Editor's note: All screenshots are a work in progress from the Star Trek Online closed beta.
Whether you’ve enjoyed their super hero MMOs or not, it’s easy to admit that the character creation portion of both City of Heroes and Champions Online have been the most robust character creation tools ever devised by an online development team. The level of detail that can be drilled onto each character is phenomenal, and you can end up with online video programs completely devoted to the creation of a player’s character in these games.
Their background automatically sets the bar incredibly high for Cryptic’s character creation in Star Trek Online and, if it doesn’t meet the unspoken standards by Cryptic’s fans, there might be hell to pay. So when we fired up the latest beta play session in STO, character was the first segment of the game that we had to take a crack at.
In many ways, the Star Trek Online character creation system was exactly what we expected from the developers at Cryptic, but there was also a level of caution employed as well. Unlike its super hero cousins, STO is based off of a licensed property that has always been firmly planted in a "humanistic" reality. Starting a character (at least initially) in STO means that you’re signing up to be a part of the Federation’s Starfleet, and that means you won’t be donning any hot pink capes or neon green masks anytime soon.
As STO fans are aware, you begin your creation process by selecting between an engineering officer, a science officer, and a tactical officer. Once you've made that choice, you can then choose between the pre-created races – Human, Andorian, Bajoran, Bolian, and Vulcan – or you can create an "unknown" race of being.
This is where the real appeal – at least for most MMO junkies – kicks in. Unlike Champions Online and City of Heroes before it, the customizable portion of Star Trek Online is more focused on a player’s face and the developers give us options that seem more organic and "real" than what you see in CO.
Gender, eyes, neck, face, ears, forehead, skull structure, skin type, pattern, nose details, tattoos, scarring, all of that can be customized to an extravagant degree. Gradients on coloring and facial details can be adjusted to make your alien’s face appear softer or stouter depending on your needs.
Of course, experimentation needs to be done when you have so many options at your disposal. Over the course of a few hours, the ZAM staff set out to create two completely different looking aliens: an enormous, burly, yet still scandalously sexy reptilian woman (that’s a mouthful!) and a midget-sized, super-intelligent, arrogant, obnoxious-looking male alien from a race that has never seen the light of the sun until they discovered space travel.
As you can see from the screenshots we’ve included in this article, we managed to attain both types of aliens – and both will appear very different at the helm of a starship.
So what else can you expect to find during character creation? Although we can’t show you details, each alien is allowed to select four racial bonuses (for the known races, two bonuses are pre-selected) that help characters in various forms of gameplay. These range from traits like "Aggressive," which gives a bonus to combat damage to “Cold-Blooded,” assists with resisting heat damage. There’s a vast number of traits to pick from the pool, so we made sure to give our female alien an assortment of combat buffs, and our little STO gnome a host of abilities that help him with starship piloting.
Even at this early stage, it’s easy to notice that players will have the ability to pick out the traits that suit their desired play styles – those that want to focus on ground combat can select those bonuses while those that want to stick to the blackness of space can benefit from other traits that enhance those stats.
While we can’t give you the numbers that we saw – we know that you’d like to see as much as you could – rest assured that there are just as many starship related traits as there are ground combat types. It’s a nice selection of flavored abilities and they will certainly make for some interesting characters down the road.
But how did Brains and Scales (as we lovingly refer to them) manage once they got into the heat of combat in the STO beta? Check back in with us soon to see just how they fared!
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