Van Hemlock

I’ve now played Star Trek Online for a few days and I’ve come to some more concrete initial impressions. Please remember that is is the first few days of open beta, I am a massive Trek fan and all in all nothing here should be taken as a proper review of the game as everything may still change before launch.

The first thought is that I’m constantly comparing experiences in game to episodes and films of the show. For instance the space combat feels very much like the fight with the Borg cube in First Contact, right down to the poor ship that gets blown up by the cube’s explosion. Watch closely if you haven’t noticed, he’s too close and explodes. I’ve always thought he must be the worse captain ever to let that happen, but now that it’s happened to me in game I’m less judgemental.

Space combat is good, and although the lack of death penalty is fun I think it causes the game to lose a lot of its Trek-ness. If I’m throwing myself at a tough enemy because my group sucks and isn’t pulling their weight (more on that in a bit) it really doesn’t feel right.

The automatic grouping is good. Each game that implements it seems to get it a bit more polished, and STO is another step along that path. Small things like the rubbish chat system make them a bit more hassle than they should be, and as a console gamer the lack of inbuilt voice chat is really annoying since a lot of these missions seem to need coordination. You get rewards for just being in the zone and part of a group so you don’t really need to do anything. This does, as you can imagine, cause a problem with people not bothering but I’ve not seen it as much as others.

Ground based combat is still, well, MMO combat. I don’t mind the space combat because it has a positional element and recharging abilities seem to make more sense, but I don’t think that the STO ground combat is just as dull as in any other MMO. Really bad animations, no flow and the lack of death penalty makes for a very un-Federation style experience. I can put up with it though as, well, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to play many MMOs at all.

Mission design so far is pretty restrictive. The worse by far was the one where I had to beam down, talk to various miners and then answer a series of questions about what they had said to the mine foreman. The answers were all obvious, of course they didn’t want to work harsh hours, wanted their holodeck fixed and wanted a new shipment of real dolls. It was Next Gen at its worse and I just wanted to shoot them all from space for being incapable of sorting out their own problems. Anybody who wants more diplomatic missions in the game is wrong, they will not be fun.

Quite high up the list of issues I have is the design of the ground based sections. The scale is way off, for probably quite reasonable reasons, and so every corridor feels like a cathedral. My bridge also needs more potted plants. And possibly a couch.

I’m getting desperate for a new ship now, I love my Miranda (with the Centaur saucer and nacelles to make it look more modern) but I want something new because everybody is in the same basic ship. It’s like the federation didn’t bother chatting before going to a party and all turned up in the same ship.

Sector space has a place of hatred in my heart. It’s a zone that is effectively the map, and you fly between different star system either manually or by the worlds dumbest autopilot. You remember all that streaking stars business with travelling on the shows and films? Well this is basically trundling along the map in a way that reminds me of moving units in Civilisation. Only less turn based. And it’s got other players in there as well.

As the days progress I’ve realised that I’m not just fighting my inherent love of Trek with this game when it comes to bias. Sure, that’s making me let the game get away with a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t, but also my hatred of MMOs is having an effect too. I see bad things and let them slide because it’s an MMO. Mission design is boring, graphics and animation mediocre and gameplay repetitive. I was chatting about it last night and the perfect comparison sprang to mind. Playing the game is much like playing Assassins Creed 1, you have to do the same few things over and over again to get anywhere, but the world may be enough to keep you interested.

The massively multiplayer-ness of the game is something that’s worrying me as well. Everybody is always in an instance of between one and what seems to be about 50 players. We’re straying dangerously into the sort of multiplayer experience that console games such as Burnout Paradise, Test Drive Unlimited and Fable 2 are moving towards where we can drop into other people’s instance of the world to play with them. You drop into a mission and a couple of random internet types are grouped up with you automatically, and there’s not a lot of difference there between a hypothetical console game dropping you into a co-op mission with a couple of other random players when you start while retaining the ability to invite people from your friends list into the group as well.

To sum up my second review (day three, about 7 hours played probably). The game is about as deep as a puddle, but that space combat will excuse nearly everything that’s wrong for me at the moment. I still feel like I’m just out of the tutorial though, which either means I need to get a move on or I have a real problem…