The first day of the Star Trek Online open beta has officially ended, and with that comes my impressions of the game. Mind you, I only played for an hour or so, because I got to a point where my frame rate was between 1-10 fps.
Star Trek Online - The Good
Star Trek Online starts off well enough. As you boot it up, and it patches, you get to hear some very "Star Trekky" music, it really got me in the mindset to play. Once it patches, the game starts up, and you get to create your character. The character creation is probably the best thing about STO. You can pick from a list of 10 or so races from the Star Trek universe, including Humans, Vulcans, and a bunch of other races I am personally unfamiliar with (obligatory blue alien chick is included). In addition to the existing races, you can also create a character from an "unknown race", which basically means you can create your character using any part from any of the existing races. The only downside to creating a character from the "unknown race" is that you can't name the race, but that's nickpicking. After you create your character, you enter the world of Star Trek Online.
Star Trek Online - The Bad
I really wish I had more good things to say about STO. But as soon as I entered the world with my newly created character, I was treated to a poor looking, poor controlling, poor sounding generic space MMO. Let me break it down further.
Graphics - It might be because of my somewhat dated hardware, but the game didn't look good. Recent MMO's such as Aion and the upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic look significantly better than STO. I even prefer the look of the now-5-year-old World of Warcraft to STO.
I could forgive the sub par graphics if the game at least ran well, which it did not. Like I said at the very beginning, I had to quit after an hour or so because my frame rate was dipping into the single digits. Again, this is probably due to my somewhat dated PC hardware, but if I can play Dragon Age: Origins, and WoW on this PC, I really should be able to play STO, at least on the recommended settings.
Sound - None of the sounds in the game really stood out, which was disappointing seeing as the Star Trek series has such iconic sound effects. When you used the teleporter, the sound played, but it seems to be a little out of sync, playing a second or two after you have already teleported. It was also rather quiet, and I had to turn my speakers up to even hear it. The voice acting is also a bit of a disappointment. Most of the text is not voiced, except when it randomly is voiced. When it is voiced, the acting is generally "okay", but nothing stands out about it. Also, I remember seeing a video that Leonard Nimoy did the narration for this game, but call me crazy, I must have missed it.
Gameplay - This is the most important part of an MMO right? If I told you that it was less responsive than the free to play MMO Perfect World, would you believe me? Because it is. The ground combat is a weird mix between normal MMO combat (see World of Warcraft), and a Third Person Shooter. Right click an enemy to hit your phaser, if they get too close you can right click them to melee them to the ground, and then right click them again to hit them with your phaser. If you hit the C button, you go into aim mode, which makes you do extra damage. As far as I could tell this is as deep as the combat goes. I mean yeah, there was more in their briefings, but the briefings would usually pop up and block all the action so I was getting attacked while I was supposed to be reading a tutorial. What usually happened is I clicked through the tutorial as fast as I could to avoid getting killed while I was reading, and then was completely lost because...I had clicked through the tutorial.
But really, the ground combat is the highlight of the gameplay. The game really lost it's steam when I was tasked with piloting my ship, the Highwind (original I know), and I was subjected to the most excruciatingly slow space combat I have ever played. You remember the excellent space combat in games like X-Wing and Freespace? Definitely not present here. But I was probably expecting too much for this 2010 game to at least match the space combat of a game released 10+ years prior. It was shortly after I killed my 6th or 7th enemy "Probe" that I was contacted and was tasked with beaming to a nearby planets surface to help fight off the Borg. This was where my game turned into a slideshow and I turned it off.
Overall
Overall I think Star Trek Online is a not-so-great game that, like so many other MMO's before it, will really fail to build up any kind of significant audience. The ground combat can't compete with a game like World of Warcraft, and the space combat doesn't come anywhere near the quality of a game like EVE Online. It really was a disappointment after waiting in a 2 hour queue to download the 7.7gb zip file, to only spend an hour with the game before going into flipbook mode. Hopefully the full release will be a much better experience than with what I had with the beta.
Oh yeah, and remember, this is based off of an hour of playing a beta, and I wrote this at 3:00 AM, so take that for what it's worth. :P
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