Say hello to my Orion Captain, ladies. Yes, she is rather cute, isn’t she? The Star Trek Online Free to Play or STOF2P Beta is continuing and while this is hardly a big name game like, oh, Star Wars: The Old Republic or World of Warcraft, I thought I would continue the coverage of it.

So, late last night, I spent some time running around playing a Klingon Faction Captain. There was a major patch this past Thursday, and it has taken me a bit to get the time to kick the tires, so to speak. I spent some time last night actually getting to play some of the missions that have been set up for the Klingons since launch. This is partially because they jumped the Klingon start level to 21. While you start with a Bird of Prey as your ship, you can change that right away for a Raptor or a Cruiser.

By and large, the game play has not changed a lot. You still get your first group of Duty Officers (Doffs) after you finish your first mission for Lady Sirella, so about Commander lvl 3. You can recruit more when you are in First City on Qo’noS, but that takes about twenty hours. What you should note is that, right now, you can do that mission before you get your first batch of Doffs. Additionally, at each level of experience in the Doff system, you are able to acquire through a chit that you are given a rare or above duty officer. My Federation captain acquired a rare Orion officer through getting to the second level of Diplomacy in the Doff system.

Cryptic went ahead and did away with the old system of merits, and you are now able to purchase items using either energy credits, gold pressed latinum, or dilithium. The last one is proving to be a bit easier to acquire now that you can get that through Doff missions as well as daily missions like exploration.

The Klingons are still lacking in a lot of content. While the Federation has this huge arc dealing with the war between the Federation and the Klingons, the Klingons have three missions directly and then the Davidian featured series arc of missions. This means that there is a lot of content yet to come, but it is still frustrating that Cryptic has taken nigh on three years to get that content into the game.

There are rumors that they will be adding in mirror missions to a lot of the ones that the Federation does, and that would be wonderful. Hopefully they will not keep the dedicated Klingon players waiting too long for that.

The game is still playable, and for those without a lot of money, certain it will be a good game to download and play in the not so distant future. My Orion captain played through the first set of Klingon missions last night, including a raid on the Mars ship yards. Over all, I had fun, but I am still a touch disappointed that they have yet to add in more Klingon game play.

One nice thing about the game is that the missions are now all your level. This means that there is no out pacing your quests and having to go elsewhere to level. For some games, that would be a problem, but for STO because it is so instanced, this makes it feel pretty good. The big problem is that they have yet to update the awards. Yeah, getting a Mark II item when you are a Commander is a bit of a problem.

So far, yes, I am doing this while I await either a Beta invitation to SWTOR or that starts up. I will be stopping by the WoW 4.3 patch shortly to give it a few kicks in the tire as well.