Star Trek online review: Character creation

Star Trek online review: Character creation

Let’s start this review with the first thing we have to do in a game: create our character.

The first thing we do in this game, versus a few other mmorpg I’ve been playing, is selecting your character class. In Star trek online there is three classes to choose from: Engineering Officer, Science Officer and Tactical Officer.

Engineering Officer is “speced” mostly towards survivability and support generator for himself and his team. Science Officer Abilities are more damage over time and healing, it’s a versatile class. Tactical Officer, on the other hand, is the combat class: direct damage, stealth and recon.

There are a total of ten (10) species, nine (9) official Star Trek species and one (1) unknown. The unknown is your own to create, let your imagination work you might be surprise of the life form you can create. The species are: Human, Andorian, Bajoran, Benzite, Bolian, Betazoid, Sauruan, trill, last but not least Vulcan. The unknown is the custom create class like I wrote above, it doesn’t let you only create your specie it let you also choose your character traits. Every species have a maximum of four (4) traits, some have two (2) or three (3) preselected traits and you have to hand pick you last or 2 last traits by your self. A side note: the character gender does not affect in any ways the traits you choose.

Traits are split in to 2 categories: space skills and ground skills. Twenty three traits total divided in to ground and space, as I said: Six (6) traits are space related and seventeen (17) are ground combat traits. The traits vary from ship power level to starship combat buffs: shield weapons etc. Ground combat skills are more diverse: it goes from critical strike bonus to bonus damage, melee knockback and maximum hit point increased. But it doesn’t stop there, if you want to be resistant to damage, there is a few resistance skills to pick from: toxic, kinetic, plasma, just to name a few.

My personal choice of skills would be:
-Aggressive: +5% all damage bonus strength, +5% threat generation,
-Peak health: +10% toxic damage resistances, +10% maximum hit point,
-Soldier: +5% all energy damage bonus strength, +10% critical severity,
-Telekinetic: fifteen (15) physical damage to a maximum of thirty (30) meter range, chance to knockback your opponent.

After accepting your character’s traits, the next step is creating your character player. This is the mostly fun step, in my opinion. The first thing you need to do is scroll your mouse wheel up to get up close to character’s face. At first sight of the window you will be disappointed, because there is not much of customizing to do. What you see is the basic customization options, click on advance to get more choices. The randomize button is the short and scary option to create your character. If you have selected Human or Vulcan as species your random options and character will look like human or Vulcan. If you have picked unknown as species you will end up with a weird combination of all the nine (9) species. To finish the description of this window is the reset button, I am pretty sure that you will at least try randomizing your character option at least once to see what I am talking about. That being said now: press reset to revert all changes made to the character.

The character creation process is divided in three (3) parts: head, body, character biography and name are saved for last. Next window you will encounter in your adventure of creation is the head details of your character. The total head option details for the face is fourteen (14), not counting the depth, width, height for eyes, mouth, chin and lips just to name a few. Your character can wear some eyewear: the choice of the classic visor to three (3) other styles to wear, it is the same with accessories for mouth; although the pieces for the mouth aren’t wearable, they are additions to your character’s detail.

The body section is not as complicated as the head part. You can change pretty much every part of your body: fingers, leg, hips, bust, hands, feet, etc. the addition we haven’t seen much in other games is the height. Wrong you will say, but in STO, the height is measured with a scroll bar AND your character actual height. Your player can go from 4’6” to 7’0”. The funny option is the stance your character can have. Brawler, thoughtful are the normal stance you can pick from, if you are more into alien style of character you can select creature as stance.

Moving on to the next screen is the choice of uniform, there are eleven (11) uniforms and each one of them has three (3) configurations or uniform design if you prefer. You have the choice to put your badge and your rank on you uniform. The lower body uniform doesn’t have much choice, four (4) styles: tights and loose, which is divided is 3 sections: long, knee and mid ankle. Theses are the places of you legs your pant length will end. No matter which style of pants you pick the boots choices will not change.

The last part of your character creation is your name, ship name and biography. The name and ship name are not optional. Unlike the character first, last name and your biography. You may not want to name your character at that time or add a story to your biography, that is why you still have the option once you have started playing, either if you are a deep role player or just a video game player who doesn’t care about role playing, the biography or character name is not required to play the game, although its always nice to read other people stories.

To finish the review I will talk about something I didn’t mention in any section: the color palette. There are a few selections to pick. The palette for the skin color and hair color is, however, way bigger than the uniform section.

This cover pretty much the character creation of Star Trek online. I am looking to play with you online when the game is going live on February 2nd 2010.

-Nooje-