I said last time I'd finish up the STO preview by talking about ground and space combat, and Klingons and PvP, but before I about that, I have to mention the event that closed off the Open Beta.

Unfortunately, though, as I entered a system (with the intention of getting some combat in on the new ship before the event, so I could see how it handled), my character crashed... I couldn't log her back in - but I could get online with my newbie level 6 Klingon in his very basically equipped Bird-of-Prey. So I did. Klingons had been told to rendezvous near Qu'onos, and I was greeted with the epic sight of a mass fleet of Birds-of-Prey and Negh'var cruisers. Very impressive!

There was confusion in the Zone chat over where exactly we should be meeting - in Sector Space near Qu'onos, or in the system proper - and what our target was. I knew from talking to my fleet on a private chat channel - yes, you can talk to the opposite faction in-game - that the Federation was similarly confused over where to defend, but a couple of minutes after the appointed time, NPC flagships spawned and offered a mission. Accepting, I warped into Sirius sector - to more confusion. We were midway across the sector map from both Sol and Starbase 24, and noone was sure what our proper target was. The NPCs had only mentioned invading the Federation. Some headed off to Sol for an attack on Spacedock, others, including me, went to Starbase 24 - normally a Federation open zone mission where combat takes place against NPC Klingons. Travelling across Federation space as a Klingon was interesting - I was still offered Federation missions, including one to save the Starbase from invading Klingons.

Zoning in, we were met by a large force of Starfleet ships, and, unfortunately, we were quickly decimated. A flaw emerged - there is only one respawn point, which quickly got camped by some of the Federation. Zone chat was interesting... "This is like shooting fish in a barrel!" "(profanity filter), there's no skill in what you're doing!" "Let them respawn, it's no fun to just kill them straight away!" Quite reminiscent of the chat in WoW's Barrens, as the Alliance raided the Crossroads. Despite full instances, lag wasn't too bad once you got underway after a respawn - but another flaw was that despite hitting my cloaking device as soon as I could, it seems the Federation ships could still target us. Despite these flaws, I eventually managed to get free of the campers, and we took down a couple of Fed ships before reinforcements arrived.

Zone chat then started to get interesting - talk of Borg! After another death, I managed to warp out to sector space - and the map had large Borg cubes on it! Deciding my newbie Bird-of-Prey - the IKC Mankrik's Wife - would be entirely useless, I tried relogging my Federation character, and this time got in. I transwarped back to Spacedock, and headed out to join a battle.

Now this was truly epic!

Warping in to a battle, I was confronted with several Borg Cubes, assisted by smaller Borg spheres. Each was thirty-four levels stronger than me! However, in our favour, there were dozens of Federation ships - and some Klingons were also helping out. Occasionally there'd be a mis-target, and a Fed would fire on Klingon, or vice versa, but facing a common enemy, people generally united. Battle against the Borg was tough. If a cube targetted you, you generally had about 5 seconds to live before your shields disappeared. However, targetted fire against a single target whittled away at their shields, and eventually, after some deaths and respawns - BOOOOM! We brought down a Cube. Only to see more warp in...

Noticing some of my fleet were actually in Spacedock, I enquired why they weren't out fighting Cubes. "There's Borg in Spacedock!" was the answer. Ooh! After helping to take out another cube, I transwarped back to Spacedock (transwarp is like a hearthstone or recall scroll - once every 30 minutes, you can use it to return to Spacedock). Beaming down, I arrived in the middle of a pitched battle. A few dozen players were fighting a rearguard action against literally hundreds of Borg. I spent about 30 minutes valiantly - well, dying repeatedly, as whatever position I was holding got swamped. Eventually, though, it was time for bed, and I logged off from the End of the Universe As We Know It.

So - a two-part event to close the open beta. The Klingon vs. Federation part was clumsy and had its flaws: no clear direction on proper targets, single respawn points for both factions in the Federation maps, the seeming inability of Klingon cloaking devices to work (at least, if someone was camping the respawn point, they didn't work), and, of course, the camping. The Borg aspect, though, didn't suffer from those complications, and was much better. And the flaws are entirely excusable. Cryptic didn't have to run an event, and I got the impression that it was hastily thrown together, but the fact that they did run one was a nice thank you to those who'd played the betas.

But more importantly, it shows Cryptic are open to running proper events. With GMs taking part as NPCs - it was noted that some of the Borg were, indeed, being piloted/played by devs or GMs. That's something I haven't seen since... hmm, Ultima Online. Given that this is effectively a 'single shard' game, it opens the door to all sorts of interesting possibilities - events could potentially lead to persistent, lasting changes in the STO universe.

Oh, and Leonard Nimoy now provides a narrated intro to each new sector of space, the first time you cross into it. Another nice touch.

Having finished the tutorial, as written about in Part 1 of this series, my starship arrived in Earth orbit, approaching Spacedock. Wow. The visuals are impressive. Spacedock is a huge space station, surrounded by other structures and a flotilla of other players' ships, floating above a gorgeous planet Earth. Approaching the station, I was given clearance to dock, and beamed over to Spacedock.

My advice - use the Chat Settings to create a second Chat tab, which has Zone chat disabled. For the most part, Spacedock's Zone chat is like Barrens /general all over again. One interesting thing is that the chat is integrated with Champions - you can whisper, and receive whispers, from Champions players. This integration is visible elsewhere - as mentioned previously, you can access your in-game mail for both games from within either, or on the Cryptic website. You can also, if you're so inclined, provide your social networking credentials, and automatically update your Facebook, Livejournal or Twitter when you achieve something in-game.

Navigation
After exploring the station, it was time to return to my ship for some missions, and my first encounter with navigation. The map screen is broken into three tabs. The Galaxy Map is the high-level view. It shows all the areas currently available in the game, namely large chunks of all four Star Trek galactic quadrants. You can see that the galaxy is broken down into territory controlled by the main factions currently in the game, and further broken down into named Sector Blocks, each of which contains three sectors of space. The Area Map is the smallest scale map, and shows local space. On missions, this will generally indicate the main area of interest for the current mission. Lastly, there is a System list. This is a list of every system in your current Sector Block, and it also lists every adjoining Sector Block.

To travel to a destination outside of the system, you need to order your ship into "Sector space". Warping there, your ship arrives on a stylized star map, which shows trade routes, sector borders, and all points of interest, such as systems, other mission points, other players' ships, and NPC ships such as traders and "enemy contacts". From here, you can manually pilot your ship around the map, or, using the System List, have the ship navigate there automatically.

This system takes a while to get used to, but it quickly becomes intuitive. An annoyance is that as you near a point of interest, your ship stops, and you receive a hail asking if you want to enter the star system, talk to the enemy contact, and so on. Reject the hail and you resume your journey. An option to ignore such hails would be nice.

Missions
STO has several types of missions available. In the Star Trek universe, "Genesis" was the name of a device that could bring life to a barren planet (or, y'know, destroy all life on a planet that already had some). Genesis is also the name Cryptic have given to their content-generation software. Basically, there are two sectors (at least, I've found two so far) that are "unexplored". Repeatable missions send you to these sectors to conduct exploration. Approaching an anomaly in one of these sectors will either allow you to scan it (scanning anomalies is the game mechanic for gathering resources), or explore a new system. Doing the latter warps you into the system, which will have a randomly generated mission, created by the Genesis software, with linking text provided by the developers. The Genesis missions I've found so far have ranged from the very quick and easy ("Scan 5 anomalies in this system/beam down to the planet and scan 5 anomalies"), to requests for aid ("We need 10 of X commodity"), to combat missions involving space or ground combat, or both.

Other repeatable missions are "Secure X sector" - basically jump into a random space encounter from the sector map, where you and other players must defeat enemy fleets. Patrol missions are somewhat similar, sending you to several systems within a sector, where again you will face a mix of space and ground challenges.

The meat of the PvE content, though, is in Episode missions. These are longer, taking about 30 minutes to an hour to complete. Generally, they will involve interaction with NPCs, leading to space combat, an away team mission, and more space combat to finish. These missions serve to unfold the storyline, which will be further developed by Cryptic. The idea is that many of the episode missions will feed into a story arc covering a "season", and apparently there is about three seasons available at launch. The early episode missions focus on the threat from the Klingons, and so far I've uncovered a plot to prolong the current war, which fits nicely with the lore. Not every episode will be tied to a season arc, though, and there are interesting diversionary episodes too. I haven't encountered it yet, but one includes time travel and a visit to the 21st century.

The Trouble with Tribbles
Otherwise known as gripes and problems. Beta play has been mostly stable - after the first couple of days of open release, anyway. The first night saw lots of lag, disconnects, and login screens saying "Server busy, please try again later." Basically, Cryptic severely underestimated the demand, and far more than they were expecting took up the numerous open beta invites that were floating around. They struggled to cope for the first few days, and to be honest, it wasn't reassuring to see them say that they had a rush order in for more servers, so
close to live launch. I expect the problem to be worse then, but we shall see.

Other things I planned to write about in this section have largely been addressed through two major and several smaller patches, so there's no point going into them now. The patches have introduced some balancing, bug and stability fixes, UI changes, a more interactive map, and really useful things such as being given the direction of anomalies when you scan for them (prior to the patch, you were just told how many there were).

One continuing gripe, though, is the number of character slots. Just three are available at start. So assuming you want one Klingon character, you're limited to two of the three Federation "classes", and can only try out a fraction of the races. Presumably more slots will be available in future, either as an in-game reward or by purchasing them via microtransaction - but it still seems stingy. Those who have pre-ordered, though, have been offered a "lifetime subscription", for $240, or an annual subscription for $120 (closing date 1st Feb). This gets you two extra character slots, and, in the case of the lifetime sub, an extra playable race - reclaimed Borg! $240 works out at about 16 months worth of a normal subscription, so seems like excellent value. If I'd known I'd still be playing WoW after 5 years and Blizzard had had a similar offer...

The next part of this series will look at both ground and space combat, and Klingons' speciality, PvP.

My fears about having a Closed Beta client proved groundless, and as Open Beta rolled around, I was able to seamlessly patch up to the Open Beta and log in. As expected, STO character generation is indeed a highlight - something Cryptic do very well. After choosing race (either a default Federation race as listed previously, or a customised one) and skills, you get to use some very detailed customisation options to design exactly the avatar you want. A good variety of base uniforms are also available, which allow customisation too. Enter a name, optional biography, and a name for your starship, and it's time to boldly go where every MMO has gone before - the tutorial...

Your newly-created Ensign avatar first appears on a Federation starship that, as the tutorial opens, has just been ordered to make all haste to the scene of an incursion by the Borg. In at the deep end! And first query answered - no, the characters don't look like the comic-book superheroes of Champions. Obviously there are similarities in the graphics - it's the same game engine, after all - but it does appear to have been fine tuned to look more realistic.

Controls and GUI are pretty much as you'd expect (WASD or mouse for movement, I for inventory, etc.), and popups appear to explain new controls or parts of the interface, as needed. Summoned to the bridge, your captain gives you a couple of minor quests (here, "missions") designed to show you how to interact with items, and then gives you a proper mission. Arriving some distance from the ongoing battle against the Borg, you have to beam over to another Starfleet ship which is in distress, and provide assistance. There are crew lifesigns detected - and also Borg.

You materialise in the distressed ship's sickbay, where the Emergency Medical Hologram program is busy at work. Nice touch - he's voiced by Zachary Quinto (Spock in the recent Star Trek movie reboot). After assisting him, it's time for your introduction to ground combat. First, though, you get some help, in the form of your first "Bridge Officer". These are a key part of STO. Your bridge officers act as NPCs on Away Missions, or, if you're grouped with another player or two, they can be used to fill out your party to the five required. Bridge Officers can be from the Tactical, Engineering, or Science branches, and will have appropriate skills either from those branches (e.g., a Science officer may be able to heal using a medical tricorder, while an Engineer could repair personal shields or set up a temporary phaser turret) or due to their race.

Then it's off to fight the Borg. Ground combat is reasonably well handled. You're equipped at start with a phaser for ranged attacks, and most ranged weapons also have a slower, secondary effect, which can include more damage, a stun, or a knockback, for example. There is a melee attack for close-combat. You will also have a ground combat skill, and each player (not Bridge Officer) can get another by equipping a "kit" appropriate to their branch. My Tactical Officer, for example, has a Grenades kit, which allows her to throw a stun-AoE grenade. Positioning is very important. The scenery works as cover, and attacks from any direction but the front counts as flanking damage, which is higher than normal. Characters are also equipped with personal shields, and once these are drained, attacks remove health. Shields recharge if you're not taking damage, and can also be repaired using consumables or Bridge Officer abilities. Dodging out of the way of attacks becomes important, therefore, and handily, a double-tap of a movement key causes you to do a "Kirk roll" out of the way.

Combat can be intense, as you issue commands to your crew (such as attack/heal my target, enter passive mode, rendezvous at a set waypoint, etc.), dodge out of danger, pop out of cover, try to avoid being flanked, and also try to flank your enemies. Once nice touch that I noticed later (not sure if it's present in the tutorial or not) is the ability to pause. Yes, in an MMO. It's only there on Away Missions, but it is present even when grouped. You have a time-bank of 45 seconds, which counts down when you pause. The pause can be used to issue individual commands to bridge officers, switch equipment around, etc. Or, perhaps, answer the front door...

Encountering the Borg, it's time to start shooting. Luckily, there is something odd about these particular Borg, and they don't automatically assimilate you into the Collective if they get into melee range!

After killing some Borg, rescuing prisoners, and destroying Borg technology, the ship is safe, and after a farewell from the EMH, it's time to beam back to your own ship. Unfortunately, though, it has since been in combat too. And, oh dear - it appears all the ranking officers have been killed. That serves - handily enough - to make you the acting captain.

This is your first view of the space controls, and they too are quite well implemented. Again, it's WASD or mouse-movement, with the E and Q keys controlling speed. There is an auto-fire, though it's hard to find intuitively (right-click on a weapon enables the mode, but it won't start until you manually fire once at each new target). Bridge Officers again play their part - they each have trainable abilities for both ground and space combat. In addition, starships have Consoles - basically a slottable equipment area which can provide a bonus or skill to one of the Tactical, Engineering, or Science areas. Examining the ship's paperdoll, you get all the vital statistics. Your starting ship, a light cruiser, has default equipment fitted. This includes basic shields and weaponry - in the case of light cruisers, meaning two forward-facing weapons (phasers and a photon torpedo launcher), and one rear-facing phaser. An important concept is firing arc - individual weapons will be capable of a 45, 90, (180?) or 270 degree arc of fire. This means that with your basic phaser banks, one front and one rear, the most efficient way of taking on an enemy ship is to get positioned sideways to it, so both phaser banks can hit it simultaneously. Energy weapons are best at reducing an opponent's shields, while photon torpedos do better damage to the hull itself. The opponent is, of course, returning fire, meaning your own shields are taking damage. Each ship has four shields - forward, rear, port and starboard. You can also redirect power to reinforce a particular shield.

Starship combat is very tactical, especially when multiple ships are involved. You need to maneuvre so that ideally you're inflicting maximum damage on an opponent's shields (so you're broadside on), then swing about so you can bring your photon torpedoes into the firing arc, all while also maneuvring to protect your own shields - and keep the opponent's damaged shield side in your weapon arcs. Throw in complications such as tractor beams (which slow), tachyon pulses (which bring shields offline temporarily), opponents that drop mines in their wake... and you've got a really good space combat system.

Not without it's flaws, though. While you have controls to manage your ship's energy across four systems (weapons, shields, engine and auxillary systems), it takes a while for the energy to be correctly distributed after you order a change to use a different pre-set. This is a problem especially after you've engaged top speed (Full Impulse) to travel quickly towards an objective - in this mode, all available power is transferred to engines - and if you mistime dropping down from Full Impulse, you find youself in combat with no energy to power your shields. The biggest flaw, though, is in maneuvring. While not allowing a ship to fly "upside down" is faithful to the TV series (OK,I'm pretty sure the Defiant could do it, but the Defiant was an exception to lots of rules) and therefore excusable, the main flaw is that there is a maximum pitch angle of 45 degrees in place. You therefore cannot aim your ship straight "up" or "down" at an enemy if it's at a different "altitude" - you need to slowly spiral your way towards it's level.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The initial encounter, with the Borg, is quite straightforward, as is proper for a tutorial. It serves as an introduction to the controls and GUI, and covers the most important concepts, such as firing arcs and maneuvring. And then you get to participate in blowing up a Borg cube. Word of warning - you do not want your ship to be in close proximity to any ship that's about to explode...

Speaking of explosions, by the way - they're rendered really well, as is the vast majority of what I've seen in space mode.

With the sector now safe, you're hailed by a Starfleet admiral, who thanks you for all your efforts, and informs you that you may maintain your new command. And to report to Spacedock (in Earth orbit) for new orders.

As tutorials go, this one covers all the bases. All the important elements of the controls, GUI and concepts get covered, and it's all wrapped up in a decent enough storyline. In fact, it's essentially the same storyline as Cryptic used in Champions Online - iconic villain of the IP in question threatens our way of life - except that unlike last time, it meant a lot more to me this time round.

The next part of this series will cover first impressions of the game outside of the tutorial experience, and inital play, based on *cough* approximately 30 hours of open beta play so far. And it has Klingons.

Part of it is the fact that it's an very casual game, and indeed, mostly self limiting. You spend actions to do things. You regain actions at the rate of one every seven minutes, until you've taken seventy actions in one 24-hour period (measured, as far as I can see, from the point at which you first took an action). You regain actions thereafter at the rate of one every half hour or so. You gain ten free actions by sending a tweet with a link to the game, which you can do once every 24 hours. You can spend Fate, one of the in-game currencies, in blocks of ten to get an extra ten actions. And you can, should you wish, buy Fate for real cash. All this means that unless you throw money at it, you can't really overplay it.

Yet another part of it is that the game genuinely gives you multiple options for progression. There are many areas of Fallen London to follow storylines in, and you can take on one of several long-term storylines called Ambitions, which will draw you through various parts of the setting and the game.

There's also the interaction with other players; you can engage in various activities, each of which can get you items that give you a second chance in the various challeneges in the game. You can also shake off some of your Nightmares onto other people, which helps keep you sane. And there's a PvP part as well, although I haven't really given that much investigation yet.

I will probably buy some Fate for cash at some point over the next month, not because I need the actions, but because I feel the people who make the game should get some payment from me for the sheer amount of entertainment I've had. You should try it.

Drew has kindly let me use Dukestreet to write about my experiences with Star Trek Online - one of the most anticipated MMOs of 2010. STO, as I write, is in closed beta. It moves to open beta on Tuesday 12th, and anticipation is building. I've pre-ordered, and will (hopefully!) be rolling my first character on Tuesday. I'll be writing about the beta experience - chargen, the tutorial, early missions, gameplay (PvE and PvP), and so on.

But first things first - let's start with ordering the game. While it's scheduled for retail release on 5th February (in Europe - the US gets it a couple of days earlier), it's been possible to pre-order for about a month. As with Champions Online, the developers (Cryptic) and publisher (Atari) have an interesting pre-order model going. Depending on where you pre-order from, you'll get different in-game bonuses. This has prompted some people (I'm not alone!) to order more than one copy, as items from different pre-orders can be added to the same account (and the free gametime stacks). The items include vintage uniforms from various incarnations of the Trek franchise (TOS, TNG and DS9), pets (including a tribble), equipment, a Borg bridge officer, and access to a Constitution-class cruiser as one of your ships - the original USS Enterprise. Cryptic have hinted that it might be possible to acquire some of these items at a later stage via microtransactions from their online store.

Previews and reviews of the closed beta are starting to appear on the net, and from what I've seen so far, the game looks promising. An early highlight is character generation. Cryptic has a good reputation in this area already, from Champions Online, but STO seems to be a further improvement. Two factions are available at game launch, Federation and Klingon (though everyone starts as Federation - Klingon gets unlocked later, after the tutorial). Federation characters have nine races to choose from (though one option, joined Trill, is only available through pre-order), including human, Vulcan, Bajoran, Bolian and Andoran.

When Klingon play is unlocked, members of the Klingon Empire can choose from Klingon, Gorn, Lethean, Nausican, and everyone's favourite green-skinned aliens, Orion. In addition to the "basic" races, though, each faction still allows you to create your own race from scratch, with a very high level of customisation, both of racial features and uniforms.

Players may choose one of three types of ships after the tutorial - Tactical ships are small and hard-hitting (like DS9's Defiant), Science vessels (like the USS Voyager from, er, Voyager) are a control and buff type, able to target specific subsystems on enemy ships, and Cruisers like the various Enterprise incarnations are versatile, but geared slightly towards tanking (as the large crew complement conduct repairs quickly. There are a further three ship classes available within each type. Customisation extends to ships, also - a player can alter the colour, decals, nacelles, struts, saucer, and so on.

So, two days to go to open beta. Knowing there was a large download involved, I tried to start downloading early. My pre-order, from Direct2Drive let me download an installer, which proved to be a quite slow P2P. Undaunted, I searched around, and found a closed beta client I could download. There is confusion on the forums at the moment, as others have done the same, and noone is quite sure whether the closed beta client will be patched up to open, or whether we'll need a new client. Being a weekend, Cryptic aren't answering - understandably enough. One interesting feature, though, is that the in-game communication system is Cryptic-wide - while playing Champions Online earlier, I was able to have a /tell conversation with a friend who was playing the closed beta. Hopefully Cryptic put us out of our collective misery before beta-day, though...

I lied about looking at the levelling system in this part, as it's pretty much covered in the last. Instead, we'll substitute in PvP, which I forgot about...

So after Millenium City's intro, as mentioned, you get to go to either the desert or the Canadian wilderness. The initial desert quests feature battles against an evil organisation, VIPER, and thousands (it seems like) of Irradiates, mutants caused by the atomic experiments of the past. Also appearing occasionally is Grond, a giant, green, four-armed behemoth. He tends to leap into an area, beat up whatever villains and heroes happen to be about, contribute some witticisms such as "You are as boring as rival MMO!", and leap off again.

I ground through a few levels with missions, and at some stage unlocked the ability to return to Millennium City, which I immediately took up. The mid-teen level missions in MC serve as an introduction to the various districts of the city, and the numerous gangs that are vying for control. You soon learn that outside the high-tech, "City of the Future" superhero area of the Renaissance Centre, MC is still Detroit at heart, and in a pretty poor state.

I ran out of missions (well - those of an appropriate level) in the high teens, and so travelled up to the Canadian wilderness, where Project Steelhead is based, and is being menaced by another criminal organisation, PSI, which is trying to release an ancient demon. And if that wasn't enough, Canadian separatists, the Hunter-Patriots, are also up to no good. Again I ran into the lack of level-appropriate missions problem, and so it was back again to MC, and then back to the desert, for Westworld-style shenanigans - out of control robots from the Western theme-park needed to be sorted out.

The look and feel of each zone is quite different. The graphics are fine, though nothing exceptional. Approaching WoW standards for the most part, but not quite there yet. Think average superhero comic, and you won't go far wrong. And in fairness, Cryptic may deliberately want the graphics to look as they do - generic superhero.
The desert manages to look like desert, and the Canadian wilderness is suitably tundra-like. Millennium City is a little sparsely populated for a thriving metropolis, but then so is every other city in a computer game. And each district - futuristic Ren Centre, dilapidated Westside, modern City Centre, Chinatown, etc., manage to look different.

Lairs - dungeons to a WoW player - haven't impressed me with their look and feel so far. They tend to be a fairly basic series of large rooms connected by corridors. The rooms will have appropriate furniture and decoration - science lab, military warehouse, etc. - and that equipment is handy for some characters with Super Strength. Nothing like a barrel of nuclear waste thrown from 50 feet away to make an impression on a group of mobs... Another criticism is that rooms that are "busy" with scenery really confuse pet AI. One of my character's mystic powers is to summon two wolves to fight by her side (gadgeteer types can also have pets) - and often they'd get stuck. Or, if I used an area of effect attack, which would damage some of the equipment in the area, they'd assume it was an enemy and continue to attack it...

There are two zones I haven't reached yet - Monster Island, I feel, may be in my near future, as a couple of NPCs have started mentioning it. And after that, there's Lemuria. And that's it, at present. More zones are obviously planned for future patches and expansions. And at least each current zone is large. I've still not explored them all, and at no stage have I been forced through a "purple" area on a mission (monsters that are too powerful for your level have purple-coloured names). Having said that - there is a slight shortage of quests. I've never been in the situation where I've had to grind mobs to level, thankfully, but I have had to go look for quests in different areas, once or twice picking up lower-level ones. On a few occasions, my log has been full of quests one to three levels above my own. And while some of them are still soloable, the problem with them is that the mobs tend to drop items that have a level requirement above my own. This has eased since I've reached 21, though, and I'm now getting regular bulletins from Sentinel, requesting my presence to deal with emergencies.

Each of the three zones has a Powerhouse, so levelling up isn't a problem, but only Ren Centre has a bank and auction house. I therefore found myself travelling back to Millennium City quite a bit. Mail can be accessed from anywhere, which is nice. In fact, you can access your in-game mails at any stage - and reply - via the Champions website, which is a very nice touch. Cryptic have also released a phone app that allows the same, as well as seeing if your friends are online. Sending items in your mails, though, needs to be done from a mail terminal, which are generally only found at bases.

Crafting and trade

Shortly after first arriving in the desert, I discovered the profession trainers. Basically there are three available - Arms, Science, and Mysticism. You can only pick one, and each has three specialities. As you fly around the map, you'll notice nodes on your mini-map that can be harvested, such as Arms Lockers for the Arms trade (no pun intended), or Occult Gear for Mysticism. Harvesting these yields base components (and may grant a skillup). Equipment you've looted or been given as a quest reward can, if it belongs to your chosen profession, be "Researched" - basically, it gets disenchanted into components. Trainers teach blueprints to make items, powers, enhancements and consumables out of these components. I learned all I could on every visit, but there was nothing outstanding at my skill level really useful to my character in terms of stats, though the odd consumable for healing was handy, and making my own bags was very useful. The lack of decent craftables may well be due to my choice of specialisation, too... I have access to a type of crafting called Enhancements, which add additional powers to existing onces. Unfortunately, the vast majority seem to add damage types (such as fire or sonic) to bladed weapons and archery powers - which I don't have.

Goods can of course also be sold to vendors, or put up on the Auction House. The AH is weak - I'm used to using WoW's AH, and my banker alts have Auctioneer addons, which tell me how much an item regularly sells for. The basic Champions AH interface, though, doesn't even allow you to sort by price. Search for a common crafting component - Aether, for example - and you'll get several pages of results, unsortable. That means scrolling through each page to find the cheapest lots. Likewise, I found it very time-consuming working out how much I should be putting up some of my loot for. It involved searching for a similar quality item, of the same level, in the same slot, that had huge price variations for no discernable reason. In the end, I gave up. I defaulted to keeping Primary items for auction at a certain low set price, and vendored all the Secondary-slot items I picked up that I couldn't disenchant. Sorry - research.

PvP

A staple of the superhero genre is to see two or more heroes battle it out (usually before teaming up to battle the bad guy). Champions allows duelling, and also has an organised PvP system - the Hero Games, which are battlegrounds. You can start PvP at any level - you get temporarily promoted in levels to match everyone else. There are three BGs in the game at the moment. The first I tried is an arena, pitting teams against each other. It was quite fun, and many powers really come into their own in PvP. And because nobody looks obviously like the healer, it can be interesting to work out who you should be targetting. The other battlegrounds available to me are an every-man-for-himself sectioned off section of the city, and a zombie scenario: you are randomly assigned a side, with a group of heroes having to defend a cabin from zombie attack, and the zombified heroes having to get into it. Defeated heroes are resurrected as super-zombies. I haven't unlocked it yet, but another scenario battleground involves a breakout from Stronghold, the prison for super-villains. Participating in PvP awards Acclaim, which can be traded for items, including equipment and costume-part unlocks.

Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Cryptic uses a micro-transaction system - their 'C-store' sells lots of cosmetic upgrades and unlocks, and other benefits such as additional character lots, character renames, and respecs. I understand that anything that confers an in-game advantage is also available through normal play. You may just have to grind for it...

Social and grouping

The chat interface annoyed me, I have to say, but a lot of my annoyance was probably down to too many years' familiarity with WoW's interface. The chat pane is broken into player, NPC, and combat, and is customisable. The player chat lets you talk to the zone (and, indeed, every instance of the zone), to your SuperGroup (aka guild), your party, or to everyone "local" to your character. The cross-instance chat can be useful - when some missions were bugged last weekend, players in zones where they were working were able to report it so those on the quest could transfer over to a working instance. The disadvantage of cross-instance chat is that in high-pop zone such as Millennium City, there's a lot of it. Some of it of the Barrens chat variety...

I got as far as the high teens mostly solo, apart from the odd group mission, but people I'd been hoping to run into didn't seem to be playing as much, and there were never enough of us on at the same time to form our own SuperGroup. Five are needed to do so, and need to register it at Champions HQ. Because of the "Superhero Registration Act"... So around level 18 or so, I sought one out. Joining a guild gives access to a SuperGroup bank, and the usual benefits of being in a guild - people to help out, swap information, and generally interact with.

Overall

So far, my main character, a Darkness-based ranged DPS avatar of a Celtic goddess, has been fun to play, and I've gotten her to level 23 (out of a current max of 40). I've achieved the vast majority of that solo. I've also started an alt, a Strength-based metallic-bodied alien, complete with knockback skills, who is also fun. I'm looking forward to getting to 25, which is when a player gets to create their Nemesis. This is a really nice feature. Every superhero has their nemesis, and Champions lets you custom-build your own. He (or she, or it), complete with henchmen, will show up periodically at some point after creation and begin to cause trouble for your hero.

After that? Well, we'll see. I've two new zones to get to, and a nemesis to defeat. However, I've also got a WoW guild and raid community with real-life friends, and Startrek Online arriving in open beta next week. My purpose in trying Champions Online was to have a look at the genre, and see if Cryptic could produce a good MMO. From what I've seen, yes, they can, and this bodes well for STO. The character creation, especially, is one of the best seen in any game (and the sneak previews of STO's chargen show it's only gotten better). But it's not a game that rocks my world. It's not Cryptic's fault - everything is competent to good, with the exception of the Auction House and some other minor glitches that will no doubt improve over time - but it lacks that certain something that would make me lose all track of time as I ground out the last few XP needed to level. I may make level 40 in Champions at some point, but it will be more a case of dipping in and out of it as a break from something else, rather than "ZOMG must level! Must see this! Must do that!", as was the case with WoW and its expansions. And, hopefully, STO.

Champions Online is based on the Champions pen-and-paper RPG, first published in 1981 and now in its 5th edition. The Champions RPG is, in turn, an unashamed adaptation of the world of four-colour comics of the 60s and 70s. As such, its campaign world features all the common tropes of the genre - secret societies, evil corporations, mad supervillains, alien invasions - and, of course, the heroes who combat them, complete with their own super groups. This is the world you enter the first time you hit 'Play' in the Champions MMO.

There are too many elves. And orcs. Even if they're called by some other name. Every MMO I've played to date has been fantasy based - UO, DAoC, WoW. Oh, there's an exception - EVE. But I found the learning curve too steep and frankly, a 10-year-old game that manages to bluescreen a 4-year-old PC has issues. Plus, from my limited experience, the combat seemed dodgy - pick a target, orbit it at a certain distance, and keep shooting. Yawn. Space combat should be like Wing Commander (I've said it before, and I'll say it again - the Wing Commander IP is just crying out to be turned into an MMO!)

I picked up Champions in October. This is a review of my experience of the game to date (where my main has reached level 21 out of a current max of 40). Installation was smooth, creating an account was counter-intuitive, but was managed eventually. First up is the character creation screen. You start by choosing your powers. There are no character classes, as such, in Champions, but the traditional tank/dps/healer roles are present. You can choose to use one of 19(!) archetypes, or as they are called in the game, "frameworks" - or you can go wild and custom build one. The frameworks are the "basic" superhero types we all know and love - fire-users, electricity-blasters, ice-men, power-armour wearers, telepaths, and so on. The full list: Electricity, Force, Archery, Munitions, Dual Blade, Single Blade, Telekinesis, Might, Darkness, Sorcery, Fire, Ice, Gadgeteering, Power Armor, Fighting Claws, Telepathy, Celestial, Supernatural, and customised. The only obvious omissions I can see in that list are web-slinging and stretchy.

Each framework gives you two default powers. One will be a weak attack that when used will also generate energy for your character, while the second is a slower, more powerful attack that, when used, uses up that energy. Depending on the framework, they'll be ranged attacks, melee attacks, or a mixture. Each of the default frameworks also has two ability stats that are more important than the others - for instance, Strength and Intelligence are the primary stats for Power Armor heroes, while a Fire-based hero needs Presence and Recovery. A character's two primary stats start out at 12, higher than the others which remain at 5.

Next up is your character's appearance. I'd decided on a Celtic-themed goddess-avatar type. The next three screens are for gender, face, and body type. The face and body screens let you do a fair bit of customisation - it's a simple job to get the body looking like you want, from an elfin waif up to a musclebound Hulk-like brick.

Next is the costume screen. Prepare to waste an hour or so - this is great fun. You'll likely spend 10 minutes just clicking on the 'Randomise' button and laughing, or going "Wow, nice!" Pretty much everything can be changed or altered, and the variety is endless (with more options being added in patches). First time round, I wanted to get into the game pretty quickly, so didn't spend too much time on this, but it's pretty much possible to create any type of costume/appearance you want, from a "traditional" costumed human to some pretty far-out demon, robot or alien types.

Part of the T&Cs, obviously, is that you're not meant to duplicate any living person or break any copyrights (a problem City of Heroes/Villains apparently suffered from) and while it is hard to duplicate existing superheroes (and people) it's certainly not impossible. I've seen an almost perfect Thing, Captain Marvel, Batman and, er... Stan Lee - but in general, people try to be original (for certain values of original).

The last screens in character creation let you choose a stance ("normal", heroic (out-thrust jaw and chest), beast-like crouch, etc.) and demeanour (stern, angry, etc.), choose your avatar's name, and write a character background, if you so wish. Names needn't be unique, which is just as well, seeing as Champions is a single-server game. This is possible as your full character name, as far as the game is concerned, is actually made up of two parts: the avatar name and your account name. So Manbat@accountname can happily run into and even team up with Manbat@differentaccount. The character background is optional, but being a roleplayer, I had to complete mine. Unfortunately, it appears that returning background information is given a low server-side priority. clicking on another character and selecting 'Info' is as likely to return a popup with a picture of the hero and a 'Please wait' message under character background as it is to actually tell you about the terrible accident that resulted in them being able to shoot ice from their palms.

Character creation done, you click on 'Play' - and are given a nice touch. A popup asks what type of GUI you'd prefer. Options are 'default Champions', 'Superhero MMO' (which presumably puts everything where a City of Heroes/Villains player would expect it), or 'fantasy MMO' (which in my case put everything where a Warcraft player would expect to see it, and, I believe, mapped some of the keys to their WoW equivalents).

That's it for now. Part II, coming soon, will cover the general Champions background and initial play.

Start any MMO (with the possible exception of WAR) and you're going to need a touch of paitence to get used to the UI. Initially I found the UI Darkfall an exercise in frustration. Everything seemed to take several more mouse clicks that it needed. Most of these things I managed to get over simply by repeated use so they became second nature and I could largely ignore them. Apart from the Journal that is. These days I just don't bother opening the Journal as it takes so long to navigate through it to get the information I want from it. Two simple pieces of information I wanted when I first started playing were what quests I was on and who from my Clan/Guild were logged in. I've no idea why Darkfall makes these simple things so difficult to get. It got the point where after about day three I stopped trying. You've probably already gathered I'm not a huge fan of Darkfall's UI.

So the PVP then. I have to be upfront and say I didn't really experience a lot of PVP. Outside of raids on one of the cities I chose to hang around. The main thing I loved about 70% of the PVP I took part in was that most of it was melee. There aren't a lot of buttons to press, it's pretty simple. Which means it was very easy for me to at least contribute something to helping defend the city when we were attacked. As a new player it was a great feeling to actually be able to help out despite my relatively low skill level. After a couple of attacks by sea (!) it was quite easy to see what the potential is for large scale battles. And this brings me to an interesting point. Like EVE, the politics of Clan alliances, who holds what territories etc is all player driven. In battles to take control of areas the players themselves are shaping what the world becomes. So in WoW where you can take control of Wintergrasp, it doesn't actually mean very much. In Darkfall is means everything, you're contributing to the history of the game and that's a very powerful thing.

So anyway. Despite not trying a lot of PVP, in what is a PVP game, I still had a cracking time in what little PVP I did see. The whole dying thing and losing all of your gear really isn't such a big deal. You learn not to carry so much stuff around with you and the notion that a players gear means anything about how good a player they are is meaningless here. I didn't find Darkfall a particularly difficult game to get to grips with. Well, perhaps with the exception of one thing, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a bit of a WoW tourist here. The one thing would be motivation.

The most obvious difference between Darkfall and WoW for me wasn't so much the fact Darkfall is PVP centric but rather the motivation. In WoW I found myself mesmerised by the XP bar during leveling. The game had such a in your face way of telling you that you're progressing. It's almost overbearing. It's a constant reminder, a pat on the back, that friendly voice telling you that you're doing well and to just keep going that little bit more because you're near the next level or bunch of buttons to press. The leveling process in WoW is, for the most part, pretty brainless. Just keep killing the badgers and before you know it you're level 80.

In Darkfall life is a bit different. There are no levels. There is no XP bar. Character development comes through developing your skills which come in tiny increments as you build them up. You aren't given a gold star for increasing each 0.01 of your stats, you have to be self motivated. Think about this for a bit. You can spend an hour grinding away and you'll see your stats move 0.10 of a skill point. It's pretty demoralising. It's at this point I realised the game wasn't going to hold my hand anywhere along the way. It was entirely up to me to find my own means of measuring my progress. I'd need to be so much more motivated because there are no badgers in Darkfall I wasn't in Azeroth anymore.

So I know what you're wondering at this point. Did I like it? I did like it but my problems with it are largely my own. When I come home from work after a hard day it was sometimes really difficult to spend the time needed to organise a group or debate the options with the Clan on what to do with the evening, so instead I chose to mindlessly grind my stats with some vague notion that it was the very least I could do and still do something useful. From that point of view I don't feel like I gave the game the time it deserved to form a real opinion on whether it's a good game or not. I'll tell you one thing I do know for certain though. I've formed a new found appreciation for those passionate players I see in forums defending their game, because they damn well have to work damn hard when they are playing.

I'm cheating a little. This is the last post, next post will be a bit of a wrap up piece on thoughts so far. I'd love to say that for my last day there was a huge amount of action and that it was a day to remember, in truth it was probably a day to forget!

Checking the Darkfall political map I tried to find another city nearbythat we were allied with that I could hang out in and I set off on a mount. When I got there I discovered just how out of date the politicalmap can be when I was 3 shotted while trying to find a way into the city. That's ok though as I'd bound myself to a chaos stone, ummm, oh actually the chaos stone was in a completely useless place and I was now faced with a long walk back to the clan Hamlet where the nearest bank was.

On getting back to the Hamlet I used my house recall to get me to Namlit with the intention of swiming north to the Alfar lands to try and find an allied city on the mainland. This went quite well until I spotted something in the distance which looked like a strange graphical glitch. The close it got I realised it wasn't a glitch. No. It was the Kraken and it cut me to ribbons pretty quickly despite me moving as quickly as I could to get away. That Kraken is a pretty fast swimmer let me tell you!

Respawning back at the clan Hamlet I used my house recall again to get me to Namlit where I quickly farmed the steedgrass I needed to replace the mounts I'd lost. At this point I decided to cut my losses and recalled back to the clan Hamlet where I banked the loot and called it a night. Not a very exciting evening, but there you go!

So that's it from me. At this point I have to express my thanks to everyone who has been reading along and everyone who left comments. I really wasn't expecting anyone to really notice I was blogging the 30 days of my subscription so imagine my surprise to see AV mention me in one of their Spotlight posts in the offical forums.

I'd also like to thank the members of the (sadly soon to be defunct) Clan Infusion on EU-1. In particular Tupelo Siah, Reidar Beck and Vaettr Storm. You guys are a real credit to the game, and it's been fantastic playing with you. I've picked up another month of subscription, and I'm quite looking forward to seeing where the game takes me next month!

This post is basically a checklist of things I did as a new player and either got dead right or got wrong. Essentially I thought it might be useful for other people completely new to Darkfall, as I was.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=149310

* Although it didn't look like it, there are actually starter quests. All I did here was wandered around my starting city and spoke to all the NPCs to pick up starting quests. Working these through a couple of times got me free gathering tools. A Mining axe, a Wood axe and a sickle and the quests taught me how to use them. Thrilling though this sounds, they're free and really if you're a new player this is the helping hand you want.

* I should have picked up the Bowyer skill much earlier than I did. All I needed to do for this was to buy saw, mining tongs and a wood working knife. The mining axe and the wood axe (which I was previously given free by doing some of the starter quests) are the two tools needed to gather materials for your own arrows. Then it's just a case of smelting the ore with the tongs, cutting the wood into timber with the saw, and then working the arrows with the knife. Although a lot of the mobs in the starting quests drop these, they're a pain in the arse to collect as you'll only get 3-4 at a time. Being able to make your own arrows en-mass by using
gathering materials is damn useful.

* One thing that wasn't too clear to me was the whole 'what weapons can I use' thing. The simple answer is all of them, but you need to switch from your default starter weapon as early as possible. I spent way too much time bumbling around with the leaf blade and thinking I needed to 'train' new weapon skills! In reality what I should have done was switched to the first new weapon that dropped from the mobs I was killing for quests.

* Getting my own mount was a good deal easier than I was led to believe it was. Essentially when you're gathering herbs (you picked up your free sickle earlier right?) just keep on farming until you get that steed grass. I worked out it'd take me about 30-40 minutes to farm one steed grass. Given the way gathering works in DF it's not like you need to be hands on mouse/keyboard the whole time. After you've got your steed grass just buy the tamer skill, and a tamers whistle and you're done!

* Don't carry too much around with you. Just out gathering? No point in wearing armour then. Would you be pissed off if you died
right now with what you've got in your pack? Bank it then. Don't assume that because you're standing by the bank with a bunch of other people that you're safe. I've seen instances where a PK has come along and killed me as well as the other six people stood there AFK.

* If you're feeling brave and you want to explore, use these two links.

If you're in a Clan The Darkfall political map will tell you which cities should be safe for you to visit :

http://df.urme.com/map/

If you're wanting to travel any distance across the map but don't want to lose too much progress if you get ganked, the Sinister darkfall map has a filter to tell you where the Chaos Stones are. So basically if you get killed you'll respawn at the last Chaos Stone you bound yourself to.

http://www.afraidyet.net/forums/misc.php?do=page&template=Darkfall_Map

If you're on twitter the offical Darkfall twitter account is @DarkfallMMORPG, that's http://twitter.com/DarkfallMMORPG if you'd rather have a URL.

Lastly, the official Darkfall forums are an interesting place to hang out but engage with the locals at your peril :

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/

* The most important thing I did to help myself as a new player was to join a Clan. This was a real lifeline beyond what the newbie channel offered me and I could get right down and ask all the silly questions I wanted. The trick to this is that the answers I got were all in relation to where the Clan I had joined were on the map. If I wanted to do some farming to boost my stats they'd tell me where some good spots were, which other Clans were in the area and what mobs to avoid and what mobs I could solo etc. Later on when we had a couple of other new players join the clan I could repay this debt by passing on the information that I'd been given when I first joined.

* Darkfall is one of those games where to get things from it you need to work at it. If you want to go and do some PVP in a group, ask in the Clan channel if anyone has an existing group or if anyone is interested in starting one which you can join. If you want to go and farm some PVE mobs for loot or cash, ask your Clan if anyone knows of a group going or start one yourself. Ask
where some good spots might be. If you want to take part in sieges, ask in the Clan alliance channel if there are any planned, if there are any Alliance raiding parties forming.

I got as much out of it as I put in and in some cases much more.

My new favourite past time is hunting for chaos chests. These seem to spawn fairly randomly and containt random items. Mostly money, the odd bit of materials. Early evening I went on a quick circuit to see what I could find. This netted me 100g or so, nothing major, and by the time I got back to the city and banked the proceeds. There followed a 20 minute gap where I chatted to one of the Clan leaders about the future of the Clan when there was an almighty crack of what sounded like thunder.

I'd never seen a sea based attack so I quickly headed out for a look see. From what I could gather of the tactics they seemed to be pummeling the city walls so that a gap could open and then 8-10 players came across the water to the city walls. Our defense was to man the cannon towers and try and fire back at the ship. In an interesting turn of events the ship seemed to be just outside the maximum draw distance of my graphics settings. I'm not sure whether this was a stroke of genius or pure luck on the part of the people running the attack.

We didn't seem to have trouble repelling the landing party and this puzzles me slightly. They out numbered us and could probably have over run the city quite easily. I found myself wondering wether their ship ran out of powder or cannon balls or something. One thing about hanging around in this particular city was that I'd bound myself to it so even if we do get attacked, and I do die in 3 seconds, at least I'm going to respawn in the same city afterward. Unlike last time when my recall point was 20 minutes away. The attack felt like it happened in the space of 5 minutes, but in reality was about 30 minutes.

Quite a rush!

The slow death of our clan continues as a lot of the new members we'd gained over the past three weeks have started to leave. This was to be expected and isn't really news.

I've been spending my time around a city which is part of the new alliance we'd formed with another clan. When I logged in this evening the word was that we were about to get hit with a siege. I don't quite understand how the seige mechanices work, but apparently you need to give 24 hours notice of a siege or something along those lines. Either way there were a lot of heavily armoured players standing outside the City bank.

Having missed the previous attack there was no way I was missing this one. I grabbed some basic gear, nothing I'd be upset at losing, mostly arrows and a staff. I took up a position on one of the cannon towers and waited. While I waited I watched a lot of people dueling. I seem to be missing something about dueling before what's supposed to be a large scale attack. Surely if you're about to get attacked at any moment then being low on health is the last thing you're going to want? Seemed a bit strange.

I waited some more. An hour passed. I waited some more. After an hour and a half I asked around the Clan channel, "It's coming", apparently. Two hours later the dueling players had moved to some rooftops across the city. Still nothing happening. So I ditched my gear, picked up a mount and went out in a circular route around the island hunting for Chaos Chests. This took about 30 minutes. By the time I got back to the city there were a lot of naked recently dead players standing around the city bank. I'd missed the attack.

War involves a lot of sitting around waiting, apparently, and I'd imagine the real thing feels a lot like this.

This was quite a traumatic experience as I was a good 20 minutes away at the time and all I heard in the Clan Alliance channel was how much damage the city was taking and by the time I got there it was nearly all over. Just as I approached the city gates and spotted where the action was taking place I was cut to ribbons in what felt like 3 seconds! Later on that evening I made the journey across the map again and bound myself to the city as news filtered down that these guys were our new allies. The layout of their city was much more organised, the Arch mage stocked a whole bunch of new spells which I hadn't seen before, and everything was much closer togetheri. Previously the runs between the bank and the various crafting stations was pretty tedious, but not it was much less time consuming. As I looked through some of the new spells available to me it became apparent that I shouldn't be ignoring magic so much. I'd largely just concentrated on my melee skills, but even though the new expansion favours melee a lot of the useful basic magic skills like "heal mount" assume that you're of a certain level. So that'll be something I'll be doing this week.

News via the Clan channel emerged that sadly one of our Clan leaders has decided to retire from Darkfall. The plan now is to hopefully fold ourselves into one of the Clans we're allied with. This has a couple of interesting aspects. This particular clan are quite advanced with their plans to do some sea based PVP. Also there are rumours of another city seige headed our way over this coming weekend. Generally speaking this new Clan alliance are much more organised. Everyone seems to hang around on a Vent server which has different channels for each clan, PVP channels, PVE channels. Most importantly for me is that they're quite social so I'm hoping to pick up some useful tips and, dare I say this given how often I keep saying it and don't do it, get out a little more into some PVP.