Euro Star Trek Online open beta begins

so the EG keys from last week don't work?

Thanks Oli

Fawkes should be in here commenting on this. But methinks he's used the snow as an excuse and is playing as we speak. ENGAGE!

Downloading the client is proving to be quite a hassle at the moment (unless you have a Fileplanet subscription etc), why go into launch of Open Beta with only one mirror posted for the client =/

I have played it, and it is good.
Bugged to fuckery though !!!!!

yay! thanks for the info Oli! got my key imported from Denmark

Sweet I cant wait to register the name Jean-Luc Picard or maybe I will go with James Kirk.

Oooh crafty! Thanks Oli!

/steals Danish key

I want to at least try it out, now that I know there's at least a year before TOR comes out. I need an MMO!

Thanks Oli!

Thanks Oli - and sorry, Danes!

Any Kirks and Picards created are shot on sight.

yeah cheers for the danish linky.

"Be quick, space is limited."

Really? Thought it was infinate?

/coat

Started downloading the client last night at about 11ish. 33% so far...hopefully it'll be done during tonight.

Oli.

I love you.

Cheers Oli! Downloading at full speed from Usenet.

Beamed over from the FoH boards:

Cpt James T Jait logs in
Jait says: Tuck in that shirt Mister!
Lt Steele tells Cadet Skywalker: "F**k, it's Jait again."
Jait straightens his shirt, puts his hands on his hips, and stares out the viewport to the stars.
Jait says: What planet is that Mister Spock? Get out your tricorder.
Kang shouts: LFM for Romulan missions
Steele says: Uhh, my name is Steele dude. Planet is lvl50, were only level 20 man, lets move on...
Fxttpewxyx tells Jait: Life is short, gaming is hard. 20,000 credits for only 50 dollars at [link url=http://www.trekgold.com!]http://www.trekgold.com! [/link] Use code: 44031 for special deal!
Jait tells Fxttpewxyx: Sulu?
Jait turns dramatically
Jait says: The ghost of Sulu has contacted me! Spock, prepare an away team!
Steele says: FFS dude, it's Steele. And I'm not joining your group. I'm heading over to Klingon space to help Skywalker twink a Klingon warrior.
Jait whips out his phaser
Jait says: So after all this time together Spock, it's mutiny mister!
Lt Steele has been kicked from the guild! (United Federation of Planets)
Steele sighs
Jait shouts: All newbies report to the transporter room. Do not forget your red-shirt.

OK I'm in with IGN (D2D) but they gotta send me a key as they are out of stock, downloading client now though now. Yay!

I'm scared, first MMO, Star Trek fans...someone hold me....

/ waits for key
/ prepares a few nice episodes of DS9 & TNG
/ wonders what the hell you actually do in a MMO
/ Makes sure he knows the blueprints to Voyager engineering deck
/ Strokes Enterprise D model next to TNG 20th boxset. Nice...

"Fawkes should be in here commenting on this. But methinks he's used the snow as an excuse and is playing as we speak. ENGAGE! "

Thanks for thinking of me, but worry not I'm not playing right now Tootr. Unfortunately the snow all melted so I can't use that one anymore. But if there's even a single flake of snow on release day, I think I may come down with a few illnesses.

Anyone else know of why Amazon are delaying sendou out their copies of STO? I got an e-mail saying they were having trouble, and I wasn't sure if it was a country-wide thing or just Amazon themselves. Whichever, Amazon are saying they're posting out around the 9th now, so expect delays. Heads up if you've ordered from there.

Eurostar trek?

Thanks for the key Danes!

@Gurgeh

Hehe, that's exactly what I expect general chat to be like on release day too!

+1000 karma to Oli.

I doubt the Danes ever get too bothered about nicking our keys

I have the key - danish site sits with 77 left and counting.....

bah. too late it seems :/

Was on there last night, very laggy and the server kick me / crashed. The borg bit is very clunky and just when I got to fly around and do my own thing it broke. Might try again but its no Eve Online. (yes I know, Eve has had a much longer time to fix / tweak, etc.)

Mini review from chap in my EVE Corporation:

Lag is horrendous, but it is beta.
Ground combat/away missions are pretty poor, may be better without the horrendous lag. But the basic mission is go here, scan this, shoot/fix that, beam out.
Space combat is mildly entertaining. It doesn't help that every weapon in the game has exactly the same range however. Weapons also always hit unless you have evasive maneuvering running, which only lasts a few seconds out of every minute so big ship with more weapons/shields > smaller ship, every time.

Haven't tried pvp yet as going in the newbie ship I fear won't end well with the way combat works.
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He followed up with more infos:
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To be honest I got as far as lieutenant-7 and am now lacking the motivation to login to get the next three levels to lt.commander to be able to get a better ship.

The game is not an MMO, its far too heavily instanced. Its a single player game where you occasionally warp into an instance with 3-4 other people to finish the instance and then all leave afterwards. This may be different when your playing with people you know already but it just doesn't feel massive or multi-player. For example, Star fleet headquarters in the Sol system, STO's version of Jita. You go into Jita in eve and you get a sense of just how many people are around. You go into Sol in STO and you will be in one instance of Sol with maybe 25 other people? The only time it felt remotely MMO like was a "defend a starbase" mission when there were about 25 people in the instance just blowing up and an endless spawn of Klingon ships, but once you had your 50 kills you left, no real sense of achievement?

Moving onto the PvE. Honestly it makes eve missions, wormholes, mining, ratting, etc look interesting and amazingly varied. I know not all of the content is unlocked in the open beta but still of all the missions I have got so far its all pretty much the same. Go to X system and patrol, you get there, you get a hail from a planet or a distress call from a ship, you go blow up some npc's or scan some asteroids (no *), hail starfleet, mission done. Away missions are even worse, I should start by saying I really don't like third person shooters but this feels like a third person shooter from 5+ years ago with terrible AI.

Ship to ship combat boils down to orbiting your enemy so you can use both your fore and aft phasers/disruptors while mashing the space button to fire them. If your facing shield starts to drop you either use your engineering officers power to boost it back up or turn around and orbit the other way so you opposite shield is facing. Once you have broken a hole in their shields your turn towards them and fire some overloaded photons into their hull and watch the pretty explosion, then you do the same to the next enemy ship. There is some power management but the way people talk about it you would think its massively innovating rather than just moving more power to shields if your taking a beating or moving more power to weapons if your shooting up a weaker ship or moving more power to engines to GTFO if your losing. All weapons have exactly the same range and never seem to miss so tactics are pretty much non existant.

I'm not a fan of the graphics either, while they are reasonable they are very cartoony and eve does look much nicer. Not sure how the engine is coded but eve at max settings has my gfx card running at maybe 30-40% to run in sync with my monitor, STO set to run in sync has my gfx running close to 100%, getting rather hot and making a lot of noise, all for 60fps?

I'm sure I can complain about a lot more stuff but I need to get on with some work.

In summery, terrible game, avoid. Maybe in 6 months when they actually add most of the promised content I'll give it another look.

Edit: to add the death penalty is also a joke. Your ship blows up and then you respawn 15 seconds later in the same instance losing no equipment, no xp, no crew, no bridge officers.
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Wow, game just crashed and I'm now uploading a 1.15gb crash dump, this could take some time

I was sceptical - but despite the odd bit of lag and server disconnects (which are getting better), it's still the best MMO i've played. The basic combat mechanics in space more than make up for the generic MMO ground combat - and that's the only problem with the ground game - it's like an MMO.

So far i like it alo, bit buggy but plays well so far.