Star Trek is one of the most known and loved names in entertainment. Unfortunately, Star Trek games have historically been horrible piles of crap. When Cryptic bought the rights to create a Star Trek MMO, they took on a huge task. Could they please the hordes of Trekkie fans while breaking the curse and producing a good game? Did they deliver?
The Good
Cryptic drew heavily from their Champions Online and City of Heroes background to create this game. As a result, they were able to create STO at record speed and incorporate a lot of time tested code and design. Some players have noted that sometimes STO feels like Champions Online in space.
Gameplay is split into two major aspects; avatar based and ship based. This fits the Star Trek theme where there are away teams that explore planets and ship combat. Avatar based combat is mostly standard MMO fare. The primary difference is that you are almost never alone. Other than the introductory missions, every mission seems to be team based composed of your own NPC bridge officers and/or other players. Your NPC bridge officers are pets with limited controls.
Whenever you enter an instance to do a mission, the game always tries to team you up with other players. This is true for both avatar and ship based missions. This is a great feature to promote team play.
Unlike standard MMO quests, most missions in STO are multipart affairs. It’s clear that Cryptic tried to focus on story by making every away team mission into something more complicated than the usual kill ten rats or delivery quests. This is a nice change from the norm, but I fear that it might mean that Cryptic will be slower at creating new content for the game.
Ship based combat is probably the biggest highlight in the game for me. You have to juggle your shields, energy levels, your movement (speed and direction) and your attacks all at the same time. If you aren’t paying attention, it’s quite possible to become overwhelmed very quickly.
One example of how ship based combat is interesting is the management of 4 different shields (front, right, left, rear). As long as your shields are up, your ship is safe from high damaging attacks. As a result, space combat is a constant back and forth where you are trying to attack the same shield to break it down, while protecting your own shields. To protect your shield, you can boost power to a specific shield to raise the regeneration rate, use a special engineering power or consumable or simply turn your ship in another direction. In addition, the basic starter ship has two lasers, one in the front and rear. So to be the most effective, you want to broadside your target so both of your lasers can attack the same target. The entire time, you have to juggle your power input into your offense, defense, movement and auxiliary functions. When facing multiple enemies, combat can become really hectic.
Avatar ground based combat benefits from the addition of the shield mechanic as well, to a lesser degree. Everyone has a shield and a health bar. Both are healed by different classes. There are no directional shields, but if you attack from the side or rear, you get a flanking bonus which results in significantly more damage.
Managing your bridge officers is a nice addition to the leveling process. You have to manage their gear as well as leveling them up and allocating skill points. Right now, I am somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer number of options. Leveling up in STO is not as straightforward as it is in other games and that is a good thing for the games longevity.
As you might expect from a Cryptic game, both your avatar and your ship are highly customizable. This is a big selling point for Cryptic and I’m sure that Cryptic will include more costume pieces as game rewards or purchasable items from their microtransaction shore.
STO runs great on my gaming rig. I’m playing at 1920×1200 with completely max’ed out settings and getting 50+ fps in most areas. Most people should be able to run STO without too many issues. Network lag is currently an issue in some areas, but since this is beta, the lag is excusable for now.
In terms of graphics, STO is passable. It’s not ugly, but, overall, it’s not particularly noteworthy either. Considering I’m running at maximum settings, I did expect more. The backdrop in outer space can look quite breathtaking at times.
The Bad
STO is heavily instanced. It’s as bad as Guild Wars. Everything is instanced. The heavy instancing can sometimes make STO feel like a single player game and this is a real problem. If I want to play a single player game, there are hundreds of better games where I can spend my limited time and money.
For many gamers, their primary problem with Champions Online was the instancing. STO is far worse. This is an issue for MMO gamers who love big expansive worlds to explore. Missions are instanced for solo or team gameplay. Common areas like the primary Earth starbase has multiple instances with a maximum cap on the population (similar to Champions Online). The maximum population in the primary Earth starbase seems very low, which makes STO feel even less like an MMO.
Moving between star systems is rather strange as well. You warp from your current star system into a strange meta-area called Sector Space, which is like a miniature version of the galaxy. In this instance, you pick another star system and your ship flies towards the destination until it’s close enough to zone in. Sector Space doesn’t look like anything real, so it’s rather jarring. I don’t understand the purpose of this meta-area.
Because of the constant instancing, there are a lot of load screens. I didn’t mind it all that much, but on slower machines, I can see it being a major annoyance.
On the plus side, Cryptic learned some lessons from the instancing in Champions Online. Chat channels span multiple instances in STO and it’s also much easier to find, create and join teams. This does go a long way towards minimizing the immersion breaking nature of having so many instances, but it’s not a perfect solution.
The ground based combat currently feels a bit rough. Gunplay feels okay, but melee attacks don’t feel right. It’s hard to explain the problem. I suppose for an MMO, this is typical, but for a game released in 2010, I expected more. After playing so many single player games recently, the combat in STO is really clunky by comparison.
I had some stability issues with STO as well. STO managed to hard freeze my computer on multiple occasions, forcing me to reboot. Since I’m running Windows 7, being forced to reboot is a big deal. I’m sure stability issues will get ironed out in time, but it’s worth noting.
I haven’t played enough to experience much of the crafting or PvP, so I’ll reserve judgment on them until a later time.
Another issue is that Cryptic currently only allows TWO characters per account. I’m sure we’ll be able to buy more from the Cryptic store, but TWO is ridiculously low. I can understand the need for Cryptic to build in more ways for them to make money, especially in this horrible economy, but having only two slots is extremely restrictive.
Conclusion
My beta experience so far is a mixed bag. I have a feeling that gamers are going to have wildly differing opinions of STO. Some will love it. Some will absolutely hate it.
As long as Cryptic doesn’t botch the launch, STO will probably do fine in terms of sales and subscriptions. After the MMO debacles of the last couple years, everyone’s expectations have bottomed out. The hype for STO is lower than I would expect for a Star Trek MMO and that is probably a good thing. A lot of gamers are skeptical of a new Star Trek game and a new Cryptic game. They are waiting around to see how well the game performs once it launches before making any commitments.
I am having fun right now, but based on Cryptic’s other games, my primary worry about STO is the longevity. Does it have enough content and depth to keep players around for more than a month or two? I don’t know.
As a final note, this post is my first impressions of the limited time I’ve spent playing the closed and open betas. There could be some major inaccuracies (which I will correct), but overall, this post is indicative of how I feel about the game right now.
STO runs great on my gaming rig. I’m playing at 1920×1200 with completely max’ed out settings and getting 50+ fps in most areas. Most people should be able to run STO without too many issues.STO runs great on my gaming rig. I’m playing at 1920×1200 with completely max’ed out settings and getting 50+ fps in most areas. Most people should be able to run STO without too many issues.STO runs great on my gaming rig. I’m playing at 1920×1200 with completely max’ed out settings and getting 50+ fps in most areas. Most people should be able to run STO without too many issues.