I’m a troll Jim, not a millionaire

In the last month I’ve had the chance to try out the Star Trek Online Demo which can be download from Steam, be warned though the game isn’t small in size, you’ll need about 8.8gb for the full install. Since we are on the topic of the install I’ll relate to you my installation adventures.

Deciding to get the download going so that once I was ready I could just install get started, this plan appeared to be working just fine. The Steam download was activated and spent most of the morning and half the afternoon obtaining the game data. Once completed I kicked off the installer and the game was all set-up and ready. Well nearly.

Stand-alone patcher?

On the scale of being a pain in the arse, Cryptic is way up there with SOE in deciding to not allow players to patch the game without first logging on.
I battled with the accounts system for a good 40 minutes until it informed me that me trial was active and I could log-on. I was fast losing patience with the game but decided to stick it out and that it would be worth it in the long run.

That was until we came to the patching.

The method of how MMO’s are released via Digtal Distrubutors rather that directly results in a problem of the DD version of the game client and the official version becoming out of sync.
This is understandable and I’d experienced the same thing with Fallen Earth, so i wasn’t a big surprise that a patch was needed for updates that had been added since the last DD release.

Boldly going nowhere

Only things weren’t that that clear cut, it appeared that the game was many patches behind the official version and I needed to download another massive patch before I could play. This wouldn’t have been so bad if the transfer speed was good, but as you can sense it wasn’t good, it was dire.
It was another 2 hours before I could click the funky “Engage” button to kick everything off and finally play the game.

To compound my frustrations even further it seemed that the STO launcher button labelled “Engage” was launching the demo for Champions Online that I also had installed. I turns out it was linked to the STO test server being offline and rather than display an error message Cryptic just opened up another game. Naughty.

Gameplay

After the best part of a day I finally get to get to play the demo.

I’d expected the character customisation to be in depth and with alot of options to style your avatar as you wish. I can say I wasn’t disappointed by the system, rather that have so many options that your brain hurts due to choice (Champions) this was well designed and thought out, allowing you to step through and focus on one area at a time.

The demo is designed to give you a glimpse of the various gameplay elements that exist in this MMO. It’s a rather diverse combo of tasks, nicely designed to allow the games to handhold you through some of the basic away team and ship actions.

Wrap up

If you are remotely interested in Star Trek, I’d get the trail downloaded and give it a whirl I doubt you’ll be disappointed by the experience. But can it drawn you in?

I’d need alot more convincing before I could consider playing this game and currently I have these bugbears

• The price of the game is still rather costly for an MMO with a monthly subscription too. For the Cost I’d expect more than 30 days.
• In Away missions the controls and skill slots system was pretty similar to that in Champions online.
• I thought the trail was OK but didn’t really give me a WOW factor that made me want to run out and purchase the game.

If you made it this far, Thanks for reading.