Actually, STO wants to sell you bridge PACKS. 120 Cryptic Points will now buy you three new bridges for your newbie ship, and 200 will get you four new bridges for your top-of-the-line Federation or Klingon cruisers. These are still (for the Feds, anyway), the cavernous flight deck hangar-sized bridges.
So now you can invite your friends to your ship, and everyone can pretend that the bridge consoles do something or the viewscreen works >< Well, they DO look nice! I spend a lot of time on the bridge of the USS Monterey because, dammit, that’s where you SHOULD be!
Ever notice how Kirk was always signing stuff on the bridge, but I don’t remember any of the followup captains ever seeming that concerned with administrative details.
The expansion also brings a new race, dwarfs Tellaraites, as playable characters. Tellarites are one of the four pillars of the Federation, along with Vulcans, Andorians and the strangely featureless, unformed, smooth-skinned “humans”. You have to wonder how the other races see humans. Doughy, neotenous, unfinished… no character at all to their bodies. Humans must look like demons or ghosts to them, right? Faceless creatures out of their nightmares.
Also new with the expansion are cash shop abilities to wipe clean all your training options, and to change your character’s name. Given that your character will still be attached to your HANDLE everywhere, going from Aaaaaa@Whoever to Bbbbb@Whoever won’t do much to make people forget who you are, but it should be a golden opportunity to change your name from Kirk, Spock or Khan. Because we have enough of those already.
Logging in the test server last weekend got you a Borg Tribble and the title Crash Test Tribble. The expansion also implemented a couple of new fleet missions that had been promised earlier. I did the Assault on DS9 one last night, where approximately one million RA6(!) Cardassians invade Deep Space 9. Note to people attempting this mission: Destroy the holo generators first, for your own sakes. I died so, so many times. I’d dread this with a death penalty.
There were also some UI tweaks and a new raidisode, “The Cure”, which requires players to have done the previous raidisode, “Infected”. I haven’t done either, but people were saying that “Infected” had gotten easier, so maybe there’ll be a chance to pick that one up this weekend.
See you in the Alpha quadrant!