers alike to expect from the genre. Also, it's run by Ferengi, making the parts which might have been fun in a world where the company had ethics just a cash-grab instead.

It has a wonderful character customization system, thanks to its pre-WoW heritage from City of Heroes by way of Champions Online, but that's about it. The writing for most missions makes Voyager look sophisticated, and despite their constant stunt-casting of Trek veterans, their voice director is so awful that they can make anyone sound like they're reading a script on a first pass.

To be fair, Cryptic had like a year to build the game after the previous developer fumbled it completely. The fact that it functioned at all after launch is a damn miracle.

Those "exploration" missions were random bits tied together that rarely made sense (31st Borg Dynasty, for example) and weren't fun, like at all. At least shooting things is interesting. Exploration missions never were.

Their voice direction is pretty bad some days, but they have gotten better. And it's not nearly as bad as it could be for the money grabbing, you can play the entire game without ever spending a dime, they don't lock content behind a paywall, just ships and costumes really.

And for that, I will happily pay them for ships and costumes. I enjoy the game. I never feel I have to pay. Every new mission that comes out, every new PVE que, play to your heart's content.

I don't really have high expectations of the story. It's serviceable for the most part. You can't make the kind of character drama that came out of DS9 when I'm creating a custom bridge crew for my ship, not characters they give me, so I just make that part up in my head. I like most of the story arcs, even the ones complained about above, with the exception of the odd mission here or there. Notable exceptions for me would be most missions that require me to beam down without my away team (Colosseum would be a notable exception because I felt there was actually a reason to be on my own). Two Admirals beaming over to Earth Space Dock without a security escort, and one of those Admirals being around 160, is just idiotic. And missions where they expect me to fly some other ship.

[sayla0079]

Okay speaking of DS9 someone answer this for me since I have heard different things. In STO Is Ezri Dax still alive or does she bite it later in the game? Someone said she dies and most info I found says she is still alive but not sure how current the info is.

[Eishtmo]

Okay speaking of DS9 someone answer this for me since I have heard different things. In STO Is Ezri Dax still alive or does she bite it later in the game? Someone said she dies and most info I found says she is still alive but not sure how current the info is.

I believe she and Bashier married and have kids and she commands a ship, but it's never directly said in game dialog, might be in some of the data log things you can do. I'd have to look it up.