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Star Trek Online 90 Day Review
Trioxic
Member Posts: 65
Current State of the Game:
Most of the things I am going to talk about have been batted around several forums now and I guess I am putting my two cents worth in now. Currently you can play the entire Star Trek Online game in 3 weeks. If you decide to level all three Federation classes about 8 weeks, now if you want to play on the Klingon side of things be prepared to play lots of PvP action and while you can level at a fair rate in PvP, and you can survive the repetition of the grind then you are all set.
Mostly the game is a breeze to play with little to no complexity, if you need directions, look at the map or read the quest. In truth you go from system to system with little to know surprises. The sector blocks have huge bill boards telling you where you are and where you can go, the sector blocks in space have massive grid lines to make sure that you don't get vertigo and don't get lost. Don't kid yourselves, this in not exploration no matter how you spin it.
Let's say that many of the basic things in the game are awesome, like the graphics, space and ships and toons are incredible, or should I mention the size scaling issue here? The artists and designers can be proud of the work they have done. The weapons and particle effects are as good as any game on the market today. The space scenery is outstanding! Although the corkscrewing flight system is totally stupid and it looks like there is no room for a joy stick leaving everyone I know wondering what happened to space flight in the last several hundred years?
However, the new raids are good and challenging, requiring both team work and planning, more please!
“Infected”
“Cure”
“Khitamore Accord”
What would be incredible would be a 5, 10, 15 and 20 man scalable raid system.
Fleet actions are fun and challenging more please! Except for the Crystalline Entity which is a total failure in how it is done, find a different way to kill it the current method is not viable.
Diversity is a huge problem in the game. Exploration clusters have few differences, and while they give needed badges for ship upgrades, they do not provide enough satisfaction in the area of exploration. If you repeat the same cluster quest with a random selection of at least 6 or 8 types of quests and these are space sample retrieval, scanning miscellaneous items on the ground, ground fighting, space fighting, computer scanning, ship defending in space and base defending in space, these come with postage stamp planets the ground missions are put on, run here, scan or kill, run there, scan or kill. How about a picnic or a holodeck adventure.
I wonder if the mandate for Star Fleet is really travel to strange new places never seen before and kill everything. I did my B'Tran Cluster dailies this morning and they where all space confrontation missions. Each of the ships were cruisers of at least 500 personal each, and doing 3 missions that's 18 ships at around 500 people a kill 500(18) = 9000 people in one morning. No survivors, I am a killing machine with no remorse or hesitations. Is this the Star Trek I remember? Is this a representation of the future that I want to be a part of? Kill kill kill?
What is missing from the Game:
Exploration is not part of this game. Everything is easy to find and there is no surprises waiting on the other side of the planet because there is only a small postage stamp of land and the rest is, well, just not available. I would have like to find each system with scanners and probes and chart everything on my own or in a group.
Many things seemed to have been left out of the game, crafting, actual planets and complexity. Is this by design or by time constraints? I do not know or care. Of course there are many other things left out of the game, things like being able to explore large planets, asteroids, nebula clouds, stars, gas giants volcanic or ice planets or any actual sized planet. I can only point my tricorder at so many things before I just want to throw my tricorder and everything. Hey! I just broke my tricorder can I take to a craftsmen and get an upgrade or mod or maybe some cool new one that makes different beeps and noises when I find something different?
Where are the plants and animals, could we clone them, breed and train, buy and sell? What about mining for minerals, for crafting, trading, selling, or chemically treating and processing them for better configurations and products for armor, weapons and space ships? Everything in the game could and should be made by the players. What about plasma production, plasma mining, buy and selling? Bio-genetics, growing specimens for study, for medical harvesting, for making better pets or mounts or perhaps even parts for vehicles?
What about the ship internals? All internal ship activities must be integrated in to the ship no instance hoping. I want to be able to go to my shuttle bay and get in my shuttle then fly to an asteroid and take up mining or take chucks of rock off it or melt it in to a ball and tow it back to my ship. I guess that would bring up that size scaling issue/feature again.
How long can we keep playing the game?
There are quests in the game that you show up and kill and blow up and destroy without even bothering to look for survivors or escape pods or taking prisoners. Another one is you go kill a bunch of ships with people on them, looking for some type of mineral to find out the asteroids don't have the minerals you want and all the ships with people on them you destroyed for nothing. What ever happened to negotiation and diplomacy, getting mining rights and make some cash for both parties. I was not aware of the gunboat diplomatic corps in Star Fleet.
Why can't I just click on a chair and sit down?
As RA 5 my biggest thrill in the game is to fly in circles around my target using my thumb to repetitively push the space bar over and over and over until I almost fall asleep or my opponent explodes and I wake back up... well to be honest my Bridge Officers do have specials that I must use to survive with and they are helpful most times. Do we really need BO's any way?
Why in the instance of the Borg Hunt map there are Sphere's Probe's and Cube's stuck in the encrypted Nods all the time? Why not just put turrets in there instead? Or is this a bug that can't be fixed or did I mean feature?
I never expected to get to RA 5 in two weeks. I usually take my time and hopefully in 6 months or a year I get to max level and have tons of fun doing it. This game is fun for 2 weeks then there is nothing much else to do but grind dailies for badges, do some raids, help some Fleet members that have not quit the game yet.
There are no presets, like “Standard Orbit Mr. Sulu.” and the ship goes to a standard orbit on a planet, or combat sets or ground combat sets.
As a Star Trek fan for more than 40 years I am not sure how much more simplicity of this game I can take, my 8 year old nephew is all ready bored and is going back to WoW.
What could be next?
Comments
Really good write up there and I find myself agreeing with you and pretty much everything you put. I got to RA5 in just over 3 weeks and felt I was not rushing.
I have to say that I have enjoyed the recent updates to the game and if they can keep pumping these updates out consistantly then I am a happy camper. Would be nice to see the scalable raid groups you put down to boost interactivity in the community.
this game isnt Star Trek, its just a mediocre space combat sim, for the moment at least. Most of the issues you've highlighted really are probably due to the lack of time to create those features in game, not to mention limitations of the game engine itself. Whether Cryptic can overcome these limitations or develop the features that most players are demanding, is, something of a question mark..
The game is worth a whol;e 1 out of 10. Pure unadulterated bullshit
Well 90 days out and it still sounds as bad as it did in beta. I am going to wait for 180 days before I go back and try it again. That is if it still exist in any form.
All I can say is there sounds like a lot of upddaes to the cstore, something I am totaly not interesed in. The real thing is the fun and playability.
Do you still run out of fun stuff to do as quickly, and is it all still repeating stuff. If so then I am so not interested.
I didnt need to wait 90 days to decide the game was crap, I found out in beta and saved myself $50. The game hasnt evolved nearly enough in the 3 months its been out for me to try it again and by the time they "fix" it, if they fix it there wont be enough people playing it anymore for it to be a success in any way.
i just feel horrible for anyone who shelled out the $299 for lifetime subscription to what only loosely resembles star trek..
Well its hard to feal sorry for anybody who bought the lifetime, especially if they played beta. You get what you pay for. If you like wasting money and can toss it around like that I dont feel sorry for them.
I learned my leason the hard way when I got the lifetime for LOTRO. It was a great game then we got mom and things have been sliding ever since. So I can go back any time and play but I am at the point of why even do that. I will never buy another lifetime ever for any game.
right, but they were promised star trek. they got generic space waster mmo that has some star-trekky costuming but otherwise isnt very star trek at all.
thats like going to buy a mustang, and getting sold a smart.
I dont really. Most normal thinking people would carfully consider spending such an amount of money, investigating it, reading up, looking for reviews.... the warnings were everywhere, they chose to ignore them, they got burnt.
I just hope they learned their lesson. and I hope everone else learns it too, because if they dont, and if consumers dont start acting rationally then its a green light for other companys to copy/paste that strategy.
I learned mine with Champions Online...
I really wish STO was.. well.. more? And actually Star Trek.. I Do... I'd almost do anything for a nice Sci-fi MMO with good content atm. since I'm so Utterly bored of all the fantasy games.
TOR is perhaps the best hope together with Earthrise (and The Secret World which at least is modern) but I'm stull very sceptical towards these games since so few MMOs actually Are good nowadays..
Read something about Cryptic wanting to include more non-combat missions though, but don't remember where.. Maybe there's hope yet for STO.. Unlikely... But I hope so....
And @OP: Nice writeup.. Sums it up very well imo.
Actually buying a mustang I would have to ask why as that is made by ford, and your not parking a ford in my driveway. I do get the anology. I would saying the game was like promising a Ferari and delivering a roller skate.
However then I go back to why did they buy a lifetime after all I say how bad it was in beta and canceled my pre-order. And if you bught the lifetime on blind faith like I did with lotro then yes I could see why they would feel burned. Honestly the lifetime with lotro I had explored anyway as I knew what I was buying, not expecting the dramitic shift in the game later.
Nice review, but truth be told if you don't know Cryptics history the things you mention are beyond their abilities, anyone doesn't beleive me I challenge you to take a spin with COH or CO very similar in design "smash em ups" with very little complexity to them. While I would hope we could have seen the types of things you mention let's be honest they will be far too busy injecting the game with C store crap and STF's which has been released in about equal quantities so far.
I'm fairly certain those guys over at Cryptic are at the least not hard to please (which is not a good quality in a developer) and at worse burying there heads in the sand and letting the chips fall where they may either way things don't look good for this game.
but yeah, to call this game Fantastic is like calling Twilight the Godfather of vampire movies....
Is it about the money or the disapointment?
Also some one just reminded me that I left out stuff about Fleet management and dates not working and no notes or reminders or an in game calendar which would be nice but at this point, beggars can't be choosers...
I'm going to wait til' they give out a free weekend. Which if it's anything like the previous content, I'll be able to complete it during that free weekend. Possibly by Saturday afternoon if I don't have to mow the lawn.
I was one of the Thousands, I am sure, who played in Beta then cancelled my pre-order. I am completely and totally bored with my current MMO and looking for something new to play. I was thinking about buying this today, but after reading how little everything has changed I decided not to. Thanks a ton for a solid review.
honestly, its about both. I have known many trekkies who are SO trekkie to their very bones that they would have to play this.. just because it is star trek. And i feel in many ways the usage of the trek franchise in this manner kind of takes advantage of their weakness.
so yeah, its both - because i know how crushingly disappointed a true trekkie might feel after playing this game.
When this game first showed up in adverts and prerelease, prebeta publications it would be the game that brought down EvE. The PvE exodus would be a sight to see.
I dont know what game was about to do that. This aint it.
The OP nailed alot. None of the bugs got mentioned, Phaser banks just stop working, you can fix it by suicide. Encounter missions with nothing to kill, beaming down to a planet and your Away team is 300 meters under ground. You arent. Everything resets at random. Specials dont fire. Bugged GUI exposes the stealth code and you soon figure out how to hack down missions even if you really didnt want to. Every weapon is the same and the difference between a common and a Very rare is minimal at best. Memory Alpha, the crafting element is dumb foundingly impotent.
Watching this train wreck drag the beloved Star Trek in to a black hole is painfull. On the up side, characters are addicting and that includes BOs. You can say you flew a star Ship. It can only get better. Really, it can only get better.
Old School SWG - "I paid you 1,000,000 credits not for you to slice my Krayt weapon for me... I paid you 1,000,000 credits to give it BACK to me."