Season 4 is Live

In this week’s weekly maintenance, Cryptic pushed Season 4 out to players of Star Trek Online.

This is the ‘big’ update that is supposed to ‘fix’ the absolutely horrible ground combat system STO has had since launch.  Full patch notes can be accessed here. Here’s a quick snippet about the ground combat changes this patch introduced.

Ground Combat Update

Shooter Mode

  • There is now an alternate firing mode called “shooter mode”. Shooter mode is very responsive, and allows for quicker acquisition of targets via the targeting reticule. Use L-Mouse and R-Mouse to fire your primary and secondary attack on your weapon. Middle mouse will activate your melee attack. You can, however, still use the keyboard keys – 1, 2, and 3 – if you prefer. Notice you can fire your weapon without a target while in shooter mode, and players can now miss targets.
  • There are new shooter mode specific keybind options in the options menu.

Swap to shooter mode

  • Use the B key to Swap between Shooter and RPG mode. If you open a menu (like your skill page) while in shooter mode, you will temporarily drop back to RPG mode, so you can maintain control over your character and interact with the window.
  • Players can auto-attack their primary fire in shooter mode by holding down the left mouse button in a default button layout.

Classic controls are unaffected

  • It was important to us to maintain the classic RPG control scheme in STO. You can continue to play with the original control, use the new Shooter controls, or switch back and forth on-the-fly at any time.

New Options

  • To help preserve the classic controls, there is now a new set of shooter mode controls and keybinds in the options menu, so you can manage both independently.

I have not had the opportunity to play since the patch.  So I don’t know how much of an improvement the new ground combat system actually is.  I do know, that I always tried to avoid missions involving ground combat because the original system the game shipped with was just that bad.  Which means, pretty much anything would be an improvement ;)  I’ll try and get on this weekend, and give it a whirl.