Impressions from PAX: STO Ground Combat

Unfortunately for Cryptic I can also sum the ground based play of STO up in one word too "boring"

As a lot of you might know, I've had my fair share of complaints about STO and as more information has come along a lot of them have been put to rest, others I'll just have to deal with and many that weren't really problems at all. The ground based play of STO on the other hand seems to get a unanimous decision from everyone, it needs some serious work.

Graphically, it's as beautiful as the space combat, the planet in question looked like some kind of desert, we've seen space station, jungles and ship interiors through screenshots too. The animations still need a bit of work. I noticed on some videos the knock back effect of being thrown to the floor had them sliding down slanted geometry or being very jerky just in general.

Due to the lack of source footage, I only have the "shaky cam" versions to work with. I couldn't see the use of skills as such during the ground combat, it seemed just as effective to stand still and shoot, if an enemy gets close you can smack them to the ground, move back a step and repeat until someone dies.

I don't think I've seen enough of the ground combat to really do it any justice but for the time being Cryptic may have over extended themselves in trying to make a fully playable space game as well as a ground game. I'm pretty sure they're going to sort it out by launch but once I get into beta, I'll be making sure to report my thoughts on it straight away.

With the release of Champions Online just passed us, Cryptic are switching priority over to getting the beta train rolling for STO which should happen in the next 4 months.