Star Trek Online is going Free to Play tomorrow. I have been looking forward to playing this game for a while now. There is only so much World of Warcraft I can take in a given year, and other MMOs like The Old Republic are not different enough from WoW to give me the break I am looking for. Star Trek Online looks to be significantly different, and they have been updating it for months to get the game ready for the F2P crowd.
What really has me interested in the game is how it has the standard ground combat and character building of most MMOs, but then also has a really deep space combat system that is pretty tactical. So in addition to your standard character building, you are also customizing a ship and crew – way more variety then most MMOs.
While combat in most MMOs comes down to mashing on buttons (in the correct rotation for whatever your fighting), STO’s ship combat is a bit different and much more tactical. One really simple example is that all of the ships have shield segments. The simple tactic is to target a single point on an enemy ship with energy weapons to drop that section of their shields. At that point you can hit the exposed hull with torpedoes. So positing actually matters in Star Trek Online, you need to keep your ship facing weakened points of the enemy’s shields while trying to keep your weak points out of their line of fire.
Check out some of the videos below to see how space and ground combat work:
Starship Tactics Part One
Shields, ship upgrades, and bridge crew.
Starship Tactics Part Two
Power management & Boarding Parties
Bridge Officers
A closer look at crew management
Power Management
A closer look at power management
Ground Combat
Ground combat is pretty awesome as well. They have an optional mode that makes the game control more like a 3rd person shooter and really increases the speed of the game. Its pretty cool.
Free 2 Play Trailer
Now that the game is free to play, there is really no reason not to check it out