Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Jeraddo. Its… oh, you know the rest. 

I’ve been in a bit of a rut when it comes to gaming. I play Guild Wars 2 a lot, dabble in The Elder Scrolls Online, and play some single-player games on the side (largely Tears of the Kingdom lately). Having a kid has made me prioritize known quantities in my gaming time; I hate feeling like I wasted my precious gaming time on an experience that wasn’t as fun as I had hoped, so I would rather play something comfortable. 

But sometimes I want something different. ESO’s action combat is fun, but not really relaxing, and its story focus means you kind of have to devote your full attention to it with your sound on, or you are missing half the game. GW2’s hybrid actiony-tab-target combat is my all-time favorite, but sometimes I want something a little more chill. Plus, to be honest, I’m a little concerned for its future, so my motivation to log in has waned a little, at least until the expansion drops.

I won’t bore you with the list of MMOs I tried and bounced off of — new games, old games, revisiting favorites, and dipping into games I have little to no history with — but I finally landed on Star Trek Online. I was there when this game launched (Cryptic Jank™ and all) and for a while I was in the habit of coming back every year or two, but it has been quite a while since I played it seriously. 

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds continues to be surprisingly good (the show they should have made instead of Discovery), handling heavy topics like the horrors of war and PTSD in Under the Cloak of War, but balancing it with goofy, lighthearted episodes like Those Old Scientists and Subspace Rhapsody, and somehow making it feel cohesive with well-written characters, even if those three episodes in a row did give me a bit of tonal whiplash. I’m not ready for the season to be almost over! 

Trek has been on my mind lately, and STO has a nice mix of well-voiced story content and mindless repeatable Patrol missions, not to mention duty officer missions that let me get XP and other regards while I’m offline. Plus it’s a game I’m already comfortable in. Exactly what I was looking for! 

My project last time I played was a new Tactical captain (an Aenar, before Strange New Worlds made it cool), and I tried picking up where I left off with her. I even used a free T6 ship coupon I had lying around to pick up the Lexington class for her, which is a variant of the recently-canonized Odyssey class (the class of the Enterprise-F, which appeared in Star Trek: Picard for about 30 seconds before biting the space dust) that can load dual canons and includes a hangar. Gotta love space pets! Unfortunately, there’s something about the Tactical class that I just don’t enjoy, so, while I got a little farther with her this time, ultimately I ended up rolling a new Science captain instead. Sure, I have a level 40-something Sci captain just sitting there, but I’m not feeling his look/theme anymore. It’s been so long that I either don’t remember or haven’t played most of the game’s existing story, so a fresh start was welcome anyway. 

I remembered that I also had the T6 Titan class sitting around. It’s one of my favorite ship designs (I even bought a little model of it, which is currently sitting in my office), so I nabbed it when it first came out, originally for the aforementioned Tac captain. Then, after flying it for a bit, I realized that, while it has the cool ability to flip between a Tac ship and a Sci ship at the push of a button, it’s much better at being a Sci ship, and while changing ship types mid-combat sounds cool, it’s not very useful in practice given that you can’t actually swap your gear or build or officers on the fly. But hey, it’s perfect for my new Sci captain! I miss having hangar pets, but there’s nothing stopping me from flying the Lexington later on with this new captain if I feel like it. 

When I played a lot back in the day (between launch and the Delta Rising expansion), I was a “broadside beam boat” player, with heavy, slow, tanky Engineering ships/captains that use phaser arrays on the front and back, turn the ship parallel to its target is in the overlap area of both the front and back weapons, and burn down enemies slowly but can basically never die. This time around, I am trying the opposite approach: I’m throwing everything forward with a bunch of torpedoes and one set of dual cannons on the front and all 360 degree turrets on the back. I was afraid that this wouldn’t work as well with the middle-of-the-road maneuverability of science ships as it does with the more nimble tactical ones, but it suits me just fine. I have my bridge officers loaded up with as many AoE exotic “space magic” abilities as I can, and it’s a lot of fun. Understanding of optimal character builds in this game has always eluded me, but the setup I have is fun and it gets me by, which is the important thing.