Van Hemlock.com

You know that whole three month rule? Well a little known clause is that it doesn’t apply to any Star Trek game, so last night I found myself downloading and playing Star Trek Online in the open beta.

I wouldn’t dream of reviewing a game during the first day of its open beta, that would just be just as pointless as using a review of the closed beta to tell if the finished game is any good. I will give a few opening thoughts from my limited play time last night.

The first thing is server stability, which is not exactly stellar so far. I suspect you want server instability from the load to show up in your betas if you are a game dev, and in fact Eve gets punished every big patch because they don’t get the heavy loads of the real playerbase. Let me explain…

Imagine you are launching a new game/patch and at launch you’re expecting a total of 100 players per server (it’s a small game). You’re not going to get that many to help test, and you may well get 10% of that number if you’re really lucky (I expect that’s way over the real numbers). Open beta starts and 10 players log in and start playing in that unpredictable way that players play. The servers cope fine, you are happy and go to launch the game. On launch day you find that if you get over 50 players then the whole things falls to bits. Zoning takes too long, lag is too high and after a while the server runs out of memory and crashes. This is strange as you tested with 150 automated test bots, but they were all scripted to do a limited set of things and could never match real players. You would have picked this up if you’d had 50 beta testers, but you were never going to get that many.

Now consider if those 10 beta players cause the game to fall over. You’ve identified the bottlenecks, memory leaks and bugs during your beta, which means you can work flat out to fix those show stoppers and your launch becomes a lot smoother. You don’t find everything of course, but you’ve avoided the main things that would cause the problems on launch day. In fact if I was a game dev I would probably find a way to make the first days of the beta fall over by any means I could. That’s what they’re for, finding out how they break and you can mess with things far more in beta than you can after launch.

In other words I don’t think the stability is anything to worry about this far from launch. Now if it’s the last few days of the beta, then I might worry but it’s certainly not something I think anybody should mark the game down for yet.

The game starts you off (at the moment) with a nice set of quests that lead you along a path through a ship and introduce you to various parts of the ground game. Combat seems a bit better than the demo I played at the EUROGAMER expo, in fact I’d probably say that it’s pretty close to the feel of some of the DS9 episodes The Siege of AR-558 being one) so doesn’t seem totally out of place. When you think about star trek hand to hand combat it’s mainly been stand still and fire so the special effect isn’t too expensive to add on after so it feels reasonably trek like to me. I wasn’t expecting that.

After you’ve had some Borg fun (they’re a little weak, I blame Voyager for making the Borg go from scary to throw away) you go up into space and watch your ground based avatar sit amusingly in space until it finishes loading after a few minutes and gives you a ship based on the Miranda hull. This first had me beaming survivors from damaged ships (Wolf 359 ish), which was sort of spoilt by how many other players there were there, all in the same class of ship with minor cosmetic variations). It was at this time I missed the overview from Eve. I needed to find the correct ships and it would have been nice to just right click on a list and select approach You know, like saying “Ensign, approach the USS Cannon Fodder” would be on the show. Instead the best I could manage was to try and see the ship somewhere around me and fly towards it (using either the keyboard to turn or holding down both mouse buttons). Again, EVEs double click in space to set a course would have been welcome. Still, I soon had all the crew members rescued and was warping off to blow Borg stuff up. Space combat is little different than the ground, get within 10km of the target and hit Space and Ctrl+Space to fire phasers and torpedoes. My bridge crew guy I forgot to mention I was given gave me a torpedo bonus ability so I hit that before firing to do more damage. I like what I’ve seen of the space combat, but as soon as I’d cleared some rats from two areas I was beaming down to a planet which was full of ensigns who have all just found themselves acting captain on a ship milling around looking for a phaser rifle. It here that a round of being repeatedly kicked from the server made me consider bed instead. The Borg can wait.

Part of me really wishes the ground combat was a FPS. Or failing that 3rd person and more like Mass effect. I’m sure when I get beyond basic phasers the combat will feel less like Trek. Special abilities don’t really fit in my mind, but I’ll not pass judgement until I’ve actually played with them more.

My review of my first hour or so in Trek Online is therefore: Had fun, shot Borg, look forwards to shooting more of them tonight. I am a massive Trek fan though so I might as well add one of those FTC style messages that we’re apparently meant to add if we’ve received anything material that may influence us about the subject. I declare that Trek probably influenced my career choice, my view on the universe, my view on religion and most definitely my thing for women with green skin. I may be more than a little biased, but that’ll work both ways as it’ll make me hate as well as love.

It is of course way too early to make comments on if I think the game will be ready for launch or not, but in general I certainly wouldn’t recommend playing just because you can get in early through the beta unless you’re prepared to accept (and not moan) that it is a beta for their purposes, and not just for you to have an early play. Wait until launch, and then wait either a few days if you’re a hard core Trek fan or 3 months if you’re not.