Really don’t think I’ll be able to write a big post about the story mode of star trek online. Like, it’s there, but there’s too many missions that have been removed, too much bad execution and writing…it’s just fucking sloppy too. I can deal with the bad animations and stilted cutscenes but when they’re literally poorly constructed it’s too much. I just did a mission where someone was like “You brought friends??? Me too!!” a whole minute before any friendly ships actually warped in. There’s so many times shit will happen slightly out of order in a cutscene or something and you’re like what the fuck? That same mission there was a cutscene where Daniels was like oh my god Noye you’re the envoy??? A WHOLE MISSION AFTER WE ALREADY LEARNED THIS.
Not to mention how like there will be entire arcs where the entire emotional crux of it is just literally lifted from an episode of star trek. Like Noye is the big bad of the temporal war arc because he accidentally erased his wife with his time machine. Which is the same time machine from that episode of voyager where the guy who invented it also erased his wife from time. It’s just so hacky. They make a big deal of our enemies being THE TEMPORAL LIBERATION FRONT who are mostly mad about the deaths of their civilizations and planets and stars being necessary for the “right” timeline to exist, which is an interesting concept, except they immediately team up with the mirror universe hitlers so you basically get carte blanche to slaughter them wholesale, which Mirror Leeta makes fun of you for doing for like 5 minutes before it’s never mentioned again. The fucked up thing is that they’re right, the Federation as presented in this game is like an evil hydra that’s entangling everyone in the quadrant and murdering hundreds of thousands of people all the time in increasingly destructive wars.
I still can’t get over how the Iconian War which they built up for like, 5 years of this game, results in a bunch of pretty dull missions where people sacrifice for no reason to accomplish nothing and the best plan the entire quadrant can come up with to win the war is to use time travel to do genocide, and you know if you’re a Federation officer who might have some qualms with that your only dialogue options are to impotently threaten to file a complaint with command but do it anyway.
we did the mirror universe questline which is insanely fanfictiony (positive) as it was revealed that my character’s counterpart is an insatiably violent lesbian who is in a dangerous polycule with all the most powerful women in the empire and then every time it showed Mothra’s character he was always hanging off the terran emperor’s arm as consort which is genuinely the funniest thing that this game has ever done. There’s no way to do this storyline without finding out about your character’s tumultuous sexual relationships. Wesley Crusher is the Terran Emperor and spends the entire last mission going “I want my mommy” before taking a brutal bump on the Voyager spacecraft radar dish
also there’s a fucking SECRET LOGS OF MISTRESS JANEWAY reference at the very end of the questline that completely validated my understanding that this story was meant to be toxic yuri
My position as Emperor “Ass Crusher” Crusher’s consort is we have decided canonically known as being the “Emperor’s Woman”, a gender-neutral term sort of like “X-Man”
probably not going to play any more star trek games cuz my hard drive with all of em on there died but here is something I wrote about the first elite force plus a sto review
this game was largely so incredibly dumb I had to get blasted out of my mind to actually sit down and finish it. so at least it’s operating on the source material’s level. people say “some kind of ____” multiple times!!! the slavish dedication to the virtual voyager experience is a big part of the charm though, you amble around the huge ass halls and everyone’s voiced by their respective actor. picardo is great, naturally, and i thought female munro had some funny lines here and there. they even got #1 star trek hater robert beltran to show up, but the real treat is for the tuvok lovers in the audience because the only other game with this much timmy russ is star trek online
at least the weapon set is largely reliable even if I mostly stuck to the compression rifle, tetryon minigun, grenade launcher, and photon burst because it’s still a raven software game after all. the rampage you go on after getting the minigun has shades of sof’s perfectly aligned shotgun-headshot intro staircase. i wish i could say better things about the encounters but so many of the enemies in this game just scream and run in a straight line at you. that being said the hirogen guy is the coolest guy in the game and it’s not even a competition. he had such kind eyes for a boss
everything is so loud all the time. someone will be trying to deliver expository dialogue and oh no there’s six species 8472 guys coming through the door at once so now I can’t hear you because of all the screaming and gunfire. the entire last level I could barely hear any of the dialogue leading up to the final boss because of how cacophonous the sound scape of this game is. and yes i fucked with the audio settings it was still too loud. the music is also like low rent in a really perplexing way where I think it sounds kind of shitty but it loops well and the loops linger in my head like the midi trumpets on corey feldman’s “megalo man”
the multiplayer was and is undeniably great due to the origins in quake 3 which is basically the real legacy of this game 25 years later. sp is essentially just one of the many half life imitators of the time but much like mods and whatnot extended that game’s life ef had great custom maps that i think about all the time like dangercity, all the padman rats maps, and pugu’s dream 7. i think this informs almost all the nostalgia people have for this game, their fond memories of exercising the god-given right to kill dozens of neelix bots in holomatch because they were 10 years old
bonus points awarded because this is one of the rare games where you can get sent to the virtual brig for misbehaving
BONUS: Star Trek Online reviewed!!!
I bought a lifetime subscription to this game a very long time ago, when Star Trek Online was brand new. I would come back to this game every few years to see what changed but this time I think I’m finally done with it. One of the biggest problems with this game is the community. They are so used to being abused by the developers and dumping money into the game they cannot fathom someone who is unwilling to. “It’s simple,” they’ll tell you when you ask about a build or what ship to use. “Just buy this.” You’ll be told to buy ships you’ll use just once for the trait or for the console they come with. Another guy in your fleet logs on and says he just dropped $1,500 to get the new promo ship because it had a meta trait for his build. Better yet, check out this item from Mudd’s Market where the developers deliberately over-inflated the prices of old event items as a “joke” according to many players of this game!
At one point someone in my fleet was talking about how he owned almost every ship in the game, probably something close to 300 ships, but didn’t even really like most of them because many were acquired only for traits or items. He’d played for a decade and felt the money he’d spent was a waste. Almost everyone who I talked to while playing seemed miserable in one way or another. Many don’t even seem to like Star Trek. They certainly don’t talk about episodes of the show. Most of them seemed more interested in talking about how space combat worked in Battlestar Galactica.
There’s also the endless gambling. Lootboxes, promo boxes, the highest tier of Phoenix token. Everyone who regularly plays this game gambles in service of more ships they don’t need. When someone wins a ship from a lootbox it’s broadcasted to the entire game. Immediately the PMs will stream in from lowlifes offering to buy it off you for well under its value. Even the mandatory jackpot message has a parasitic economy of its own. It’s a gacha game wearing Star Trek’s skin. The story is a cheap funhouse where celebrities from the TV shows act out poorly written scenarios for you often with little enthusiasm. It doesn’t even have the charm of a fan production. Then the story missions are over and Seven of Nine is gone. Worf is gone. Wesley is gone. Time to calm back down Grandpa. Go back to grinding TFOs and opening those boxes.
Star Trek Online can only ever make you feel like you’re sitting at the slot machines with the other senior citizens.
Star Trek Online When Played With Veronica (STOWPWV) is a stunning improvement over its predecessor, Star Trek Online When Played Alone And Sad ( ST:[ ), and I’m happy to report it is my Game of the Year. Now I’d be lying if I said Star Trek Online didn’t ab-soo-LUTEly suck the dick clean off a donkey, so mired is it in strata upon strata of gacha wormshit from twenty or whatever the fuck years of this paypig being passed around to various packs of salivating jackals. It does truly, truly fugging suck as a video game. There is nothing of value to go do, no interest to encounter or challenge to be had, the people playing the game at best want to be be left tf alone. BUT, it is very Star Trekky! There are Star Trek ships and Star Trek sounds and Star Trek guys getting in big Star Trek fights!
This is where the “Played With Veronica” part comes in, because now you’re cooking up fun characters based on Diane Duane’s wonderful Rihannsu TOS series, you’re pulling in details from Honor Harrington and Sewer Sharks, you’re spending sessions piecing together your crew to fit the story you’ve begun to weave together. You’re sitting there trying to build Kirk’s hated Irish pipehitter nemesis Finnegan as a viable security officer, so he can lunge-kick some borg dickhole, which is funny every single blessed time you see it. MMOs often purport to let you create your own story, but no more true is this idea than in STOWPWV, and the secret was this: Do not have an actual functioning game present. Have an empty cardboard box with a starfleet logo on the side. If anyone asks you to fill the box, tell them to go fuck themselves. You will soon find two cats tornadoing around that dinky little box, ripping goofs and spinning together fanfiction threads. They’ll have a blast. Eventually the box will give out and they’ll scatter! And hell, I WISH most MMOs had the decency to have an end point!
Interplay’s Star Trek games are some of my most favorite Trek games. i remember getting a demo version of Klingon Academy in some PC Gamer demo disc and KA has stuck with me since
the space combat genre was fairly crowded in the late 90s/early 2000s, with games like Freespace 1/2, Tachyon, Starlancer, etc, so KA had to stand out. what it offered is that the massive vessels you fly actually feel like they’re things with mass and heft, the ship-to-ship combat feels incredibly satisfying with how impactful it feels and how the damage modelling is done, and KA also improved upon the simulationist-tier depth that Starfleet Academy had; beyond just being able to micro-manage every aspect of your ship, the highly interactive space environments in KA are still one of my most favorite features from a space combat game, and i haven’t seen any other game do what KA does in that regard. nebula’s, gas giants or asteroid fields aren’t just there for show -you can actually use them to hide or gain an advantage, but this is also incredibly risky: the intense wind currents in gas giants will gradually wear down your vessel, and you’re more or less blind in a nebula (but so is the enemy).
KA also has Christopher Plummer chewing the scenery as Chang and that never gets old. i could watch Chang quote Shakespeare all day long
I was killing time tonight in that blasted heath we call Gamestop while waiting for a seat at a restaurant, and I saw a used PS5 copy of Star Trek: Resurgence for $25. Is that game any good? Looks like it’s by former Telltale people. Seems to star Spock and Riker, which strikes me as a weird pairing.
I only played like an hour of it but it’s absolutely a telltale game. I did some chores in the cargo bay and then I started having to make Hard Choices because the captain is unstable. Riker will remember this…
Spock makes an appearance and Riker might be in it a little more than that but they aren’t main characters or anything. The other thing that was interesting about it but idk if they do anything with it is that one of the playable characters is an officer and the other is enlisted.
