Pumping Irony

Today Cryptic’s Star Trek Online officially launched as Free-to-Play (F2P) for all customers! We’ve had a week or so of Early Access where previous subscribers could login and play but today is the real deal for everyone. The launch of F2P on the 17th of January was no coincidence, either, for those Trek-minded readers. 17-01? Hello? The Enterprise from the ‘60s television series was NCC-1701..

Also check out the new F2P Trailer which uses the in-game engine and features some of the new settings such as Starfleet Academy. Watch it on the official site or YouTube.

Already today I’ve seen over a dozen instances of Earth Spacedock (ESD) with each instance close to player capacity. ESD zone chat is crazy busy, and it’s usually busy anyway. Hopefully this is the mark of good things to come.

Now that F2P is upon us and the bulk of the conversion work is over, the design team can get back to giving us more Stuff To Do!

Acting Executive Producer, Stephen D’Angelo writes in the Season 5 Dev Diary #11 that the next few months are expected to be busy at last with new content. Exciting times!

• February brings the game’s Second Anniversary celebration.
• The Anniversary event also brings the new ships – Odyssey class cruiser (aka the Enterprise-F) for the Federation and a new Klingon flagship – into the game’s lore.
• The Season 5 Featured Episode (FE) story arc will begin in February and continue into March with five episodes. This FE will be centered around Deep Space 9 (DS9) and the Dominion.
• March will see the first expansion to the Duty Officer system as well as the next new set of game features.
• More content and events continuing into April and May.
• The Season 6 FE is currently in development and hopefully will arrive in June.

D’Angelo says it best towards the end:

All told, it’s my goal to have something new in the game nearly every week starting with the second anniversary event and running through the end of April.

I’ve been enjoying the content lately already. I still haven’t completed all the accolades for the Borg Red Alerts yet, so I occasionally jump into one if I’m not already on my way to something else. The new events are a lot of fun, especially the Mirror Universe invasions which are setup in an identical fashion to the Borg invasions but are less difficult and completed faster, therefore leaning themselves to less frustrating pickup groups.

I’ve also been doing a lot of the new space Special Task Force (STF) content, now that they are separate from the ground content, which seems more difficult to me. I’ve only done one ground STF so far. A lot of fun, but I didn’t really have much of a clue what was happening. That was also true the first time I did each space STF so I’ll learn as I go and get more confident what to do with my team.

Also the new Deferi Invasion is a lot of fun! It appears to be the largest ground map in STO and in some sense could be considered a “public quest” type affair. The event doesn’t happen very often compared to all the others, however. You beam down to the base camp and there are three NPCs. Each has two missions labeled Easy. Complete those and you unlock two Medium, then a Hard. At some point a Hard mission from a fourth NPC opens up but I haven’t had a chance to do that one yet. The event only last two hours and my group ran out of time finishing up the final Hard mission and just barely made it back to the base camp before the event ended. But considering the type of ground content STO has always had, it’s damned impressive to see a map that big and all those players running around shooting Borg drones, saving Deferi, uploading new software to anti-infantry turrets, etc.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 7:03 pm and is filed under MMO, Star Trek Online. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.