Star Trek Online
Report from the beta quadrant.
It's amazing how far Star Trek Online gets just by having the right sound effects. The high-pitched warble of scanners and transponders, the hiss of phasers, the shimmering harmonics of the transporter: these sounds beam you directly to a universe which, you find, you already know by heart. It works even if you're not a particularly big fan, Gene Roddenberry's benign science-fiction now being so ubiquitous that everyone has absorbed it by a kind of cultural osmosis, whether they wanted to or not.
So, from the moment you hear that unmistakeable French horn fanfare on the character-select screen, Cryptic's Star Trek MMO is winning the immersion war without even having to try. It's just as well - the Champions Online developer needs all the help it can get. Not because of any shortfall in talent or ideas, but because this game has clearly been put together on a fairly limited budget and schedule by MMO standards - it is, after all, only 18 months since Cryptic announced it had the Star Trek licence, and four months since it launched Champions, with four weeks to go to Star Trek's release. The Californian developer hasn't got time for world-building on the scale of Azeroth or the Old Republic, but the Star Trek licence has raised interest and expectations for this game far beyond the niche. It's great news that it sounds right - and, as we reported from the Eurogamer Expo, feels right - but what's next?
Playing through the early stages on the beta, you're confronted with a game that's being assembled, almost before your eyes, out of multiple discrete parts - like a flat-pack MMO. Star Trek Online is essentially a series of short bursts of instanced action - either ship combat, or planet-side runabouts with the away team - hung on a framework of massively-multiplayer socialisation and novel, flexible RPG progression. It's a little rough, surprisingly simple, immediate and accessible - and it hangs together surprisingly well, despite having so many disjointed one-click jumps between starbases, sector space, space combat and beam-me-down rucks.

Hit the "randomise" button on the ship customisation screen to be amazed at how many variants Cryptic has coaxed out of the class Trek design.
Character creation is more straightforward than Champions'. You can knock together an archetype for your Federation officer very simply and quickly, choosing from most of the famous (and some not-so-famous) Star Trek humanoid races. Inveterate slider-tweakers will enjoy creating their own race though, with Cryptic's peerless experience in character customisation allowing you to conjure up all kinds of unique, yet somehow inimitably Trek, blue-skinned and ridge-browed freaks. Otherwise, it's a simple matter of choosing your career specialisation: science, engineering and tactical.
Broadly speaking, science is a buffing and healing class, engineering provides gadgets and crowd-control abilities, while tactical is straight combat and stealth. All three classes can be further specialised later on. But as with many things in Star Trek Online, Cryptic is clearly thinking about Star Trek first and MMO convention second. Your main combat abilities are dictated by your weapon, not your career, and any class is effective in man-to-man combat, while the careers apply slightly differently to ship skills than personal ones, where there is more scope for hybridisation.
In any event, whether on board ship or in an Away Team, you're always going to be complementing your player-character with a selection of Bridge Officers, who have their own slightly more limited advancement paths. On foot, these operate like AI party members in a single-player RPG. On board your ship, they contribute buffs and skills, effectively joining with your player-character to create a sort of all-class meta-character. You'll collect a lot of Bridge Officers and be able to swap them at will, so there's huge scope for configuration, and no avenue is ever really closed to you whatever career you choose - vintage Cryptic design.
You begin the game as a lowly Ensign, assuming command of your ship during a catastrophic Borg attack. By the time you've romped through the tutorial storyline, you'll be a Lieutenant and officially have your own Starship Command. From that point, you advance through the ranks of Lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander, Commander, Captain and Admiral, and each of these has 10 levels. You can only employ Bridge Officers below your own rank. When you gain a rank, you'll be awarded a new special ability and the access to new classes of ship but most of your skills you choose and balance yourself by spending skill points. You don't need to visit a trainer to do this - it's right there in the skills window - but you are required to spend those points to rank up.
Gaining ranks and new ship types is a powerful levelling motivator, and progress is flexible, but with almost none of the traditional RPG stat mainstays to use as a bearing - and the split in skills between Ship and Ground abilities - it's quite easy to feel lost in this unfamiliar system at first. Nevertheless, it's so flexible and progress is so constant that learning on the job doesn't feel too intimidating, and Cryptic seems to have struck a nice balance between pure skill- and level-based styles of progression.

Crew members move erratically but seem to be able to handle (and crucially, heal) themselves.
After the tutorial you arrive at Earth's spaceport. It's a social, trading and customisation hub, a standard MMO town in other words, with vendors, mission givers, an auction house and a bar. Stations like this and "sector space" - which is basically an over-world map - are the only places in Star Trek Online that you'll actually see other players running or flying around unless you group with them (well, more or less - Cryptic has said that the star system instances aren't entirely locked and you may end up playing with one or two strangers, but I haven't observed this in the beta yet).
Accepting your first missions, you beam to your ship via a loading screen - bridges you can visit have been promised, but aren't in place yet - and then warp to the abstract map of sector space. Here you can fly manually, or via autopilot, to star systems. There are occasional roaming enemies, which trigger an instanced space combat mission if you fly too close, and also "fleet action" points where multiple groups of players can take part in large-scale player-versus-environment space combat.
Mostly though, you'll fly to a system, warp in, and then engage in either space combat or beam straight to the planet surface. Missions come in two categories, Patrols (quick five- or 10-minute quests on foot or in space) and longer chains, usually involving a mix of space and ground action and aping the style and storyline of a Star Trek TV episode. Early examples of the latter include saving the crew of a freighter from pirates, or escorting a Vulcan ambassador, who isn't all he seems, to a monastery besieged by Klingons.
In these early stages, space combat proves the more compelling of Star Trek Online's game of two halves. Although the ships move slowly, it's surprisingly tense and hectic. Rather than using a vast array of skills, you find yourself mashing away mindlessly at the "fire all weapons" button while concentrating on balancing your shields and power priorities (switchable between attack, defence, speed and balanced) as well as the absolutely vital element of positioning your ship so as to expose the enemy's weakest shields but not your own. It's pleasantly engrossing, edge-of-seat multitasking that rewards quick thinking and skill alike, like a simplified three-dimensional version of Pirates of the Burning Sea's excellent naval combat.
Ground combat is less convincing. As with ship battles, Cryptic is to be commended for keeping things simple and direct; with few skills to worry about, capable AI officers accompanying you at all times and fast-paced battles against multiple enemies, Star Trek Online has to be one of the most immediate and easy-to-grasp MMOs out there. But, as is the case with Champions, the timing is too hazy and enemy behaviour too erratic to deliver a satisfying action-RPG punch, and if anything it seems too mindless and simplistic. The addition of flanking bonuses is a nice touch, making positioning and target selection more important than usual, and interesting squad mechanics may reveal themselves later on in the game, but at present it lacks the tactical bite of the stellar battles.

Sector space is crawling with swarms of toy ships at peak times.
At this basic level, Star Trek Online seems enjoyable and easy to get into, and like Cryptic's previous games, it's likely to be more suitable for casual, short-session play than many other MMOs. Although it might not boast lavish production values, it also seems well-equipped to introduce a wider audience of Star Trek fans to the genre, as well as giving the field of massively-multiplayer sci-fi a much-needed, much lighter counterpart to the intimidating EVE Online.
But with several key features yet to be implemented in the beta - notably the ability to create Klingon Empire characters [edit: actually you can do this, I just forgot that it unlocks later in the game] and the Genesis system that creates randomly-generated content for explorers - the bigger picture is currently impossible to make out. We'll be watching it come together over the next month, and bring you our review as close to launch as possible.
Star Trek Online is released for PC on 5th February.
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Comments (45) Latest comment 2 years ago
Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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Dont care about ground combat, space is where it's at for me! A lighter EVE is just what the market ordered!
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Perhaps it'll find a niche though in the casual crowd or MMO newcomers like the article says - which could be a very good market for the devs.
It'd take a serious amount of positive 'word of mouth' from beta testers for me to try the game out though.
hope it does well.
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<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/sto-kl ingons-require-unlocking-cryptic">Klingons Unlock at Level 10</a href>
Does make me a tad concerned that either Oli didn't play it all that long or the levelling curve is a bit steep, though to be fair I think most of what you'd need to know you'll get told in the first hour. I enjoyed reading this great little hands-on though, here's hoping it doesn't get old quickly and it's kept fresh for a good while
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On the other hand, if I wait 6 months to a year to play it, I'll be so far behind the hardcore gamers that there's no point playing...
What do you guys think?
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I'm a sci fi and trek fan but I've never played a MMO game before (the nearest I've come is PSO and PSU) so I think I'll get this. The fact that it's a MMO lite and not a grindfest by the sound of it definitely appeals to me, hopefully they keep the new content coming thick and fast.
I'm probably going to be a complete and utter arsehole at this game, I plan to team up with others and just go around attacking individual ships guerilla style (de-cloak, fire, cloak).
The only question is where to pre-order from?
Every retailer is offering different DLC be it an exclusive shuttle, weapon, pet etc.
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As soon as the NDA drops there will be tears.
CO in space.
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You pre-ordered on steam ouch man
£39.99 for normal edition or £49.99 for special
I paid £24.99 for special edition of Amazon...
Really looking forward to it, should be getting the beta key this weekend.
Plus i get a Borg Drone with my Amazon package (Damn i sound like a nerd but who cares this will be awsome haha)
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CO in space."
I really wish I didn't agree, but I do.
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I also can't abide the way MMO devs get away with releasing games that are quite clearly unfinished.
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This is something I'm afraid we'll have to get used to, in this era of shrinking capital investors expect returns before leaving the checkbook open. Fallen Earth is a good example of an "unfinished" mmo running hard to polish the game up after release; their latest patch included an impressive graphics overhaul.
The six month rule will become a more dramatic indicator of a game's success or failure. Expect more licensing, less original ip, to get more cash upfront. The good developers will act fast and build a successful game by fleshing out a strong gameplay skeleton. I'm guessing that is what Cryptic is trying to do here from Oli's preview.
I plan on picking it up at retail a week or two after release, if only to try to support some diversity. For such a popular genre, mmorpg's experienced quite a bit of fail in 2009...and I wish to see more games, not less.
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Also, Klingons currently unlock at level 6.
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Hopefully it'll be doing well in a year and I can consider it then.
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I preordered of amazon read a post a little above just a good offer,
I know how you feel though i spent £40 on Aion and barely played it i enjoy them to a point so i like trying then all out..
But the problem i find is the model,, as an MMO the idea is you play with other people, but i rarely play, few times a week if that so any friends i make soon delete me because i don't play as much, i find that takes a lot out of the game and in the end causes me to stop playing all together.
As it stands i tend to see MMOs as a lengthy RPG because of that reason, hopefully Star Trek will be different and ive ordered it so now its a matter of wait and see
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How much are they likely to change in under a month? Surely it's reasonable to assume that the fundamental game mechanics aren't going to change dramatically?
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Actually, it isn't reasonable. Alpha and Beta stages are for testing diffirent methods of gameplay to see how those play out and change them, if possible, before launch. People have just started thinking that Beta equals early playtime - when it actually is just a testing period.
Closed Beta often means limited playtime, as well as content, and I see more and more posts about "how bad the game is..", etc. - from people that either haven't played it or have only had a very limited amount of playtime in Closed Beta. I believe the loudest complains are about content (which is a strange complaint during a limited content testing period). It is more reasonable to assume that when the end of Open Beta draws near that no major changes are going to happen to gameplay (although that is still a possibility).
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Yeah I hear you on that. I struggle to make friends on them too. Only time I did was when I was investing more than 10 hours a week on them. *sigh* No, I really think that I've bought enough games in the last few months. Plus Mass Effect 2 should give me my sci-fi RPG fix. I'll pass, but I reckon that due to this being the first time in a long time I've wanted to play an MMO...it's likely that I'll get around to it at some point.
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Yes, okay, Champions Online isn't excellent, but it's not exactly dire either. Continual patches are improving it and it's gone a long way since the beta. Even during the beta I thought it was a rather fun game; it improved upon Cities of Heroes a lot and was good fun to play.
I reckon STO is going to suffer from a similar situation to CO, and I think that's more due to Cryptic being constrained by Atari than anything else. Cryptic are a good enough group but they're stuck in an ever competitive world and Atari cannot afford to give them the length neccessary to do a massive project. Despite this I reckon STO should be given a break and at least tried, before people go "Zomg it's cryptic it won't be good."
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The Geekest Link has beta codes shipping monday! http://th egeekestlink.com/store/index.ph...
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big the ups don't mention the downs, another fine review....
It's a preview of a game in beta, not a review. Also I'd suggest you read it again as he mentions a number of problem areas in the game and there's a huge caveat about how "the bigger picture is currently impossible to make out." Oli mentioning that several key features are unimplemented in the beta this close to release is worrying in itself.
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You seem to have missed the joke.
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Probably the best Trek fans have gotten in years gaming wise. Glad I preordered.
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If your going to not get the joke atleast do it properly.
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ofcourse theres a niche for games like these but ultimately they just wont make the cut for most people.
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