So, I finally have my grubby mitts on Star Trek Online… I’ve been waiting so long for this.

This post will contain first impressions, a bug and recommended update thread, and some stuff I’ve really enjoyed seeing in the game.

I downloaded the game, installed it, then went to work!

Really.

But then I got off, went home, and spent the next hour and a half struggling for a Newbie Slot (apparently the number of slots available for newbie mission runners is finite… and so is the patience of all the screamers on the forum pissed that they have to wait for their turn during launch-hour of early Open Beta.)

First Impressions

Star Trek Online is going to sap all my free time, for months to come. The game is well designed, nice to look at… it’s a ton of fun, even with the buggy beta.

I want to start off by saying that the bugginess of the beta should not distract you from this game, or the review.  Editor's Note:  Espeically after the first bug patch, distributed while I wrote this, has made every part of the login and playing process faster and smoother and more stable... in some cases by 10x! There's plenty of time to fix it, the developers are hard at work, and with bug reports flying at 'em like bullets on the Beaches of Normandy you can be sure the game will be polished up.  And I want to make that point... from my initial experiences, the game runs extremely well... it just needs some polish here and some sanding over there.  But the core is solid.

The creature creator is the first bit you see when you get into the game.  The Beta is lacking a bit in the extras department, but that's OK.  The graphical engineers are hard at work making all the rubbery bits for character faces and somewhat.  So it'll be even better than it is... and it's good.  Intuitive and very flexible, with various levels of micromanagement available... so if you just want a black guy with a white uniform that's somewhat tall, that'll take you seconds.  However, if you have a specific character in mind... you can do that too.

My personal self insert... just about how I imagine him:  Cameron Broderbund Sanantonio*

The first (and main) complaint I hear from people who, frankly, haven’t given STO a second look, simply writing it off as a loss before it launches, is something along the lines of “the graphics look like the old PlayStation.” I don’t know why, but Cryptic seems to have taken their screenshots with a cell phone camera or something, because the art looks mighty fine to me!

A view of Spacedock's interior; Club 47 to the left.

A view through the windows of the observation lounge. Only missing spaceships in orbit. What dock doesn't have ships sailing around it?

Alas, the first impression of most people trying to get into the beta was the game dumping out to Login every time you attempted to join in due to a lack of Newbie instances. This makes the game look unstable… once you’ve got your account running… or at least once I had MINE running… and have left the Newbie area, you’ll have little trouble getting into the game.

The sound effects are authentic, and very well done. The instance sound ambiance is also very well done.  The specific sound that sticks in my head is on the Earth Spacedock, you hear the intercoms mumbling in the background with the familiar bosun's call used for the intercoms since TOS.  It's easy to forget how important sound effects are for immersion, but Cryptic gets an A+ for this. The sound effects aren't overdone (I'm looking at you Star Trek Games which play LCARS beeps and boops with every mouseover);  they're done correctly.  Speaking of LCARS...

The user interface is a nice combination of Star Trek LCARS and an actual usable computer interface. It also has some design pointers from the consoles of the Classic Star Trek Movies, which is a good thing.

So my ship's called the U.S.S. Beeblebrox... you have a problem with that?  I wanted the USS Wesley Crusher, but apparently that was an illegal name...

Kitbashing is fun. The standard Star Trek practice of taking bits of various consumer-grade models of Starships, slapping some new pant over the bunch, and calling it the USS Pride of Fort Worth and making it a backdrop starship for the Enterprise comes into it’s own in this game. At first, I thought mixing and matching kit pieces for starships would end up with decidedly ugly ships. But I was pleasantly surprised. Took me the saucer of a Miranda, and the pylons and nacelles of a Centaur and ended up with my own personalized ship to call home. My only complaint here is that the color tones allowed in the color picker for ship paint jobs are somewhat… bland. So far they’re all dull colors, and on the Miranda saucer, the paint covers over the registry numbers. No sweat… I just fly paintless.

If Burger King made Starships...

A note about Betaness:

We have become spoiled when it comes to the word “beta.” The open source community’s refusal to ever call anything “release quality” in addition to Google’s never ending Betas, have given people this concept that “beta” means 98% working with absolutely no showstopper bugs anywhere.

That’s not Beta.

This game… is Beta.

GASP! I CAN'T BREATHE!

There’s a lot of rough edges and mistakes, typos, bad baked textures, etc. Some are humorous, some are frustrating… all are livable… except for the lack of Newbie instances. If you can’t even get INTO the game, you’ll never be able to see how fun it is to be able to survive the bumps. Unfortunatly, in Cryptic’s rush to get as many people on the open beta as possible (I had to put cold hard cash down to get my beta key (preorder) and I saw an announcement that some keys are now being handed out for free… D:) they’re failing to ACTUALLY GET PEOPLE INGAME. It’s like the difference between “access” to health care and actually talking to a Doctor

In fact, I just recently had a crash while attempting to set my paint job on my ship. Happy Beta Day!

Bugs and Annoyances!

A whole load of these complaints were fixed, or modified, in the patch that came out around 10PM Central tonight.  I leave this here for posterity - Ed.

The motion prediction for away teams sucks, and sucks hard. There are many times when I’ll suddenly slide 100 feet to the right, or spin in a circle, or jump over something, or just otherwise simply not go where I was intending to go. I know that the server has to keep state on my location to ensure I’m not cheating, but it would be nice to be able to walk a straight line in a somewhat complex instance without jumpin’ around like a drop of water on a hot skillet. Games had to handle lag for decades; this is the worst I’ve seen in a long time.

Really, it makes the away missions all but impossible to navigate. Ship battles, luckly, don’t suffer with this.

Getting kicked to the Login Prompt. This one will make you scream. It seems that each and every error in the game, from losing a list of items to having the connection with the server jiggled, causes the game to give up, dump core, and throw you to the Login screen. There’s no queuing for resources or error timeouts. Just SPLAT!

Expect to see this during Beta. Alot.

The progress bar on the game launcher… never progresses. At least the numbers let me know how long I’ll be waiting for the game to start.

Suggestions

I’d like to see Eve Online style helm controls, centered around whatever object you have targeted. A small control panel that allows me to (1) approach, (2) retreat, (3) keep at weapons range, (4) orbit left, and (5) orbit right would be so full of awesome. This isn’t too hard to imagine… Captain Kirk had Sulu to micromanage the helm. I enjoy having manual control over helm, but on the other hand I’d like to sometimes focus on tactics or manipulating power levels or whatnot.

NOTE! I don’t recommend ditching the manual helm controls. Just having somebody who can handle the boring bits (intercept that, orbit this, etc) would be a nice bonus.

Speaking of things Eve does right: Overview. Kirk had Mr Spock who could look into his little hood and tell him where things are. I was constantly getting lost flyin’ about, unable to find some location I was supposed to be at. Overview combined with a “Helm Officer” would make flying in space rock my socks.

Action timers, also known as throbbers. None of the in game dialogs have any signal that anything is happening. You just assume that because the game is still RUNNING that it’s still WORKING.

When you get rewards after ending a mission, it’s itty bitty font printed on top of whatever noisy background you’re currently looking at, in the center of the screen. This makes it impossible to read what it is you just got before the words fade away. Simply draw a transparent user interface box, similar to what’s used in chat, behind the words. The UI disappears quick enough… I just can’t READ THE WORDS.

Naming ships:  there's no printed guidelines anywhere I could find with rules on naming ships, yet when I entered "USS Wesley Crusher" I was told my ship name had illegal words in it.  I assume that the name of Star Trek properties are being filtered out, perhaps?  USS Beeblebrox, however, was open and allowed.  Some kind of help text saying what is and is not an acceptable ship name would be good.

Better dev communication, especially during Beta would be nice. An official Twitter feed that contains status updates, or a web based ticket system (the ingame one is OK, but another route to handle my bug reports would make me want to do an even better job at my job as a beta tester), perhaps a single page which contains ALL known, reported issues being worked on, all issues queued, etc. There’s a huge amount of threads in the forum, making it less useful for somebody just trying to get back to the game.

Try again on the EMH’s recorded dialog. Especially the line “I’m an Emergency Medical Hologram, not a..” whatever the line was. I mentally blocked it. Put some emotion into it. Watch more Robert Picardo. I can tell you’re going for that “Stiff computer simulation” feel, but… it’s just not there. Too bad you couldn’t get Picardo himself to reprise his role. I ended up turning off the sound and reading the EMH’s line in my head with Picardo’s voice.

I’d like a few alternative “Going to warp” camera angles… the first 50 times you jump to warp, the camera position is neat, but it just gets monotonous.

Take that, Canada!

Awesome Stuff

• Spacedock’s bar is named “Club 47“
• Commander Akira Sulu.
• The launch button in the launcher starts with “Make it So” and ends with “Engage.”
• Tribbles multiply in your hold.
• You can visit Deep Space Station K-7
• The Azura was hauling Tranya.

* Where in the world did I come up with that name?