Star Trek Online Revisited – The Tutorial [STO]

As I mentioned in a previous post, I felt like giving Star Trek Online another try. I had purchased a lifetime subscription back when the game launched, but lost interest after a couple of months. This time, I want to try to push towards max level.

Installation of the game was no problem – just a matter of running over to the Star Trek Online website and downloading the installer. Logging in for the first time though, I ran into an issue – I had to determine if I had a Perfect World account (not likely) or a Cryptic account (most likely) – I guess I missed the news that Perfect World was in charge of the game now that it has gone F2P. I searched for my Cryptic account password and got in, but then I was presented with dilemma #2 – I was presented with 3 shards to log into. When I last played, this was a single world game – now I see a Live (Holodeck), a Public test (Tribble), and a Redshirt shard. A quick trip to the Internet explains that Redshirt is a 2nd test environment along with Tribble, so I jump on the Live (Holodeck) server. When the screen loads, I am surprised to see that the 3 characters I previously abandoned were still sitting there waiting for me to come back to the game. I logged into Kitty and was subjected to about 60 seconds of veteran and subscription length achievements and a messed up UI that must not have survived all the patches since I last played. Never the less, i was pretty pleased to see that my characters were still around, but I want to start fresh…

My new character is Cassie. She is a Human Engineer with specialties in Leadership, Teamwork, Warp Theorist, and she’s Creative. These traits all mean something, but I’m not sure how they will effect actual game play and I purged that information from my memory banks way back when I shelved the other 3 characters. Anxious to get going, I tweak some of Cassie’s appearance settings and head into the tutorial. As you can see, I did update her uniform to show off my lifetime comm badge.

Things are pretty standard in the tutorial – wasd to move, number keys for abilities – same as most MMOs, but I needed to make a mental adjustment back to MMO thinking since I’ve played Diablo so much recently. Click-to-move is not the standard and I can hit the space bar to jump.

I do enjoy running around on the bridge of a starship, and I was happy to see 5 other “noobs” running through the tutorial with me – that makes me think there is some life in this game as F2P.

So far it has been a good return visit, however, a little frustration occurred when I looked to my screenshot directory and only saw pictures from the ground portion of the game, so here is a shot of me laying down some mines to take out the Borg Drones. Apparently I needed to set up keybinds for screenshots for both ground and space combat. Oh well, next time I will have a few pictures of my ship – Monty – in space.