First Steps Into The Final Frontier

It was only four days before it ended that I finally managed to wrangle myself a key to Star Trek Online's Closed Beta. It didn't really start off well, what with a four-hour client download, but it was interesting enough (and Star Trek enough) to hold my interest and keep playing despite the annoying "betaness" of it all.

Open beta has brought with it continuing improvements, as the game seems to become more polished and fun to play with every patch. I knew I was going to want to play this game enough that I preordered the collector's edition. I was willing to go that far sight unseen just because it's Star Trek. Once I got a taste and good idea of what this game is about, I gave STO the greatest vote of support and confidence any player can offer. I bought a lifetime subscription.

Buying a lifetime subscription to any game this early on has to be at least something of a risk, but I think it's a very safe bet that this game will be around for a while, a long while, in fact. If all goes as I anticipate, I think the folks at Cryptic are going to make a whole lot of money from this game. Still, just the fact that I'm confident the game will be around long enough to make it worth the $239 bucks I just blew on a lifetime subscription wouldn't be enough, in and of itself, to get me to shell out that much (bringing the total with the collector's edition to a little over $300 spent on STO).

No, what got me to drop the big bucks on this game is that it's fun. Even though it's more directed in certain ways than some MMOs, I feel like I'm more in control of my own experience in STO than in others. Until recently I played EvE, and in that game there reaches a point where pretty much everything you do in the game of any significance has to be done in concert with other players. I reached that point, and the problem became that my real life schedule is so irregular that there's really no way for me to coordinate with other players. In STO, I play when I want to (and have time to) play, I team when I want to team, I coordinate with other players when and as I have the time to do so. This game has a lot of what I love about EvE but almost none of what I hate about it.

And then, there's the other factor: It's Star Trek, and because it's Star Trek, it's special. No I'm not into it enough to speak fluent Klingon or anything deeply concerning like that, but I've been a fan just about all my life and so it's a comfortable and fun universe to play in.  

As far as the game itself, right now I feel like I'm just wandering around, learning what I need to learn, trying things to see what happens, all those things you do in beta that you'd probably never dare try once it counts. I'm trying and retrying missions (the last patch gave starter ships a nice power boost and some missions I couldn't solo the first time were beatable afterward), and just basically trying to learn the game as best I can before they wipe the servers and it all starts for real.

For now, at least, it really feels like the final frontier. Everything is new and and just waiting to be discovered. I've made a bet that I'll still feel that way a year or ever two years from now, a pretty expensive bet at that. Call it a hunch, but I have a feeling that it's going to pay off.

Stick around. I have a feeling this is going to get interesting.