I collect RPG source-books not just because I have an interest in playing them, but because they offer insight into the IP they’re based on. With the acquisition of the core rules for Star Trek Adventures, I’ve been more or less immersed in all things Star Trek for the past few days. In order to drive that lore-soak, I’ve started watching series that I never got around to (starting with DS9) and have jumped back into Star Trek Online.

I started a new character, and have been going through all of latest “new player experience” content. STO is, I believe, the only MMO which regularly cycles it’s new player experience. Over the course of the game’s lifetime, there’s been the the original starting experience, The Original Series experience, a few derivative starting experiences (elsewhere in The Next Generation era, like focus on the Romulans), and most recently the Discovery experience. Although Star Trek has been on again-off again over the years, STO has drawn from that rich well of content to add more ships, more features, and more characters, usually front-loading the game as opposed to offering back-loading, high-level content the way other games do. As someone who rarely gets to the end game in an online title, I have a beef with games that let lower-level content stagnate in a bid to carrot the highest level players (hi, Secret World Legends!), so STO is a constant tsunami of new stuff available to basically everyone, all the time.

Personally, I like STO’s content. I find it to be very Star Trek, pretty well written (voice acting can be hit or miss), and because of the way it’s presented, it reads very much like episodes of a TV treatment. Although the missions span the course of a larger story, I can usually play a few episodes and put it aside in a reasonable time frame. Since I’ve been reviewing the Star Trek Adventures content, I’ve been in the “module” frame of mind, and have been appreciating the stories and structure of the missions that the most recent content drops have been providing.