I've been playing STO's Klingon faction pretty heavily for the past few days and so naturally, I've been prompted by both friends and some staff here at Alltern8 to share my experiences. Actually, as an amusing aside, I was originally asked to write an article about Klingon Character Creation. However, after actually creating an Imperial Klingon Defense character (I made a Romulan using the custom creation feature) I realized that such an article wouldn't serve much of a purpose. Klingon character creation is for all intents and purposes completely identical to its Federation Counterpart. There are of course preset differences (you can't outright chose a Vulcan for example) but with the robust nature of the customization options it's irrelevant. My IDK Romulan is identical to my Startfleet Romulan in every single last detail except clothing. If you were so inclined you could create a Human, Vulcan, Andorian, etc, and have them fight alongside the Klingons with little difficulty.

Once you're finished creating your character and get through the extremely short tutorial you'll likely notice that in comparison to the Federation, the Klingon experience is shallow and unbalanced, though still fun in its own strange way. I realize opening with that paints this article in a somewhat negative perspective and while I'd like to present both sides in a slightly more impartial way, the simple truth is that while I am having fun and enjoying myself as a Klingon I don't believe that enjoyment is stemming from any rational objective standard. I'm having fun because I love Klingons. That's it. My positive impressions at this time are completely subjective, and thus to an extent, irrelevant. However, the negatives aspects I've noticed are in my opinion objective observations and thus I am going to focus on them.

One of the first things a Klingon player will probably notice is the complete and utter lack of genuine PvE content. The Klingons are a PvP faction, there is no escaping that. They essentially have 2 or so PvE quests (grind quests really that have you go kill 50 Federation ships) and the rest of your quests will be PvP in nature; ie, compete and win in 3 scenario type skirmishes. As far as the content goes that's it, those are pretty much your only options. Either grind on kills in PvE and/or Fleet Actions (you would have to be a masochist to take this route) or compete in instanced PvP battlegrounds. Naturally most people will choose PvP and to a certain extent they have to chose PvP. It's the only way to actually gear out your ship/avatar. Since there are no real PvE quests there are no loot rewards as a result. Therefore the only way to gear up is to compete in PvP, gather Medals of Achievements from those PvP engagements, and convert them into gear at specific merchants. This leads to some extremely limited and shallow gameplay.