Star Trek Online comes to Steam and it's Free
To boldly go where... everyone has been for about 2 years now...
This week Steam added another Free to Play title to its roster. Alongside such fan favorites as Team Fortress 2 and DC Universe we now have Star Trek Online (STO) from developer Cryptic and publisher Perfect World Entertainment. The game has actually been available since February 2010 but was not Free to Play on Steam until this week.
This latest installment of a game franchise that stretches back to the early 80's aims to capture the hearts and wallets of Star Trek fans by allowing them to explore a vast MMO world. The game showed up on Steam on January 31st and requires 10GB of free space to download the installation files.
For the uninitiated a Free to Play MMO title is basically a massively multiplayer game like World of Warcraft that allows you to play without purchasing anything. Star Trek Online does offer "memberships" however that allow access to better in -game equipment and perks that free players cannot access. There are also ample opportunities to purchase items a la' carte for use in the game.
There's been much debate over whether such a model gives an unfair advantage to players that choose to pay for a subscription but in my own testing the subscription model is little more than an inconvenience for someone who chooses to keep a free to play game free. As it is with most Free to Play titles players who choose not to purchase generally face a penalty of slower advancement timeframes, inability to access special items or reduced functionality.
Set in the Star Trek Universe 30 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis in the early 25th Century, Star Trek Online is an MMO role playing game. Your first task upon starting a new character is to customize them to your liking and begin your first tutorial mission where you begin to learn how to navigate the user interface. The tutorial missions introduce a new player to the different gameplay modes with the first being a third person mission where you interact with npc's and the ships controls. This mission is followed by a space combat mission and finally ends up in a multiplayer MMO lobby cleverly disguised as a starbase. It's an interesting epiphany when you realize that most of the people running around the starbase are not NPC's but other online players just like you.
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