Beware Romulans bearing gifts…

I got my Romulan character up to level 50 in the new STO expansion. Leveling goes pretty quickly in that game, as I haven’t completely finished the Romulan story arc yet, and that’s only “designed” to get you to about level 40. I have some bonus XP as a veteran player and I did a fair about of XP gain with the DOFF system.

What do I think of the expansion so far?

Story

This is definitely the shining light for the expansion and puts the rest of STO missions to shame. You are immediately sucked into the plot of being a Romulan survivor of the destruction of Romulus (a plot point thrust on Cryptic part way through the games development thanks to the 2009 movie). Their response to that major event had been rather uneven before (and still is, though using the aftermath as a stage for the Romulan story has been great).

You start out as a simple civilian on a new Romulan colony just before its attached by the Tal Shiar and their new allies, the Elachi. Your colony is wiped out but you and your best friend Tovan escape on an old warbird, the version from TOS. It does a good job of introducing the games control to you, far better than the Federation tutorial.

From there, you begin working for the new Romulan Republic, searching for other Romulan and Reman colonies. You’re trying to help protect them from the Tal Shiar and to get as many to join the Republic as you can.

The best part is the addition of the crew. I spoke to this before in my first look but getting further into the game play, they continued this development. During the first several missions you get to know a few more wayward individuals who end up joining your crew. Their stories don’t continue beyond their introduction but that’s fine. You now have a crew with some story, rather than a collection of random generic bridge officers.

The story isn’t perfect though. When it reaches the mission that reveals the backstory of Romulus’ destruction, its just as uneven as the Federation story. You’re in the middle of infiltrating the Tal Shiar and then suddenly you’re investigating the Hobus star system (the one that blew up and destroyed Romulus). You learn that the Tal Shiar were responsible because they were experimenting with something.

This plot thread just kind of comes out of nowhere and then goes nowhere. The Tal Shiar blew up your homeworld and doesn’t really feel like it matters. The whole mission felt like a side trip in the middle of the adventure.

I did catch onto something I missed before though. Taris, a person of interest in the Federation arc, is revealed to be the Romulan captain who encountered the Iconian gateway with the Enterprise in TNG episode “Contagion”. I had missed that and she now has a purpose, rather than just being a random Romulan. Though, ironically, in the Romulan arc she is just a random person because she appears once and vanishes.

Overall the story (so far) has been good. I look forward to finishing it now that I have a max level ship and crew.

Environments

This is another area the expansion did really well. You get to visit a large number of locations during your adventures, many of them completely new maps. Early on, the homeport for the Romulans starts out as being part of a flotilla of ships. Its pretty cool being able to look out a window from the flagship and seeing a bunch of warbirds flying in formation.

At one point you visit a Suliban helix. You don’t get to land and the Suliban were a stupid species but the station looks cool. The custom Romulan space station you encounter for one mission bodes well for when they get their own stations.

One nice little tidbit is just a background piece. During one mission, you’re sent to Nimbus III (from the movie that shall not be named) and you visit an Orion Syndicate bar. There are scantily clad dancers dancing away and one of them’s a guy. Star Trek doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to gender equality, and based on the Vulcan on the STO homepage, its not really improved in the video game.  So it was nice to see both men and women being treated as sex objects equally.

Gameplay

There wasn’t a whole lot of game play changes with the expansion. For Federation characters, nothing really changed aside from a few tweaks to some abilities and the Trait revamp. I really like that change. Being able to select between abilities at end game, instead of picking at character creation when you don’t know what any of it means, is nice. And the new ones add some cool effects.  I like being able to use Miracle Worker and Photonic Fleet more often.

The addition of warp cores, and for the Romulans singularity cores, was another nice touch. I haven’t experimented with trying to find a perfect one for my Fed guy yet, waiting for Fleet cores to be added. The singularity cores are less exciting because I’m so far only “meh” on the whole singularity mechanic.

Romulan ships have some inherent abilities tied to their special power core. That seems cool but its turned out to be a little unwieldy. It takes awhile for the powers to charge up to a useful level. Then, whenever you use one, it starts a 1 min cooldown on the charging process. Without special consoles, its about 2min between abilities.

That’s good for balance but makes you need to be real cautious about when and which ability you use. Fire off you damage boost power and then you can’t use your damage resistance one for awhile. Also, the singularity power cores give bonus damage to a subsystem depending on the charge of the power meter. That means when you use a power, you’re taking away the opportunity to use others and reducing your ships overall subsystem power levels.

Conclusion

Overall, the Romulan expansion for STO has been a real positive addition.  Good content and fun. Hopefully they’ll do another one in a year or so for Cardassians.

Contest Entry #2:  This posts title is a quote from what Star Trek movie? What is the context of the quote (describe the scene)?