KMC Forums - Star Trek Online

The more casual-friendly the better for me, because there's no way I can gather any sort of large group of friends for guild-like play what with silly real life things like jobs and families getting in the way. That's why, for all its technical quality and good ideas, Guild Wars 2 is no good for me really as you need five people online at once to do anything interesting, which just isn't going to happen with me.

Hence TOR is much better for me because you can play 95% of the game with just one other person online, with more being a bonus, with the downside being no way to play between people of large level gaps.

STO is much more like the latter. I can't do fleet stuff but it doesn't seem like a big deal. I can, however, casually play with any friend who is on, with it level adjusting so it doesn't matter where we are in game, and with a F2P entry it's easy to get others to take a look (just as with TOR, a sub fee was always the wrong way to go for this game). The gameplay is not brilliant but it's fun enough- heck, I've played (and paid much more for) prior Trek games with much worse space combat and overall it's a fun casual experience. The makers are clearly genuine Trek fanboys who have made the best of what they can with clearly much more limited resources than the likes of TOR and GW2. I know some big Trek fans are unhappy with the overwhelming combat focus being not entirely Trek-like, and I sympathise (and it would be great if there was a truly all-encompassing Trek game made one day), but I'll take what it offers, and it does what it sets out to do pretty well. I posted a few years ago in this thread trashing the game for that combat focus, and I still think they did make a bit of a misstep at the design stage (I see they've been trying to add on a lot of diplomacy and exploration stuff since the game came out, but it doesn't have the underlying design to support them much) but certainly with the sub fee out the equation I think that is less of an issue than I thought at the time. As a casual thing, you can enjoy it for what it is.

The clincher for me was adding the Romulan faction though. Perfect.

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