PAX 2009: Hands-on and phasers locked with Star Trek Online part 2

No matter how good the away team AI is, you can never replace playing with a competent human being. To that end, players who group up will have an easier time dealing with the harder encounters and will also receive a skill bonus.

Ground combat itself is much faster paced, and plays around the speed of Champions Online except with phasers, personal shields and other Star Trek geekery replacing superpowers. Players can bring two weapons with them into a ground encounter, and switch between those at will with the Tab key. All ranged weapons have a basic attack and some kind of secondary, but also come with a third melee attack for those close and personal situations.

While weapons are nice, where a player's ground role and skill set come from is their kit. The kit is a career-restricted item, that gives you a plethora of powers based on the role you've chosen. A tactical kit comes with things like a leg sweep ability that knocks enemies prone, whereas a engineer kit focuses on placing down mines, turrets and shield emitters to support their team. It's important to note that choosing a career kit at character creation doesn't stop you from picking up some healing or support abilities entirely, but it does point you in a broad direction. So if you want to load up with a melee weapon and related skills you can do that, too. We were also promised that the big wild west style punches (double-fist hit!) would be included in the game, as well as the trademark Vulcan neck pinch.
We were also shown ship customization, which I really don't need to say too much about as it's basically what we've come to expect from Cryptic Studios: insane. Yes, it's insane and in both a cosmetic and functional way, as your weapons array is fully customizable too. Want nothing but torpedoes? Go for it! Not that having no way to deal with shields is a good idea, but if that's what you want. The ship's deflector dish abilities, energy and shields can be affected by how you equip the ship as well -- and let's not forget about those officers. Plus, all this can be upgraded over time, and we're guessing that you could take an older ship and sexy it up with newer tech to make it a little more combat viable.

Additionally, while we saw a ton of customized ships, they each possessed a distinctive silhouette. We saw a huge variety of galaxy-class ships, but they were all basically in the general configuration of that type of ship.

Now we couldn't leave PAX without getting Cryptic to tell us something extra cool about STO, so we asked them about the potential for future updates to include playable ships that aren't Federation or Klingon in origin. Craig's answer was, "Eventually, we do expect to add multiple playable races. The Klingons may end up using ships from other races, but the Federation kinda sticks to their own models right now -- but yeah sure maybe in the future." We couldn't leave it at that without a little prodding, so we asked about Romulans. His answer? Pretty straightforward actually -- it was a probable yes.