Star Trek Online

Over the weekend I managed to get my hands on an open beta key for Star Trek Online by Cryptic.  As an avid fan of Star Trek, I was expecting truly great things from this game.  I was sadly, horribly disappointed.

The graphics are fairly good for a space-based game, with quality lighting, engine trails, and explosion effects.  The ground effects, on the other hands, are reminiscent of Elite Force (the first one) without as much polish.  Character animations are jerky and disconnected, NPC pathing is asinine, and everything looks like it's made out of plastic.

To make matters worse, the game has some of the most extreme instancing I've ever encountered.  To move between systems, you first have to warp to 'sector space', which is somehow supposed to represent warp travel, but really just looks like a semi-3d map that you can only navigate at about 1/4th maximum movement speed.  In fact, you don't even have to know where anything is or explore it, they have a convenient list of every system in the sector, and doubleclicking on any system auto-pilots you to it without effort.  There are no random encounters or world mobs, only mission-oriented ones.  Now, once you warp to Sector Space (load screen), you find your system, auto-pilot to it, enter it (load screen), get the mission brief, kill some enemy ships, then either have to beam somewhere or warp somewhere for the next piece (load screen), then warp back out to Sector Space (load screen).  To make matters even worse, every single zone, including both missons and the 'public' areas (ie. the non-mission areas, Sector Space, Earth station and surrounding space, etc.) are all instanced by themselves, with dozens of instances that often cap at 10-20, or possibly up to 50 in certain high-density areas like Earth station.

Lastly, the missions actually get more difficult when you group, as the number of enemies increase, and they tend to focus-fire one ship at a time, make survival a great deal more of an issue, and the rewards only barely increase (no extra skill points, only extra loot, and that's shared among the party on a round-robin).  All these combine to make the game nothing but a solo game that you have to log in to play.

It's also an astoundingly grindy game.  The levels are broken down into 5 teirs: 1-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, 41-50.  When you start the game, after the initial tutorial missions (which you have to do on every character you start, there's no "Ya, I've done this, skip please" option), you are given command of a Nebula-class starship, a light ship with 3 weapon hardpoints (2 forward, 1 rear), and 3 bridge officer positions.  You are stuck in that ship until you reach level 11.  I've put in about 6 hours play time combined in the beta thus far, and while I'm certainly not power-leveling, I haven't really been slacking either, and I'm about halfway through level 5.  That's right...the first 10-15 hours of play offer zero ship upgrades.

Next there's the methods of leveling.  First, you can PvP.  Second, you can complete missions.  However, the missions are astoundingly repetitive and shallow, all being variations of 'kill all enemy ships', with maybe some 'collect x of y', 'use x', 'escort x to y', or 'beam down and kill all enemies' thrown in.  The larger of the first missions are the patrol missions, which require a patrol of 4 specified star systems, each of which can take up to an hour, and the reward is usually just access to 1-3 more patrol missions and possibly a new minor upgrade or bridge officer candidate.

Leveling is also rather complex and tough to understand at first.  STO doesn't have experience in a traditional sense.  Instead, the player gains skill points for completing missions, which can then be spent on poorly detailed skills with no explanation of the specific benefits gained.  Each 'level' simply requires a certain number of skill points be spent.

The currency system is another hideously overcomplicated system.  Instead of any normal currency system, STO uses several types of tokens.  First up is Energy Credit, which can only be gotten by selling or melting down items received as loot or quest rewards (the quests themselves only award skill points and merit points).  Selling items grants 50% of vendor sell price, melting them down with the replicator grants 40% (but can be done without returning to Earth station).  Energy Credit is used to most basic items and services.  The next currency item is Merit points.  These are used exclusively and only to purchase bridge officers and train them (think of BO's as a weird hybrid of talent trees and minions), and are received from quests.

STO also has a stack of Exploration tokens, which can be used to purchase higher-level ground and space upgrades, and a bit more than a half dozen salvageable items from spacial anomalies in each system and ground mission, which are used to craft certain rare upgrades or consumables.

Just to accentuate this, STO entered Open Beta a week ago.  The devs are still working on major bug fixes and implement much of the content intended for release.  The game releases in two weeks.  That's right, open 'beta', which is supposed to absolute last phase of testing, running a stress test (which they failed miserably), and squashing last minute bugs, has turned into late alpha testing, and the game is due in just two weeks.

Ultimately STO feels like a rushed, half-assed Star Trek clone of Champions Online (in fact, the UI still has most of the same look, and even the same cartoony font).  It's grindy, unfinished, boring, unrewarding, socially truncated, and only barely has the Star Trek feel that was the entire point of making a Trek MMO.  Add to this that Cryptic seems to be running a rather desperate cashcow scheme by offering the ability to play Liberated Borg characters for the small price of just under $300 for a lifetime subscription (also included 2 extra character spots, which btw, they only give you 2 to start with and sell you ones beyond that), and the entire game just seems like a last-ditch effort to cash out on the Trek fan community to save Cryptic's failing finances after the debacle of Champions Online.

My advice: avoid until Cryptic is bought out by someone that can actually produce a successful game (Activision or Bioware come to mind).