It may be dangerous to go alone, but at times it's even more dangerous to not go alone.
At the end of my last run of Star Trek Online I talked about how I'd come to the end of the mission arcs that were specific to my faction and would now be coming to content that was open to all factions. I've been critical of elements of the "Romulan Mystery" arc but I will give it credit for continuing to feel like a Klingon story throughout.
"Cardassian Struggle" on the other hand is really obviously written for Starfleet, with only a token attempt to justify my presence on Deep Space Nine. Fine, I've got enough experience of running co-op content as a villain in City of Heroes to just go with it, and to turn a blind eye to the moments when NPCs talk to me like I'm a Federation petaQ.
But there was one line of dialogue that was put into my character's mouth early on that felt really out of place, not only as something that she wouldn't say, but as something that I, as a player of the game, wouldn't say.
"I could do with some backup."
No. Just no. I really don't want backup.
I've learned to dread missions in MMOs that give me allies. Friendly NPCs are usually either so overpowered that I might as well not be there, or so ineffectual that they might as well not be there. STO lurches back and forth between both extremes, and recently it's been doing it so often that I found myself wishing that the game would, just once in a while, let me see what I could do, on my own, in a standard encounter.
The key word there is standard because once there's one or more friendly ships on the screen it's likely that what I'm going into will be anything but that, which can be a problem because if my allies aren't pulling their weight then all of a sudden I'm facing off against a significantly greater enemy force effectively on my own. Being hit by four tractor beams at the same time during "Mars, the Bringer of War" had me wondering what the hell the rest of the KDF ships were even doing in that battle.
After that fiasco I was dubious about staying on Advanced difficulty going into the next arc, but my first few run ins with the Cardassians went well and the battles were more interesting than if I'd been effortlessly blowing them away on Normal difficulty. It was only after the Defiant showed up to 'help' that things got messy. I got through the encounter, but I still wish they had stayed on DS9.
I suppose this does mean that even if the dialogue in this arc doesn't fit my chosen faction then the gameplay does. I've learned to resent the presence of even friendly Federation ships, and what's more Klingon than that?
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