Star Trek Online Review, Part 1 - The Old - Page 5
Note that for Klingons the ship types are different. You don’t necessarily have a Science Ship, you might have a ship that has more Science slots, but it doesn’t make it “a Science Ship”. Same for the other types. They might have more slots for some skill types, but their weapon load-outs will differ from the Federation ships, effectively changing the gameplay experience.
Factions
There are two player factions at the moment but Cryptic said they were looking at a third one (possibly the Romulans). The current factions are the Federation, which include all of the Federation’s races which are not human, and the Klingons. The latter doesn’t only have Klingons, it also has Gorn, Orions and Nausicaans. The Klingon faction is basically composed of those races that are allied with them. The game story happens after all the movies and series currently available in the Star Trek franchise, and the Klingon have separated from the Federation and declared war. You can check their website to know exactly what happened. I should note that some Klingons remained with the Federation so you can play as one and still be able to be a Fed. There are other NPC factions, such as the Borg, the Romulans, the Undine (species 8472) and more.
Currently most of the PVE content is for the Federation Faction. The Klingon Faction has some PVE, but It’s mostly PVP centric. Cryptic is adding episodes to this faction as well, but it’s a slow process. Any new content that’s been added since launch however, such as instances or featured episodes, is available to both sides.
Ground and Space Combat
This is a point where I saw many reviews differ in opinion greatly. It was almost unanimous that the space combat was really fun, while ground combat got mixed reactions. The latter is also what got quite a bit of attention in the last season, which added an aim and shoot mode, yes like the shooter games such as Global Agenda, APB, and so on. But we’ll talk about that in detail later.
Space combat isn’t really complicated, but it can require quite a bit of skill when you start PVPing. In PvE it’s a bit more relaxed, although that also depends on the difficulty you chose to do your mission on. But again, this was a feature that was added later, so we won’t talk about that yet.
The gist of space combat is: fight a ship, fire your phasers/cannons to take their shields down while keeping yours intact, fire a torpedo/kinetic projectile of your choice to destroy their hull, win, loot. Now, I realize I oversimplified this so I am going to explain a little more.
Continued on the next page
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