STO Helpdesk With Jo4play, Episode 1: First steps
Did you like the format of the first episode or should i tweak it a bit? | ||||||||||||||
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Total Votes : 3 |
Character creation
All players of this game started in the same place, the character creation screen. This menu changed from time to time but in the essence it always remained the same. A lot has been added since the 5+ years i have been playing. But to a new player this can be very confusing and hard to decide, so many choices after all but that is where we can light the way in this dark forest of choices.
"For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. *That* is the exploration that awaits you. Not mapping stars and studying nebulae, but charting the unknown possibilities of existence." - Q
Faction Overview
Time to get to the first big hurdle, what faction to choose, it is hard to choose really, but in the essence there are 2: Starfleet and KDF. These are the 3 groups I like separating starts into: Fed faction, KDF faction and Choice factions.
1. Federation Faction consists of 3 different starts:
- 25th Century start: This is the start I recommend for any new player, the tutorial is a decent new player expirience, now with curtailed missions, the flow is much better and you better scale to the content you are playing
- 23rd Century start: This start offers an extra storyline atop the standard 25th century stuff but i don't really recommend it because it can kind of break it if you don't have a clue what you are doing, you will start scaling steeply and not maybe be able to pull ahead of the curve
- Discovery start: This start is a brand new one, tutorial is a copy pasta of the 25th century but voiced by Mary Wiseman as all beloved (???) Cadet Tilly, you get a couple of missions in than dumped into the 25th century (see the pattern)
2. KDF faction focuses on KDF start:
While KDF used to be a pvp oriented faction, getting more love from the dev team makes em more and more viable over time. Sadly undercut in the ship roaster cause federation petaQ have all the cool ships, but that's not to say klingons don't have some tricks (*cough* Pirate *cough*). Racially surprisingly diverse but hey it's not the federation with their thousands of worlds and races. Klingon focus is a lot different than that of the federation. They don't have big shiny ships. They only have warships. Cloaking device comes standard for klingons which offers a raider type feel, striking swiftly and surelly. KDF captains are helped by the fact that they can get lots of the lockbox traits, while feds need to get entire ships, so money saving is cool I guess.
3. Last but certainlly not least are the choice factions, they are called (logically) because you can choose to align to a certain faction ( FED or KDF). These factions have strengths of their own but they are underdeveloped compared to the 2 big ones, hence the need for a joining to a faction:
- Romulan Republic has by far the best storyline (and boffs cause come on SRO), but is very ship crippled so you will most likely end up using a non romulan ship. Romulans do have some interesting concepts of their own but those will be covered in the future (singularities hmmmm).
- Dominion has a interesting start of it's own, you are jumpstarted to lvl 60 and thrown into the middle of a storyline, while they are extremelly fun they require a skilled player to be managed well, cause the tools you are working with...well let's just say whoever chose em could have done a better job but hey i don't complain about free stuffs.
Races
Races are one of those fun things where the game tries so hard to make a huge deal out of them but in all honesty, the differences are trivial. The biggest difference is a estetic one (tho some would disagree). If you are concerned about a choice of race somehow crippling you every race has their own unique traits. Some argue that aliens are the best because of that +1 trait slot, and in some way I could agree, but if you want to play some race, don't be concerned about the traits.
Customization
In this game customization is very sizeable subject, you are left with lot to be able to do, including naming your first ship and maybe even writing a small biography. The legend goes that some spent more hours in the editor editing every single bridge officer they got rather than playing the game, but hey that is just a legend, anyway once you have perfected your character to the last pixel you will probably notice a thing i skipped (intentionally) and that is what career paths you can take.
Couple of random clicks and you get Pood, a monstrosity in it's own right.
That is the end of the first episode! In the next one we will see the diferences between classes (hoorayyy???). Please leave comments and questions i haven't answered about this part, i will gladly edit this as needed, also if you have any general questions feel free to post them.
Jo4play OUT o7
*updated 4.12.2018
Last edited by jo4play on Wed Oct 07, 2020 11:37 pm; edited 6 times in total