Early Impressions of Star Trek Online

I went into the beta of Cryptic’s new MMORPG with high hopes. I’ve been interested in the genre for a while but I’m not much of a fan of the high fantasy settings that so many of these games go for. I’ve no objection to grinding my way through hundreds of faceless enemies, I’d just prefer they were aliens rather than orcs. With access to the Star Trek Online open beta, I created an attractive female avatar named Jenna Jameson and put her in command of the U.S.S. Neckbeard.

In terms of its interface, STO was instantly familiar to me. The genre seems to have reached the same point that console based first person shooters reached after the release of Halo. Sure there are a few unique features here and there but they’re about as significant as moving the ‘reload’ button from X to B on a console controller.

The on-foot sections of STO were as familiar as the interface. I found myself moving to waypoints, clicking on enemies and selecting attacks from a hotbar until their hitpoints dropped to zero. I will credit STO with some refinements that became apparent to me. I didn’t seem to spend a lot of time backtracking to quest givers and instead moved from one objective to another in succession. The fiction helps in this regard, the presence of communicators and transporters in the Star Trek universe allows instant movement and updates to quests. Despite these admirable attempts to streamline the on-foot sections of STO, I still found the quests as repetitive as those from any other MMORPG.

Where STO really distinguishes itself, at least from my perspective, is in the space based combat introduced at the end of the tutorial. Survival requires that the player keep their strongest shields facing the enemy through direct control of their vessel. It gave me a sense of having to pay close attention to the battles. Once I got past the tutorial section I actually got into situations where I would succeed in battle through careful ship management rather than grinding until I had reached the requisite strength.

MMORPGs have an inherent problem in terms of how they deal with player death. The more forgiving they are, the less thought has to be put in to how much risk the player should take. Conversely, the more punishing MMORPGs risk alienating the player and discourage exploration by forcing the player to gamble hours of progress on an unknown reward. STO definitely tends towards the more forgiving philosophy.

The first time the U.S.S. Neckbeard was destroyed in battle I wondered what was going to happen. As it turns out, after a few seconds I immediately respawned earlier in the encounter. I won’t swear by it but as far as I could tell, nothing had been lost and any enemies I’d killed before dying hadn’t respawned.

This experience definitely put a damper on my more positive impressions of space combat. There’s something about seeing my spaceship explode and almost instantly respawn that hurt my suspension of disbelief. STO sacrifices the emotional peak of succeeding against all odds to rid players of the despair that would result from having to rebuild after permanent losses. In the final equation, I prefer this approach but it definitely robs the experience of a true sense of accomplishment.

As well as assigning skills to your own character, three bridge officers accompany the player on away missions and provide special abilities to your ship. I can’t say I found them to be particularly remarkable. Essentially they just represent three additional and quite simple skill trees to be managed by the player. They felt like walking lumps of hitpoints and didn’t seem to have any real character. They felt more like pets than companions which is something of a misuse of what could potentially be interesting party members.

At some point during the development of STO Cryptic had some clear choices to make as to where it would sit in the Star Trek contuinuity. In the end they chose to set the game decades after the events established in the TV shows and films. For practical reasons this was probably the lesser of the many evils on offer. By setting it beyond the events of the TV series they have a greater creative license in terms of how they depict Star Trek. The trade-off is that there isn’t much fanservice on offer. In my time with the game I encountered a few familiar surnames, in particular a member of the Sulu family. At times it felt like a Star Trek skin wrapped around a standard MMORPG template.

The best compliment I can give to STO would be that I’m tempted to buy the full game once it’s released. I’ve been looking for a sci-fi MMORPG that isn’t as threatening as EVE Online for a while now. However, for me that’s all STO seems to be – a streamlined MMORPG in the Star Trek universe. The space combat was a pleasant surprise, although battles could get drawn out and a little repetitive. The on-foot questing is adequate, doing everything you’d expect it to do but not much more. There’s nothing here that leaps out at me as a mechanic that will set the world on fire.

Of course, these are just the impressions of someone with limited experience of the genre. For a more in-depth analysis of the game, no doubt filled with incomprehensible jargon, check back here when the beta is over for Wex‘s thoughts.