As your crew grows, though, so do their armouring requirements, and at higher levels it became more of an effort to keep myself in decent gear let alone everyone else. The sensible thing is probably to just use one companion and ignore the others, but it seems a bit of a waste (and strangely familiar) to always leave some of your team moping about the ship in their starting gear. Missions continue to offer upgrade options on occasion, but when you have a choice of six pairs of companion-specific boots it can be a bit of a struggle remembering what everyone is currently wearing and whether you care enough to get them some new stuff (not that they ever appreciate it; you’d think a flash pair of boots with vastly improved stats would net some Affection points, but nooo, they just want random bits of tat, the ingrates). Loot drops can still be helpful, but it seems that 82.6% of the armour I’ve found in the game is +Strength stuff, useless for any of my crew (I admit there might be some “other queue always moves faster”-type selective observation going on there).

Kaliyo remains my favourite companion personality-wise, we have a similar attitude to authority even if mine is generally well-meaning irreverence and hers is more credit-driven sociopathy; we get on fine so long as the conversations stay away from the profit opportunities of selling the rest of the crew. Capability-wise, though, I’ve found a healing companion is more effective, and my preferred healer has the added advantage of using exactly the same type of armour as me. This makes the armour upgrade process considerably easier:

“Oooh, that’s decent looking leg armour, Mr Commendation Vendor, I’ll take a set.”
*vanishes behind a nearby rock; sound of a zipper*
“Snazzy! Oh, hey Doc! Got an upgraded pair of trousers for you! Yeah, they’re still a bit warm, don’t worry about that…”

He must feel like a younger brother, always stuck with the cast-offs that don’t quite fit properly. Still, he should probably be grateful he isn’t in my Star Trek Online crew; armour is universal in that game, so when I get an upgrade for my Captain he passes his previous gear to the First Officer, who passes her gear to the primary Tactical Officer of the away team, who passes her gear to the Chief Science Officer, who passes his gear to the secondary Tactical Officer… by the time the tertiary Engineering Officer gets anything it’s about eighth hand. You have to hope that the 25th century laundry service is really good at getting out those ground-in stains…

It’s here:

You’re welcome,

The KiaSA Team.

I’m not sure if a strange inverse-nostalgia lowered my expectations to the point that not being physically poked in the eye was a plus, but the open beta seemed far better. Character creation was varied enough before, sticking mostly to the Star Trek “human with a bit of prosthetic work” alien option, and had been lightly buffed to a sheen with further options and a nice array of uniform elements. The only problem is it entirely ignores Star Trek canon and only allows your character to have two ears, and we all know that starship captains actually have three: a left ear, a right ear and a final front ear (sorry!) You get to enter a ship name along with a character name, though I’m not sure the more devoted Trekkie/er/ists would appreciate my Culture-inspired Lack of Gravitas.

The introductory mission was exactly the same tussle with the Borg as back in closed beta, bit of running around inside a starship, flying around shooting stuff, beaming down to a planet, but somehow left me wanting to keep playing instead of logging out after hitting the planet’s surface. Even though I’m not much of a Star Trek fan I could be tempted if there wasn’t much else on the go, but the SSV Normandy from Mass Effect 2 decloaking off the starboard bow I think I’m going to be a bit busy for a while…

Shatner’s Girdle: They just couldn’t find a graphics processor powerful enough to hold all those pixels in such a densely compacted space.

Malfunctioning inertial dampening: No matter how hard they tried to coax their physics engine to do it, it simply refused to throw the player characters in the opposite direction to each other and, more importantly, the ship.

Personal inventory: Have you ever seen a Star Trek officer with pockets?

Alternate (sic) dimensions: They couldn’t run the risk of you running into someone from another version of the game where players didn’t have to grind the same tedious missions over and over. Besides, they’d need to have space on the server to store an entire secondary set of your crew with pointy beards. And the female avatars looked really weird with beards.

Replicators: “One of every top tier epic equipment item in the game, please.”

Expanded range of phaser settings: ‘Oven left on at home‘ setting proved to be overpowered.

Tailoring: an early beta included a crafting skill that allowed players to produce cloth items with a machine on ship, but a number of problems prevented it ever working properly resulting in a slew of bug reports demanding the developers “Make it sew!”

Holodeck: This feature was going to allow players to create their own game content that other players could access through their ship’s holodeck. It was all going well, with various mini-games based upon Westerns, Nazi occupied France and fencing, until someone created a mini-game where your ship’s captain played a gamer who was playing STO on his computer. Alas this ripped a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum here in the real world, and Cryptic had to send a rerouted tachyon pulse through the game’s central database server in order to close that timeline down and set us off on our current timeline. Alas, in this timeline it appears that Tabula Rasa and Vanguard were utter failures, and Richard Garriot and Brad McQuaid are not the happily married benevolent rulers of Earth that they were.

The Computer:

“Computer”
*beedle*
“Run an analysis on this game’s data and make me a good game based on that data that isn’t entirely reliant on fans of the IP.
*beedle* “Estimated time to completion, three minutes, forty two seconds.”
“Send the result to my PC.”

Voice commands: Unfortunately players would just pick the mouse up and start talking into it, before moving on to shouting ‘Hello!’ in various and progressively louder ways. Alas, it was later discovered that Cryptic’s system ONLY… managed… to … pick up on… STRANGELY… intonated SENtences with pauses… IN… all the… wrong places entirely.

Rock Climbing skill: Players complained when the Vulcan science officer kept using crafted rocket boots to beat them to the summit.

Q: The first raid boss of the game was removed after an exploit was found whereupon he could be easily defeated with a simple script if your starship captain was a small bald Yorkshireman pretending to be a Frenchman. Later, after a fix was issued, a trans-dimensional bug caused him to issue players with weird gadgets like a shoe containing a radio transmitter and a watch that turned into a hedgehog.

Boldly: This was removed from the game when testers found that, due to a bug in the language, no players were able to boldly.