In the genre of MMOs it seems like everyone keeps looking for the next "WoW Killer"; that game which will take massive numbers of WoW players away from WoW and into a new, better, and more unique online game playing experience.
Well, let's temper expectations here a little bit and assure everyone that "Star Trek: Online" is not a WoW killer, not by a long shot. The same elements of gameplay exist in STO as every other MMO I've played (go here, go there, fight this, fight that, get some points and gear, repeat) so there's nothing earth shattering new about the game. However, what it does have going for it is the Star Trek license which means players can now don the Starfleet or Klingon uniform and do battle against all the bad guys that Trek fans know so well: Klingon, Romulan, Orion, Jem H'Dar, and the Borg.
With the Trek license in hand that allows every single Star Trek nerd to hop into the captain's chair of their favorite ship (and some new ones) and go explore the galaxy. However, as of this writing it is probably more appropriate to replace 'explore' with 'annihilate' given how heavily skewed the game is towards ship-to-ship combat.
The game picks up a few decades after the events of the most recent Star Trek movie -- or at least the 'prime' Trek universe and not the alternate Kirk and oh my god my nerd beard is showing!! -- and since that time everyone living near the Federation appears to have lost their minds. The Romulans are rebuilding after their planet was destroyed and fighting anyone that looks at them funny, the Klingons are rattling their swords, the Cardassians have become wimps except for some who teamed up with Jem H'Dar, and of course the Borg are lingering around looking to turn everyone into cyborgs who could really use some sun.
Into all this, you and your crew are dropped near Earth in a starter ship and told to go solve all the problems so, like, no pressure okay? So naturally, this is where the mission questing and level grinding begin as a fresh faced lieutenant and you can keep leveling and getting bigger and better ships all the way up to the Rear Admiral rank. This system of questing, reward, and eventually moving up in ranks of course does not provide anything new but I did find myself enjoying the progression of the mission and story more than I did with something like Everquest 2 where the story had little or no meaning to me except for the end reward.
As a fan of Trek, the missions, places, and events do provide a certain familarity that provides a nice little touch and at the very least kept me more engaged in the overall story. For example, since the story of the game takes place several decades removed from the shows, a lot of the younger people shown on the show (or their children and grandchildren) have also picked up the Starfleet mantel and appear in the overall storyline. In one instance you find your character talking to Chief O'Brien's children or even find that the child of one couple has been deemed a savior by one faction who then kidnaps her. While admittedly these are not major things that a non-Trek fan would enjoy, fans of the show will probably find it entertaining.
However, little throw away bits like that won't keep people paying $15 a month so what is also needed is some good missions. While other reviews do register many complaints about the combat missions, particularly about it becoming repetitive on solo missions, I still found myself enjoying it though that is probably due to my Trek fan nerd creeping to the surface. But if you step back and think about it for a minute, isn't every MMO like this? Sure you can get put into a new environment or landscape but in the end you're clicking the same spells and heals and watching little progress bars and -- if you're really dedicated -- probably studying DPS logs when you should be doing something else more productive, like eating, sleeping, or bathing.
Anyone familiar with the Starfleet Command series of games will find the ship combat in STO startlingly familiar right down to the balance of ship power systems. All combat now though can go through all three axis rather than two. While that is nice to see since space combat games like Homeworld have done that for years, the game is not full three dimensional combat in that your ship can not perform a full 360 turn along the vertical axis and instead appears to be limited to climbing or diving about 60 degrees along the vertical.
Whether this was a game engine limitation or a game mechanic choice to help make tracking combat a bit easier for players is unknown but I would lean towards the latter and possibly a design decision to try and keep keep the game more in line with what was shown on the Trek series as most ship to ship combat mimicked naval warships on the high seas than it did jet fighter combat.
To complement your ship you can pick and choose bridge officers which you can promote, train, and replace as you see fit to satisfy the needs of your ship role or battle needs. As you go up in rank you are given new officers which can replace existing ones or train your existing officers in new skills to replace unwanted skill sets. This mechanic then is similar to getting new spells or skill sets in other MMOs. Each bridge officer has their ship skills and their ground base skills. You can also keep extra officers if you wish so that you could, if desired, have ground specialist and ship combat specialist. Personally, I found myself rotating officers in and out in ship combat based on if I was soloing or in a group but kept the ground officers the same.
The problem with the space missions is that they come in very few flavors: find something, scan something, fight something, and rescue someone. If this was any other game it would become very dull very quickly but, again, seeing my little Defiant warship slice through Jem H'Dar warships with multi-cannon phasers is just great and then seeing the ship tumble over before exploding is just some hot nerdy action.
What is needed that was often very prevalent in the Trek series are diplomatic missions. What I would think is that these diplomatic missions would have to be more akin to something like an adventure puzzle and less about pointing and killing. Missions of this nature should provide multiple dialog trees and even the chance to fail and force starting over.
You could also have intra-ship missions to solve such as ship personnel issues, strange and enigmatic problems on the ship, or things of that nature, too since it seemed like the there was always something wrong with the starboard nacelle on the Enterprise or the transporter room was broken or something like that.
Yet, the biggest, and I think overlooked problem, is that there's no sense of humor about the game as there was in many of the shows. There's no cynical humor such as Garak or even over the top camp such as the Ferrengi. Instead, it is a very unhappy time in the Federation with no one wanting to smile or have a little fun. At least the writers of the series tried from time to time even if it was hit or miss. Unless you count the acting on Voyager, but unintentional humor doesn't count.
Ground missions are also provided where your team travels down to the surface of a planet and performs a few basic mission types that are readily familiar: find stuff or shoot stuff. As you might expect, some of these missions are more of a grind than entertaining but that's pretty par for the course in MMOs.
As a whole though the missions, while repetitive, do have one thing going for them that something like EQ2 did not. Each star system you might venture to becomes an instance zone and if anyone else is running the same mission at the same time you are put into a group with them automatically to work together. So unlike EQ2 where you could often find yourself looking for groups and often not having any luck, with STO you are forced into a group, making the missions go faster or at least a little less difficult.
Because of this though you will find that until you get to the Rear Admiral rank you will probably find yourself quite capable of completing most missions without the need for guilds or groups and can instead solo everything except the most difficult of missions. Therefore, it makes the entire experience much less of a grind and quite a bit more casual than the level questing and grinding I've experienced in other MMOs.
The biggest disappointment so far is the terrible market for selling and buying items from other players. The interface, search feature, sorting, and posting of items are all complete rubbish that need to be seriously refined or completely rebuilt from the ground up. As it is now, the ability to search for items to see market rates before posting requires way too many windows and clicks. Also, the 20 slots allowed for selling items is considerably too low since just about every ship or planet has something for you to grab and sell later on to other players.
I suppose then I would summarize my experience so far with STO as one of pleased but also getting a little bit bored with it after several months of gameplay. Fortunately, I have other things in my life to keep me busy though so I don't consider it money wasted. The game gives us the Trek license and everything that goes along with it, but more varied missions are needed to keep it entertaining. From my first foray into the Borg content of the game, the mission descriptions seem to suggest some good Trek nerd-out stories are about to kick in but I would have to reserve my judgment till later.
I would suggest then that if you've never played an MMO but need something a bit more casual that won't suck the life out of your bone marrow for several hours a night (like EVE), then STO might be the game for you. For any Trek fan though I would consider it almost a must to have simply for the enjoyment of gallivanting across the galaxy.
Addendum: If you want to have a whimsical name be warned that the admins appear to be cracking down on questionable names. My toon's original name "BadMuthaFugga" was rescinded and I was forced to rename him. Boo, Cryptic, boo.
Well, let's temper expectations here a little bit and assure everyone that "Star Trek: Online" is not a WoW killer, not by a long shot. The same elements of gameplay exist in STO as every other MMO I've played (go here, go there, fight this, fight that, get some points and gear, repeat) so there's nothing earth shattering new about the game. However, what it does have going for it is the Star Trek license which means players can now don the Starfleet or Klingon uniform and do battle against all the bad guys that Trek fans know so well: Klingon, Romulan, Orion, Jem H'Dar, and the Borg.
With the Trek license in hand that allows every single Star Trek nerd to hop into the captain's chair of their favorite ship (and some new ones) and go explore the galaxy. However, as of this writing it is probably more appropriate to replace 'explore' with 'annihilate' given how heavily skewed the game is towards ship-to-ship combat.
The game picks up a few decades after the events of the most recent Star Trek movie -- or at least the 'prime' Trek universe and not the alternate Kirk and oh my god my nerd beard is showing!! -- and since that time everyone living near the Federation appears to have lost their minds. The Romulans are rebuilding after their planet was destroyed and fighting anyone that looks at them funny, the Klingons are rattling their swords, the Cardassians have become wimps except for some who teamed up with Jem H'Dar, and of course the Borg are lingering around looking to turn everyone into cyborgs who could really use some sun.
Into all this, you and your crew are dropped near Earth in a starter ship and told to go solve all the problems so, like, no pressure okay? So naturally, this is where the mission questing and level grinding begin as a fresh faced lieutenant and you can keep leveling and getting bigger and better ships all the way up to the Rear Admiral rank. This system of questing, reward, and eventually moving up in ranks of course does not provide anything new but I did find myself enjoying the progression of the mission and story more than I did with something like Everquest 2 where the story had little or no meaning to me except for the end reward.
As a fan of Trek, the missions, places, and events do provide a certain familarity that provides a nice little touch and at the very least kept me more engaged in the overall story. For example, since the story of the game takes place several decades removed from the shows, a lot of the younger people shown on the show (or their children and grandchildren) have also picked up the Starfleet mantel and appear in the overall storyline. In one instance you find your character talking to Chief O'Brien's children or even find that the child of one couple has been deemed a savior by one faction who then kidnaps her. While admittedly these are not major things that a non-Trek fan would enjoy, fans of the show will probably find it entertaining.
However, little throw away bits like that won't keep people paying $15 a month so what is also needed is some good missions. While other reviews do register many complaints about the combat missions, particularly about it becoming repetitive on solo missions, I still found myself enjoying it though that is probably due to my Trek fan nerd creeping to the surface. But if you step back and think about it for a minute, isn't every MMO like this? Sure you can get put into a new environment or landscape but in the end you're clicking the same spells and heals and watching little progress bars and -- if you're really dedicated -- probably studying DPS logs when you should be doing something else more productive, like eating, sleeping, or bathing.
Anyone familiar with the Starfleet Command series of games will find the ship combat in STO startlingly familiar right down to the balance of ship power systems. All combat now though can go through all three axis rather than two. While that is nice to see since space combat games like Homeworld have done that for years, the game is not full three dimensional combat in that your ship can not perform a full 360 turn along the vertical axis and instead appears to be limited to climbing or diving about 60 degrees along the vertical.
Whether this was a game engine limitation or a game mechanic choice to help make tracking combat a bit easier for players is unknown but I would lean towards the latter and possibly a design decision to try and keep keep the game more in line with what was shown on the Trek series as most ship to ship combat mimicked naval warships on the high seas than it did jet fighter combat.
To complement your ship you can pick and choose bridge officers which you can promote, train, and replace as you see fit to satisfy the needs of your ship role or battle needs. As you go up in rank you are given new officers which can replace existing ones or train your existing officers in new skills to replace unwanted skill sets. This mechanic then is similar to getting new spells or skill sets in other MMOs. Each bridge officer has their ship skills and their ground base skills. You can also keep extra officers if you wish so that you could, if desired, have ground specialist and ship combat specialist. Personally, I found myself rotating officers in and out in ship combat based on if I was soloing or in a group but kept the ground officers the same.
The problem with the space missions is that they come in very few flavors: find something, scan something, fight something, and rescue someone. If this was any other game it would become very dull very quickly but, again, seeing my little Defiant warship slice through Jem H'Dar warships with multi-cannon phasers is just great and then seeing the ship tumble over before exploding is just some hot nerdy action.
What is needed that was often very prevalent in the Trek series are diplomatic missions. What I would think is that these diplomatic missions would have to be more akin to something like an adventure puzzle and less about pointing and killing. Missions of this nature should provide multiple dialog trees and even the chance to fail and force starting over.
You could also have intra-ship missions to solve such as ship personnel issues, strange and enigmatic problems on the ship, or things of that nature, too since it seemed like the there was always something wrong with the starboard nacelle on the Enterprise or the transporter room was broken or something like that.
Yet, the biggest, and I think overlooked problem, is that there's no sense of humor about the game as there was in many of the shows. There's no cynical humor such as Garak or even over the top camp such as the Ferrengi. Instead, it is a very unhappy time in the Federation with no one wanting to smile or have a little fun. At least the writers of the series tried from time to time even if it was hit or miss. Unless you count the acting on Voyager, but unintentional humor doesn't count.
Ground missions are also provided where your team travels down to the surface of a planet and performs a few basic mission types that are readily familiar: find stuff or shoot stuff. As you might expect, some of these missions are more of a grind than entertaining but that's pretty par for the course in MMOs.
As a whole though the missions, while repetitive, do have one thing going for them that something like EQ2 did not. Each star system you might venture to becomes an instance zone and if anyone else is running the same mission at the same time you are put into a group with them automatically to work together. So unlike EQ2 where you could often find yourself looking for groups and often not having any luck, with STO you are forced into a group, making the missions go faster or at least a little less difficult.
Because of this though you will find that until you get to the Rear Admiral rank you will probably find yourself quite capable of completing most missions without the need for guilds or groups and can instead solo everything except the most difficult of missions. Therefore, it makes the entire experience much less of a grind and quite a bit more casual than the level questing and grinding I've experienced in other MMOs.
The biggest disappointment so far is the terrible market for selling and buying items from other players. The interface, search feature, sorting, and posting of items are all complete rubbish that need to be seriously refined or completely rebuilt from the ground up. As it is now, the ability to search for items to see market rates before posting requires way too many windows and clicks. Also, the 20 slots allowed for selling items is considerably too low since just about every ship or planet has something for you to grab and sell later on to other players.
I suppose then I would summarize my experience so far with STO as one of pleased but also getting a little bit bored with it after several months of gameplay. Fortunately, I have other things in my life to keep me busy though so I don't consider it money wasted. The game gives us the Trek license and everything that goes along with it, but more varied missions are needed to keep it entertaining. From my first foray into the Borg content of the game, the mission descriptions seem to suggest some good Trek nerd-out stories are about to kick in but I would have to reserve my judgment till later.
I would suggest then that if you've never played an MMO but need something a bit more casual that won't suck the life out of your bone marrow for several hours a night (like EVE), then STO might be the game for you. For any Trek fan though I would consider it almost a must to have simply for the enjoyment of gallivanting across the galaxy.
Addendum: If you want to have a whimsical name be warned that the admins appear to be cracking down on questionable names. My toon's original name "BadMuthaFugga" was rescinded and I was forced to rename him. Boo, Cryptic, boo.
2 comments:
Great review, thanks!
But I have to agree with Cryptic on forcing your rename. I personally can't stand silly captain names like "WhoseYoMama", "JewBacca", etc. Or ships like "KlinksStoleMyRunabout". It just takes some of the immersion out of it for me.
While I can appreciate your concern for keeping it "real" in a fictional fantasy game, I prefer to have a little fun with it.
Besides which "BadMuthaFugga" was just a good quality name choice, especially when my ship name was USS SoulGlo.
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