Ark's Ark

Note: This is my opinion of Star Trek Online as it currently stands just before launch. Like any MMO, it is likely to change greatly over the months and years, and not everything I say here will necessarily hold true at the time of reading.

Like so many, I had high expectations for a game based on Star Trek. I don’t think those expectations were unrealistic. Indeed, most of what I expected had already been done in other games. I love Star Trek, and I wanted to love this game. I was, as any of you that have bravely read all thirteen parts of my liveblog may have guessed, pretty darn disappointed. If you have a spare half hour and like watching paint dry, you can find the start of that epic here. I found both good and bad on that adventure, and depending on what you’re looking for in STO, you may find it more encouraging. Myself, I was looking for an MMORPG.

I have a lot of issues with STO, but I’ve already written about a million words on it, so I’ll try to keep this short:

War is everywhere!

Combat was always going to be a big part of any Star Trek MMO. I can live with (and enjoy!) having more fights in an hour of gameplay than would normally happen in a season of TNG. I did expect to be able to limit casualties, through diplomacy, trickery, or disabling ships. On the ground I expected to be able to set phasers to stun, and be able to leave my enemies unconscious but alive, ready to be beamed to the brig. Instead, I leave corpses and burning hulks in my wake.

Some people, especially on the forums, say that it is WAR!!! That we can’t act like Federation officers in the TV shows because we’re at war and the rules all change:

Firstly, us being at war was brought in after the fact as an excuse for the game being all about killing.

Secondly, the rules don’t change in war. Not for the Federation. We’re still supposed to abhor violence except when strictly necessary, and supposed to try to limit casualties on BOTH sides. In STO you have a mission where your job is to kill the witnesses to deeds Starfleet don’t want reported. Picard would resign his commission if he was ordered to do something so obviously against everything the Federation stands for. “The first duty of every Starfleet Officer is to the truth.”.

The non-combat missions consist of you wandering around an empty planet, or bit of space finding glowy things (usually 5 of them) and pressing F. Sometimes they mix it up a bit and you have to fight enemies AND press F at glowy things. Sometimes those glowy things are people and don’t actually glow, but they work in much the same manner.

Combat in STO is fun, don’t get me wrong. If you want an online ship-combat game then you’ll probably really enjoy this. I also enjoy the ground combat, which is quite chaotic and surprisingly tactical.

The lack of choice.
All decisions are made for you. There is only one way through every mission. As mentioned, frequently that one way involves doing something you might utterly disagree with.

The problem-solving aspect of Star Trek has been completely neglected. Any interaction with a console or device is simply a case of it being one more glowy object you have to walk up to and press F at. If only they’d taken the time to have actual engineering/science skills, and minigames to use them in.

NPCs too are just objects you press F at to talk to. You might have a few different questions you can ask them, but in the end, you have to press the green line to carry on with the mission. They feel like mere automatons. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the “diplomatic” exploration missions, where they ask for a resource, you give it to them, and then thats the end of the mission. Mike Singleton’s games showed, two decades ago, how you could procedurally generate interestingish NPCs with their own likes, dislikes, goals, and desires. There was no need for STO’s NPCs to feel so static.

Pull Up! Pull Up!!!
We’re limited to 45% pitch against an arbitrary flat plane in STO, and we cannot roll. Post-hoc reasons why this is a great thing have been trotted out (often suggesting that we, the players, just can’t handle full 3D movement), but I suspect the real reason is that STO uses the same engine as Champions Online. As the bug which has you as a ship on a station, or a man in space shows, the space combat engine is simply giving our character a spaceship body. It drastically reduces your freedom to use interesting tactics, and further makes all space fights feel samey. The Jump to Lightspeed expansion for SWG, for all it’s faults, showed that full 3D movement was entirely possible, and fun, in an MMO.

Klingons
The Klingon faction has almost no content outside of PvP. That is not an exaggeration. Apparently this is being fixed after release. Until then, Klingons are just there to provide Federation PvPers with someone to shoot.

Crafting
There is none. Sure, there’s harvesting, in as much as you find anomalies in space and on the ground that you can get objects out of. But then you take those objects to an NPC on a starbase and swap them for equipment. That’s not crafting. That’s just buying stuff with yet another currency.

Where are our scientists and engineers, building clever contraptions, and jury-rigging ship improvements? Researching cures for mysterious plagues, or inventing a weapon that can harm an otherwise invulnerable space-worm?

To End

Star Trek Online is in many ways like Pirates of the Burning Sea, but without the in-depth economy, and the meaningful RvR. Even with those positive differences, I still tired of PotBS (though I pop back from time to time) as one ship combat feels very much like another. Unlike on the land, there is far less variety of location and enemy to make you feel you’re doing something different. STO has exactly this same problem.

I pre-ordered from Direct2Drive. They have a no return policy on MMOs, even if you change your mind before launch. If it were not for that, I would have cancelled my pre-order. As it is, I will play out my included month, and I suppose I’ll see what sort of state the game is at that point. Maybe magical things will happen between now and then, but we need more features, not just more of the same sort of content we already have. I’ve been at this too long to trust developer promises terribly much though.

Final advice for any MMO developer that happens to swing by:

1. Stop designing MMO to be released on both PCs and consoles. You end up removing half the depth, the game fails, and then it never ends up coming out on a console in the end anyway. See: Champions Online, Age of Conan.

2. You need to try to appeal to multiple playstyles. The successful MMOs knew this. STO, I fear, will only appeal to people who really really like the limited space combat it offers. Perhaps also the subset of Star Trek fans who find the bits outside of the fight scenes boring.

3. Don’t make all the best stuff pre-order bonuses. I know that the idea of someone buying multiple copies of the game in order to get all the gear is the sort of thing that makes accountants weep tears of joy. Personally I find it rather exploitative. STO made the uniforms from the television shows all different pre-order bonuses, leaving us with unfamiliar, and not terribly nice uniforms. Being like Picard or Sisco is why so many people are buying the game. It boggles my mind that something so iconic, and able to bring joy, is considered an extra. That greed will cost in the long run.

Some folks will enjoy Star Trek Online for what it is. You might be one of them, and even if you only get a month or so of enjoyment out of it, you might consider that a good deal. Maybe I had unreasonable expectations. I hope, one day, someone makes the Star Trek MMO I dreamed of.

Would somebody please buy the Cryptic team a Next Generation boxset. Ideally force the marketing team to watch it too. I’m all for trying to attract non-trekkers, but there are actually quite a lot of Star Trek fans. I think we’d be a big enough demographic for them to do quite well, if they’d stop trampling on our childhoods Abrams-style.

That sound you can hear is Gene Roddenberry spinning in his grave.

I’ll be writing my final Star Trek Online conclusions some time between the end of Open Beta (to give them a chance, however slim, for a wonderpatch), and the beginning of headstart.

In the meantime, that advert pretty much tells you what you need to know about STO as it currently stands.

Continuing on from Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 11 – Patch Edition.

Or you could return to the beginning of our STO Open Beta coverage with Part 1.

2:17 pm GMT, Day 12

I took the day off yesterday, dealing with Jack Steel related things, and Cryptic have been busy with the patches.

Update 20100119a.10

Update 20100119a.12

Most notably, the issues I had in the last episode with combat being too easy, and with exploration clusters not having enough anomalies, are supposed to have been rectified.

2:55 pm GMT, Day 12

With just three days until the end of Beta, I’m not going to go through individual missions in much detail unless they really stand out as something different to what I’ve already described. I want to make sure I get to Lieutenant Commander and can show what happens at that point.

I only need another 500 or so skill points to be promoted, and to that end I’m doing a few Exploration missions in the Arucanis Arm. Not having any problem finding anomalies reasonably quickly now.

Lieutenant Grall’s “Do three Explorations” missions are now granting Badges of Exploration, which is good news. I should pop back to Sol and see what 75 1st Order Badges of Exploration will get me.

Badges of Exploration are finally discovered!

In the center area of Sol Spacedock there are NPCs you can buy goods off using your Badges of Exploration. It all seems ground-based equipment. Armour, weapons, and kits are all on offer. For the tier 1 items, they are all of common (white named) quality, except for the kits that are green. From tier 2 onwards the guns and armour are green, and the kits are blue, making it a lot more useful.

Speaking of item quality, we got some information on those green named Bridge Officers that turned up recently. Stormshade gave us some details.:

Here’s the deal with the “higher quality” Bridge Officers:

1) You guys haven’t seen all the Bridge Officer Skills in the game yet. These guys have a chance to grant you access to those uncommon, rare, and super rare skills. They also might have higher tiered skills in a lower level slot. The only skills available at the Bridge Officer Trainer are the common skills.

2) The traits these Bridge Officers have are superior to the traits a “white” Bridge Officer has.

At the moment the rarity of a Bridge Officer skill is not marked. I have no doubt that someone (maybe even me) will sort out a list of the rarities before long, but it would be helpful if we could tell just by looking at them.

4:48 pm GMT, Day 12

When you spend enough skill points to reach level 11, Admiral Quinn contacts you and asks you to come to see him at Sol Spacedock.

On speaking to him you gain 6 more inventory slots, 12 more bank slots, a free costume change, and a plaque which will get your your first real ship! Your maximum number of Bridge officers increases to 6 from 4.

5:02 pm GMT, Day 12

Taking that plaque to the shipyard, via the turbolifts, gives you a choice of free ship you can receive. Either a cruiser, escort, or science ship. In spite of being an engineer I went for a science ship, as I suspect the low manoeuvrability of the cruiser would not agree with my flying style.

The Shipyard also has consoles, ship weapons, and other goods available for Badges of Exploration. I pick up a nice new phaser turret.

And here is my new vessel. The USS Opera is a Nova class science vessel. For any given tier and category there are up to three ships. They have identical stats and you can mix and match the parts between them. This one is pure Nova, simply because I think it looks nicest that way.

The Nova Class Science Ship

To get a good idea of what ships have which capabilities, I recommend Suricata’s most excellent ship chart. It shows not only what the ships look like, but also gives you details of weapon hard-points, manoeuvrability ratings, and much more.

10:04 am GMT. Day 13

Another patch came in overnight, bringing us up to version20100123a.1. Patchnotes are here.

Muck Later

After a little rest, we finish up with the End of Beta Bonanza!