Star Trek Online Multiplayer
Version ST.11.20110224a.19
Official Site: http://www.startrekonline.com/
Official Forum: http://forums.startrekonline.com/
Community Sites: http://www.trekradio.net/ http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/?cat=377
Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_Online
Developer: Cryptic Studios
Publisher: Atari

Welcome to the Star Trek Online multiplayer review! Star trek online is an MMO based in the future of the Star Trek universe.

What’s it about?

The game is set after the destruction of Romulus and Remus, after the Romulans setting up home on Rator III. The Klingons try to take advantage of the Romulans weak position by invading their space, and the Federation are doing their best to aid the Romulans and defend against the Klingons. The political situation is getting worse between all factions, especially after the Undine turn up again, taking the form of various heads of state in the different races, and pitch them against each other. The Dominion are also rebuilding their forces, planning to attack the Federation with the help of the Cardasians, and the Borg are back again, but not as you know them. They’re bigger, badder and stronger.

Your main character is your captain. On the ground, you directly control your captain, and your ‘pets’ are your bridge officers. In space, you directly control your ship from a third person view, where the skills your bridge officers possess and the skills your captain has, determines what abilities can be used in space. Your direct weaponry, shielding, sensors and other equipment equipped to your ship determines damage and resistance against damage. You can either use an Xbox 360 controller, mouse and keyboard or a joystick to control your character.

Settings:

Here are the setting’s the review will be conducted using:

I’ll be playing through the tutorial of Star Trek Online with a fresh character to give you an idea of the learning curve, difficulty and general mechanics of the game. Before the playing of the game starts, you must design your captain. The character creator is extremely vast in customization, far too much to describe, so here’s a video to show you more:

You can also play as the Klingons, but we’ll get to them later!

Here are the gameplay videos of the tutorial:

How it plays

Starting off on your ship, you’re presented with an attack by the Borg that you have to deal with. This might sound like a bit of a hard task to overcome considering you’re lumbered with bog standard equipment and no crew, but the Borg are not as you know them. They are weak, useless, and probably smelly, and bear in mind this is a tutorial anyway, so don’t expect to be doing too much in the way of dying.

Speaking of basic equipment, you can load out your captain and bridge officers with various bits of equipment throughout the game, each with their own capabilities and abilities. The slots available include two weapon slots, a personal shield slot, an armour slot, and four equipment slots (these can be used for anything from food, to weapon power-ups, to tribbles), and a kit slot. Your bridge officers have the same slots available, although they only have one weapon slot and no kit slot. The load-out screen is shown in the series of gameplay videos.

Combat is also explained in the videos, with primary and secondary functions for your weapons, and over time as you fight, you will be able to gain bridge officer skill points to upgrade your bridge officers skills, and gain skill points for your own character also. The skills for captain types are unrestricted, so tactical captains can specialise in engineering if they want to.

Bridge officers are gained through the reward scheme built into missions, which work as you’d expect, receiving a reward comprising of a bridge officer or piece of equipment for you or your ship, along with skill points and Starfleet merits. Merits are the currency you need to buy ships. This currency runs alongside other currencies, such as energy credits and points awarded for exploration and PVP combat. These can be spent on weaponry and equipment when buying from the federation (or Klingon) stations. Unwanted items can be run from your inventory through the replicator, to get a percentage of its energy credit worth.

Bridge officers have their own area of expertees, science, tactical, or engineering, and each area has its own special set of abilities that can be used in space combat and on the ground. Engineers help support the ship and it’s crew, whilst tactical has more focus on blowing up enemies and science applies buffs and de-buff on yourself and the enemy. These skills can be seen in action in the fleet action trailer later in the review.

The ‘Exchange’ is an integrated marketplace in Star Trek Online, where you can buy and sell your items. Items are usually picked up in the form of loot. Common items can be sold on the exchange as-is, whether you have used them or not, but any uncommon, rare, or super rare items that are equipped at any point to your ship or your crew/captain, they are bound to you forever and cannot be sold.

Teaming and Instances

STO, instead of being across multiple servers, is completely instanced from one location, allowing players from all over the world to play with or against each other. For the main quests, you can choose to slot in with a group of other people to complete them or complete them alone. Loot can be configured to be evenly distributed or first come first serve, whereas the skill points are distributed evenly. The amount of enemies scale with the size of the group (up to five people in a team per instance) and players get the opportunity to scale their own captains up to the level the current highest level player is in order to not get instantly killed by fighting enemies that are many levels too high.

Quests and Missions

Quests are story driven missions given to you Starfleet, and involve two space portions (one when you encounter the mission, then beaming to a ship or planet for a ground based section, and ‘The Escape’ which is space based again). You can either do them in the order they are given to you, or you can progress your character through the non-story driven activities, which are PVP, patrols, deep space encounters and exploration. The main storyline is where you will spend most of your time, giving you more rewards and progress your captain at the correct rate for the difficulty of the enemies (although the overall game difficulty can be adjusted to suit). When you reach certain levels, you gain access to better ships and equipment. The access to new ships comes once every 10 levels when you reach a new rank.

Exploration

At the edge of most sector blocks, are the exploration zones where you can pick up a randomly generated mission (which are usually pretty mundane if I’m honest).The exploration missions can either be space or ground based (one or the other, not both like proper quests) and involve a lot of boring activities, such as ‘Scan the source of these 5 unusual tricorder readings’ or ‘kill the enemies… then kill the next wave… then kill the boss’. Luckily you won’t progress your character in this manner unless you are totally, completely and utterly insane.

Exploration missions also tend to include a lot of unknown artifacts that turn up in the playable area. These can be collected and used in the crafting system. The crafting system allows you to build your own equipment and weaponry if you really need to use a type of weapon that you haven’t been able to pick up as loot. This is about as far as the crafting system goes, with the better equipment and weapons requiring rarer artifacts to build. You cannot build your items on your ship, you have to go to a specific station (K7 I think) to create them.

PVP

This is where more of the fun non-storyline content comes in. Various types of PvP exist, which includes space and ground activities (either/or), such as a plain old team deathmatch, or you can go down another route, such as sector control. Here’s a video demonstrating some features of STO that you haven’t seen yet, including sector space and the PVP queuing system.

Patrols and Deep Space Encounters

Patrols involve going to static pre-set space locations around the specified sector and eradicate enemies located in the systems. A patrol mission is completed when all five locations are cleared of enemies. Deep space encounters are the same, but these involve enemies flying around each sector that hunt you down and bump into you, if you are unlucky enough to cross their path. These turn into deep space encounters, where you and a small group of other people who happen to be in the same instance, kill whichever enemy type that bumped into you. You can complete sector control missions by completing three deep space encounters in the specified sector.

Fleet Actions

One of the main attractions of Star Trek, is the idea of a massive battle, as all the most memorable moments of the TV series are the battles and certain death situations that the captains always wriggle themselves out of. In STO, these come in the form of fleet actions. The idea is that the fleet action is in a static location, where you can turn up and kill things in order to get the highest score per round, and get a nice reward depending on where you rank in the final scores. Fleet actions are both space and ground based (predominantly space), and each instance can handle up to 20 players. The fleet actions work on an objective system, the same as any other mission.

The Klingons

When you’re not playing as the Federation, you can play as the Klingons. They don’t have a heavy storyline, so the only way to progress (other than one short set of story based missions) is to play PvP, exploration missions and deep space encounters. These are no different to Federation content. Obviously the main difference with the Klingons are the ships and weapons available. Some Gorn ships are also available under the Klingons after being recently added. Klingons are unlocked once you have completed the federation tutorial, and have reached level 4, which I have been recently informed by a kind member of the STO forums called TrentTyler.

Conclusion

Now I’ve briefly covered everything you need to know about the game, I can finally get to how the game makes you feel while you’re playing it. Star Trek Online is a vast game, so it’s best to think of space combat and ground combat as two separate games.

Flying around blowing stuff up with lasers (sorry, Phasers) and torpedoes is exactly what everyone wanted when STO was announced, and it’s exactly what everyone received. There were some pretty major bugs that plagued the game when it was first released, but 99% of bugs have been ironed out now, and playing is an enjoyable and rewarding experience. The graphics are top notch for a MMO and the performance is great too. There’s no lag to speak of (at least not for me), which shows the servers and the net on the back of the server cluster is up to the job. The storyline needs to be involving, and luckily it is! Due to it being an MMO, not all the dialogue has voice acting over the top, so you need to be able to read without falling asleep, because the amount of dialogue is immense.

The ships and ship customization is crazy-cool, as you don’t just buy a ship and use it, you can pull parts from various ship designs and have a mix and match ship, with narcelles from one design, hull from another, and a saucer section from another, you can change the window designs and paint jobs. You will rarely ever see two ships that are the same due to the level of options that are available. This level of customization also extends to the character creator, as you will have seen earlier in the review, meaning no two captains will ever look the same either.

On the ground, it does feel like a grind through all the enemies the map is programmed to throw at you, and it can be tedious having to kill so many of them, but the mechanics of fighting are quite well implemented. Some abilities appear to be very underpowered, like the fabrications for healing barely recover any health at all, and considering the length of time they take to deploy, don’t help in any battle situation. Also orbital bombardment from your ship in space does minimal damage also, and works when you are indoors, which seems odd to me. Luckily the ground combat is very story driven, usually meeting many different people on the way through a mission, so reading dialogue does break the game up a bit, but the real action is always in space.

Overall, the game is well worth the monthly fee as it’s constantly being updated and fixed, and the game itself is fully re-playable with different characters. Due to the different ship and character types, its great to do this as the second run through never plays out the same as the first when it comes to combat style.

Audio: 9
The sounds from the weapons, and the quality of the voice-acting (where applicable) are top notch, not to mention environmental effects from exploding ships and anything else that happens to be going on. The game detected all available sound hardware and used the selected one appropriately. Classical orchestral music isn’t usually my thing, but when you’re in the Star trek universe, it’s a must, and the game really delivers on that part also.

Video: 9
The graphics are great, but some of the effects do glitch out on occasion. When a phaser fires, the trail fro the phaser does not always appear, although I must stress this rarely happens and does not affect the game in any way. The textures are crisp, the lighting is great, and for an MMO it’s basically flawless. Since the sector map re-vamp, sector space looks just as gorgeous as the system maps. The only reason I haven’t given this game a 10 is because of the minor phaser glitches and the ground/captain textures could be a bit more realistic, like EVE has managed to implement for their player avatars, but it’s hard to complain about this because STO is not designed to be a simulator, and the style of the engine is completely different to EVE anyway.

Networking: 9
All the problems I have ever had with lag, apart from the odd occasion, have been eliminated. There is the odd case of rubber banding just after a map has loaded, but this is the only bad effect lag has had on my STO experience in the last 9 months or so. STO seems to be incredibly efficient when it comes to its usage of network packets.

Gameplay: 7
This is a game of two halves. Space combat in the main story is great, I really can’t fault it whatsoever. Ground combat is OK, for reasons I have already stated, and the storyline supports both areas. I don’t find the exploration missions very fun, although they are a technical achievement as they are thrown together using a random mission generator, but due to the re-playability factor and the general way the game works, you don’t HAVE to do the exploration missions if you don’t want to – you can just jump into some other blasty killy mission to take up your time.

Fun: 8
Fun is STO’s middle name. Blowing up massive starships with a huge array of different weapons couldn’t possibly be boring. The only part of the game that could be more fun is flying through sector space. Sector space is slow and boring, and I’d love to see some sort of integrated audio system that you can listen in on to hear chatter from nearby star systems or some sort of Starfleet broadcast system.

Hardware Usage: 6
Hardware usage is along the same lines as any other title available, using 4 of my 8 available threads, and no memory leaks or apparently poor usage of memory occurs.

Lasting Appeal: 10
As long as the Cryptic developers keep adding content, and the customers keep paying for it, this game will last forever. Being Star Trek, they can add any number of crazy races with multiple political or racially orientated storylines and get away with it. More non-combat missions were wanted by the community, and added by the devs, showing that Cryptic want to keep their customers happy. The same applies to the change in sector space. the devs hearts and minds are in the right place, so kudos to them.

Overall: 8
With the game engine working so well, and the amount of content growing almost weekly, Star Trek Online won’t be leaving our lives for a while yet. If what we have been told is true, the customer base is still growing and the amount of lifetime subscribers is also increasing. The main downfall to this game is the repetativeness of some of the combat aspects when it comes to ground based activities. Other than that, the game is truely great! You don’t need to be a Star Trek fan to enjoy this, but it helps if you are to get the full experience out of it.

With any luck, this game will carry on growing and become a contender against WoW.

Here, have a small screenshot gallery: