Star Trek Online is the best MMO ever made. But that doesn't mean it's good.
The game has two portions... a Starfleet Command style ship combat system that's fairly sophisticated and pretty fun, along with a ground combat system that is awful. Most of the game takes place in space however so it's good on average. Like Guild Wars, the game uses an instance system and thus I went through the majority of the beta playing by myself and eschewing any and all contact with my fellow human being.
The gameplay of the average MMO is not fun. WoW fights boil down to finding an enemy, attacking them, pressing your hotkeys for special skills and hoping to kill them before they killed you. Party play took that central concept and made it somewhat grander but did not change the fundamentals. Star Trek Online is thus unique in the sense that basic space combat is actually a fairly fun game in its own right.
But unfortunately, that in turn begs a simple question: Who the fuck got all this MMO into my single player game?
So the first thing you do in the game is create a character.
At first I was trying to make a girl that looks like Jadzia Dax, but while playing around with the sliders I noticed that it's perfectly possible for me to make a Starfleet officer that looks like she's maybe 12 or 13 years old. After thinking "I would totally watch that anime" I created the first lolita Starship Captain in order to see how long it took some Star Trek douche to hit on me.
Thus was Atera Kell born and the answer to the hit-on question was five minutes after completing the tutorial. Oh Star Trek fans, you guys are just so predictable.
In any case, the character of Atera Kell in my head was a Wesley-ish Child Prodigy that was given her own ship because really Starfleet's standards are THAT low nowadays. Anyhow, this was funny for a while but by the time I became a Commander I was a bit tired of looking like a 14 year old girl and thus broke out the char creator again and aged her...
I actually really like the way you can change your look at a moment's notice. You can also hide things like body armour and such so that you can make a nice customized Federation uniform as I did above. It lets you really feel like you're progressing as you go along and makes your character feel a bit more consistent. You don a different uniform as you rank up, rather than simply put on whatever you find on Klingon corpses. I actually thought it was pretty cool when I became a Captain and changed my look to this:
Neat.
You can also customize the look of your crewmembers. From left to right there you have Ensign Kayla, Lieut Commander Olox (my Security Chief), me, Chief Engineer Takara and my medical officer Sha'kar. I spent a fair bit of time tweaking their appearances.
I especially like how Olox came out. Imposing Bolians are cool.
Anyhow, so this is pretty solid so far, I'd say. You have a ship... you have a crew... you fly around the galaxy shooting other ships and beaming down to planets to shoot dudes. Why's it so bad?
Reason #1: It's an MMO.
A random crewmate will be selected to read some quest dialogue ("Sir there are some Klingons here, let's kill them). I suppose the reason for this is that you aren't supposed to be chatting with NPCs, you're supposed to be chatting with other players. But that isn't how Star Trek is. In Star Trek social development is directed inside the ship, with only occasional appearances by Admirals and other Captains. In this you're in a fleet battle against 10 Borg Cubes every few moments.
That's not what Star Trek is like! Voyager sucked! Stop ruining the Borg! I rarely grouped up in the game because that's how Star Trek should be: a single ship going around the galaxy, having its own little adventures. But at no point will you get any genuine personality from your officers. They're literally just upgrades for your ship that you take down on away teams.
I would really prefer a single player game with that sort of interaction. I'd like to be able to hear about how Olox lost his barber father during a Borg attack on the Enterprise or whatnot. I don't really have much interest in having five ship Captains beam down to a shitty planet to scan for microbes.
Which brings me to...
Reason #2: Scanning for Microbes.
Or rocks. Or lava. Or archeological artifacts. Or... whatever. Exploration is the essence of Star Trek and they tried to put it into this. This turned out to be just beaming down to a planet, finding a couple of rocks (usually 5), hitting 'scan' and then leaving. It's really boring and really pointless. Sometimes they'll be some random enemies loitering around the microbes which you have to kill before you scan, which isn't really how Picard did it in my memory.
What would be better is if they did what is done in the shows and used these silly missions to develop some of those bridge characters. When you do the missions with other people it's just a bit of the other dudes like 'this sucks' as everyone runs in every direction to find the shit. I would kill to have them use it as a platform for character development, but that sort of thing is possible only in a single player game.
Reason #3: The story is bad.
It's set thirty years after Nemesis. In true nerdish overcomplexity tradition, let me explain reason #3 in three parts.
#1: Bending over backwards to make references and connections to the original series. Stuff like this:
Ich.#2: Complete unoriginality.
Almost all the missions are rehashes of old Star Trek episodes. There was a Section 31 mission that involved a long 'test' exercise on the Holodeck, like that Bashir episode of DS9. There was a mission about the Hirogen doing some bullshit that was not far removed from the shit they did to Voyager. There's a mission that's like that episode of DS9 where some Jem'Hadr have a Gateway. It's like they think that if something can't be directly connected with an episode, the fans will revolt. I guess this must be what Star Trek novels are like.
#3: It's stupid.
The game is based around combat. You can't hail a Romulan vessel and do a bit of cowboy diplomacy to get them to cut out their shit. You have to open fire immediately and the way they try to justify your doing that is often just retarded. Without going into the painful details, let's just say that there is no fucking 'neutral' zone anymore if I'm going into Romulan territory and destroying their ships.
And honestly:
Holographic ships? Fuck if you can have those why bother doing anything else ever.
#4: Ground Combat
It's really bad.
It has two issues that I would think any developer would be able to catch. The first issue is that the enemy does not deal enough damage. I didn't put much thought into my away teams. Two Tactical Officers, an Engineer, and a Doctor (I'm also a Doctor). The enemy could never even put a dent in me.
The second issue the worst possible thing you could combined with the first. They have WAY too many hitpoints. It takes FOREVER to kill ANYTHING. So you have a situation where fights last a good 5-10 minutes where you're struggling to whittle an enemy armed with frickin' dart guns down. Awful awful awful.
Your away team is also retarded. They can get stuck on anything. Open doors... chairs... a bit of debris... a knee high rock... you name it, they get stuck. It's fucking terrible and it seemed like I spent almost as much time trying to get my away team from room to room as I did fighting. A simple solution would be to have the idiots teleport to you if they got too far, but simple solutions don't belong in MMOs.
#5: PvP
Someone working at this studio needs to play Team Fortress 2. If they did, they would see that there are certain things that team-based PvP needs in order to succeed.
They are:
- Spawn points/safe rooms that cannot be camped
- Objectives to discourage turtling strategies.
- A setup phase to let people load the map so that you don't have 5 Klingon ships loading while there's only one Federation vessel.
- Autoteaming. There's no point in playing a medic without easy access to the team's health bars.
- Voice commands (i.e. "BEHIND US!") that can be broadcast with a press of a button.
The game has none of these. Space PvP missions thus boil down to Federation ships drifting around in a circle waiting for the Klingons to decloak and attack. If the Klingon ambush is good enough they win and get spawn camped. If the Feddies hold them off, Feddies win. Terrible.
In conclusion:
I had a fair bit of fun with this over the last week or so. It's certainly better than WoW. But it just suffers from the fact that it's an MMO in a universe that really just isn't an MMO universe. I thus will not be giving it any of my coin. There's more ...
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