The Now-Old Federation Tutorial

I thought I would begin with the classic Federation tutorial that so many of us experienced, now retired in favor of a more academy-themed introduction.

Here is Captain - well Ensign - Wolfcastle, my engineering character and a remake of my old lost main character (made it all the way to level 43 back when the cap was 45). The tutorial starts you out as a junior officer on a Miranda-class ship.

You are summoned to the bridge when the ship is called in to help repel the borg invasion of the Vega colony. Yes, I think we can all agree that's a very impressive bridge for a Miranda. The basketball court is offscreen to the right ...

You end up being beamed over to another ship that has been damaged by the borg. Here you get to help out with medical and engineering and of course, shooting.

There was quite a bit of shooting - fortunately it was against the weakest borg in the universe.

There were borg outside the ship too.In this stage you beam back over as your captain is out of action and you are now in charge of the ship! One fun thing was that right there in the tutorial there were usually several players online going through it too so you would have a squadron of Mirandas running around shooting things. It was a nice reminder that it was a multiplayer game.

Eventually you beat the damaged cube in space and then it's time to move to the ground.

Down on the ground you learn the basics of ground combat and run around a very dark zone shutting down borg equipment.

Eventually it's back to space and some final borg 'splosions as you warp to another area and help the fleet (and usually some fellow tutorial players) finish off the remaining borg in space. Yeah, we win!

Then it's a trip to earth spacedock, a meeting with the admiral, and your first command ...

Man that is pretty ... anyway the whole thing took less than 30 minutes and was a nice intro to the basic mechanics of the game. It was a little clunky compared to newer missions, and focusing on the major threat of the setting might have been a mistake in logic, but it worked for me. Farewell old tutorial!