Due to this past weekend’s open Star Trek Online trial period I got several hours of STO down so far in the trial, and here are my brief impressions.
Conceptually, the game is brilliant. The MMO market needs a great, great WoW caliber sci-fi RPG game, and STO makes the attempt to be that game. Being a Star Fleet captain, flying around doing both space and land missions is a great concept. They do get some things right with breaking out of some usual MMO trappings, and while it takes a bit of getting used to at first — in comparison to spell and sword MMORPG games — it’s not all that different, but does put a fresh perspective into the genre; especially progression. That said, it’s not all fun and games. There are also some major issues I encountered during my play time so far, but here are the pros and cons I see:
PROS
+ Great graphics, sound effects, and score with an overall high production value.
+ Tasteful lore, true to the Star Trek IP.
+ Some great innovations, like multi-tier naval officer based (kind of) progression instead of straight leveling, along with side by side progression of officers, and your ship itself.
+ Fun space combat, although at lower levels it seems you’re just mashing the all phasers button too much (space bar), but you get plenty of skills through you and your officers to keep it fresh; especially in larger battles.
+ Very in depth character customization (although you’ll see more of the ship itself probably).
+ Great ‘auto grouping’ quest mechanic during certain missions, to avoid having to LFG for certain quests (episodes).
CONS
- Bad, bad quest system in comparison to more recent MMOs, and even WoW’s new quest system. Very difficult to find objectives, and little help from the game (as vague as vanilla WoW, or worse). Only nice thing is being able to use your communicator to talk to major episode givers to complete quests instead of having to fly / walk back, but not good enough.
- Terribad maps. The full galaxy map looks nice, and high resolution, but any of the local sector maps for areas your ship is immediately in look like straight 1985 Amiga bitmaps. It’s pretty terrible to navigate with, and with such a high production value everywhere else I have no idea why they missed this one thing.
- Only three “classes”. Yes, I realize this is Star Trek, and it’s based on a theoretical real future that could happen (i.e. no spells, bionics, etc.). But it’s basically all ranged DPS with some light melee abilities, and (of course) three different subsets of abilities in-between the three classes. Not sure if they could have done anything different here, but it’s killer (in a bad way, for me).
- No death penalty (that I saw). Seriously, what – the – fuck. I lost all fear of dying, whether it was on space, or ground, and basically you can just “Leeroy Jenkins” everything if you wanted to with little fear of repercussion, outside of lame respawns on the ground in certain episodes. There was this one epic episode that was also an auto party episode, where you joined in on a massive space battle with several other players. If you died in this battle you simply respawned on the outskirts, and jumped right back into the fray to force your way through the opposition. At first it was amazing, and then rendered moot by the lack of a penalty for dying. A serious disappointment.
- Ground combat. Probably my biggest gripe, and it also ties into the class selection above. At first it’s kind of interesting, kind of fun, because it’s different from anything else I’ve played in that genre. You can also duck for cover, and roll, which is really nice at first. However, as you go along, well… at least me, I felt like the ground missions were something I started to not look forward to, when I wanted the opposite. The best example I can give is the Starbase 24 episode. You beam down and start to look for scientists that are being held hostage by Klingons. I start to go through the instance, which was a hallway / bunker type thing for starters, with my party pew pewing away with their various Phaser variants. After clearing the first hallway, saving two scientists, and making a left not 3 or 4 minutes afterwards everything I cleared instantly respawned behind me, including the scientists I had to rescue. The respawns happened almost on top of the position I was holding dealing with the mobs further on, so I had to deal with all these Klingons running around like idiots, basically phasering, and rolling around like an idiot myself. Then since the other scientists respawned I simply ran back to them and rescued them over again to count for the total number I had to rescue. The whole thing just felt very disconnected, and very broken. I didn’t like it at all.
So, as I mentioned, there are some great things, and some really, really horrible things about STO. I really want to have a great sci-fi MMO, as I’ve not had one for many years now, and I would have liked for STO to be that MMO. Sadly, there are some ‘deal breakers’ in this package that really turn me off. I’m not sure if it will continue to compel me to play, but maybe it’s something that the developer (Cryptic) will hopefully continue to work on. City of Heroes / Villians is probably Cryptic’s best example of long term success, but then they also failed with Champions Online, in terms of fleshing out a full product. Hopefully time will prove us wrong, and they can bring this up to par (at least, up to par in my opinion).
