Star Trek Online: worst MMO evar?

I've been playing Star Trek Online in the open beta for a few days. I set a goal to get to level 6 so I could create a Klingon and see how the other half lives. But after RAGE QUITing five times for a variety of reasons, I'm not sure I'll make it, so I'm posting my thoughts now.

Simply put, it's the worst MMO I've ever played. I pride myself on being balanced and finding the good in all games, but there's not much good to find in STO. I'm not alone: I know three people personally who pre-ordered the game, played the beta, and then cancelled their pre-orders. There may be something good buried inside the game, and I'll try to highlight it, but the game suffers from WoW-clone gameplay, a complete disdain for storytelling, and being released at least a year before it's ready. Between this and the fiasco of Champions Online I wonder if Cryptic has long to last. Sorry guys, I really wanted to like your games.

The good

Space combat is innovative. It's very positional: you have shields on 4 sides, so you need to maneuver to keep your weak shield safe. You also have limited firing arcs so positioning and weapons loadout are subtle. It's 2D flying, but that's OK with me.

I like the duality of having both space combat and ground-based action.  Characters can specialize in either space or ground action, so you can focus on one type of action. (Although as near as I can tell, there's never an option in any mission; you always have to do what is scripted). Switching between modes is a nice break.

Bridge officers are cool. In space they give you special abilities, like my engineering officer lets me divert emergency power to shields. On the ground they are your away team NPCs, like a group of particularly capable Warcraft hunter pets. They have their own names and levels and skills. Once they fix the slavery language it will be nice role-playing.

The bad

As innovative as the combat seems at first, it gets boring fast. Every single battle I fought was basically "broadside the bad guys to hit him with both phasers". Simple WoW-style cooldowns that you just turn on all the time. It's particularly difficult to do anything tactical when there's more than a couple of enemy ships.

There's no sense of exploration in the game. Even after playing just a few hours every star system looks identical. And every place has been explored by 1000 other people before you. The actual "exploration missions" are laughable repeatable quest crap. The last one I ran literally had this goal text: "Scan Device. Scan Different Device. Devices Scanned 0/3".

They don't use the Star Trek IP well. It's a weird mish-mash of all 200+ years of Trek lore, sticking Tribbles in with Trill. It fails to capture the aesthetic of Star Trek. A common visual experience is the galaxy map screen with 40 little dinky Federation ships all clustered together; I missed the majesty of the Enterprise on her own taking on a single alien ship in empty space. And on the ground the Federation has suddenly been overrun with Andorrians, and Bajorans, and weird goofy tall alien guys at the extreme of the character designer sliders. Part of what's charming about Star Trek is how human-centric it is where the alien characters are even more human than the humans. STO has too many non-humans, both PC and NPCs. Finally, the game is full of dumb hat-tips to Star Trek lore, like the tailor NPC being a Cardassian or the Emergency Medical Hologram saying "I'm a doctor not a.." Get it? It's like two nerd moments in one! And no depth to back it up.

Everyone is a captain. I've been on a few PUG group quests and we're five Starship Captains all beaming down (in our red shirts) to kill a few Klingon thugs. How does that make sense?

There's no meaningful economy. They have the same anemic auction house as Champions Online, without even basic search capability. There's a confusing array of currencies: at least six different kinds I could count. And there's apparently no player crafting. There's some hint of some (with another 10 kinds of currencies!) but they just get turned in to an NPC with a vendor interface.

The dumb

There's no death penalty or explanation of death mechanics. Your starship blows up and then you respawn. That's it. Same thing on the ground.

Loot. Sometimes a spaceship blows up or a guy on the ground dies, and they leave behind a glowing object that's loot. No spaceship wreckage, no corpses, just bizarre objects with no context.

No login queue. I won't harsh on the game for being underprovisioned in a beta, but the system has no mechanism for handling overcapacity, just reporting errors while you keep clicking "login" hoping to get lucky.

Lots of bugs. Again, it's a beta, so fair enough. But how do you launch an open beta with a bug that has you in your starship "walking" around a station, or in your spaceship-sized body floating in space? Also, half the missions I tried were broken in some way or the other. It's not just beta, it's untested.

You're flying grandly through space when some mission text pops up. Your ship comes to an immediate stop (no inertia) and the whole game pauses while you read the text. When you close the dialog, your ship is still dead in space.

Conclusion

I didn't have any particular expectations for Star Trek Online. But I did expect it'd be kind of fun and somewhere near a complete game. The market could certainly bear another space MMO. Eve Online is great but it's a very complicated wine, difficult to enjoy. (Oh, if they had combat anywhere near as fun as STO!). There was some hope STO would do something fun. Nope.

Between the mess that's the STO open beta and the mess from Champions Online, I can only conclude that Cryptic is undercapitalized. They have some good ideas in both games, but CO was not ready when it launched and STO doesn't look to be ready, either. Maybe it was a mistake for them to take on two MMOs at once and they just have to get it out the door or else the company closes?

Comments

[Andrew]

Yikes - none of this sounds good.

[Adlib]

That sounds awful. I have to admit I started laughing uncontrollably when you mentioned the goofy looking characters generated by messing with the sliders. My husband did that in the Aion beta, and it made me think of that so I know exactly what you mean. That really had me laughing!

[We Fly Spitfires]

I was really excited when I first read about Star Trek Online but from what I've heard from people's beta impression, the game play sounds to be lacking. It's a real shame because the IP has so much potential.

[Gebeji]

I have been playing the game since closed beta and i'm still undecided as to whether or not i will buy it. Unfortunaltely i haven't been able to get to level 10 to see another ship and i don't think i will either before launch, which is a shame (my character got wiped 3 times in closed beta, and without a group or doing a lot of pvp i don't really know how anybody gets so high level so fast, unless they play all day long all the time, which is only possible now because playtime was limited in the closed beta).

[Romo]

Thanks for a very informative (and ironically humorous) review. As an ST fan, I would have been willing to participate in an imperfect launch, as long as my support contributed in some way to future development worthy of the brand. But from the sound of it, this effort may be entirely misbegotten from the start and doomed to be abandoned. I can't sink time into that, despite my anticipation. I'll wait for post-beta reviews, and hold purchase for now. You may have saved me many wasted hours, thanks again.

[TK]

I have greatly enjoyed my STO experience. I will just go ahead and say I am Star Trek fan boy, but if the game sucked I wouldn't have signed up for a life time sub. Headstart launched on Friday at 1pm EST and I hit Commander 1 (level 21?) this morning. There are some throwbacks to classic episodes, there is one with the portal that Bones jumped through and got sent back in time. Ground combat has become much smoother since Open Beta. Space Combat is great!! You really can't get a feel of the game without putting around 20-30 gameplay hours in. The basic ship is like playing WoW lvl 1-9, it sucks! The game starts at lvl 11 (Lt 11), the game then "begins" at level cap in WoW, I think it will be the same in STO. Back in WoW (pre=BC) the game sucked until you hit 40 and got a mount, so I am not sure why everyone is so quick to destroy a game because it doesn't give you everything like WoW. I want some challenge...as long as that challenge isn't trying to find out when the server will up and running. Just my opinion

[Nelson]

Glad you like it, TK, and I hope your lifetime subscription gives you many years of fun. I hate that I bagged so hard on STO because I really do want to support the game. But, well, my experience was terrible. Even after the UI patch that came out mid-open-beta. It's good to know the game picks up at level 11, but I have to disagree with you about WoW: levels 1-9 are super fun, particularly the first time. A game that only starts being fun after 30 hours hasn't got long for the world, I fear.

[Jeff]

I'm not sure why so many reviews talk about how innovative the space combat is. This has been around in Star Trek games since 1999 or earlier (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_Starfleet_Command for an example) and the basic 2D maneuvering, weapon ranges/arcs, and hull (shield) strength have been in plenty of naval combat games. The space combat might as well be a direct copy of Pirates of the Burning Sea, except with different graphics. Oh, yeah, and PotBS had different ammunition for disabling an opponent's rudder, sails, crew, etc.

If the best thing about the game is the way you have to "fly" (in 2D?) in circles to bring your weapons to bear on an enemy ship, well, that will get old quickly.

[Xenon]

I'm a Trekkie and not ashamed to admit it, and I play the City of Heroes MMO. After almost 3 years of City of Heroes, I am still not bored with the game. On the other hand, even being a total Trek fanboy, it took me two days of playing a 10-day "guest pass" trial period to get bored with it.

(Though it was fun to fly around in a ship called the U.S.S. Crunchy Frog)

[Bob]

I was so disappointed with STO i so wanted to like it, after waiting all this time for this crap. I certainly wont be buying any cryptic titles in future, like the poster above i am a Star Trek fanboy, but this games sucks monkey balls. thre are better ftp's available. On a side note im enjoying FE, the free 10day trial is available, and i think im goona sub for a while, was not expecting FE to be as good as it is, still go pleanty of potential.