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Star Trek Online has been hyped for quite a long time and after a little drama (company changes / rumors of vaporware) it is finally released.
Starting Up:
When starting out I was presented with the same basic "create your character" sequence that is common with most MMOs. A somewhat unique feature is to be able to give yourself specific traits. Character customization is good and keeps everybody looking different. You also get to pick whether you want to be part of the Federation or Klingon Empire (each comprises several different races). In this part of the game you also select what you want your ship to look like. You can do a reasonable amount of customization to your ship which keeps things looking a little unique between everybody. The intro/tutorial does a decent job of walking you through the basics of the interface and interaction with the world.
Game Play:
After everything is set up you start out by doing missions for different people. After you get your missions, you leave the space dock and "fly off" to your mission location. What I found quickly is that the missions consist of two types. Type one is essentially "go to this location and kill the bad guys". Type two is "go to this location, beam to the surface, and kill the bad guys".
As you kill more bad guys and complete your missions, you gain experience to improve your abilities (most of which help you to kill bad guys faster). After you gain enough experience you gain a new rank (go from Lt. to Lt. Cmdr.). Each rank contains 10 grades. So the total number of "levels" you can obtain is 50 I believe. After gaining rank you can buy better ships... so that you can more easily kill the bad guys.
Crafting/Gathering:
One feature is the ability to scan and collect resources. While traveling around you will come across or can scan for anomalies. When found you can scan them up close and collect different resources. These are used for the extremely simplistic crafting system. The idea is that you bring your different items that you have collected from the anomalies to a person and they will use them to upgrade some ship or personal item you are carrying. The idea isn't as bad as the implementation. During the time I've played so far you are extremely limited as to what you can upgrade and what upgrades are done. The upgrades also don't get you items that are really worth the effort of gathering the resources.
Exploration:
Not too familiar with this but my understanding is that you basically go around and complete missions (Kill stuff) for a group of systems within a sector. Then you are awarded exploration points or something like that which you can use to buy ship or personal items. Not much emphasis was put on this part of the game from what I can tell so far.
I haven't got into the PvP part of the game so that is absent from this review.
Pros:
You get to be a ship captain in a star trek environment.
If you liked the combat based episodes of Star Trek then this game is tailored for you.
Space combat mechanics is fairly well done and interesting.
A "Hold your hand" approach to game play. (Could be a con if you like the sandbox approach)
Cons:
If you are picky about graphics quality you will be disappointed.
Pretty much everything in the game is "instanced" and separated by "rooms". What this means is that you are never in a true "Massively" multiplayer environment. Most of the rooms you are in have roughly 50 people and the instances have even less.
Even with the instancing and rooms, the game universe feels small.
The game suffers from the typical "grind" to progress issues.
The point of the game is to shoot anything that moves (i.e. If you're not sure, shoot it). Many feel that this is not what Star Trek was/is about.
Little emphasis placed on Crafting/Gathering and Exploration.
Overall the game will appeal to people who want to play specifically because it is Star Trek. As far as an MMO is concerned... it is not. I suspect that even Star Trek fans (like myself) will want more than what is offered here. I've found the general consensus from people who participated in the open beta is that the game has so much potential but falls short on the delivery.
My recommendation is to wait a few months to buy the game until it is complete and some of the "Afterthought" features are finished.
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As a huge fan of both Star Trek and video games, I have been looking forward to trying this game for years. Trek and an MMO really seem like the perfect marriage, if you think about it. There's a whole galaxy of content and 40+ years worth of stories to draw on. This game was really a no-brainer. Or so one would think.
I had the opportunity to play in Open Beta, through the Head Start, and now I'm about a week into release. So, I've been playing this game fairly consistently for close to a month. I play games a lot, and I have played nothing but this game since beta, and I think I've got a pretty good handle on most of what it offers, so I feel like I have more than enough information to write an informed review.
I bet if you were to ask any Trek fan who had never heard of this game (hypothetically) what a Star Trek MMO would be like, you would get a huge amount of great, creative, fun ideas for a truly massive game that encompasses the vast and noble feeling of Star Trek.
The one thing a Trek fan would NOT tell you is that they would expect ANYTHING like what this game is.
What Cryptic has done here is taken all the 40+ years of lore, all the potential for a massive and engaging game, all the many varied aspects of Star Trek, and they distilled it to a very, very simplistic space shooter that feels about as massive as a shoebox.
All that talk of diplomacy from the TV series? Forget it. This is Trek for the ADD crowd. It's all phasers and photon torpedoes. It's all out war all the time, and you won't stop until every ship in every system is reduced to a pile of floating debris.
Exploring the galaxy? Seeking out new worlds and new civilizations? Hardly. The galaxy is represented by the "sector map" which is a ridiculous looking neon grid where you'll see your ship, and the ships of other players, floating around heading for various neon icons of planetary systems. Notice I said "planetary systems" and not "solar systems?" That's because they only bothered to make one planet for each system.. and with very few exceptions, you can't even go to that one planet unless you've been told to go there by your Starfleet contacts. And when you DO get to beam down to a planet? Each planet consists of a tiny patch of land with nothing but the objectives for the one mission that allows you to go there. I'm talking very very small here. I think the largest one I've seen so far was an indoor environment about a quarter of the size of an old Doom level. You scan your five "whatevers", vaporize a few dozen baddies with a ground combat system that's as bland and boring as they come, beam back up to the ship and then do it all over again in another "system" Wash, rinse, repeat.
One more thing that needs to be mentioned about the "Sector Space" is that each sector is divided into several "blocks" of systems, and in order to get to the next block, you have to go through a loading screen. Not only that, but each block is divided into a bunch of "instances", to keep the server from overloading. What this means is that, when you go to Earth Spacedock for example, 20 of you will go in to Earth instance A, 20 of you will go into Earth instance B, and so on. So, not only do you not get the feeling of a massive galaxy to explore, but you also don't even get to see everyone who's there! Just 20 random people. Even if you are in a group with your buddies and go to Earth, you will almost certainly not end up in the same instance.
This causes the game to suffer in a number of ways. They have a few space stations set up here and there, like Earth spacedock, Deep Space Nine, etc.. and they are clearly meant to serve as social spaces. They have a bar and an observation lounge.. heck.. at DS9 you can even go to Quark's, but there's nothing to do, nobody there, and as a result, nobody socializes. Quark's (which is itself a seperate instance from DS9) is always totally devoid of human players. It's depressing to walk around these places and notice how empty they feel.
So.. the majority of your time, you're going to be floating on the neon grid of Sector Space, flying towards your next boring shoot-em-up mission that's just a reskin of the last one you did, and most of the time, you'll be doing it all by yourself.
To be fair, they do have what they call "exploration missions." What that means is that you're directed to another block of the Sector Space grid. Only, instead of seeing icons of planet systems in the distance, you'll see a pink haze and the same blue grid, with the occasional "anomaly" for you to scan. This will sometimes take you to a random mission in an "unexplored system". But, you'll quickly find that these missions are just like the others, and you'll often be doing the exact same one two or three times in a row as you go from anomaly to anomaly.
All of this exploration stuff takes place in a block smaller than any of the other blocks, and you'll usually see another 15 or 20 people there waiting for these "anomalies" to spawn. When they do, it's a race to get to them, because once a system has been explored, it disappears and pops back up in another spot at another time. Imagine floating in a blue boxed grid with pink fog with 20 other people waiting for these systems to appear. That's what they call exploration in this game. Where no one has gone before? Indeed not.
So.. with all that negativity out of the way, there are some things that I DO like about Star Trek Online. Mainly the space combat. The best part of this game to me is that, as you work your way through the ranks from Lieutenant to Admiral, you will get to control more and more powerful ships at each step. The ships can be equipped with a wide variety of weapons and stat enhancing consoles which you will also upgrade along the way. You also get to commission Bridge Officers, who each bring different abilities to the table. In your first ship, you are allowed to have one Tactical Bridge officer, one Engineering officer, and one Science officer. At first, only one of their abilities will be available to you in space. You may have a Tactical officer with the "High Yield Torpedo" ability, which allows you to fire 2 torpedoes instead of the usual one, or a Science officer with a "Sensor Jam" which will remove the enemy's ability to target you for a short time.
The way you can mix and match your weapons, equipment, and Bridge Officers is very well done. It's obvious that this is where Cryptic spent most of their development time, and I think most players will at least agree that the space combat is fun. It starts off very easy, but as your level increases, your combat options and the enemy difficulty increase quite a bit. Taking down 3 Romulan Birds of Prey with nothing but your quick fingers and wits, escaping by the skin of your teeth.. it's really quite awesome.. and as out of place as it feels to be constantly blowing up ships in a Trek MMO, you never really get tired of it.
So, to sum up.. this is an extremely unfinished game. It's very light on content right now, does not feel anything like an MMO, and needs a HELL of a lot of work before it should even be considered as a serious contender to the other MMOs on the market. That said, I want and hope to see the game grow, so I have decided to subscribe for a few months and see how it goes.
Is it worth it for you? Well, all I can say is read these reviews, watch some gameplay videos, and read up on Cryptic's plans for expanding the game. If you believe they will make good on their promise to make this game better, then give it a shot. It's going to be the only Star Trek MMO that we have for quite a while.
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Imagine a Star Trek RPG where you have your own ship and crew and you travel the galaxy, exploring strange new world and seeking out new civilizations, involving yourself in first contact missions, talking to new species, fighting new enemies and feeling like anything could be over the next horizon.
Now throw all that away, because instead we got a tired MMO.
There is no real RPG here for fans of classic RPGs. The dialogue is bland and perfunctory, without choice or consequence in any serious measure. The enemies are all normal Star Trek enemies, and basically reskins of each other. The exploration is limited to pressing a button on a shiny object and getting some useless mineral reward. If you imagine a game like Mass Effect, Dragon Age or Fallout with the Star Trek license you will be severely disappointed, because you end up with a bland and stale traditional MMO with no feeling of story, exploration or discovery what-so-ever. I think we all pretty much knew this would happen when this was announced as a Cryptic MMO instead of a single-player RPG, but it is still disappointing to see.
Space combat is probably the saving grace here... very fun, and though insanely repetitive it never really grows old much. Ground combat is fun but extremely buggy the last time I played, just not a polished experience at all. Even if combat was awesome across the board though, you still need a reason to fight, and STO gives you nothing... no story, no innovative missions, NOTHING.
Unless you love Guild Wars style MMO missions, avoid at all costs, despite the license. I wish I did.
Honest reviews on Star Trek Online - PC
I played the open beta. I created a couple different Federation characters and one Klingon. Ultimately I felt that game was rushed to market and does not have a true MMO feel due to the heavy instancing. I would recommend anyone interested in this game to give it 6 months and then check on its progress.
PROS:
* I found the space combat to be fun and I did enjoy the graphics and 3-D combat.
* Being able to hail Starfleet to turn in quests and receive new ones is great. I love not returning to the quest giver directly.
* The Federation ships can be customized to produce a lot of detail and diversity.
* The ship replicator easily disposes of unwanted items without having to waste time finding an NPC vendor.
* Some of the space backgrounds and settings were very detailed and nicely rendered.
* Death or ship destruction just results in you re-spawning.
CONS:
* The ground combat felt rushed and primitive. There is no cover system only a lot of standing/crouching and shooting.
* Enemy ground AI was fairly simplistic. They either rushed in to melee or stayed back to perform various ranged attacks.
* Many things seemed rushed or unfinished concerning story and overall polish.
* Klingons characters are currently so devoid of quests/solo content that Crypic is promoting them as a PVP race.
* Klingons also show rushed development in other ways, their ships are not nearly as customizable as the Federation ones.
* Even though this is supposed to be a Massively Multiplayer game, it feels more like a solo game that has some online components.
* Ship exploration is not fully implemented. Currently the bridge is the only "explorable" area of the ship.
* Leveling up can be confusing as skills are not fully explained and the immediate effects of powering up a skill are not always apparent.
* Warping though space is accomplished via "sector space" which just allows you to use impulse engines to fly to an object or sector marker. Then a quick warp animation loads the area.
* Sector space seems good and bad as long transit times are reduced but where is the detail/bonus speed in having a warp 9 capable ship versus a new starter max warp 2 ship?
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I had waited for this game since Perpetual began developing it years ago. I think when Cryptic picked this game up, unfortunately it sealed Star Trek Online's fate.
Pros: 1.The ship combat isn't bad. Initially it is a lot of fun swapping out weapons and blowing up ships.
2.Decent amount of customization. This isn't that big of a selling point for me, but there are many uniforms and customizations available.
3.Some fun moments of homage to Star Trek nostalgia. City on the Edge of Never is arguably the highlight of the game. With the old enterprise and Nimoy's voice overs, it gives any old Trekkie a grin.
Cons: 1. Ground combat/content is terrible. Bridge officer AI is severely lacking. Combat is little more than repetitive button pushing until the enemy is all dead.
2. Space combat gets old. Eventually, much like ground combat, it becomes a flurry of pressing the space bar. (fire all weapons)
3. Almost no depth at all. No crafting, no diplomacy, no variety in missions. Missions come in about 4 or 5 different cookie cutter varieties, with exploration missions being a smaller version of the same content.
4. PvP system is sub par. PvP missions have no rhyme or reason as to when they start, rather than waiting until you have a semi-full group on either side before they begin.
5. Even less depth for Klingon players. At least 80% of this game's content (at present) is Federation only. Klingons are limited to PvP and a handfull of repeatable missions. Other factions completely unavailable at present.
6. Very few subscribers + Shard system = lonely sector space.
7. Still many bugs even months after release. Some of the bugs from open beta were fixed, but a surprising number still remain. Including missions not giving you credit when grouped. Forcing you to repeat missions, or do them all entirely solo.
8. Complete disregard to Star Trek canon. The universe they are proposing is completely combat driven. Inclusions of Star Trek references seem to be gratuitous and not thought out. No diplomacy, exploration isn't exploration, no research missions, no boldly going where no one has gone before. Just blow things up, and don't ask why.
9. Far too easy. Death rarely happens, and when it does it means a simple respawn. The missions and combat are so simple that the only challenge lies in PvP. Leveling is also a simple task, as we reached RA5 (maximum level at present) within the first month playing VERY casually.
In my opinion a few things happened to hinder this game. Cryptic took the engine used on another one of their disappointing MMO's (Champions Online) and rushed it into a Star Trek MMO. The game feels like it was flawed from concept, and then rushed to completion. Speculation is that Atari offered Cryptic a substantial bonus for initial sales on a time line, and Cryptic offered another sub-par product to achieve that goal.
My advice is to avoid this game. I really, really wanted to love this game...but simply couldn't get past its faults. If you are truly thirsting for a quality Sci-Fi MMO, look to EVE, look to Bioawre's upcoming Star Wars offering, but don't look to Cryptic to offer a quality product.
