Cryptic has a friend in Netflix. The Internet movie streaming giant recently obtained a two year license to offer every episode of every incarnation of Star Trek (aside from the animated series) for instant viewing by folks in the United States.
There’s not one Trek fan who isn’t gonna watch a few episodes and not want to get into the bridge of a starship of their own and mix it up with some Klinks and Rommies. Star Trek Online absolutely delivers on that. With their Foundry, you can even potentially create some episodes of your own. I was watching a Voyager episode, “Message in a Bottle”, which features a fight where a Nebula-class starship is chasing a stolen experimental assault ship when Romulan battleships decloak and start firing and then Federation starships catch up and then there’s a grand old battle. If STO wasn’t down for maintenance right now, I could have whipped up that exact encounter in about half an hour.
Cryptic dropped their Season Four: Crossfire update yesterday. Ground combat has been significantly updated; there’s now a mode that gives you a mouselook reticule for aiming, but I have to admit I didn’t find it a huge game-changer. That could be because I was playing a low level character and the fights just weren’t that tactically difficult. Gorn are pretty big, slow targets on the ground.
Klinks (er, Klingons) get a redesigned homeworld, which was much needed. You know when your best option to sell off your trash loot is to head to Defera because you can’t find anyone to buy it in the Great Hall, there’s something wrong. Perhaps signalling recent victories in the long conflict with the Federation, Klingons have new sectors with new Patrol missions. Those Klingon-only Patrol missions are experience gold mines for horseshoe crab-heads.
The game itself has gotten a huge graphical update; the animated loading screens as you move into and out of missions or across sectors are so awesome that I was wanting to see the entire UI look more like THAT. With meaningless numbers scrolling all over the place and flashy stuff, can’t get enough of that.
Still to come for Season Four: The new Feature Episodes. This is Star Trek Online’s ace in the hole; but perhaps unfortunately, the FEs are of such high quality that the rest of the game really just seems like stuff to do when I don’t have a new FE to do.
While we wait for the Feature Episodes to start rolling out, STO will be upgrading our onboard personnel with Duty Officers and Department Heads.
Duty Officers give those excess crew that aren’t being used in away missions or on the bridge something to do, namely, to beam down on dangerous missions so they can be killed by rocks/strange plants/hostile natives/space anomalies/hangnails and be mourned by the series regulars for forty three minutes until they are forgotten forever.
That’s right. Season Four is going to give you redshirts of your very own. If your redshirts manage to survive their missions, you can get valuable resources, crafting and other nice things. Or you can make a bit of change selling off the possessions they left behind in their quarters before you sent them to their doom.
It could be worse. Much worse. Your department heads could eat them. So, you know, there’s that.
You’ll be able to assign crew members to be Department Heads for the various bridge stations – engineering, science, tactical and so on. By assigning a duty officer to a department, the Department Head “swallows” the officer and gains some of their abilities, and are then able to provide extra abilities when they are slotted into bridge crews or away missions. If one of them is promoted to First Officer, then they can give your character a new ability of their very own.
That’s yet to come. Cryptic has also been revamping their older missions to bring them more in line with their new tech. It’s all good stuff, and combined with Cryptic’s recent acquisition by free-to-play titans Perfect World Entertainment which will almost certainly make the game also free-to-play in coming months, there’s no reason not to find a quiet Jeffries tube, set the replicators on “snack” and head into the Alpha Quadrant for some cinematic space action in Star Trek Online.