Starfleet Command III

 

Hi, I’m Sphinx, and I’m a closet Trek junkie.  I first saw it in high school back in 1992 and instantly liked Next Generation.  Then Ds9, my personal favorite, came along and I became an official junkie. There, I admitted it.  Admittance is the first step towards being comfortable with oneself.  That and a good fitting pair of underwear I suppose.  Having said that, you might expect a completely gushing review of Starfleet Command III, wouldn’t you?   Well … tough.

Even if you’re a casual Star Trek fan, Starfleet Command III has the potential to be one of the most fun multiplayer experiences you could ever have online.  Of course, you also have the potential to win the lottery, make hot love to a supermodel, or even get hit by a raging bull at the rodeo.  Potential does not translate to success and the multiplayer experience needs a lot of work.

The Dynaverse, which is supposed to be the meat and potatoes of the multiplayer experience, is awesome when it works. What fan of Star Trek wouldn’t want to hop into a Klingon Bird of Prey or Federation Galaxy class starship and get into photon torpedo duel with the Borg or Romulans.   Honestly, the first time I hopped into a Defiant class starship and let rip the pulse phasers I laughed in delight as the Borg ships systems began flickering on and off like a California office building

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that great.  The way I understand the system of Dynaverse is that you first log into the master server where your name is stored. Then you find a server hosting a game.  These games are supposed to be running 24/7 but in reality the servers crash about once an hour, sometimes with a glorious reset of the universe meaning you lose all your points and possibly your really freaking sweet Defiant class starship which took you 3 hours to get. Me bitter?  A little.  

After you get logged into the game you have a hexagon based map where you run around and look for stuff to destroy.  When you start, the only real way to get any points is to team up with others (or find some computer controlled allies) to earn points quickly. 

The teaming up part is where most of the troubles in the Dynaverse currently lies. Supposedly, you can team up with 2 other people and then take on 3 other human players if you wished to do so.  I believe the way this works is that the master server is told that you’re going to fight and one of the people who is playing then hosts the game on their PC rather than having it run on a dedicated server which to me would be the smart thing to do but what do I know?  After the battle is over you then reconnect to the master server and the battle results are uploaded, the map is updated and you’re supposed to continue on your way to protecting the universe.

At least that’s the theory. In reality, about once every five attempts the game will crash, or I get some pretty wicked lag, or once a battle is over my stats are not updated on the server and I can’t move. In all of these cases I’m forced to quit the game and re-enter, which in turn also wipes out any points I earned in the battle I just finished.  There’s also the issue of no documented in-battle team chat (though I’ve been told it’s ctrl-enter) but most people are getting around this by using Roger Wilco or TeamSound.

While in-game, you’ll also notice that the interface has been dumbed down from SFC 1 and SFC 2.  There’s no more Electronic Counter Measurements panel (ECM), there’s only 4 shield quadrants instead of six, no way to reinforce multiple shield quadrants, no transporter bombs, and shuttles may not be reconfigured. Another big item missing is missiles effectively wiping out a huge part of the first two games.  Whether this was done to stay more true to the Star Trek Next Generation universe or to make the game more appealing to a wider audience I do not know. But honestly I don’t mind. 

After a while you can get enough points to bid on new classes of ships and upgrade them or completely customize them, similar to what you might have done in the MechWarrior series.  This is really fun as the possibilities for customization are nearly endless.  Four pulse phasers on the Enterprise? Sure, why not!

But what about if there’s not many people on the Dynaverse server?  Can you still play? Sure, but the single player is not that enjoyable.  There are some standard missions (scan planet, raid convoy) but without people to play with or smack talk to it can become quite tedious.  It’d be great if there were more dynamic missions like “Distress call from nearby starbase” or things like that. 

There’s also a single player campaign who’s real high point from what I can tell is that Patrick Stewart does some voice over acting.

SFC3 has the potential to be one of the best multiplayer games around. Star Trek fans will greatly enjoy the ability to take the big chair in a massive capital ship and casual fans of the series or tactical combat will have fun too.  But it has so many faults right now that it’s probably going to take a lot of patches to fix it.  Unfortunately, with Star Wars Galaxies about to come out, most of the sci-fi fans will probably migrate to that game and simply put this one aside.