Having spent some time at the Lt. Commander tier in Star Trek Online, whilst also dabbling in an assortment of other games I’ve posted about, I have been trying to determine how I really feel about STO, two months in.
I have certainly been playing infrequently, and in small doses; when my better half and I log in to play together, we don’t pull off more than a patrol mission and a story episode before calling it quits for the night. Sometimes we mix it up with a patrol mission mixed with PvP! And while I can honestly say it’s fun to fly around blasting ships and gaping at the scenic asteroid belts and planets we orbit (I’m not even tired of patrol missions yet; they feel much less grindy than “kill twenty boars” to me), at the end of the day the most exciting part of any game session is, for me, the moment when my first officer suggests that we beam down and check something out.
I have posted before about my fears that I would feel disconnected from the game if I spent most of my time being represented as a ship, and whether or not I’ve sabotaged myself by calling it, my fears seems to have come to pass. It’s not that I dread space combat, or the act of beaming up, exactly. I’m pretty good at the space side of things, but I do wish there were rather less of it. Even my mindset towards my Bridge Officers changes between when I’m on the ground and when I’m in space: I equip myself with Tachyon Beam and Beam Overload, but I train my First Officer in Draw Fire. In space, my BOffs are just buttons that I press to make myself more effective, but on the ground they are bodies I fight alongside, instruct to give cover, and resuscitate when they fall. I can’t stop thinking of my ship as a vehicle. It is not “me (in-game),” and I want, more than anything in this game, to be able to be “me.”
I hear that at higher tiers there are ground Fleet Actions, and of course the raidisodes (which I am unsure I will ever see) have ground content as well. I hold out hope that the ground game will be improved and expanded on as time passes; additional exploration content and, of course, more ship interiors will contribute to what is currently lacking.
In the meantime, I’ll just be hanging out in the exploration clusters, warping in and out of missions in the hopes of finding things I can apply a tricorder to.
I’ve always felt that my “real” crew is my away team, just because they get so much more face time in this game. I enjoy both ground and space combat, but like you said, the ones on the ship are just abilities, nothing else. Maybe in addition to the ship interior changes in the future, we’ll also get to see more of our officers in action while in space. Not holding my breath on that though, but I can always hope.
[...] with any regularity, I found my interest in space combat beginning to wane. I discovered that I don’t connect well to ships as avatars, and as a result I did not look forward to launching yet another mission and spending yet another [...]
[...] only a few months into our year-long subscriptions, citing several conflicts of interest, from my aversion to what I felt was excessive space gameplay, to his PvP burnout Klingon-side, to our disappointment with the crafting system, among other [...]