Star Trek Online Review
Posted by
sirdesmond
on
Star Trek Online was released for PC on February 2, 2010. This review is based on 20 levels of Federation play and 14 levels of Klingon over the game’s first month of release.
MMOs are a dime a dozen nowadays with countless companies hoping to become the next big thing, grabbing some of that huge chunk of change that is World of Warcraft. Cryptic Studios is a developer that already has several MMOs under its belt including the long-running City of Heroes and not-so-critically-acclaimed Champions Online. Common to Cryptic’s first two entries were initially exciting and different gameplay mechanics that later fell victim to that MMO grind and general tedium. So does Star Trek Online step things up a notch or fall right back into Cryptic’s old problems?
Space environments are interestingly designed and absolutely breathtaking.
Star Trek Online has been a long time in the making. Initially in development for about 4 years with Perpetual Entertainment before the studio filed for bankruptcy, the game was essentially cancelled, the property passed along, and the game remade by Cryptic over the next two years. With all this changing of hands and its lengthy development cycle, it’s a wonder that Star Trek Online was ever released at all. Not entirely surprisingly though is the hodgepodge feeling seen throughout the game with some strong portions and others so poor you’ll have a hard time believing it’s 2010.
Starting with one of the strong points (although it’s a somewhat shallow one), Star Trek Online can be an absolutely breathtaking game at times in terms of visuals. The space environments are well detailed, interestingly designed, and diverse enough to keep most players panning the camera around to view a distant moon or asteroid field for weeks. Although the ground environments tend to be quite bland and extremely under designed at times, every once in a long while a planet will come along that’ll similarly take your breath away for a moment.
Ground environments can be detailed from time to time but tend to be bland and entirely unimaginative.
Like most all MMOs but not necessarily all that much like Star Trek, Star Trek Online is all about combat, especially on the Klingon side of the gameplay. Space combat is interesting, exciting, and filled with wonderful bits of Star Trek lore, sounds, and visuals. It is quite simply the most well designed portion of the game and where most players will wish to spend a majority of their time. Although it can be played as simply as any other MMO combat system, it has layers of depth that can make both single and multiplayer experiences much more exciting and visually interesting.
Players have full control over diversion of power to weapon, shield, and auxiliary systems, the ability to use different members of their crew like traditional MMO skills, alter their throttle, steer fluidly with both the mouse and the keyboard, and direct themselves and enemies in different directions to fire both fore and aft weapons (which is very reminiscence of games like Sid Meier’s Pirates! and the MMO Pirates of the Burning Sea). It’s easy to see that a lot of thought went into making it feel like traditional Star Trek combat while keeping the player invested in each and every action.
Unfortunately, it seems that most of the good ideas were spent on the space combat as the ground combat is boring, repetitive, and an absolute grindfest (with only a few notable exceptions). Your character and his or her away team beam down to the planet and, nine times out of ten, are forced to fight through corridor after corridor filled with identical squads of identical Klingons. Despite the complexity possible with the four different characters capable of being controlled by the player, the ground combat is nothing but boring. Most characters used ranged weapons primarily and as such, you’ll find yourself staring at two or more characters standing in an empty field or hallway pointing guns at one another every few seconds and pew-pewing until someone dies. It makes the typical MMO auto-attack melee fighting look exciting.
Ground environments like this aren’t the norm, but rather unfortunately, the visually-interesting exception.
One of the most unusual issues I found in my time with Star Trek Online is that there is almost no desire, need, or even focus on playing in groups and by that I simply mean actual multiplayer. There is an open instance system that will allow players participating in the same quest to enter your instance and be placed on your group automatically, but this happened rarely and required little, if any actual player interaction. The fact that Cryptic has decided to take on the single server with hundreds of instances for its recent MMOs is a problematic one.
Much like in Champions Online, most environments feel extremely empty, players seem distant, and there’s a huge chance that, particularly at times of low server population, players may not run into anyone at all except at a space station. One of the coolest aspects of MMOs is that feeling of being one of so many, like playing music in the Prancing Pony in Lord of the Rings Online or going someplace with a lot of people in WoW (I’ve never played the game beyond the few first levels, so I apologize for my lack of a proper analogy and now damaged nerd cred). The instanced nature of Star Trek Online and the fact that players are accompanied on ground missions by a team of NPCs make playing solo not only doable, but in many ways, preferable to grouping with other actual players which damages not only the gameplay of STO but the community as well.
Space stations can be found at a few points throughout space, but you’ll find yourself mainly sticking to one or two.
After fully facing my disappointment over the ground combat and solo-player focus, I started to think about whether or not Star Trek was really the ideal franchise for an MMO or even a video game for that matter. If the ground combat strayed too far from the set-phasers-to-kill style it currently has, it wouldn’t really be Star Trek would it? Star Trek, at its core, is more about talking, diplomacy, and intriguing social commentaries than it is about combat and epic struggles between good and evil. Occasionally, I would stumble upon a diplomatic or exploratory mission that actually felt like a proper episode of Star Trek, but they were anything but exciting. Not a lot of cinematic glory can be gleaned from voice-acting-free text boxes and lackluster character models.
Simply put, Star Trek Online’s biggest problem may be that it is aiming to be a Star Trek game, something perhaps more fit for the Mass Effect treatment than the WoW one.