As of writing this Cryptic has released a rather large patch for the beta. This has significantly changed the look of the game. Icons and items are changed as are communications and some character models. As you I loaded into the game I am greeted by the dulcet tones of Leonard Nimoy. I was surprised to say the least. It seems they introduced a new string of missions that gave some backstory to the game and why things are as they are now. Which it seems that will be in the final game and its a very nice touch especially for people that will be new to the game.

The icons and such were much nicer but there were still some bad bugs. Like appearing as a ship when beaming into a ground mission without your away team. Funny the first time but now wearing thin. Especially since you have to beam back out and then load the mission up again to get them to appear. You may have to do this a few times. A new bug is appearing in space instead of your ship and then falling down to the bottom of the map and taking damage. I would have thought the major patch would have fixed it but then again they took down the servers again later on that day for more maintenance. We can only hope they will iron out some more of these persistent annoyances.

As for the gameplay today was a very good day. A mission that I and some others of the Destructoidians (the name of our fleet) took on involved us visiting the Guardian of Forever and the nostalgia factor kicked into warp 9. We went back in time to meet the original Enterprise and even had Spock with Leonard Nimoy voicing him hail us a few times. It was all enough to give me a raging nerdon or nerd hard on. We took out several old style Klingon ships and even got to see the old school Klingons without the forehead bumps. Malcor unleashed his patented Malcor Maneuver on some ships. It was super effective. After some battles and some falling through space before transforming back into ships and a bit of time wibbly wobbly action we were back in our own time space and getting our rewards. That was when another bug popped up that I encountered before. Malcor for some reason or another did not get the completion for the same mission we all just did. So he had to go back and do it again. I have encountered this problem and I can tell you it is rather frustrating in the extreme. To do all that work to get a big fuck you do it again at the end.

We did enjoy the mission though and it was a very big love letter to the fans to let them experience a bit of Trek history themselves and let them feel apart of it. This is what Trek should feel like. Using the enormous history and mythos as a story telling tool and letting the players engage in it and become part of it. I hope to see more referencing missions like this one to flesh out the world they are creating here. There has been tons of littls facts about the universe of Trek to date at the bottom of each loading screen. Information that may lead into missions that do indeed involve old show or movie cast members making appearances in the game. Whether or not they got the voice actors to jump onboard will be a different story. I would hope they could get them.

After the patch Cryptic opened up some more sectors of space such as the Alpha Centari block which was where the Romulan space was. Also apparently the space leading into DS9 area is open as well but I have not visited that area yet. Exploration will be quite fun visiting some of the more iconic places like Bajor.

I will fill you in later when I explore some more of the opened up sectors. Stay tuned.