Interested in Star Trek Online Playthroughs?

[Mecha82]

A lot of the fun in STO is playing with what they give you and in your 'brain space' of imagination as you get to play your Star Trek character. It would not make a good video series.

I think that that's problem with doing playthroughs of most MMOs other than TOR and FF14. Those don't really have story of they own and person doing that playthrough needs to be good storyteller to make it interesting. Let's face it, MMOs other than TOR and FF14 tend to be boring to watch some one else play because there needs to be story to keep it interesting.

[Worffan101]

Only if you call out the Devs for the Kobali being a species of space rapists, the Elachi ALSO being space rapists that the devs imply are better than us and it's OK that they're Body Horror space kidnappers and rapists because they're "close to nature" in the form of the mushroom kingdom, and the attempt to build sympathy for the mass-murdering Iconians by making them space elves.

Man, the morality in this game is fucked.

[CharlesPhipps]

I love Star Trek Online and this is inspiring me to reboot my Xbox One account to get back into it and try to do some more gaming. I initially played when it was able to fit on my laptop back when it first came out as a Federation officer and got to the Cardassian Arc.

Then I switched to KDF and managed to get all the way to the Delta Quadrant arc before those damn missions became too much of a difficulty spike and it just wasn't fun anymore. I didn't know what I was doing wrong as either I needed to grind more or I just wasn't good enough. However, traveling around the Dyson Sphere was a nightmare of constant death. Hmmm, maybe I don't need to return.

I'm disappointed to learn that they fucked with the Guardian of Forever mission since the Kuva'Magh adventure being about how she brings an end to the Augment Plague is easily among the most Star Trek plots they had. It involved time travel, continuity, solving the Federation-Klingon War (which needs MORE content not less), and so on.

I'm going to say that I don't think that it would be very much fun to do a review of the game, though, because 90% is "Space ship blowing up stuff. Pew pew with Phasers." The acting in Star Wars: The Old Republic is what makes videos of it entertaining.

Only if you call out the Devs for the Kobali being a species of space rapists, the Elachi ALSO being space rapists that the devs imply are better than us and it's OK that they're Body Horror space kidnappers and rapists because they're "close to nature" in the form of the mushroom kingdom, and the attempt to build sympathy for the mass-murdering Iconians by making them space elves.

Man, the morality in this game is fucked.

I actually have to say the whole Kobali arc is more interesting because of the twists and turns in it than less. I feel like they've been tripping out a lot of content that is good because it is easy and feel good. The Kobali are portrayed as a bunch of assholes for what they're doing (the fact they did it to original recipe Harry Kim is proof of that) but they're a military ally in a situation in Galactic World War 1 against the Iconians and their slave races.

You just don't throw that away when billions of people have already died in it.

Then again, I'm DS9 Trek.

[Worffan101]

I mean, I refuse to acknowledge that the Iconian War arc happened in any more detail than "there was a war with the Iconians, the Alliance won".

Fuck that ending, it was horrible.

[CharlesPhipps]

I mean, I refuse to acknowledge that the Iconian War arc happened in any more detail than "there was a war with the Iconians, the Alliance won".

Fuck that ending, it was horrible.

I can't comment unfortunately due to the fact, again, the Delta Quadrant campaign defeated me the player from continuing. May I ask what was so bad about it?

[Worffan101]

I mean, I refuse to acknowledge that the Iconian War arc happened in any more detail than "there was a war with the Iconians, the Alliance won".

Fuck that ending, it was horrible.

I can't comment unfortunately due to the fact, again, the Delta Quadrant campaign defeated me the player from continuing. May I ask what was so bad about it?

The Iconian War, in a nutshell (not counting the Blog War blogs):
EPISODE 1: BLOOD OF THE ANCIENTS!: The Iconians invade en masse and the player faces a grueling battle even on Normal difficulty against their science-fantasy minions, the Heralds (Iconians proper have cutscene power and are basically godmode), and essentially is in a fighting retreat the whole time, suffering heavy casualties before Federation, Klingon, and Romulan forces rally and defeat the Iconian Boss Ship in the Preserver-archive system from the Deferi arc, and the Iconians temporarily fall back (i headcanon this as being because the Iconians are laughably tactically inept and get their asses handed to them)

Episode 2: Delta Flight: Admiral Awesomename, HERO OF THE DELTA QUADRANT, joins Tom Paris and a ragtag bunch of misfits in a desperate attempt to shut down an evil space station being used by the Iconians to get the creepy monster-monks from TNG: Schisms as reinforcements.

Episode 3: House Pratfall: Kahless II gets his dumb ass killed and loses the Sword of Kahless bragging to a fallen Iconian about how honorable he is as the worst Klingon commandos ever watch picking their noses, and the one COMPETENT Klingon (an engineer who gets no respect and whose lesbian relationship was attacked on the STO forums because some people are assholes) of the bunch is given no credit even though she's the one who actually hurt the Iconian. The player is railroaded into going along with this.

Episode 4: Time in a Butthole: the Krenim are hiding in a time pocket, which the Iconians can't find because technobabble, also apparently everybody knows about what happened in Year of Hell for some reason and we get bad exposition about it shoved at us. Also Ferengi are involved. Yay.

Episode 5: Armchair General: Idiotic Klingon questgiver Captain Kagran burns men and ships on a frontal assault on the Dyson sphere from TNG: Relics, which the Iconians are using as a staging base for their invasion of the Milky Way. This is supposed to "buy time" for the completion of a replica of Annorax's weapon ship from Year of Hell so we can rewrite time to save the trillions who are already dead from the war, but only really succeeds in burning men and ships and pissing off the Iconians, though Admiral Awesomename, HERO OF THE DELTA QUADRANT, manages to get their ship through an Iconian portal and, at great personal risk and without support from Kagran's dying bunch of idiots, manages to kill an Iconian after unloading enough firepower to kill several armies at her and nearly being vaporized several times.

All this does is piss off the Iconians more, and provides a negligible morale booster for the allied forces that is more than countered by all the senseless death in the futile counterstrike.

Episode 6: Butt-Fly: Grouchy Asshole Krenim and his friendly proto-Sphere-Builder wife have Admiral Awesomename roleplay computer simulations to see how history should be altered to stop the Iconians. For reasons, several simulations are shown to be kind of bad, but then when the alteration is done for realsies on the "good" option, the Borg assimilate Romulus for no reason in the ATL. Nobody offers a decent explanation for this other than "LOL random".

Shooting a Borg transwarp conduit with the erase-from-history beam is enough to reset history, though nobody, not even the devs, bothers to explain why. However, as a result Noye's wife is vanished because the sphere builders are retconned to have always been...well, the Sphere Builders. Don't think about it too hard, the Devs and their lickspittles said, and then turned around and talked about how deep and thoughtful a discussion of time travel the mission was.

Episode 7: Springtime for Space Hitler: The Iconians attack Earth in a massive, actually pretty fun to play space battle, with the Dominion showing up at the last moment to unite with the Federation against the bigger threat. Sadly they are convinced to do so by war criminal and perennial asshole Sela, but I'll take what I can get.

Kagran takes the Annorax ship into the past to wipe out the Iconians as they try to escape a servitor uprising, but it's revealed that the Iconians were magic hippie space elves (they still had a slave species but this is treated as OK because they evolved on the same planet, but the Valakians were evil and oppressing the Menk because they evolved on the same planet, but ow my head I think I sprained my brain trying to process that bullshit) until ungrateful ugly people attacked them unprovoked and stole the magic ball that contained their good feelings (or something like that, it was dumb), and it turns out that Sela caused a stable time loop that turned the Iconians evil so the player is railroaded into saving the Iconian survivors (several of whom the player recognizes as the very same ones that will personally murder dozens of people in front of their eyes in 2409 and then lead a campaign of genocidal war against the Milky Way in 2410) even if a Romulan or a Klingon or whatever, then heads back to 2410 in the aftermath of the battle (because stupidity) to hand the magic ball back to the Iconians who say that they'll stop killing people--except for the one Iconian who promises to keep killing people because the devs "wanted an explanation" for why the Iconian PVE queues were still going even though we never had or needed one before--and refuse to apologize or make any form of reparations for the trillions they murdered in what boils down to a futile tantrum of mindless xenophobic rage by totalitarian racist Smug Snake smiling monsters.

The forums essentially blew up.

[Worffan101]

That was the second of three times that they made the ostensibly good-guy NPC faction Smiling Monsters. The Kobali are treated as heroic and get off scott-free for their space rape, the Iconians are treated as sad and misunderstood for their genocide and get off scott-free (though tbf there's not much the allies can DO militarily against them), and the Elachi, which are VERY clearly and nightmarishly shown as inhuman monsters, like the Magog from Andromeda, in the Romulan arc, are in the most recent episode ("Beneath the Skin") retconned as elfish close to nature good guys.

The devs keep fucking doing this and they NEVER show any indication of treating these abominations with anything close to the seriousness they merit!

[Nealithi]

@Worffan101
I am sorry but your ticked off accounting of the stark terrors of the Iconian war forgot a segment. Around the middle of all that was Holiday Beach Vacation!
Come on down you tired captains and fly jetpacks to earn a shiny new ship you probably won't fly!
Surf! and make sandcastles!

Side Note: I actually did like Sela having set off the Iconian turn to darkness. Since it meant she was to blame for Hobus.

[CharlesPhipps]

Thanks.

That does seem like a mess, though "it turns out it was all a misunderstanding" is pretty much classic Trek.

[Eishtmo]

*snip*

Wow, so much vitriol over a game. I'd read all of it (and I haven't) but I have to go to work in 15 minutes.

I have problems with the Iconion War story, but they are focused more on presentation and pacing. There wasn't enough war in the first half of the story, and the second half didn't seem as desperate as it should have been. I enjoyed it otherwise for what it was and the questions it posed the the player.

You didn't like it. Okay, but seriously, did you need to write something that long to say it?