Ground combat was my least fun part, because the enemies were bullet sponges, I had to blast a klingon like 15 times with my phaser rifle before he went down. Just my opinion, but shouldn’t phasers be a little more powerful than a pellet gun?

I also tried Warhammer Online and that game has the exact same problem that STO has. I went back for a week to Warhammer and the lag is still there along with the lack of polish I have come to expect after playing WoW.

I was excited about it as well until I played the beta. I pre-ordered the game and canceled the order after playing the game and exploring the content. I might be missing some spectacular end game stuff but if I am I’m sure I’ll hear about it through the grapevine.

My impressions are this: The game is slow and complicated.

Space battles are hard to control and mostly consist of hitting 1, spacebar, 2. while turning your ship slowly so your shields don’t deplete on the side that you’re being fired on. You fly incredibly slowly except in the warp space.

There are too many options for upgrades, food, leveling – as a newbie to the game it’s just overwhelming. I thought that I’d be making my character a medical officer, but it seems that I got a science officer later that did the medical stuff for me. I have no idea what’s important – like, do I want resistances to Psionic telepathy? How often am I going to encounter that?

The ground battles are also weird and frustrating. There are so many baddies and again, you just hit 1, 2, 3, until they’re dead.

I also hated bumping into things. That was really annoying.

Randomly you get thrown into groups for missions, some don’t make sense to be grouped for (escort the transport ship – nothing even attacked us). You don’t know you’re going to be in a group, there’s no “raid marks” to coordinate the attack (when all three ships are called “Orion vessel” it’s kinda hard to know what to attack).

I don’t know what I was expecting, but I guess between school and WoW, I didn’t enjoy it enough to decide to play it. I canceled my preorder.

I will likely buy it again in the summer once they’ve worked out a lot of the kinks and it plays more like an established MMO. But you can bet I will not be spending $200 on a lifetime membership for something that I don’t see why it has to be an MMO (can’t I fly around and land on planets and be told a story in a normal game? Give me a ST: RPG for $50 and call it a day) and will likely not get sucked into anywhere near as much as other games like WoW, Civilization, Final Fantasy, or the Sims did.

A friend of mine used to tell a story about I believe Everquest, which also had solid players. One of the character classes could Charm animals, so they used to routinely summon hundreds of sheep and park them in front of the bank. Toons would try and wade through the sheep herd, but they could barely move so it took forever. Meanwhile, invisible rogues in the middle of the herd would pick their pockets…

Lord of the Rings Online also has a lifetime subscription option, which is still available post-launch.

Northrend, if I had the $240 for a lifetime subscription, I’d get one. But there’s no way right now.