Star Trek Online

A friend of mine sent me a buddy key for Cryptic’s new Star Trek Online (STO) game. This is a massively-multi-player online game set in a the future of the Star Trek universe. I’m not so much of a trek fan that I’d go with either term Trekkie or Trekker, but at the same time, Star Trek is near and dear to me, as are MMOs, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I’m not going to offer a full review of the game; instead, I’ll just throw out the impressions I’ve developed after two nights’ playing.

The short synopsis: you start the game in media res as an ensign aboard a ship involved in a Borg invasion; you save the day, naturally, through a series of away- and in-space missions that also act as your tutorial for the game. Once you’re done, you warp to the Sol System, where you’r e promoted to lieutenant and given your first command. After that, the game proceeds through missions, multistep quests that have you exploring and fighting in space and on planets.

First, the very cool: It is the Star Trek Universe. All of the ships you’re flying around in are 100% canonical and cool, and the space and phaser combat and the sound effects are all right-on Star Trek. It’s also a nice change from World of Warcraft (WoW), the MMO I’ve been playing for the better part of 5 and ½ years.

In terms of game-play, I’m still not entirely comfortable with the interface yet. When you’re on the ground, the controls seem soft; there’s a bit of a delay between pressing a movement key and your movement coming through the character. It’s not much of a delay, but it’s enough to make things feel just a little unresponsive, a little lacking in crispness.

So yay for Star Trek. And yet...in some important ways, it doesn’t quite feel like Star Trek to me. The ship interiors, for one, don’t seem right, especially on the smaller ships. Rooms and hallways seem cavernous, which doesn’t quite fit a small vessel, and the interior of the space station doesn’t seem particularly Star-Trekky. Don’t ask me to define that, please.

But here’s the big immersion killer for me, and it’s the same point that just broke my heart about Pirates of the Burning Sea (PotBS): You do not get to walk around on your ship. When you’re flying around in space, you become your ship, and you never have the option of being on board, walking around. Sure, you can go to the “bridge” but it’s a generic bridge with no windows and nowhere else to go. You can’t even sit in the captain’s chair.

As I note, this lack really kills immersion for me. I don’t want to be my ship; I want to command my ship. The ship interface is fine—it’s easy to use and easy to work with—but if I’m a starship captain, well, I want to walk around on my ship!

This player-on-board-ship is one of the aspects of space flight that Star Wars Galaxies: Jump to Lightspeed got right. You could fly either via an external view, of you could go to a cockpit view, and if you were on a ship that had more than one seat, you could actually get up from your pilot’s chair and walk around. You can see a ship here (a side note; you could use your ship as a place to hold all your stuff, too). I think that if STO had gone this route, I would have been a happy, happy person all around.

Something else that sits a bit oddly with me: almost all of the action in STO takes places in instances, so when you go to do a mission, you’re the only person there. Now, I have, in the past, claimed that this is my preferred way of playing, and it’s not untrue, but at the same time, it makes for a really odd world. There are public places where you can interact with other folks, but very often, it’s just you. That’s both ok and not so much ok.

Communities make or break MMOs. WoW doesn’t really require people to take care of or look after each other, so the overall community in WoW is pretty crappy; that’s the argument for instancing, I suppose. On the other hand, a great community makes for a phenomenal game; I think about the communities that developed in the first days of Star Wars Galaxies for proof that a good community can help you overlook major flaws in a game.

My feelings are mixed, then. In ways, STO plays more like an RPG than an MMO, and I’m not entirely sure that’s a good or bad thing.

The instancing, though, presents another danger: if leveling continues the same way (get a mission, fly to a system, enter your instance, do your thing, comm out), the game’s going to get a little stale. Even though game play mixes away missions in, still, looking at the same basic scenario for 50 levels will decrease my desire to play. Again I point to PotBS: leveling in PotBS worked this way, and it was dreadful how quickly I got tired of the same basic premise over and over. City of Heroes had the same flaw.

There you go. STO is, at this point, a mixed bag for me, and so I don’t predict a long career in Starfleet. I’m enjoying it for now, and it remains to be seen how long the game holds my attention.