Initial Thoughts

[Undergrid]

* Slow - Theres no feel of speed anywhere, yes I know space is huge and it takes ages to get anywhere, but E&B and even Eve gave the feeling of speed in warp.  In STOL's warp you look like your impulsing through a map display or something,  slooooooooooow.  At one point I ended up walking through the map and overtook a couple of cruisers in the process!

* NPC's Extreme Closing - Every space based MMO has done this, E&B, Eve, even the space bit of SWG.  Attacked NPC's come right at you almost as close as they can get which makes no sence.  Surely they have a better chance of me missing if they stay at max weapons range?  It did mean I could use the photon mine layer I aquired basically as a missile launcher.

* Circling - If I have to orbit someone thats attacking me (because they decided to come toe to toe) give me an option to automatically orbit them!  Don't make me manually have to turn all the time while trying to remember to fire (auto-fire can be set by right clicking on a weapon, don't use it with missiles or mines though)

* Semi-twitch combat - wtf?  The chance to hit and damage etc are all roll-of-the-dice, but which shield you hit on a ship (or if you get a flanking bonus on foot) depend on where you are relating to the target.  In space though, everyones moving and turning so damn slow you can't concentrate on one shield and you can't aim for a specific shield, only be in the specifc part of the arc to hit that shield.  And can I target sub-systems? Anyone remeber "Take out their weapons number one!"

* Roll Ship - Space doesn't care which way is up and for some reason I can't fathom my turning circle stinks (the shuttle can turn on its access IRL, why can't I?) so when someones battered down my port shield, why can't I roll ship to interpose my starboard shields?  (Too much Honorverse I guess).

* Auto group - ok, trying to limit instances here and get people to work together, but I don't need to see the whole welcome-to-the-mission crap when I'm in the middle of a dogfight.  I'm trying to remember to circle and fire, I don't need 6 identical dialogs popping up one after the other when some new people are dumped into my instance..  Which brings me to......

* Auto-open dialogs - great for getting the story across, they also stop your ship dead so you don't run into things (I guess), great idea.  Except when your in the middle of a dogfight, you end up stopping dead for dialogs you want to read later (and don't think because you've finished the current section of a mission that everythings stopped shooting at you).  Do it like E&B did, a comm request at the side of the screen you can click when you've finished getting the shit kicked out of you.

Other than that, and the obvious bugs and teething trouble, I kinda liked it.

[rover]

lol

[|fury|]

Everything's still a little odd to me at the moment, I've not really read anythign other than paul's informative post so I've had a little trouble with a couple of things. First example being not noticing where the turbo lift to the admiral was at sol station and ending up running around the whole place twice before realising it was right in front of me where I'd originally materialised

quite amused by the whole 'spawning as a bloke in space and as a spaceship on the ground' thing, I guess that'll get patched at some point 

on the whole I think there's potential, it's a difficult product to get right imho - you're _never_ going to please all the trekkies out there and it's essentially 2 games in one. I'd read somewhere that two developers have already tried and failed with this franchise so fingers crossed cryptic get this game to where it deserves to be, and don't get mullered in the process.

I appreciate a lot of MMO fans want mega depth in their games but i'm more of a casual gamer these days (hence why I always got on so well with City of Heroes/Villains) but I also realise that for an MMO to flourish it does need a sufficient level of depth to keep the hard-core MMO players entertained

I'm not really a fan of Star Trek, I certainly don't mind it but I think the idea of SWG was more appealing to me and was more engaging as a result. That said, I've enjoyed what I've seen so far despite not really knowing wtf is going on half the time  I'm not going to pre-order just yet but there's still a strong possibility that I will

[RichardWhitely]

Most of the things I can find wrong with it are little niggles - like everything is so friggin huge, you could fit an army on transporter pads and probably another army into those turbolift doors (were they made for giants or something?) - I can see what they were trying to do, create a huge epic world/universe but making everything 10 times as big is just a cheap cop out.

My crew automatically regenerates - how? actually do I really want to know how... Anyway, I did read it was supposed to deplete through damage and then you would have to visit a starbase to replenish it - perhaps its been turned off for open beta, but thats a bit of a bizarre decision if it was - probably bugged... 

Also some missions like for example - scanning plant types on a planet, are incredibly frustrating to do. Perhaps they could plonk in a option to scan for them using the tri-corder and then have them appear on the minimap if they are within a certain radius, much better than now where you are just running around the map like a loon looking for this one last plant that you just cannot find...

Loot - this needs a big overhaul, one of the things that keeps people playing wow is the sheer amount of loot and all the shiny shiny stuff to collect. People like getting shiny shinies - make moar plz! Have more things drop more and varied loot.

Getting around on the ground and finding people you need to interact with is also poor. I don't WANT TO have to walk around that entire space station to find say the Lounge or Capt So and So, I want to pull up the map and SEE where that person is, and a "you are here" icon for myself that reflects where I am, and a waypoint directly to that person. Yes I have been spoiled by the way WoW is at the moment

In COH seeing the icon on the map, and being able to find it was easier, as the cities were wide open, but in STO these are multi-level structures, with walls and scructure in between, and for instance the Klingon starting point, finding all those people was frustrating, and confusing. It shouldn't be, this a something that's VERY VERY simple in most other MMOs. And there's no reason it has to be like it is at present in STO.

I've tried to plonk some parts with more speed and better turning onto my ship, plus invested in skills that apparently do the same, but it seems to make no sodding difference, the ship is as slow as ever, perhaps because its a noob ship, but still I would expect some improvement.

I dont know what is going on half the time either, plus my game seems to plonk me into instances totally at random most of the time - so I have even less of a clue what is going on .

In the short development time they had they have done quite well and it is quite star trekky. I hope they can work out a way to add in more types of missions, maybe some diplomatic stuff (like doing things the picard way and boring them to death - rather than the kirk way of shooting everyone in the face - maybe having a multiple choice thing and then mission outcome is affected by your choices or something) and more exploring type missions (although that maybe difficult to do outside of go to point A and womble around a bit).

Things do look okay for STO as this is the first weekend of open beta and they managed to max out the number of concurrent connections on their server cluster. So hurrah!