Gonna start this thread off with what wasn't in the STO demo just to get it all out there and avoid a mass of questions when I don't touch on a certain topic.

The demo was strictly a short combat mission that started in space and ended on the ground. It was more or less just enough to get a feel for the way the game played, movement and ship system controls and to get a look at the graphics in action first hand and play with some of the ground weapons.

The demo was Fed only, so no Klingon play. No deep space. The space combat was conducted in what seemed to be a nebula near a planet and there was no in-station play.

Didn't get to test melee weapons. I did get to use melee attacks with hand phasers, rifles and.... a gatling phaser. Yes you head that right... a f***ing gatling phaser! More on that later

There was no display of the ship or character customization screens or any other screens other than in game play and dialogue.

Ok, I think that about covers what wasn't there. I will commence with the awesomesace now...

---------- Pictures linked throughout post

Combat felt amazing in space! When I was in line to play I was rather disturbed about how simplistic and dumbed down it looked. I couldn't have been more wrong.

I walked up to the keyboard and started out in a Miranda class ship. I had a dev who looked a lot like Adam Savage walking me through my first demo play narrating the features I was using and giving me hints about keyboard shortcuts and UI controls.

As soon as I got the movement and throttle control down the ship handled like a dream. W, S, A and D are nose down, up, left and right respectively. The throttle control is just a slider on the bottom left of the screen, but the R key toggles between full throttle and all stop so you've got the basic "go" and "don't go" key right next to your movement control. There's also a "Full Impulse" option witch is faster than full throttle that is used to get around open space or close distance on enemies quickly to get them in weapons range.

Shields are divided into front, rear, left and right sides, as you can see in the lower left corner of the screen. You can boost power to one side quickly in a pinch and return them to balanced just as easily using the small round button you see in the upper right corner of the shield control UI. I am amazed how strategic yet still streamlined Cryptic has managed to make shield control. Impressed? Yes I am.

The demo didn't really have any situations to warrant playing with power control but I toyed with it just a bit while a station was empty. The power control UI is just to the right of shield control (reference previous pic). There are four presets, Attack, Defense, Speed and Balanced. You can also adjust each system individually to tailor to your needs directing power to and from weapons, shields, engines and auxiliary. I only switched between speed and attack but didn't notice much of a difference because there is no speed indicator on the UI. The only reference you have for your speed are engine trails and how fast targeted object close distance on the range meter. I can see how these could be vital in different group combat situations, which me and Tamgros had an interesting chat about, but in solo play it just seems best to stick to attack or defense depending on which is your priority.

Weapons work far better than I expected. You have a choice. You can micro manage all your individual weapon system, or you can just strategically spam the space bar, which works pretty damn good if my complete pwnage has anything to say about it (in my second run though the dev who was manning the station said, "Woa, you got them all already?"). Continuing along the GUI moving to the right of power systems, we have the weapon controls. The left two boxes were my fore and aft torpedoes, and the right two boxes were my fore and aft phaser arrays. These can be clicked individually to fire or you can use the space bar to fire all phasers with an available arc or use ctrl+space to fire all torpedo tubes that are facing your target. It feels very "in control" (i.e. not just button mashing while waiting for cooldowns) while still being streamlined enough to be able to handle movement, power and shield management without feeling overwhelmed. It would have been nice to try out some tactical situations with some bigger more capable ships, but Cryptic was keeping them pretty well locked down. I only got a glimpse of a couple other ships out of the kindness of the dev's hearts, no play time with them though.

All that's left for ship combat is BO (bridge officer) abilities and the overview! I only used two of my bridge officers abilities, but the usefulness of them became immediately apparent. My tactical officer had an ability to fire multiple torpedoes in a volley on a very reasonable cooldown timer (short enough to want to keep an eye on but not so short that it became your primary fire mode). My science officer had a boost shield ability which may or may not have saved me on my first run though. There wasn't much in the way of the special abilities to screw around with, but the one's that were available felt like they fit very well into the game.

Put all of this together and you have a very beautifully flowing space combat system. I immediately started picking up tactics like flying at a group of enemies head on until my front shield started to wear down, making a "sharp" left turn and circling around them placing them into the overlapping arcs of my fore and aft phaser arrays while boosting power to starboard shields. When the target was almost destroyed I would make another sharp turn away and finish them with a volley of torpedoes from my aft tubes using my tactical officer's special ability then circle back around to the left exposing remaining enemies to my as yet untouched port shields. I have to tell ya, space combat just felt... "right". I've played a lot of space based combat games and I've never been more comfortable or less encumbered feeling with any other control scheme.

Group play I can image being just fantastic with a good team. Even with a small group of Mirandas like we were playing with you could tailor each one's power to specific needs to produce some deadly tactics. One moves in with full power to shields to tank while one with full power to speed makes strafing runs back and fourth using fore then aft weapons. One more sits at full weapons range with full power to weapons providing heavy hitting damage. And since power distribution can be switched in combat with a short delay (power drains from powered down system while boosted system fill) you can switch roles on the fly as the battle evolves. This is probably one of my most anticipated aspects of STO from what I saw. I think team based play is going to be no less than epic once you factor in everything I've described here, different ship roles, ship customization and BO special abilities, all of which can be tailored to fulfill a special role that falls far outside the realm of the simple "tank/DPS/healer/buffer" model of team play.

Pfew! That's it for space flight and combat! That took one and a half beers to type. Let's hope I finish before the typing skillz start to go downhill.

----------I'm not going to bother with pics of ground combat. There was nothing to photograph that isn't already in the STO gallery in higher quality.

Ground combat, while not as stunningly impressive as space combat, was a real treat to get my hands on. As soon as I destroyed the Klingon ships I was alerted that some had already beamed down to the planet and given the choice to stay in space and fight more ships or beam down to finish the ground troops. I know this is trivial, but beaming looks amazing to me for some reason. It took every once of manliness in my body to keep from squealing and giggling like an idiot when I saw my team materialize.

I was beamed down into a structure with a tunnel-like corridor. Controls at first seemed very unrefined for ground based movement but as soon as I discovered holding the right mouse button for mouse-look so I didn't have to use clunky feeling turn keys I was hooked. After this it was just a matter of using WSAD for forward, back and strafe while holding the right mouse to produce smooth turns.

As soon as I approached the first bend I was greeted by a small squad of Klingons. I went to work with my hand phaser and made short work of them with the help of my BO's. Hand phasers are good for crowd control and would make great support in a team if someone would just use their special fire to keep approaching enemies stunned. With your NPC BO's however, id stick to the big guns. After this squad was destroyed I decided to switch weapons to my phaser rifle. That was fun, felt more effective than the hand phaser and was more satisfying to melee with.

Your BO's will, for the most part, stay back and attack. If you have a medically equipped science officer she will dispense heals as needed. If you end up in close combat your 3 key is melee attack with your current phaser. This will usually knock an enemy to the ground so you can reestablish a distance to fire from. Tactical captains will also have a "leg sweep" maneuver which is an AOE move that knocks down all close enemies. It's not the most realistic looking combat I've seen, but it's better than nearly every target-based combat MMOG I've played and it's not even finished yet.

Now for the part I know you've all been waiting for since my intro, the gatling phaser rifle!!!

I wish I could have got a video clip of me shooting this bad boy... You hold the thing from the hip in a fashion that's reminiscent of the movie Predator. As soon as I pulled it out I swore under my breath in amazement. Whichever dev was manning my station was talking to onlookers as I played and said, "Oh see, now he's bringing out the big guns", to which I replied with wide eyed assertiveness, "Is that a gatling phaser?" which invoked the stuttered response, "I uhh... umm, yea, yea it is". I guess they never thought of it that way?

This beauty was a blast to fire and just invoked a bad ass feeling. Phasers have always seemed so non-threatening feeling and anti climatic to me. Not this puppy. It's a large pulse phaser that shoots in short bursts, but the normal attack isn't the attractive part about this weapon. Hit your special attack and you've got a cone of fire mode that strikes all enemies in a cone in front of you. This looks fantastic because it doesn't just play an animation of phaser blasts flying randomly out of the weapon. You can actually see every phaser pulse move from the emitter to the enemy that it damaged. This sounds like just eye candy (which it is) but is also extremely useful for keeping track of what enemies you've damaged and to what extent.

The only part of ground combat (or really the whole demo) that let me down was when I looted a photon grenade. This was another giddy moment of excitement as I ran off over the hill to find a fresh group of Klingons to use it on and see how big of a mess I could make...

Well I set myself up for serious disappointment. The grenade exploded (if you could even call that an explosion) and did some visible damage to the enemy I threw it directly at, but there was no indication of splash damage other than some dipping shield bars from his surrounding allies. This is literally the only time during my demo that I thought "aww, really?"

Cryptic, work on those photon grenades please! I know you're going to be reading these threads for feedback!

Ground combat, while not as impressive as space combat, was very pleasing but felt just the slightest bit unpolished. There's plenty of time to work out kinks and smooth things out. If Cryptic is capable of designing such a good flight system then I have no doubt that they're fully capable of tweaking the ground combat to be as smooth and silky as the space pew pew.

I'll be going back tomorrow and Sunday and plan to get in a few more demo rounds so there may be some updates to this if I can find anything I missed.

Don't forget to check out Tamgros's interview over at Hailing Frequency!

 Good to hear the game is coming along well :)

Still iffy on cryptic though...maybe with the beta impressions I'll have a more rounded idea >_>

Thanks for the great review HS.

Did you play with the kits at all in the ground phase?

I was there too, and I did play several different characters. Each station had a different set-up. The differences in the kits weren't huge, mostly range vs melee vs AoE.  But it was a noob mission, we'll see what htey have in store :) 

Originally posted by Yauchy

 Good to hear the game is coming along well :)

Still iffy on cryptic though...maybe with the beta impressions I'll have a more rounded idea >_>

I didn't like CoH or CO, just not my play style but after playing STO hands on and meeting the devs I'm very impressed

Great post smoke, so can't wait to try it out.   

Originally posted by HittingSmoke

Originally posted by Yauchy

 Good to hear the game is coming along well :)

Still iffy on cryptic though...maybe with the beta impressions I'll have a more rounded idea >_>

 

I didn't like CoH or CO, just not my play style but after playing STO hands on and meeting the devs I'm very impressed

totally agree. I stopped playing CoH before the trial was over. It was just way too simplistic.  CO was an improvement, but still not my thing.

STO played very very well. The Base combat mechanics are far superior to any other MMO I've played, and pretty much any game I've played (over 45 MMOs alone).

Originally posted by OuroborosAgn

Thanks for the great review HS.

 

Did you play with the kits at all in the ground phase?

We didn't get to change kits or anything, but we did get to play with some kit skills that were already on the characters

Glad to see that the game is coming along so well. Those controls for space will take some getting used to, but I'm glad that it's more complex than what some have tried to decieve people into believing around here. Thanks for the info :)

Great review!  Thanks for sharing and hopefully beta is right around the corner for those lucky and those who bought subscriptions.  Can't wait!

Originally posted by ktanner3

Glad to see that the game is coming along so well. Those controls for space will take some getting used to, but I'm glad that it's more complex than what some have tried to decieve people into believing around here. Thanks for the info :)

Haha, yeah.  That's one problem with the internet and places like mmorpg.com  Missinformation is really easy to spread.

Originally posted by tamgros

Originally posted by ktanner3

Glad to see that the game is coming along so well. Those controls for space will take some getting used to, but I'm glad that it's more complex than what some have tried to decieve people into believing around here. Thanks for the info :)

 

Haha, yeah.  That's one problem with the internet and places like mmorpg.com  Missinformation is really easy to spread.

Misinformation? On the interwebs? NEVER!

Very nice and informative review. Seems the game is shaping up nicely. Now if we could just get some more info on the non-combat aspects of STO it would really get people pumped up about STO (And silence some of the critics). Great review, thanks!

Bren

 That was a great read.

I really liked the space combat section and your thoughts on tactics and team play.

Have you played the SFC series of Star Trek games???

Good write up. The game looks really good, and I'm excited for it due to the hard work of Cryptic. Finally a MMO for the trekkies!

Ibby1kanobi signing off.

Originally posted by Kinneas

 That was a great read.

I really liked the space combat section and your thoughts on tactics and team play.

Have you played the SFC series of Star Trek games???

Nope. I bought the Star Trek Ship Creator when it came out and was so mad about it that I made a point to avoid Trek games. I missed out on a few good ones I know but just started playing BC and it's pretty cool :)

 good post HittingSmoke

I've even read somewhere that the space combat is the best in ANY Star Trek game so far. I f they can do the same with the other ground and other stuff this will be a game I'll enjoy for a long long time

Live long and prosper STO

Great post smoke

Great Info And Insight To The Game, Keep It Up!

sounds great aslong as space combat works i dont mind about ground combat

thing is ground combat obviously would be fantastic to be just as good as space combat but prioritys for launch is what im thinking about - ground combat can be fixed later - get the essentials done first

like wheres me klingon ships!