Review Date: Feb 16 2010
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Cryptic Studios
ESRB Rating: Teen
Genre: MMORPG
When it comes to science fiction franchises, they don't get much more iconic than "Star Trek," and it's evident that the sci-fi crowd also has a penchant for video games. Cryptic Studios has taken on the enormous task of adapting this famous TV and film series into an online game. After all, what Trek fan doesn't dream of firing up the warp engines in their own ship to explore some distant part of the galaxy?
Star Trek Online (STO) is set in the year 2409, and the Federation is at war with the Klingon Empire. Shortly after creating a character and completing a few introductory missions that involve a scuffle with the Borg, you'll find yourself in command of a Federation Starship.
Your New Career
In true Cryptic fashion, character creation is very flexible, and if you want to you can even create your own alien species. Ships are composed of interchangable sections of several different styles, which provides a nice amount of customization while still keeping them looking like they belong in Star Trek.
There are 3 careers in STO: Engineering, Science and Tactical. These loosely correspond to the familiar trinity of tank, support, and damage dealer. In the early missions, you'll also be given a bridge crew. This crew grows as you move to larger ships, and gives you another way to tweak the abilities you take into battle.
The Klingon Empire
While it's not immediately obvious, there is a second faction in STO. After you've reached level 6 as a Federation character, the option to roll a character in the Klingon Empire appears on the login screen. There are numerous races to choose from on the Klingon side, including Klingon, Gorn, liberated Borg, and Orion.
The Empire is intended to be a largely PvP faction, as there is very little PvE content for Klingons in the game at the moment. Outside of one or two repeatable missions, about all you can do is queue for a PvP match. You also have far fewer options for customizing your ship. It doesn't take long to get the impression that the entire faction was quickly tacked onto the rest of the game before being anywhere near ready. Lamentations abound in Klingon chat, and hopefully Klingons will get some love in future updates.
Controlling Your Vessel
If you were hoping for some sort of space simulation with a semi-realistic flight model that might encourage you to dig out your old joystick, STO is not the game for you. Ship controls are very simple and they mimick the conventional RPG interface for keyboard and mouse. Space is presented on a fixed plane; you can go up and down, but you always level off at an appropriate angle. It's not possible to make fancy flight maneuvers like loops or barrel rolls, and when you encounter other ships they are "upright."
I understand their desire to make the game easy to learn and simplify navigation, but it's too limiting for my tastes. There are times I want to fly straight up or straight down, for example, but I seem stuck to about a 60 degree incline, which is plain silly in a spacecraft.
Although the game does have collision detection and you can't fly through other ships, there is no damage taken from crashing into things. You never have to worry about being rammed by a desperate enemy, or accidently smacking into an asteroid.
Space Travel
Every game that is set in space faces the problem of how you make space feel big without making it overly time-consuming to travel across, and these qualities are mutually exclusive. STO gives us "Sector Space" as a compromise, condensing the vastness of space into zones that are meant to represent travel at warp speeds. While this has the odd effect of making it feel like you're going slow, it's not hard to imagine that you're traversing light years on this map. There are complaints about the few minutes it takes to cross a sector, but I'm in the opposite camp. As it stands, space in STO seems small and fragmented. I timed the trip from Earth Spacedock to "Deep Space 9" and it takes about 5 minutes. It feels so little like deep space that you might as well be teleported there. Granted, traveling from one corner of Sector space to the other would take considerably longer.
Normal space in STO is quite confined as well, typically limited to the area surrounding a single planet or space station. You can fly in a straight line for only a short time in any direction before meeting an immersion-breaking invisible wall (and it's not an encounter with Q).
The Final Loading Screen
The final frontier is out there, but you can bet your dilithium crystals that in STO it's going to take another loading screen to reach it.
STO employs a great deal of instancing, and the world is broken up into ground zones (including space stations), normal space zones you fly around at impluse speeds, and Sector space for long distance travel. Each of these requires a seam in the game, so a trip from one planet surface to another means a minimum of 4 loading screens. To make matters worse, Sector space is also divided into zones. And does the Admiral's tiny office on Earth Spacedock really demand yet another instance? At least let us beam straight from the ground to Sector space when there is nothing for us to do in normal space anyway except hit the warp button.
No doubt, a certain number of seams are to be expected, and there are some benefits to instancing, such as the elimination of servers or shards. Everyone plays on the same "server," so it's always possible to find your friends using a menu that lets you jump between instances. Unfortunately, the system doesn't always keep large groups in the same instance as you travel around, which defeats the purpose of forming a group in the first place. And of course, instances with only a couple dozen players in them don't come across as all that "massive," in STO or any other game.
Space Combat
Ship to ship combat is easily STO's most appealing feature right now, and it makes up for some of the game's shortcomings. It's pure third-person RPG; from a camera view outside your ship, you select a target and attack with various abilities on your shortcut bar, including Trek favorites like photon torpedos and disruptor beams.
