Star Trek Online

Around a month ago I wrote an article detailing my first impressions of Star Trek Online (STO), and whether or not I could see a future for the game in the MMO market. My initial experience was mostly positive, but I decided to write this follow up article to share my thoughts now that I’ve had some time to truly play around with it.

STO has entered an extremely important phase in its lifespan – its second month on the market. The second month of any pay-to-play MMO’s existence is a very important one, as its longer term success is largely determined by these defining weeks. It is the month by which the pioneer customers’ free 30 days of play has been depleted, and they are required to hand over their first monthly fee in order to keep playing. This retention ratio is obviously paramount to both developers and players alike. STO has enjoyed excellent initial retail sales – probably due to the IP itself and not necessarily the game – but those sales mean nothing unless the customers who bought it continue to play it.

My issue is that I see a game. I do not see the produce of passion. Cryptic have released a working and mostly polished product, but that polish is not enough to hide the fact that it is hollow. It’s shiny on the surface, but after a good few hours spent in-game I realised that the surface is all there is to it. There’s simply a complete lack of depth to it that I don’t feel justifies the required monthly fee. It’s fun for a couple of hours, but that’s where it ends. As a single player game it would perhaps receive less criticism, but as an MMORPG requiring a monthly fee it fails dismally.

That right there is Cryptic’s first problem. There’s nothing “massively” about Star Trek Online, and even “multiplayer” feels like a bit of a stretch. If you’ve ever played Guild Wars you’ll understand what Cryptic aimed for – a game where players can run into each other in stations or player hubs, but missions are heavily instanced. Whilst this worked great for Guild Wars, it doesn’t suffice for STO. Put simply, Guild Wars has towns and meeting spots bustling with people, whereas in STO such zones are few and far between, and when inside them no one is really doing anything apart from chatting to NPC’s. It leaves me feeling like I’ve played a single player with IRC running inside of it.

But the problems don’t stop there. There’s also a complete lack of variety in the content that’s already in-game. Discovering new and uncharted systems sounds great on paper, but in implementation it’s disappointingly underwhelming. Whilst the randomly-generated parts of space are well-designed and have left me taking a break to simply enjoy the scenery, these new discoveries mean nothing. The systems I discover have no greater effect on the game world as a whole. I simply receive my usual quest rewards along with a “thanks” from Starfleet, and that’s about it. I can’t scout out amazing potential resource routes, nor can I stumble across an undiscovered planet with unprecedented trade opportunities.

No, I either scan anomalous readings or fight thugs in a rather monotonous fashion in space or on the ground. For the first twenty hours or so of play this was great, but soon the cracks began to surface in the gameplay model. I began questioning the point of playing in a so-called virtual world if that world had such strict and strangling boundaries placed upon it.

Another issue is that it offers absolutely nothing new to the market. It’s exactly what we’ve seen time and again, but in a different skin. This has been the downfall of many a big-budget MMOs in the past, and I can easily see this being the case with STO soon if Cryptic do not do something drastic. How is the game supposed to compete with similar larger and far more established games such as Guild Wars or World of Warcraft, when they both offer far more content and variety? In the former’s case it doesn’t even require a monthly fee.

These grievances bring me to the conclusion that STO is simply too shallow to be a true player in the MMO market. What it offers is essentially the model “theme park” online experience. Players have a small number of rides at their disposal, and once they’ve ridden each ride a number of times, a sense of monotony is experienced. On paper the concept behind a Star Trek MMO is awesome…online worlds should be about exploration – the discovery of new frontiers and possibilities. But what use is all of this if these feats don’t actually mean anything? Building any sort of relationship with fellow-players, or working towards some “higher purpose” in-game is impossible. All I get is a couple of standard quest rewards and a “thanks” from Starflleet.

However, one thing I am continually impressed by is the amount of new content Cryptic are releasing for the game. They’ve released so many patches that I’ve simply lost count, and have already released a major content update, with more announced on the way. Many other developers could learn a thing or two from them in this department. One way to keep players happy is to continually provide them with new content in order for them to justify handing over their monthly fees. Unfortunately, most of this content is reminiscent of existing content, so whilst it adds more to do, it doesn’t necessarily add anything new to do.

Ultimately, I can definitely see myself logging in every now and then to complete a mission or two – mainly because I don’t have to pay the monthly fee – but as my main or even a casual MMO on-the-side, Star Trek Online simply doesn’t suffice. There’s neither enough variety to content, nor enough interaction between players. It functions well as a game, but as a massively multiplayer online experience it fails dismally. The speed with which Cryptic developed and got the game out of their door when they took over development from Perpetual Entertainment leads me to believe they had dollar signs on the brain rather than the will to innovate and truly make an MMO worth playing.

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