Star Trek Online First Look

When Cryptic announced that they had acquired the Star Trek license and were busy working on Star Trek Online while at the same time being busy developing their new superhero-MMO Champions Online, people were understandably nervous. Even Blizzard, sitting on all those money bags, seems unable to produce enough polished and entertaining content to keep the playerbase happy for a single MMO, how on earth a smaller developer would manage doing not one, but two major MMOs, more or less at the same time. Even if they'd share the underlying technology, the sheer volume of content, gameplay design, tweaking and testing would be mindboggling.

Well, after Champions Online I guess we got an answer to that question. For details, you can check our review here. In retrospect, I was probably too kind to the game and it would have deserved harsher words. In any case, Champions Online indicated that Cryptic's "solution" was to skimp on everything. Major features that were barely functional, gameplay balancing that was done with a pseudo-random number generator and content that was so paper-thin that I doubt you can find a single "lifetime subscriber" that can honestly say that they are getting good value for money out of that game.

Trailer

Mere four months later, Cryptic now is about to launch a second MMO, Star Trek Online. Sadly everything seems to be pointing towards a re-run. In many ways, Star Trek Online feels a lot like Age of Conan at launch - rushed, unfinished, poorly balanced and thin on content. As the game hasn't technically launched yet, I'll give Cryptic the benefit of the doubt - a final word and scoring has to wait until a proper review based on the "real deal", sometime after the launch. During the "marketing beta", STO has received large patches with many fixes and tweaks that have wildly swinging the game balance around, so in theory, there is still hope for that mythical miracle patch just before launch.

This first look preview will include my initial impressions on what to expect based on the open beta as it is about a week before the launch (currently scheduled to be 2nd of February, with Head Start for preorders beginning on 29th of January). It is up to you if you believe in unicorns and launch day miracle patches. My view is that this is what we are going to get and it isn't very pretty.

Instance Trek

After the (very good) character generation - the bit that has always been solid in Cryptic games - my first impressions of the actual gameplay are not flattering. Just like in Champions, Cryptic has decided to toss the player in the middle of an epic event and you are expected to familiarize you with the controls and the basic game mechanics while a massive battle against the Borg is going on. Oh, actually, scratch that... there is nothing "massive" in Star Trek Online - it is all thinly populated instanced copies of zones, exactly like Champions Online. Both games obviously share the same engine and server code.

So, a battle against the Borg plays out in the background while you learn to move around, talk to NPCs, watch a loading screen, click glowing objects, watch a loading screen, shoot enemy NPCs and move about a bit, watch a loading screen, shoot some more NPCs and learn to crouch for aiming, watch a loading screen, click another glowing object... well, you get the idea. Everything is instanced and partitioned into tiny sections and basic "ground" gameplay is basically a Star Trek skinned version of Champions Online. Indoor areas also suffer from a puzzling "giant hall syndrome" - all rooms and hallways are several times larger than they should be, with doors over two times taller than your average Starfleet officer.

You also get to pilot a starship and blow up some Borg ships and... there goes the suspension of disbelief, straight out of airlock, before the tutorial is over. A newbie field promoted ensign-acting-as-captain flying a crappy ship, blowing up Borg hardware at such ease that if you still happened to be immersed in the STO world after the assault of the loading screens during the early parts of the tutorial, the space combat part takes care of that problem. Cryptic, you have the most obvious "newbie tutorial" tool known to man, Holodeck, at your disposal and you go for this? I'm almost tempted to include a "Picard Facepalm" picture right here. Google it up, in case you don't know what I mean.

ompleted a small tour of the starbase at Earth, you are handed a bunch of generic MMO quests and then sent off to command your crappy Miranda-class ship around the galaxy. You do not actually command a ship from a bridge view - instead you travel by steering a model of your ship around a map of the sector. The map view is effectively a big room dotted with star systems and sector markers, complete with stupid invisible walls and marked edges that toss you to another sector (oh, another loading screen...). I guess a continuous map view of the whole galaxy was apparently too much for the Cryptic engine. This is the first time you actually see more than a couple of other players to go about doing their business, but like every other part of the game, even the map view is instanced - 30-40 players per copy seems to be the standard.

Missions are, at least initially, very generic stuff. Fly to solar system X, fight either in space or on foot, click some glowing objects, collect loot and XP, repeat. What strikes to me as the biggest issue with all this is that everything is just generic MMO gameplay with a Trek skin applied on top. Instead of being a Star Trek game, STO is a MMO game with some Star Trek makeup.

The game is also very combat heavy and the sheer volume of ships and NPCs you have to kill during even the most basic mission is just silly... I mean, a basic job to investigate an outpost that hasn't been heard from for a while and the game expects you to blow up a dozen Klingon warships (alone, still in your newbie Miranda-class starship with basic weapons), taking on up to 3-4 ships at once. You are then expected to proceed on foot and blast away a small army of Klingon warriors with your away team. These are not Klingons - these are generic_MMO_enemy_level1 with some Klingon models and textures.

The only upside is that at least the space battle mechanics are, on the most basic level, passable. You have to maneuver your ship to present different shield quadrants to the enemy, take into account weapon systems with limited firing arcs and further spice things up with bridge officers doing "special moves" of sorts - boosting shields, improving weapons and so on. It is very much two-dimensional affair with no top/bottom shields and little reason to move up/down, but Star Trek space battles never were that three dimensional to begin with - with Wrath of Khan being one of the exceptions that proves my point - so I guess it is okay.

Beaming Down

Should your mission include a ground part, you get to beam down to yet another tiny instanced area, this time with an away team consisting of your bridge officers and random redshirts filling up any leftover slots. To complete the task at hand, the away team runs around in a Trek-skinned Champions Online mission, complete with packs of enemies that sometimes include bosses (sorry, I mean "officers") that are completely blind to anything that happens more than ten feet away. At least in Champions Online you were a superhero that could be expected to take on an army of villains and the combat was suitably over-the-top. Here you just fumble around shooting phasers, watching the AI to fail at pathfinding and duck away to keep your "personal shields" topped up in case you get shot. Can't recall seeing personal shields in Trek, but I guess there had to be a way for characters to take tons of weapon fire without getting nasty questions why they are still standing.

Instead of actually trying to model combat that would somehow look a bit like in the TV series, STO is just reskinning Champions Online and replacing superpowers with special shots and gadgets. Heck, I find the whole combat-heavy gameplay to be decisively so-not-Star Trek that in my opinion Cryptic has completely missed the mark in their treatment of the license.

Star Trek has always been primarily about exploration, talking and problem-solving - often with liberal amounts of technobabble thrown in. STO does none of these things in any noticeable quantity and substitutes them with massive amounts of senseless combat that is poorly executed and doesn't fit the theme. Yes, there are several specific missions that feel a bit more like an episode of Star Trek, but for each interesting storyline mission there is five others that are nothing more than "shoot X enemies and click some glowy objects or blow up Y number of enemy ships" - repetitive, unimaginative, boring and not Star Trek.

STO also appears not to bother explaining away dying and has no death penalty whatsoever - got killed along with the rest of your away team or watched your ship get blown up? Well, just wait a few seconds for a respawn. Kamikaze tactics seem to work just fine - just keep zerging and you'll do fine. Not sure about you, but I would be extremely worried that such basic gameplay aspects appear unfinished two weeks before launch.

Further adding to the confusion, the skill system is poorly explained and there seems to be no respec options available. I assume this is because originally skills were supposed to be uncapped - in essence, you could eventually learn every available skill to maximum level. This was just recently changed to a skill cap, requiring specialization. I'm not entirely sure what the final word on this is and in game it is hard to see practical benefits from spending skill points, at least early on, so I'll just chalk the whole skill system to "needs more work" category.

Multiplayer? Where?

Yes, there are other players in the game as well. Not that you have to care about the fact as there is absolutely no need talk to anyone. As an attempt to try and get people to play together, by default most mission instances have Auto Grouping on. In this mode, you are automatically tossed into an instance of the area with some random people who happen to be on the same mission. Any opposition automatically scales based on the number of players your side has. In away team bits, any additional human players replace AI-controlled away team members.

In principle, an interesting idea to inject some multiplayer action into otherwise instanced-to-death solo game. Sadly the system is ripe for exploitation and game mechanics feel unfinished. You can just warp in or beam down, go watch some TV while letting others to do the killing, returning when the mission completes. There is no way for others to kick you out and there is no penalty for leeching. It doesn't even matter if they somehow try to get you killed due to the lack of death penalty. In missions where the objective is to find some glowing items, there is no real benefit from being the one who bothers shooting at the enemies, so you can let others do the hard work and just quickly grab the mission item and get out. At least when playing with a NPC away team, you actually have to do some bits yourself to complete the required objectives.

During space-based missions, you can also end up with an unfinishable mission if enough people decide to take off mid-mission. If you entered with four people, you got enemy spawns based on that - completely unkillable with just one or two ships. In theory, I guess you can wait and see if more people turn up, but in practice the system is just broken.

Stuff like this should be well thought out and solved ages ago in a game that is already in "marketing beta". This is basic game mechanics level stuff that may not be trivial to fix. Heck, many aspects of STO gameplay could have used a lot more iteration before any beta testing ever took place. I'm sure griefers will have a field day with the feature and the the practical result is that everyone will turn Auto Grouping off (it is an option - thankfully) and play the game as Massively Singleplayer Online Game instead.

Klingons! Cardassians! Romulans!

In addition to Starfleet characters of various species, it is possible to create a Klingon faction character once you reach rank 6. However, at launch Klingons have effectively no PvE content available, so the only reason to create one would be to play very limited PvP (with balancing to be patched in later). In practice, anyone who plays a Klingon will be playing a punching bag for the masses that are playing their Starfleet main characters.

Klingon side of the game is also unfinished in other ways - Klingon faction has no tutorial and you instantly level up to rank 5 when talking to the first NPC after character creation. This probably explains the odd reason to make them unlockable only after you have completed the Federation tutorial and reached rank 6. Cryptic didn't have a tutorial ready for Klingon side, so they... improvised. There are also many small details that betray hurried inclusion of them. You find plenty of Starfleet insignias and other obviously unfinished bits - transporter effects are not Klingon, many decisively non-Klingon icons are shared and while some effort has gone towards faction-specific UI elements, it is a mishmash at this point. Romulans and Cardassians are even worse off - they have been quietly moved to "future promises" section. In practice, the game has only one playable faction (Federation) at launch.

The license does offer almost unlimited potential for new factions and locations, but considering what we appear to be getting at launch (not much), I would be very careful about all the promises Cryptic is making about future content. I'm sure there is a pile of stuff cut from launch that is in different stages of development - available trailers show as much - but considering that most of the content that is going to be there at launch also feels rough and unfinished, it may be a while before all the big promises are fulfilled and I have some doubts about the quality.

Milking The Fanboys

While Star Trek Online really could use another 6-12 months of work, ready or not, it is launching in February. Marketing departments at Cryptic and Atari are going ahead with the launch, complete with special deals for the fanboys. The most obvious money grab is the lifetime subscription (special pricing before launch, while supplies last) - should you wish to skip paying the standard monthly subscription fees ($15 a month), you can opt for a lifetime subscription - yours for the cheap price of $239! It should be noted that they are talking about the lifetime of the game, not you - there is a difference. For those that might hesitate paying a grand total of almost $300 to play STO (no, game box price is not included in the lifetime deal - that's extra), Cryptic offers some exclusive perks - the ability to play a "liberated Borg" character and two additional character slots.

"Two character slots? Who ever fills all their character slots in a MMO?" Well, Star Trek Online is normally limited to three characters per account with one of them reserved for a Klingon character that you must first unlock. You also cannot just create more characters on other servers as the game uses one global server cluster, just like Champions Online. It all seems like an obvious set-up - I'm willing to bet that Cryptic is planning to sell extra character slots at a premium.

Even if the actual benefits of playing an ex-Borg are questionable, when deals like this go beyond cosmetic rewards like pets, limiting a "playable race" or a reasonable number of character slots only to someone who is silly enough to effectively pre-pay 16 months of subscription time on a bunch of promises is flat out wrong. In my humble opinion, this time Cryptic has gone too far. Pre-order bonuses, special deluxe edition bonuses and other junk are a disease, and the only way this crap will end is if people stop buying games that use them. Everything also points towards plans to double-dip with a microtransaction store in addition to the subscription fees - perhaps the next playable race will be sold to you for Cryptic Points? Of course the microtransaction store isn't quite ready yet, so we don't know what the actual plans are.

Initial Impressions: Not Ready

Based on my initial impressions, I cannot recommend Star Trek Online for anyone at this time. It is unfinished and full of gameplay loopholes large enough to drive through a Galaxy-class starship. Even if all the bugs, loopholes and balance issues somehow magically got fixed, we then get to the other big problem - it just isn't immersive or fun to play. Everything is instanced to the death, loading screens break the action at every turn and missions are so unimaginative and filled with senseless slaughter that it just doesn't feel like Trek. In many ways STO feels like a "burger MMO" for the consoles - which I guess was the plan at Cryptic all along. Never mind that they haven't spoken much about the Xbox 360 version of Champions Online recently and with STO heading towards a very rough launch, I wouldn't hold my breath.

Okay, this is just my first impression based on limited play hours, so I guess we'll see. I understand that after level 11 (Lt. Commander rank) you can specialize to three different ship types that effectively fill "tank", "healer" and "dps" roles. While this is yet another generic MMO gameplay concept being re-branded for a Trek game, it is possible that later on there is some actual reason to group and combat may gain some additional depth. However, at least early on abilities are very limited, missions lack depth and combat is repetitive and boring.

For a MMO gamer that doesn't care about the license, STO offers a pile of rehashed gameplay mechanics that can be found implemented better in just about any other major MMO. Those days when a grossly unfinished MMOs could be thrown out with the hope that the audience would still gobble it all up and wait for patches are history, and that doesn't bode well for STO. As for a Star Trek fan that is new to MMOs, I guess STO could provide entertainment for a couple of weeks. Still, once the shallow and bug-ridden gameplay is uncovered beneath all those Star Trek bits, I'm sure Trekkies will be the ones that will be mercilessly ripping the game apart for failing to be true to the franchise on forums long after MMO gamers have already moved on - either back to their favorite games or to beta testing the next MMO, hoping that maybe it will be somehow different. Too bad. I would have loved to play a solid sci-fi MMO with a strong existing universe, but it looks like this ain't it. Bioware, you are my only hope...

Update: People have pointed out that the third character slot isn't actually reserved for a Klingon. My bad. Still, if you wish to play what little Klingon content there is, you most likely will still roll a Klingon which then eats up one of the character slots. Conclusion is still the same - the number of slots available is very limited and the carrot of two more slots is being presented as a reason to go for the lifetime subscription, which in my opinion is going to be poor value due to lack of content. Just ask anyone who went for the lifetime subscription with Champions Online...