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Taking on the task of reviewing Cryptic’s Star Trek Online is by no means an easy one. First, you’ve got the fact that the game’s IP is one of the most beloved in the history of science fiction and what exactly it means to be “Star Trek” is something that even fans of the IP will happily disagree with each other about ‘till the cows come home. Then there’s the fact that it’s a game made on Cryptic’s engine, a platform that received a good deal of attention with the launch of their previous title, Champions Online and relies heavily on instancing to create its world. Let’s not forget too that the game makes use of two distinctly different play modes in the form of space and ground. Oh and then there’s that pesky C-Store to talk about. Yes, there is a lot to consider when looking at Star Trek Online, but I’ll do my best to break it down for you.
Character Creation
The character creator is one of the ways that this game shines, right off the bat. It’s a signature that we’ve come to expect from Cryptic and they didn’t disappoint with this one. By allowing players to “create an alien,” the developers have opened their game world up not just to the “famous” Star Trek races, but also to those nameless others that often show up in the movies starring the original series cast.
What impressed me less was trying to figure out the different abilities that each race gained, and the ones that players had to choose. Each of the abilities confers a different bonus. Some were relatively easy to understand but others were confusing. Frankly, players new to the game aren’t going to understand what those bonuses mean and it’s going to cause confusion right out of the gate, which could be a problem for some.
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Star Trek Online narrows user choice down to three when it comes to traditional classes. You can choose to be either a tactical officer (good fighters), a science officer (buffs and debuffs) or an engineer (gadgetry). It’s an interesting take on the class system that on the surface would seem to over-simplify but if you take into account the other ways that Cryptic provides for players to alter and customize their play style (ships, skills, kits, etc.), the simplicity is easily overlooked.
Tutorial
Star Trek Online’s tutorial puts players right into the middle of the action, running players through the basics of pretty much everything they’re going to be asked to do both on the ground and in space. It also introduces players to some of the game’s story. The Borg are back and for some unknown reason they’re not only acting squirrely, but they’re also targeting all officers in Starfleet above the rank of Ensign. This provides the game a neat little loophole in which to give you command of your own starship. Personally, I thought this was a bit of a thin premise to hang the game on.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t call a spade a spade in saying that Zachary Quinto, who served as the voice of the tutorial, really phoned in his performance. The dialogue was presented in such a stilted and emotionless manner (he was playing an EMH, not an android) that it gave me the impression that the man arrived at the voice studio, read the script cold into the microphone and then left. Both he and whoever directed his voiceover sessions should be embarrassed that what sounded like rehearsal recordings made it to publish.
Still, the tutorial does what it needs to do.
Missions
There are a number of different kinds of missions that players can get and play through in order to advance, and I’ll spend a short time commenting on each of them:
Story Missions: Story missions are similar to the “epic quests” that might be found in games like Lord of the Rings Online. They’re the ones that advance the game’s primary plot and, simply put, are the best thought out and more engaging of all of the game’s missions. It’s definitely worth a player’s time to read dialogue in these missions and follow the story.
Exploration Missions: Players are sent to specific sectors of the galaxy to take part in randomly generated missions.
Honestly, this was the mission type I found most disappointing. When Cryptic first started talking about their “genesis system” that would provide new worlds and new missions for players to help re-create the exploration part of Star Trek, I pictured engaging first contact missions and the like. Instead, we got very generic repeatable content that at times just fills in the blanks with a new species name and enemy ships. While playing and trying to complete my 3/3 systems explored, I did the exact same mission twice in a row. Only the background, species and enemies had changed.
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Fleet Actions: I was happy to see Fleet Actions included in the game. Very reminiscent of Warhammer Online’s Public Quests, these missions bring players together to accomplish a shared goal. Both space and ground combat fleet actions are available and provide a nice balance of frustrating if people aren’t playing correctly and exhilarating if they are.
Patrol Missions: Patrol missions take players from system to system, helping the native inhabitants, whether they be miners under attack or colonists under attack… That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but the patrol mission missions come off as quite shallow.
PvP Missions: Missions wherein you are asked to engage in PvP. Basically, these are reward incentive to engage in PvP.
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Combat (Space)
The space combat system is one of the most entertaining combat systems I’ve played in a while. While I recognize that there are some players out there who are upset that the game doesn’t allow true vertical movement, not doing so keeps the combat from getting needlessly complex.
Space combat in STO allows the player to engage themselves not only with the typical, use power, hit enemy, do damage, repeat, that is found in so many MMOs, but also with maintaining their defences, and controlling power to their critical systems. When the combat is challenging, I found myself constantly engaged in an exciting way.
Unfortunately, space combat up until about your mid-Lt. Commander rank is extremely easy. Not as easy as some would make it out to be, but certainly not to the level of challenge that manages to get the blood pumping in any meaningful way.
I do understand this to a point as a design decision. Space combat can be a bit much to learn for the novice casual player, but to dedicate the entire ten levels of lieutenant is a bit much and is going to turn at least some people off. There’s a lot of repetitive space combat in this game and if it’s not exciting, you’re sunk.
All in all, despite the repetitiveness of it, space combat can be an exciting and rewarding experience.
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Combat (Ground)
I’ve read a lot about how terrible ground combat is, but after looking at it objectively, it’s not as bad as some people say it is. What it also isn’t though, is particularly good.
Players beam down to the surface of a planet or another ship equipped with phasers, personal shields, hyposprays and the like, but also with their own personal retinue of bodyguards. Bridge officers who, in space, just grant you extra attack abilities actually come to life on an away mission, acting like your party from classic RPGs like Baldur’s Gate. You have limited control over their actions like you would pets in most other MMOs. It actually makes for a fairly unique playing experience.
With that said, the combat itself feels clunky and a bit stilted. You get two weapons, one of which can be equipped at any given time. Each of those has a small number of attacks. You also have access to personal “kits” that provide you with special abilities or attacks. My Engineer, for example, became quite adept at making phaser turrets and shield generators.
While the kits and some of the positional combat did provide some extra amusement, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that every time I beamed down somewhere it was the same tired: walk 30 feet, fight a group of bad guys, walk another 30 feet, find some more and fight them in exactly the same way. It’s not that this isn’t fairly standard in MMOs, but with the Star Trek setting and a unique combat design that included flanking bonuses and dramatic somersaults it comes off as more hollow than the average MMO combat experience.
Combat (PvP)
I have thoroughly enjoyed playing in the game’s PvP scenarios. Whether it’s control point based or simple arena based kill everyone in sight, the game’s PvP is engaging and fun. The differences in the abilities of the two factions (Klingon and Federation) are certainly noticeable (Klingon ability to cloak, for example) and fun without unbalancing the play or giving one side a clear advantage over another. I won about as many battles as I lost.
Where the game’s developers missed the boat a little bit was in keeping the PvP entirely separate from the game world. While it’s a fun feature and will earn players experience and skill points, there really isn’t a solid point to it beyond that. You are not battling for territory. In fact, the battle outcomes don’t affect anything at all.
Then, there’s the fact that in order to even enter PvP, you have to find a menu by pushing one of the numerous buttons around your mini-map, select PvP and then navigate an at-times quite confusing interface to choose which game you want.
I would, however, have liked to see a few more features would contribute to increased socialization. While the PvP scenarios are so similar in execution to those found in Mythic’s Warhammer Online, I was disappointed to find that STO does not make use of, for example, a similar grouping mechanism.
The lack of communication and grouping tools in PvP serve to highlight one of the game’s most obviously lacking features: voice chat. PvP, like most other grouping experiences in the game including those where you are thrown into a group of strangers to complete a mission really beg for an option to hail your friendly ships. Voice chat would help not only with communication, but immersion in the universe as well.
Advancement
I fell in love with Star Trek Online’s advancement system. Rather than giving players (and their bridge crew members) requisite skill and ability increases every level, on the level, the Star Trek Online design team has players tinkering with their skills as they earn new points throughout their entire play experience. While this may decrease the rush of dinging a new level, it certainly allows players, especially casual players, to feel as though they are accomplishing something each and every time they log in.
The only complaint that I have about the game’s advancement system is that it can sometimes be difficult to understand where best to put my skills and what actual in-game effect each of them has. The simple descriptions provided in the game just don’t offer enough information, especially for the casual player that the system seems to be targeted toward.
Still, it’s the most fun I’ve had advancing in any MMO I’ve played to date. It does, however, make me wonder why they chose to use levels at all instead of simply sticking to a skill only system.
Crafting
I was extremely disappointed with the crafting system in the game. While I will say that I admittedly didn’t have a lot of experience with it, I will say this: In my experience, I found the system to be a bit basic and almost tacked-on to the game world. It’s not the worst crafting system I’ve ever come across, but it certainly didn’t do anything to make me want to use it extensively.
Klingons
I found Klingon play to be exactly what it promised. It’s a faction in the game that relies extremely heavily on the PvP aspect of the game. Now, in a way, that’s an advantage. As I said earlier, the game’s PvP is a lot of fun. But the lopsidedness of the content and development time really shows here.
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I am aware that Klingons are getting their own content patch in the near future, and that’s great. I truly hope that they keep with the development path that the race is currently on. With that being said, it certainly doesn’t help the game to feel launch complete when one of its two factions is a mere shell of what it could be.
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The Star Trek Factor
A lot of hullabaloo has been made about whether or not this game actually feels like Star Trek. In my opinion, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. On the one hand, the war setting allows the developers to focus the game more heavily on combat. On the other hand, unless you were a fan of Deep Space Nine and its very gritty portrayal of the Federation at war, you’re going to be left wondering why Starfleet’s finest have become shoot first ask questions later types.
The sounds, look and feel of the game are uniquely Trek, although there is a significant amount more that could have been done to make players feel more like captains of starships in Starfleet and less like pilots of one man fighters. Here are a couple just off the top of my head:
Add in some meaningful diplomacy: This game needs more than just the option to destroy. Heck, I’d settle for allowing a point when an enemy ship reaches 5% hull where you’ve disabled it and it limps off, defeated. Give people the option to blow them up if you must, but the same feeling could be expressed without seeing twenty exploding ships every mission.
Have sector space take place on the bridge of your ship: There is no need for sector space, the area that binds quest instances together, to appear the way that it does. Why not allow players to navigate between systems from their bridges, sitting in their captain’s chairs with their crew around them?
Use a viewscreen: Communication that happens when you’re on your ship should appear on a graphic of a viewscreen rather than the same old NPC chat window we’ve been looking at since City of Heroes.
In short, there are a number of things that the developers could have done that would have made the game more appealing to all Star Trek fans, and would have made them more likely to forgive the combat oriented nature of the game.
Still though, I’ve played a lot of Star Trek games and as far as this IP goes, Star Trek Online is a pretty good “trek” game.
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The MMO Factor
I know many of you reading this question Star Trek Online’s validity as an MMO. While it certainly isn’t an open and seamless world, it holds enough of the trappings of the modern MMO that its place among them isn’t really in question.
That being said, it’s not the kind of MMO that’s going to appeal directly to fans of the genre and has some elements that may be a turn-off for many long time MMO fans. The aforementioned heavy use of instancing, the overall casual feel and design of the game, the ease of the first eleven or more levels of the game, the lack of a malleable world and other elements make this not the best game for the hardcore MMO player unless they are willing to put their preconceptions aside and join STO on the level that it was intended.
That being said, I don’t think it’s the hardcore fans that this game was designed for. The lack of end game content at launch really speaks to the fact that Cryptic was looking to cater to a slower moving crowd.
For the casual MMO fan, or just a Trek fan, this game is going to be more appealing. If you’ve only got an hour or two at a time, the game is designed so that your fun is maximized. Accomplishments and even small story arcs can be achieved in a relatively short time, the controls are relatively simple (it’s all in how you use them) and it’s very familiar. It’s fun, quick and relatively easy.
Bugs
I have to admit that in playing this game, I ran into enough bugs that I certainly noticed them. Most of them revolved around quests that weren’t redeeming or just flat out weren’t working.
That said, I realize that games at launch tend to be a bit buggy and while they certainly do exist in STO, they don’t quite exist to the point where I think it’s intolerable.
C-Store
Yes, Cryptic did decide to include an item shop alongside their subscription model. The store, at the moment, includes two playable races that need to be paid for in order to access. Personally, this didn’t hamper my own fun, but it’s worth mentioning because I know that there is a significant group of players for whom this kind of business model is a deal breaker.
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Score
When scoring this game, I constantly came up against the reality that STO is a game that you are going to either love or you’re going to hate. It goes headlong into the kind of game that the developers intended it to be without too much consideration of the other side. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it means that the value of the game is going to differ significantly based on the general category of the game involved, so I tried to see three distinct perspectives: 1) Hardcore traditional MMOers 2) Casual players and Trek fans in general and 3) Myself. Reviews are first and foremost about the reviewer’s opinion.
Hardcore Traditional MMOers: 5.0
This game just wasn’t built for fans of open, malleable world sandboxes. If that’s your kind of game, if that’s what you consider to be the pinnacle of MMOs, then this game probably isn’t going to be for you. That being said, it is still playable and there is enjoyment to be found in it if you’re willing to look at something a little more unconventional.
Casual Players and Trek Fans 7.5
As a casual MMO, this game scores much higher for me. Its strength really lies in the pacing of its combat, its story, and its casual friendly advancement system. If you’re the kind of person who likes to jump into an MMO for a short time and isn’t tied to more traditional MMO conventions, there’s a good chance you’re going to have a good time playing this game.
Personal Score: 6.8
Personally, I’m really enjoying my time in STO. I’ve enjoyed its story, and its systems and I’ve enjoyed being able to log in, quickly do a mission or two, and log out again. It’s been a thrill to get to be a part of this futuristic Starfleet, fight Klingons, meet characters I recognize, and take part in uniquely Star Trek experiences.
Still though, the part of my brain that’s been doing this job for five years can’t necessarily see past some of the bigger issues. The game feels a little bit over-instanced to me, and is missing the kinds of features (voice, better grouping, etc.) that it would take to keep me playing month after month. I would have also liked to see more time put in to the game’s “virtual world” making it feel more like a Trek game and less like an MMO with a Trek skin.
So, I’m coming down mostly in the middle of the two extremes I listed above. Average that together and we end up with a score of 6.4. The bottom line with this game though, is that you have to know the kind of game you’re looking for and decide for yourself if this quirky but engaging title is really for you.
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