Author: johnk

Star Trek Online: Best Space Wars simulator ever?

The upcoming season of Star Trek Online features an instance with a black hole, and Cryptic dev “trekhead” couldn’t resist turning it into a PVP map. Yes, boys and girls, STO just became a giant Spacewar!/Space Wars simulator with a huge graphical update!

That early vector-graphics arcade game ate more than a handful of my quarters in the distant past, but it’s not the only blast from that past with Season 12. Remember the Breen Rezreth Dreadnaught Cruiser? It wasn’t just the game’s Rock Lobster; it always reminded me of the Cygnus from the Disney flick The Black Hole. See for yourself:

I haven’t touched PVP in years even though I have many fond memories. In STO’s first year, PVP was how Klingons leveled: there was great PVP to be had at every tier all the time. Since then, balance went out the window for a bunch of reasons, and it’s just too much grind to be competitive with the min/maxers and pre-mades. Regardless, I’ve already dusted off my Rock Lobster and renamed her Cygnus. I’ll definitely queue up for this PVP map a few times before hitting the hyperspace warp-out button back to PVE.

Here’s the big unanswered question for me: Is the black hole map going to be a Foundry asset?

UPDATE: R.R.W. Cygnus with Reman Prototype Shield

Poor Impulse (Engine) Control: @trekonlinegame’s third expansion, Agents of Yesterday, approaches!

Star Trek Online‘s next expansion, Agents of Yesterday (AoY), goes where we’ve all gone before, into The Past. It’s 50 years since The Original Series (TOS) first aired, and STO’s paying tribute by adding a new faction and episodes squarely set in the “Wild West” period of the Star Trek universe.

Pinoeer, the new starter ship, is a TOS version somewhere between NX-01 and Reliant
Starship Porn: Pioneer, the new starter ship, combines bits of the original Connie,  NX-01, and Reliant. It’s best viewed from behind, but I’ll leave that as an in-game pleasure for you”shuttle bay” aficionados out there.

When the new episodes arrived on the test server in their current “diamond in the rough” state, I swore I’d do the tutorial and no more. That was easy at first because a bug half-way through prevented completing the tutorial. But that got fixed, so last night I thought I’d finish the tutorial, quietly put AoY back in its virtual box, and get to bed early. So of course I stayed up late and finished all the new episodes. Ugh, it’s the same kind of post-binge-eating guilt that leaves me feeling both satisfied and ashamed.

STO producer and shamelessly hard-core TOS fan Maria Rosseau talked with Trek.fm about the loving attention to detail–and sometimes lack of detail–it took to get the look and feel right [TREK NEWS AND VIEWS 103: PUTTING THE TOS IN STO]. AoY doesn’t attempt to improve on or reimagine TOS through the eyes of STO or all the Trek that followed it; that’s created some controversy in the STO community among players who can’t look beneath the veneer of TOS being a late-sixties TV program that sometimes viewed the future through groovy-colored glasses. I’ll gladly take another dose of go-go boots and space hippies and 23rd Century Gorn fashion over this year’s dreadful installment from that talentless hack. Set phasers to groovy and full speed ahead!

StarTrek-Gorn