Star Trek Online

Now that the Open Beta has expired, Talarin takes a step back from shooting Klingons and muses on Star Trek Online. Just remember, it's all Mark's fault.

Last night, Star Trek Online finished it's Open Beta with a flourish and laid on a "major event" for the players before they were all banished into the virtual wilderness. I wanted to take a moment to talk about my own impressions of the game so far.

Note that this is not meant to be a review, although I will probably write one after the game has launched.

This sordid tale starts with a conversation that Mark and I had via Steam chat, where he extolled the virtue of the game. Me, being a bit of a Trek fan anyway, gave it some thought - went "what the hell" and purchased the pre-order via Steam. After downloading some 10GB of data, I promptly tried to log in and couldn't and had to wait until the next day before I could have a stab at it. Now, I'm not the most patient of people and that probably wasn't my best start.

Character Creation and Tutorial

The game opens with the creation of your character and naming of your first command. I'm not going to labour this area, as Pete did a nice number in putting a YouTube video up (see the earlier article in the STO section) but I found it pretty much as I expected based on previous RPGs I'd played. It certainly wasn't a chore.

The game then hurls you into a first-mission-cum-tutorial which both teaches you the basics of the game and explains what a junior officer is doing in command of a starship. Broadly speaking it was simple enough to get through, although I felt that many important functions weren't explained well and you were expected to figure a lot out for yourself - which wasn't really appreciated.

There's also some snippets which explain the state of the galaxy as it is now (set some 50 years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis) which can basically be summed up as "everyone hates the Federation".

To it's credit (and so important in such a big franchise) it is done well enough that you really can imagine it being a proper Trek adventure and (as a fan) it was very easy to get carried through that.

Options, options, options

I should quickly say that the game doesn't seem to stint on how much you can customise your character and equipment. From the start, when you can choose your discipline (tactical, science, engineering) you have a miriad of options open to you about how to equip yourself, your crew (you can pick up or recruit bridge officers to team up with you) and ship.

Then of course, as you level up (aka get promoted) you can get bigger and better ships.

I quite like the system.

Boldly going where thousands of players have gone before

From the end of the tutorial, you are told to report to your new commanding officers and can start completing missions. At first it was all lovely with missions such as patrolling areas, saving miners, a spot of diplomacy and carrying dignatories to other places - it all has a Trek-episode feel.

Missions take place in space and ground arenas (sometimes both) and the combat is pretty absorbing (although seemed a bit too easy at times).

However, after a while I did get to the point at which I said "is this it?". That's not to say that there aren't a few memorable moments: taking on a battleship on a mission and finding that I was desperately outmatched was a bit of a moment of panic (thanks to Flashy and Mark for saving my bacon there) and, conversely, turning up at a system to help Mark who was getting cuffed by a Klingon squadron was another.

It's just, after a while, it all seemed to get a bit samey.

It's only a Beta

In fairness, I was playing the beta, where the team are testing out machanics and gameplay (and server systems) to ensure things are working as they should. It's unlikely that we were playing all of the launch content and Cryptic (the developers) have already said that they'll be adding bits and pieces into the game as time goes on. It's not their first MMORPG by any stretch of the imagination, so I'll assume that they know what they're doing.

At the same time, if the game is to keep long lasting appeal then more variety of content MUST be available than we've seen thus far. Content and variety is, after all, king.

We saw enough in the "End of Beta Event" to show that the developers have some ability to add some quite cool stuff into the game (mass story-driven events), albeit it certainly wasn't the finished article and a few quite obvious flaws were shown up. I bet they'll have been learned from though.

Would I recommend it? Yes, absolutely. Especially if you're a fan of Star Trek.

27th January 2010, 20:13