Star Trek The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

2010-02-10 21:00:38

The Good

Customization is a hallmark of Cryptic-designed games and Star Trek Online doesn’t disappoint – you’re given the tools to craft pretty much any alien being you can think of. As far as clothing, you’re given a subset of futuristic armor-plated Starfleet uniforms as well as the, in my fanboy eyes, far better looking earlier “classic uniforms” – everyone has access to the TNG/DS9 uniforms and various pre-order promotions unlock the Wrath of Khan, original series, and mirror universe uniforms as well.

You’re also able to customize your bridge officers (which fill out your “away team” in ground missions), although a bug currently blocks you from outfitting them with pre-order unlocked uniforms, so alas the away team of all TOS characters shooting phasers at Gorns throwing Styrofoam boulders will have to wait.

Ships can be customized as well – not to the degree of personal appearance, but more a mix-and-match set of building parts. You also have the ability to give your starship a name and registry number, which of course will never be abused, ever.

Flexibility is something I was not expecting with this title, and am quite pleasantly surprised with. Essentially, you have two separate ‘classes’ – your actual class (Engineering, Tactical or Science, which *very* roughly equate to tanking, DPS, and buff/debuff classes in fantasy MMOs) and the ship that you fly (which, in rough analogue to the classes, are Cruisers, Escort Cruisers, and Science Cruisers). What is fairly cool about this system is that you aren’t locked into a ship at all – in fact, once you unlock the ability to fly new classes of ships at level 11, you can easily afford to buy all 3. Gameplay with each ship type is *very* different – cruisers play as battleships which can take a pounding but maneuver very slowly and ponderously, while escort cruisers are the exact opposite; glass cannons which dart around the battlefield looking for (and making their own) openings, and then hopefully flying away before taking too much fire. And since you can own any of these, if you’re not feeling like being a battleship, you can equip your fighter craft and blast away.

There’s also quite a bit of gameplay (and some theorycrafting, though not too much) in equipping your ships and officers. Each ship has various numbers of hardpoints on which can be equipped weapons, shields, and the like, as well as duty stations for bridge officers (the same ones you take on away teams); as you’ll have more bridge officers than duty stations, you can specialize their skill builds based on situations (or have some that specialize in ground combat instead). New equipment for your starship also can drop as loot (which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense thematically when you loot a quantum torpedo launcher from a Romulan centurion on the ground, but then, neither does looting gold from a wolf).

The impact of all this is that your ship will shoot and fly different from others. Already there are different builds for each ship type, such as the “beam boat” cruiser loaded with nothing but wide angle phasers to slowly wander into battle and plink away at anything in reach, or the “torpedo boat” escort cruiser which relies on a first strike of heavy hitting weapons at the cost of, well, any other weapons. Of course theorycrafting may make all this moot eventually and produce the “one correct build” much as in other skill-based games, but for now the jury’s still out, which makes arguing your own unique build more fun.

is present, and though it’s not too deep, it’s deep enough to add an immersive feel to combat that isn’t present in many other MMOs. Ship combat is all about attacking from four angles (the Z axis is abstracted to a degree, though present) and given the very wide disparity between ship maneuverability, lining up one’s shots can take a degree of… dare I say it? Skill. The ‘terrain’ of space can also sometimes come into play – battles frequently take place in asteroid belts, and as asteroids block fire, dodging behind a nearby rock to recharge one’s shields is a perfectly valid ploy. Ships blowing up also do a tremendous amount of damage when they explode to nearby vessels based on their size – blowing up the battleship surrounded by birds of prey can be more rewarding than you’d think, though you may not want to be that close yourself. Of course, there’s a delay to the explosion, so you can have the cinematic “flying through the exploding ship” moment that is a key part of any space opera.

The Bad

Content is present – but not enough of it. You’ll quickly find that half of any given level is taken up with story missions (or quests), and the other half of the level will have to be earned through other means. There are quite a few other means , ranging from PvP, to all-combat randomly generated PvE “deep space patrols” to sometimes non-combat randomly generated “patrol missions”, but after a while they tend to become repetitive. I’m told that once you reach the level 25-ish range this becomes less of an issue, although this may be less due to more content being available and more that those levels simply progress quicker – there are already quite a few max-level players, one week after release.

If you play as a Klingon, you don’t even get the one-story mission per level content – there is *no* non-random PvE content for Klingons at all. The developers are promising more content, especially for Klingons, but it remains to be seen how if at all this will address the issue.

Crafting is present as something of an afterthought, and not a well explained one. You find “anomalies” throughout your travels, which you can loot after a brief scan period (any similarity between this and “gathering” skills in other MMOs is strictly coincidental). You are instructed to take them to Memory Alpha, a starbase where you can cash them in to upgrade other minor loot. The kicker is that to get to each level band of crafting, you have to cash in enough of the previous level band’s worth to unlock the appropriate NPC – and there is no in-game guidance for how much is required. Given that you most likely won’t even make it to Memory Alpha until after level 10, you’ll have already outlevelled that first level band by the time you begin experimenting with the process. At this point, it’s difficult to see much use for it other than a money and time sink.

Your first ten levels aren’t as fun as the rest of the game. You’re given a single ship, the Miranda class light cruiser, which just isn’t very good – it doesn’t have the survivability of cruisers, nor the maneuverability of escorts, nor the special abilities of science vessels. By level 8, you’ll most likely have exhausted the available story line missions and will find yourself grinding deep space encounters just to get a decent ship. This is not the best first impression; experience point requirements for the 5-10 levels should probably be greatly lowered.

All weapons have the same range, and most weapons in the same level have the same DPS, so equipping one’s ship is mainly a matter of choosing which overall type of weapon to include, without many (or any) choices within that type. Ground combat at first glance doesn’t measure up to space combat for polish and fun; eventually the fun part comes through (especially in fleet ground actions when you’re running around shooting up the place as part of a 10 or 15 man force) but it takes some doing to get

The Ugly

Server stability has been an issue this first week, with unstable queues to log in, frequent server crashes occasionally leaving your character stranded logging into an instance, and other such teething pains. As the game’s only been released for a week, it remains to be seen if this is, as is most likely, temporary.

Lack of documentation hampers the game at times. Players get a dizzying array of skills and abilities for themselves and their bridge officers, and at times it’s hard to tell what each actually does. For example, a popular tactic for cruiser players is to try to invest in maneuverability skills and items so that their battleship doesn’t turn like a, well, battleship. Yet research is beginning to suggest that thanks to how skills are used and due to (completely undocumented) diminishing returns, trying to modify a cruiser’s turn rate is a waste of time. Generally, if a buff isn’t perceivable by a player, it’s a useless buff; and Star Trek Online, by that definition, is suffused with useless buffs and debuffs.

Is Star Trek Online an MMO? At first blush this is a patently silly question – thousands of players playing at once? Well, of course it’s an MMO. Yet, like Guild Wars, Star Trek Online is heavily, heavily instanced – while this allows all players, like in Guild Wars, to effectively play on a single “server”, this also means that at any given time you’re only with at the most 20 or so other players, and usually no more than 4 others. Unless you’re in a well-organized “fleet” or guild, those 4 people will be total strangers, and because of that there’s almost always no communication at all between them. Ironically, the one part of the game that is most massively multiplayer is the one you will turn off almost immediately – the global chat channel.Guild Wars doesn’t call itself an MMO. It may be that Star Trek Online shouldn’t, either. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad game – as my “the good” list should imply, it’s one I’m enjoying playing, at least for now. But a little more “MMO” in the mix would make the game go much further. Say, just as a wild example, marking out PvP-friendly sectors of space owned by fleets, with stations that they invest in and manage, which act as economic hubs and have to be defended by enemies which shift from day to day based on politics.

by: Scott Jennings