Star Trek Online's Welcome Back Weekend

his past weekend Cryptic Studios those with lapsed Star Trek Online subscriptions back to the game for free as part of their Welcome Back Weekend promotion. I decided to resume the captain's chair to see what had changed since the MMO's launch.

Aside from a new achievement-like system called Accolades, improvements made to the game weren't immediately obvious from my initial login. But after a few hours of digging deeper it became clear that a lot of aesthetic upgrades had been implemented.

New customization options have been added to the character creator, particularly on the lacking Klingon side. The bolstered range of costume pieces meant that I could now equip my Orion captain in the appropriate Orion slave girl outfit, though there was also a host of more battlefield appropriate attire available.

Players are now able to explore their ship's interior, a feature many fans found disappointingly absent when the game launched.The Federation side already had an impressive number of customization options at launch, though I did notice a few minor additions here and there like an increased array of hairstyles. Overall, these improvements have allowed for more variety to the NPCs you see scattered around the on-foot quests and hub areas.

Players are now able to explore their ship's interior, a feature many fans found disappointingly absent when the game launched. While it was nice to finally take a tour of my engineering and the crew decks, there wasn't much point to it. Other than a wall, which I could decorate with models of my past ships, these areas seem to be purely for social functions and role playing. Hopefully future updates will add quests and further customization options to give them a little more meaning.

Cryptic has also added two new mini-games to STO. When scanning anomalous readings — which is essentially the game's answer to mining for resources — you now have to play a waveform matching puzzle. There isn't a penalty for failing these but if you match the two images in the allotted time you'll be granted bonus resources.

Make my day . . . please? Low Klingon numbers mean PvP games are impossible to find.If you visit the bar on space station Deep Space Nine you can now play Dabo, Star Trek's space-age equivalent of roulette. Though I didn't spend enough time with it to get a handle the game and its rules, it was interesting to see that Cryptic had recreated Dabo girl Leeta to host and explain it to players having even hired her original Deep Space Nine actress to fully voice the role.

The Klingon Empire was one of the major points of criticism when the game launched in February. From what I saw during the Welcome Back Weekend the faction is still lacking player versus environment quests meaning player versus player combat remains the only way to level your Klingon ship and its crew.

It's this lack of compelling content that has seen the players abandon this side almost entirely. On several occasions I checked the list of instances in the main Klingon zone to find roughly three open with about a dozen players in each. Compare this to the main area of the Federation where there are usually fifteen plus instances chock full of inhabitants and it's obvious that the majority of players stick to Star Trek's most famous alliance.

Future updates should add further customization options to give interior decorations a little more meaning. The knock-on effect of these low Klingon numbers was that PvP games were impossible to find. Every one I was accepted into was quickly cancelled with the system returning an error message about there not being enough players to create a balanced match.

I was excited to see more of the so-called episode quests — lengthy multipart missions that emulate the style of an edition of the TV series — but any new ones seem to be only accessible to top level players. This was disappointing because the ones I'd played before were the highlights of my STO experience, offering sequel stories to previous TV episodes and providing a dramatic backdrop to the usual repetitive combat.

In fact a lot of the new Season Two content seems to be for the endgame players so I didn't get a chance to see most of it in my time with the Welcome Back Weekend. Purportedly there are new ships, higher-level caps and a new array of quests in the game now, but my paltry Federation captain and Klingon crew unable to level up were marginalized. Perhaps Cryptic should think about creating more of the entertaining episode missions for low- to mid-range level players.

I wasn't expecting the oddly disjointed universe, the uninspired combat or the other core problems of STO to have been rebuilt, but I at least expected to find a good deal of new content especially on the Klingon side. With the lack of people playing that faction crippling the game's player versus player aspect, Star Trek Online might presently be less recommendable now than it was at launch.

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