So a Star Trek Online open beta key magically showed up in my email last Thursday evening. No idea who hooked me up - but thanks! Over the weekend, I got a bit of time in the beta - as much as I could, given the single OB server is absolutely slammed with people! Seems they're using OB as an extended Stress Test, which is a good idea IMO. But that of course means it's hard to get in.

But, wow, the game is very good. I got through the intro/tutorial and then did the first mission I got assigned to. The intro/tutorial is pretty good - it gets you through the basics of how ship combat and ground combat work, introduces the UI, basically all the stuff you expect an MMO intro to do.

Graphics are very good. I had to update my video drivers to get good performance - seems SLI was enabled for STO back in November but I hadn't updated since then. Once I did that, wow, good performance and great visuals. My machine's no slouch (i7 950, 12GB RAM, 2x GTX295 cards), but there's a lot of tweakable options so I'm sure the game will perform on a wide variety of hardware.

The first mission is what really grabbed me. You're sent out to investigate what happened to a transport that hasn't been heard from in quite some time. It's Captained by an experienced Captain, so it's not like they'd just forget to check in - so Starfleet expects Something Bad(tm) happened. So you warp out to it's last known position, and as you arrive you receive a distress call from the transport, saying they've been attacked by Orion pirates and the ship is damaged and they need help. As you approach the ship, you find a couple of Orion ships still attacking, so you have to deal with them. It's a decent space battle between your ship and the 4 pirate ships, which you can deal with 2 at a time if you're careful.

Then the Captain signals that their warp core is leaking radiation and they can't beam off the ship - plus there are Orion pirate boarding parties onboard. So you gather an Away Team and beam onto the ship to deal with the pirates and stop the radiation leaks. Now you get a good bit of ground combat as you work your way through the transport, ridding it of pirates.

Then, of course, the warp core goes critical and you have to escort the ship's crew to the cargo bay to be beamed off to your ship safely, while the Captain stays behind to try to stabilize the core. Of course, more pirates beam aboard right as this happens, so they must be dealt with too. This is a tough bit of combat - there are a lot, and they're pretty smart.

Once you've got the crew to safety, more pirate ships attack, so you beam back to your ship to command it through another space battle. This time 4 pirate ships - then a HUGE pirate battleship warps in, as a sort of "boss fight" - it's pretty tough, but I got it down. Then you have to beam the transport's Captain onto your ship as her ship is going to explode.

So in this first little mission you're given, you get introduced pretty heavily to space and ground combat, and it's definitely not a guaranteed win - especially the second wave of pirate boarding parties as you're trying to escort the crew to safety. There's a LOT of them and they use flanking and cover pretty effectively!

The thing is - I always expected that one of the "sides" of STO would feel "tacked on" or "limited" or to put it more crudely, that it would suck. Either the space combat would be limited, or the ground combat would be. I didn't expect both sides to be engaging, well done, and detailed. But they are.

The space combat isn't "arcade style." It's real, naval combat. There's firing arcs, and turning speeds, and you've got to present your "best side" to the enemy, while at the same time trying to bring your weapons to bear against their "worst side" and so forth. I'd compare it most closely to Pirates of the Burning Sea. It's really well done!

And the ground combat is just as well done! You can use cover, flanking, you can go into "aim mode" to increase damage, but then you move more slowly and take more damage. You can also roll to avoid attacks, by double-tapping a movement key. It's not twitch/FPS style combat, but it's definitely a lot more active than an auto-attack based MMO. Of course, you've got all kinds of special abilities you and your Away Team members can use, depending on what you're specialized in.

Another good thing I noticed was there's a good loot system! I had been concerned that in a game based on, basically, you being in the military (Starfleet), there wouldn't be a lot of cool loot items to get and work for, like there is in another MMOs. Well, during the ground combat on the transport, I found 3 different bind-on-equip body armor items, all of which seemed pretty decent! So there's loot to collect and such too, which is a good thing, as it's a big goal for a lot of people in MMOs (myself included).

STO is also interesting for being the second major MMO title to offer a Lifetime Subscription - the first being LOTRO of course. For $240, you can get a lifetime sub to STO - and of course the perks they're included with it are pretty compelling, especially to fans of the IP and/or the game itself. Said perks include the ability to design your character as a liberated Borg! Lifetime sub is the only way to do this - and it's only being offered from now until the game releases! It's ... pretty compelling! ;)

So, in 4 days, I've gone from being fairly "meh" about the game, to being pretty damn close to putting in a preorder. O_o I really had to experience first-hand how fleshed out both types of combat were - that was the main thing I had been concerned about. I really didn't think they'd be able to "nail" both space and ground combat. I've rarely been so happy to be wrong. :D