Welcome back to Let’s Play.  Last time, O’Malley wiped out some Borg, and now Admiral Quinn wants him to be a ship captain full-time.  How will O’Malley handle this new assignment?

Admiral Quinn asked me to return to Earth Starbase and see him about a ship commission.  I’m not too sure how I feel about that; I’d rather just stick with engineering.  He wouldn’t force me to be a captain, would he?  I guess I won’t know until we get there.

Earth Starbase looks pretty big:

We park the ship and I beam in to the lobby outside Admiral Quinn’s office.

Coming out of the transporter room, I turn the corner into the Admiral’s office.

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Welcome back to Let’s Play. Upon beaming back to the U.S.S. Innovation, O’Malley learned that the Borg had killed every single officer on board the Innovation while he was away, leaving him in charge of the ship.  Will the power go to his head, or will he spend most of his time tinkering with ship’s systems?

Well, I guess I’m in charge of the ship.  I head to the bridge and get my first overview of the situation in space.

It’s pretty bad.  Debris floats everywhere.  Damaged ships drift aimlessly.  I don’t see any Borg ships in the immediate vicinity, which is probably a good thing, since weapons and shields are down.  About the only systems that are functional are engines and navigation.

My first act as captain is an easy decision:

After all, my own replicators are broken, so why not take advantage?

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Welcome back to Let’s Play.  We last left our hero as he beamed from his ship, the U.S.S. Innovation, over to the U.S.S. Khitomer to see how he could be of help.  What will he see when he beams in?  Will he ever be given a security detail?  Will he be forever stuck with his handheld phaser?  And most importantly, will he ever fix the food replicator in his quarters?

I beam into the sick bay of the U.S.S. Khitomer, not quite sure what I’ll see.  Turns out that, despite the Borg invasion, sick bay is doing pretty well.

There aren’t even any explosions or anything, though there are cargo containers stacked haphazardly on either end of the room for some reason.

Out the windows, I can see some crewmen fighting off Borg invaders in the shuttle bay.

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I already wrote briefly about Star Trek Online during its open beta period.  Back then I promised I’d write a Let’s Play series using Star Trek Online; beginning with this post, I am going to attempt to do so.  I’ll post one per week, if all goes well.

The majority of everything I write after this paragraph will be from my character’s point of view; if I have something to say I’ll set it off somehow so you know it’s me, rather than my character.  All of the missions I describe will be real, but my characterizations of various… characters… is usually completely fictional – after all, nobody wants to read a literal account of the game.  So, with no further ado, let’s play

The year is 2409.  The Federation and the Klingon Empire are at war, the Romulan homeworld has been destroyed, the Cardassian sector is in turmoil in the aftermath of the Dominion War, and… oh  yeah.

The Borg are attacking.

I’m Ensign Jason O’Malley, a recent graduate of the Starfleet Academy of Engineering.  Welcome to the mess hall of the U.S.S. Innovation.  I’m off duty, despite the Borg attack, which suits me just fine.  It has given me time to tweak my phaser.  That’s basically how I spend my free time… I’m always fiddling with one thing or another.  Last night I improved the efficiency of the food replicator in my quarters by twenty percent, and there aren’t any really bad side effects.  Unless you ask for banana pancakes.  Please don’t ask my food replicator for banana pancakes.  Or anything made with bananas, really.

But other than that, it’s perfect.  Just like this phaser here – it works perfectly.  I’ve only made minor modifications.  At any rate, it doesn’t matter.  I won’t get a chance to use it.  I’m the most junior officer on board, so it’s not like they’re going to ask me to go on any away missions or anything, and the Borg probably won’t beam on board to attack us.  Why would they?  That cube there is a thousand times the size of our little ship.

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I’ve been playing the beta of Star Trek Online over the last two days, and let me tell you – it’s really fun.

When the game was announced, I was worried that Penny Arcade’s comic would reflect the gameplay; that is, I was worried the missions would feel contrived to prevent you from using the types of technology that make Star Trek what it is.

More recently, I’ve been worried that the writing would be terrible; the reason for this worry was that the developers, Cryptic Studios, did an absolutely atrocious job of writing in Champions Online.  (The fact that I still liked it despite the writing and terrible balance speaks volumes about how entertaining the gameplay can be.)

Instead, what I find is a surprisingly well-written, non-contrived set of missions.  Indeed the game refers to them as “episodes”, and that’s kind of how they feel.

Space battles are quite entertaining, especially when they get large – two dozen player ships fighting a bunch of NPC battlecruisers makes for an epic battle scene – and the little touches make the battles that much more interesting.  When an enemy ship explodes, you need to get out of the way; I’ve been destroyed more than once when my shields were low and I was too close to a defeated enemy when his warp core exploded.

Ground battles are, similarly, well done.  I had been worried because in a lot of MMOs you just stand there trading blows with the enemy; that’s not how Star Trek portrays ground combat.   Instead, you get a personal shield, and you can dive and roll out of the way of incoming shots, and you have an away team to help you.

I also like that group missions are automatically grouped for you.  Say you’re patrolling the Risa sector; the game automatically matches you with other people also patrolling the sector so you don’t have to sit there waiting for people in chat to say they need to do it too.  It makes perfect sense, and it’s so convenient.

The beta has some bugs; sometimes missions won’t complete, or the graphics glitch and you spawn in ground areas with the ship model instead of the player model (or vice versa, in space).  But these things should be expected during a beta.  In fact the most annoying aspect of the beta so far has been players complaining about bugs.  Guess what?  If you want a bug-free game, the beta is not something you should be playing.  There is a price for early access.  (The other annoying thing has been players not reading mission text, or not looking around.  The answer to “where is the Admiral’s office” is “right where you beamed onto the station, under the big sign that says Admiral’s Office“.)

As a result of the entertaining time I’ve had playing the beta, I pre-ordered the Star Trek Online Collector’s Edition from Amazon.  Now I just have until the game launch to decide whether I want a lifetime subscription; I’m leaning toward “yes”.  I’m having far more fun playing this than I had playing Champions or Lord of the Rings or any other MMO I’ve tried.

At any rate, once the game is officially released and (hopefully) the beta’s kinks are worked out, I’m planning to do a Let’s Play series with Star Trek Online in the spirit of Shamus Young’s Let’s Play Champions Online series (which itself was in the spirit of Rutskarn’s Let’s Play Morrowind series).  I’m hoping it will be an epic story of a young Starfleet officer’s efforts to defend the Federation, rather than a story about how a young Starfleet officer retired at age 30 due to nonsensical plots (as Shamus’ series ends).  This will be an experiment which may fail completely, but nonetheless I’ll try.