Star Trek Online

Note from Quik:
There will be no STO review from me. I just got Fated’s review in the e-mail and after reading it I cannot express enough how right he is. I feel exactly the same way about Star Trek Online and Fated’s review opened my eyes to some aspects I pretended I did not see but somehow felt in the back of my head the same way as Fated. There would no point in my writing exactly the same review, especially since Fated’s is greatly written and pretty much says it all. So all you Trekkies who want to try STO because “it’s all I’ve dreamed about for years and years”, you must read this review!

Star Trek Online review by: Fated

Star Trek Online has a generally well deserved reputation as one of the worst MMO’s ever. To give you an idea, a recent review of Final Fantasy 14 I’ve read had not one single good thing to mention about the game, but did give the following “positive”: Not as bad as Star Trek Online. Is this deserved? Taking my passion for Star Trek aside, definitely.

STO is one of the least polished games I have experienced. It does not seem simple, but every complication seems to be there for the sake of complication, instead of enabling some deeper gameplay. You have a choice of ground weapons and personal shields and kits, each of which have ever so slightly different effects, such as sometimes pushing an enemy back slightly, or slightly lowering their damage, or slightly doing something else not truly meaningful. There are all kinds of shields for your ship, some of which regenerate slightly faster, others that are a little more solid, and others still that last a longer time under fire, and all of those are affected by some generally hard to decipher skills. Tell me, is my shield getting stronger from my Starship Engineering Training, my Starship Warp Core Training or my Starship Command Skill, or all three? Who knows without spending hours reading obscure blogs and wikis on the internet? What exactly is a +12 to a skill, what does it do? Should I go with a +10 instead? You may never know. It is unnecessary confusion and obfuscation to make a system seem less simplistic than it really is. (Quik’s note: OK, so you do you understand why I “lost it” at one point when trying to organize my inventory . Can’t all RPGs have a character developement system as fun and detailed but also intuitive and easy to understand as Fallout 3?)

The only thing in the game that has seen a lot of serious work is the art, which I believe was borrowed from a prior developer. The Star Trek look is there in the ships, the uniforms and the settings. It is easy enough on the eyes. However, you only need to fly by a few Capt. Jack Daniels flying their USS ScotchWhiskey to lose your immersion. It doesn’t help that all the personal shields, tactical kits and combat armors with armor-plated glossy uniforms make half the players look like they jumped in from Unreal Tournament or Global Agenda. I’m sorry, was Cryptic working on Voltron Online before they got the Star Trek license? Probably.

The biggest gripe most fans have with the game is that it doesn’t “feel” very Star Trek. The shows and movies are about violence as a last resort, no battle is gone into without at least some attempt at communication and remediation. The Federation does not give orders to “destroy” pirate outposts, but to conduct diplomacy and mediate an agreeable solution. The game is not like that AT ALL. It has more in common with what you would expect from Warhammer 40,000, where humanity is at war with everyone forever. There were points at which I and Quik would be faced with enemies, and we wanted to hail them. There is no such option; you cannot hail your enemies. You don’t even get the “we’re kind of trying” pretense of “Captain, they’re not answering our hails”, there is just combat.

Ground combat, heck, ground missions are ludicrously bad. Bring your scanner and your gun. You either scan ten rats or shoot them. Except the rats look like metal boxes or Klingons, respectively. In addition, every other ground mission will have enemies materialize into the ground and shoot you with apparently trans-dimensional weapons while you are unable to do anything about it. Transporter technology has obviously lost some of its finesse, because boxes and objects are constantly shown inside rocks and trees.

One of the earliest missions has a Klingon Captain telling you that a particular ambassador is a traitor, and asks you to hand him over. Why can’t I? I believe him, why can’t I end the mission there and then. Because this game sucks, that’s why. Why don’t your enemies ever surrender, or run away, or ask for a cease fire, or hail you? Bottom line, you get war, constant war, with no peace possible, no mercy, no prisoners and nothing of the spirit a Star Trek fan would care for.

Your missions are repetitive, and very few are nonviolent. The nonviolent “diplomatic” missions are tolerable, although boring. The biggest crime is that there are no choices, pretty much in anything. I HAVE to talk to all the miners, I “Resolve” their grievances by correctly repeating their problems back to them. WOW, if only the world was really like that!! I HAVE to destroy that Klingon away party, to the last man. I HAVE to blast that Orion Pirate and his inhabited Starbase from existence. I HAVE to scan the first artifact before I can scan the three identical ones down the road. It’s ridiculous in its simplicity and disregard for canon as well as your intelligence.

But do not despair, the game is not hard. If you “die”, you or your starship respawn a few seconds later a few feet from your last location. The game has a nice resuscitation system for away teams, but why bother when you can just respawn anyway. Why, in the future, does “food” still heal us from laser blasts? Seriously, wouldn’t some “Medical Nanobot Injection” been too hard to use instead of Romulan Ale? It doesn’t feel serious. When my starship is destroyed, why aren’t I rescued by someone or eject? Why aren’t I towed back to the nearest starbase and repaired/given a new ship?

In space combat, your crew can be injured or killed. Your injured crew recover fairly quickly, but so do your dead, in the middle of battle!! Why do I not have to go back to a star base to get new crewmembers? Why is it never held against me that hundreds of people die under my command each day, and my promotions just keep rolling in? Wouldn’t it make canonical sense that taking heavy casualties would be held against a captain and affect his rate of experience gain, aka promotions through the ranks? Nothing matters in this game, not even the “pretend” lives of your “pretend” crew in this pretense of what Star Trek should be.

The ship to ship combat in this game is passable, and along with non-violent diplomatic missions, it is the only part of this game even remotely enjoyable. Your ship is slow, turns slow, and takes a lot of hits to be destroyed, and that is how it should be. Your crew’s special training is implemented in special abilities like “Emergency Power to Shields”. However, there are gaping holes in what you can do. You cannot launch shuttles, target enemy subsystems, use a tractor beam, or beam boarding parties to the enemy ship without the requisite special abilities. That is like not being able to turn right in a car without a passenger trained in Driving 3. Oh wait, maybe they were modeling NASCAR J.

So why do I play this train wreck of a game? Why do I find enjoyment in it? The answer is simple: my friend Quik. Ultimately, we play social games for the people, the friends and the camaraderie. It doesn’t necessarily matter if the game is good or not, as long as you have good company to play it with. We are both Trek geeks, we can role play our characters, we do not fly the USS Ikillyourship. We do not give our captains Justin Bieber hair and combat armor from Star Wars. We play the game our way, the Trek way, even with all the limitations against our doing so, and only then is it any fun.