Star Trek Online: Re-Review (PC)
We first reviewed Cryptic’s Star Trek Online back in Feb last year a few weeks after launch, and whilst (like every other MMO player) i’m waiting for SWTOR to be released, I’ve decided to revisit a few old MMO’s to see how they’ve changed.
Is It more Star Trekky?
Story driven episodes
One of the key issues I had with STO during the first review was it’s over reliance on combat for missions. If there’s one thing Star Trek was never about, it was killing everything you came across. And, whilst there is still a lot of combat in STO (there is a war on after all), Cryptic have also added a lot more non-combat/puzzle related sections to it’s missions, along with dedicated ‘diplomatic missions’ which have no combat at all.
It seems in the 16 months since the game launched, someone over at Cryptic suggested the wacky idea of actually watching some episodes of the various Star Trek tv shows, and the penny finally dropped on how they should be writing missions. The Romulan based ‘Cloaked Intentions’ and the new ‘The Devidians’ series of episodes, are a huge leap forward in storytelling from the early ‘go here > kill that in space > kill this on a planet > kill that in space again’ mission structure. The new improved STO has some great, well written stories, that really pull you into the game and actual feel like Star Trek.
So there’s more content?
Star Trek Online
In addition to Cryptic adding more stories, there’s also a slew of new content added by players themselves through the new Foundry mission builder. The quality does vary somewhat between episodes, but some of them are really well constructed, and vastly entertaining. There’s a simple, player reviewed, 5 star rating system which helps you to filter things down and find the better missions. Some are somewhat like the filler episodes of the show (entertaining, but you could live without them), but as players have got more competent with the Foundry system, they are now producing epic, linked episode arks, that almost match the new stuff Cryptic are writing.
Interface immersion
No more astrometrics
One tiny change which made a huge difference to me, is the ability to switch off the ‘astrometrics’ layer on the space maps. Previously, when you warped from system to system, you got thrown onto a stylised tactical map interface, which jarred horribly with the beautifully crafted spacescapes you get inside a system. Now, you can turn off all the extraneous stylised graphics, leaving you to warp about a far more pleasant environment. It’s still not the vast and open space that you’d get in a game like EVE, but that minor change does really help with the games immersion.
Another addition, is the ability to wander around your ship, rather than just your bridge. You still can’t access every area, but you can visit the crew deck – which has sickbay, crew quarters and a lounge – and you can also get to the engineering level. It’s a small thing, but it all helps sit you in the Star Trek world.
The rest of the interface is as generic and functional as it was previously (i still think they missed a trick not using a LCARS interface). However they have tweaked some things by adding some some long overdue filters onto the HUGE list of items in the shops/skills windows. I’d still like some decent filters on the Exchange (aka auction house), that allow you to look for things by function rather than just by name, but it’s a start.
What about the combat?
My 'helpful' crew
Space combat is pretty much as it ever was, and that’s fine by me. It might not be perfect, but it’s entertaining, and there’s enough skills and variety in the ships and officer choices for players to find a fit they’re comfortable with.
The ground combat sucks a bit less… That’s not to say it’s good… it just not as bad as it was. Your away team seem a little less stupid than they were. They still get stuck on things – although not as much as they did. They still run around and jump about like they’re being controlled by an 10yr old child who’s just downed 3 bags of Haribo and a litre of Coke. They still don’t care if your stood next to the enemy when they decide to throw a plasma grenade at them setting you on fire as well. Honestly, if Starfleet saw some of the antics your away team got up to, i’m pretty sure every one of them would have been court martialed a long time ago!
And how are the Graphics?
Star Trek Online
Due to the fact that STO is built on Cryptic’s MMO engine, it’s still got that horrible floaty feel to it, same issue they had with City of Heroes and Champions Online. Until they decide the build a system that doesn’t feel like everything is held together by elastic bands, i guess that’s always going to be the case.
There’s also issues with the graphics themselves. I have a relatively new PC and reasonable graphics card running up-to-date drivers, which should be able to cope with STO without any issues at all. However i’m still really struggling if the shadows are turned onto high, or if there are a lot of lighting effects on screen. I’m beginning to suspect it’s just that STO is not that well coded, and that’s causing issues on certain graphic cards. I can’t see how a rig that runs newer games like Dragon Age 2, or other MMOs like the visually stunning Conan, without so much as a glitch, still struggles with STO’s graphics.
Conclusion
Danube-class Runabout
Despite Cryptic’s engine, and some graphical issues, Star Trek Online is a really fun game. Over the last 16 months Cryptic have worked hard to make STO feel far more like Star Trek than it ever did before. The addition of the Foundry means their is always some new story to play through. And if you want a take a break from playing, you can always create your own episode. It’s not perfect, and i’m still not a fan of the ground combat, but the new ‘out of combat’ stuff is wonderfully written and engaging, and far more like what i wanted it to be in the first place.
8/10 – More Star Trekky than has gone before.
Star Trek Meets the Knights of the Round Table
Some Sunday afternoon sillyness…
Star Trek Meets Monty Python
Review: Star Trek Online (PC)
Review: Star Trek Online (PC)
As I mentioned in the Star Trek Online History post, i’ve been playing around in Star Trek Online since Closed Beta. I wanted to point out, this is very much a review of the live game experience. You may see a number of reviews out there that are based on the reviewers beta experiences, but that’s extremely unfair on the work Cryptic put into STO before launch. The difference between the live game and the awful ‘car crash’ of a beta test in terms of stability and playability are light years apart… Not that there aren’t still issues…
U.S.S. Geektown
These are the voyages of the Starship, Geektown…
At least they would be if you could log into the server…We’re a few weeks past live release and as far as I can work out, Cryptic seem to running STO on some old networked Spectrum ZX81s powered by hamsters in running wheels. I’m sure they’ll upgrade them soon… maybe get in some Commodore 64s powered by badgers on treadmills. However, this minor annoyance (which is slowly turning into mild irritation after the 3rd server crash today), does give me a break from playing to write this review.
Character Creation
You can pick to play as a Tactical (damage/tank), Engineer (support/survivability), or Science (healing/support) Officer. You’re limited to Federation (Fed) until level 6, where you unlock the Klingon Empire, in a similar way to how Lord of the Ring Online runs it’s ‘Monster Play’. Like ‘Monster Play’, the Klingon side is very much a PvP focused, cut down version of the main game. Choices for Fed races include Human (obviously), Andorian, Bajoran, Betazoid, Bolian, Saurian, Trill, Vulcan, and ‘Alien’. The character customisation is tempered depending on your race, however if you do want to go nuts, you can always pick the alien option, which basically unlocks all the sliders and lets you create your own wacky species. Your race determines your basic look and some of your starting abilities. Betazoids for example are empathic (reducing threat generation), where as Bajorans are creative (increasing skills with ‘kits’ – items that give you extra abilities). You then can pick your costume, which come in a variety of Starfleety type options.
Boldly Going…
Star Trek Online
Being a traditionalist, I picked a human tactical officer as my first character. After a intro voiced by Leonard Nimoy, I pop up in the mess hall on the U.S.S. GeekTown (a Miranda Class Light Cruiser) with red alerts blaring all around. It seems the Borg are trying to assimilate a nearby ship, so I’m instructed to beam over to their medical bay to see if I can give some help to the emergency medical hologram (who sounds suspiciously like Syler from Heroes…) Once a few crewmen are patched up, I’m sent to engineering to blow some Borg out of an airlock, and then fight my way to a transporter, where I get to pick a my first bridge crew.
Bridge Crew serve 2 main purposes. Firstly, they man stations on your ship. As you up level up and get bigger and better ships, you gain more crew, and more advanced station configurations. For example, the Enterprise like Cruiser Class has 2 engineering stations, 1 science, and 1 tactical, where as the Defiant style Escort class has 2 tactical, 1 science and 1 engineering station. Each bridge crew member has their own set of space skills, such as my new vulcan science officer, has a tachyon beam skill that lowers the shields on an enemy ship.
Your Bridge Crew’s second purpose is to serve as party members for the ground missions when your not grouped with friends - side note: when you are grouped with friends, it means the Captains from each ship all form the away team… which I’m sure must breach some Starfleet rule on officer safety… – Again each crew member has a variety of skills, such as the science officer’s medical tricorder, or the engineers turrets and mines.
Space… The Final Frontier…
Beautiful spacescapes
Moving on a bit through the starter mission, I find myself battling a Borg Cube. Thankfully, I’m not on my own. This fight takes the form of a fleet mission, where as you enter the zone, your automatically grouped with other players to take on larger objectives (if you’ve familiar with Champions Online or Warhammer, you’ll be aware of this form of open mission).
I’ve see a number of reviews where people describe STO space combat as fairly slow, but it’s really more depends on the class of ship. Cryptic do need to try and keep the ‘Trekness’ in the game, and to see the Enterprise suddenly pull a ‘handbrake turn’, spin 180, and launch a barrage of cannon fire straight at a Klingon really wouldn’t seem very ‘Trek’. However, if you do want more maneuverability, once you reach level 11 you can choose to take an Escort class ship (e.g. DS9′s Defiant), which gives you a much nimbler ride, with a whole array of forward facing turrets, but does sacrifice survivability.
Overall I find the space combat mechanics good fun, even if the missions themselves can be rather repetitive – Go here, kill 5 Klingon ships… then kill 5 more Klingon ships… then 5 more etc… There are some variations, but that usually just involves flying to something and hitting the ‘F’ key to scan/repair/interact with it in some way.
Ahead, Warp Factor 5
Warp travel interface
Travelling through space is a different matter. One of the most disappointing things for me was mechanism to warp from planetary system to planetary system. Whilst inside a system, you get to see your ship in these stunningly beautiful spacescapes, scattered with asteroids, nebulas and planets. However, during warp travel, your ship model is thrown onto stylised tactical map interface, which totally pulls you out of any immersion. What would have been great during the warp travel would have been the ability to wander around my ship, or some interaction on the bridge (you can visit your bridge in STO, but it’s basically an instanced room, so you can’t travel in warp and be on the bridge at the same time). The system map interface just instantly made the STO universe seem small and ‘game like’, rather than the vast openness of space it really should be.
Ground Combat
Ground Combat
I beam down to a planet, my newly acquired science officer with me for backup, to show some Borg the business end of a phaser rifle. I have an issue with the ground combat in STO as I’ve had with other Cryptic’s games. I’m sure Cryptic’s proprietary MMO engine makes it easier and quicker for them to develop, but it has this horrible ‘elasticy’ feel to it. Their always seems to be a delay between action and consequence. Throw a grenade, it lands and explodes. Count 1… 2… 3… and then people fall down from the blast. I’m positive it’s not a lag issue, as there was a similar issue with Champions Online, and even City of Heroes. The engine just has this ‘floaty’ feel to it which makes the ground combat feel less solid than most of its counterpart MMOs.
Another issue is the away team AI, which seems to stands for Artificial Idiocy. It is vastly improved from beta, but you do still find yourself occasionally tracking back across a map because you’ve just noticed your tactical officer is stuck trying to walk through a wall somewhere. They also have a tendency to think running through the fire created by the plasma grenade they’ve just thrown is a genius idea. All in all, not Starfleet’s best and brightest.
The Interface
Whilst STOs main player interface is perfectly adequate overall, there are a few basic things that really bug me. Why is it Cryptic still can’t make an auction interface that actually has a decent number of search filters on it? Same goes for any of their NPC shopping interfaces. I can only imagine the conversation went something like “Shall we put some filters on this?”… “Nah, just whack everything into one MASSIVE list, and jumble it all together so it takes them forever to find anything, it’ll be fine!”
Also, given your dealing with Star Trek, surely the obvious thing to do would would be to base it round a LCARS interface? Michael Okuda went to a massive amount of trouble designing LCARS for the Trek universe, and it’s just disappointing there isn’t even a vague nod to it in STO, rather than some generic MMO graphics.
Boldly Going...
But is it Star Trek?
The ship designs and uniforms are very Trek. The history/lore of the universe is tied in nicely to the Trek timeline. They even have Nimoy (and Quinto) doing voice work. But I can’t help thinking, what would Gene Roddenberry say if he saw it? I rather suspect he’d be extremely disappointed in the over reliance on space battles to entertain, rather than exploring and plot. Star Trek was never about combat. It was about exploring new world. Boldly going where no one had gone before. If any game needed an EVE-like vast openness of space, it was Star Trek Online. Instead you get a bunch of instances held together by a map.
Conclusion
Although there are a number of negatives in this review, I am enjoying my time in Star Trek Online. I’ve made lieutenant commander, and am heading toward my next level of ship. It’s just overall, i see it as a missed opportunity to do something great with such a rich and textured license. I would have loved STO to have been more of a Star Trek universe, rather than just a Cyptic game with a Star Trek license slapped over the top. It’s more an MMOG than MMORPG. The role playing bit has got lost somewhere along the way. As someone mentioned in ‘system chat’ last week – “We all know we’re just treading water till Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out”… And unfortunately for Cryptic, i think that’s probably true.
7/10 – Fun in places but a missed opportunity.
Tired of all the Vulcans and outer space? Get back down to earth at moonbingo!
GeekTown’s Top 5 Sci-Fi Movies Of 2009
2009 was a pretty good year for the sci-fi film. Not only did it produce the movie that’s well on the way to becoming the highest grossing movie of all time, but also some great little sci-fi gems that you may have overlooked. So heres GeekTown’s top 5 list of sci-fi movies from the last 12 months:
GeekTown’s Top 5 Sci-Fi Movies Of 2009
Watchmen
5. Watchmen
Watchmen got a fairly mixed reception on release. Yes, it did lose some of the weight of the Moore/Gibbons source material, but considering the number of people that had said it was ‘unfilmable’, and the directors that had been attached to the project and given up, I think Zack Snyder did an decent job with it. Maybe it wasn’t a unique as the comic book fans wanted, but Zack still made a very complex graphic novel into a perfectly fine, engaging superhero movie.
Avatar
4. Avatar
Currently on it’s way to sinking Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time, James Cameron proves once again with Avatar that he doesn’t know how to make a non-smash hit movie. The lush visual world Cameron creates on Pandora, and the groundbreaking CGI work used to create the Na’vi set a new benchmark for special effects in film.
For our full review of Avatar and the Avatar premiere, click here.
3. Moon
Moon
Moon is probably the least well know of the films in this list, but is well worth seeking out on DVD/Blu-ray if you haven’t seen it yet. Duncan Jones makes a stunning directorial debut, in a clever film that has far more in common with the distopian sci-fis of the early 70s rather than your Avatar style blockbuster. The film is practically a one man show for the lead Sam Rockwell, who turns in a performance that (if there’s any justice) really should gain him an Oscar nomination.
Created for the tiny sum (in filmic terms) of $5 million, Moon proves you don’t need a massive Hollywood budget to create impressive, intelligent sci-fi.
For our full review of Moon click here.
2. District 9
District 9
District 9 was another of those films that crept up through the summers massive blockbusters of giant robots and pointy clawed mutants to slap them around the face and show you didn’t need a massive budget to make great sci-fi. Shot for a modest $30 million, Neill Blomkamp made a stunning feature length debut by adapting one of his earlier film shorts, Alive in Joburg, to create District 9. Taking on the themes of apartheid and translating them into a sci-fi setting Blomkamp creates a wonderfully intellegent and brilliantly original movie. The film is also a feature debut for lead Sharlto Copley (soon to be seen as ‘Howling Mad’ Murdock in the A Team movie), who manages the difficult job of taking his character Wikus van der Merwe, who really shouldn’t be all that like-able, and make you feel sympathy for him.
1. Star Trek
Star Trek
Like a lot of Trek fans, when it was announced that they were planning on rebooting Star Trek, a shiver ran up my spine… You can’t recast Kirk! You can’t recast Spock!.. Well, turns out you can. And very successfully too! JJ Abrams managed the seemingly impossible task of updating Trek without annoying Trekkers/Trekkies, and still bringing non-Trek movie goers to the franchise. By the simple but ingenious idea of creating an alternate timeline, thereby leaving the original universe intact, every body’s happy, and JJ has a whole new Star Trek universe to do whatever he likes with.
Zachary Quinto turns in a performance of Spock that nearly ‘out Spocks’ Leonard Nimoy (who also appears as ‘Spock Prime’). Chris Pine manages to still convey a very Kirk-like attitude, but without trying to imitate the unique Mr. Shatner. A mention also needs to go to Karl Urban’s brilliant portrayal of Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy which at times felt like he was actually channeling DeForest Kelley.
JJ Abrams achieved the seemingly unachievable in reinvigorating the Star Trek franchise without alienating existing fans and stomping over it’s rich lineage, and for that, we say ‘Live Long and Prosper’.
Click here to read our full review of Star Trek, and here for our coverage of the Star Trek premiere.
Hailing Fequencies Open For a New Star Trek Series?
Could Star Trek return to the small screen?
Rumours started to fly about the interwebs yesterday that a new Star Trek TV series may be on the way after Bryan Fuller announced he was leaving Heroes… again.
Fuller was an executive producer and writer on the 1st season of Heroes, but left to pursue other projects (including the brilliantly original Pushing Daisies). He returned to Heroes during the 3rd season after signing a 2yr development deal with NBC Universal Media. After planning out some of the major story arcs for the 4th season of Heroes, Fuller was finding himself stretched a bit too thinly – “Development was really starting to heat up, And it appears like I may be writing multiple pilots for NBC so that wasn’t leaving a ton of room for ‘Heroes,’ unfortunately. We crafted some really great arcs for the season that I’m excited to see come to fruition. I love that cast dearly and am sad to go, but the plate – she was over-flowing.” Fuller told AICN.
Fuller has another year and half pilot and pitch writing for NBC Universal, however the bit that has got most of us sci fi geeks excited though, was that Fuller expressed a desire to help create a new series for Paramount set in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek universe. Fuller is no stranger to Trek, having had 22 episode writing credits on both Star Trek: Voyager and – my personal favorite of the next gen Trek – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
I’d love to see Abrams and Fuller get a chance to bring Star Trek back to the small screen. I can’t see it being with the Enterprise crew necessarily, but maybe you set it on one of the other starfleet ships. I’m sure Kirk, Spock & Co weren’t the one to have interesting adventures going where no one had gone before!
The Day Hollywood Offically Ran Out of Ideas… Cliffhanger ‘Reboot’!
Stallone in 1993's Cliffhanger
Comingsoon.net is reporting that Original Films is to ‘reboot’ the 1993 Sylvester Stallone erm.. ‘classic’ Cliffhanger. “Just as they rebooted ‘Star Trek,’ we’re going to do the same with ‘Cliffhanger,’” said Neal Moritz of Original Films… Okay Neal, you need to stop right THERE! I have a couple of issues i’d like to raise here:
1. For the love of [insert deity], WHY? I mean i’m not saying Cliffhanger was a bad movie. If fact i’d go as far to say, it’s a perfectly solid 3 out of 5 action adventure film. But honestly?.. Really?.. Have Hollywood sunk so low as to be raiding the archive for second string 90′s action movies to remake? Which brings me to my second point…
2. What your doing Mr Moritz, is not a ‘reboot’… At best, it’s a sequel, at worst it’s a remake. Don’t give me this “Just as they rebooted ‘Star Trek,’” rubbish! Star Trek has 43yrs of history behind it. It has 5 tv shows, an animated series, 11 movies, numerous computer games, plus hundreds of comics, books, and audio adventures. All covering a rich and complex universe of detailed and intricate characters and worlds. You Neal, have one 113 minute slightly above average 90′s action flick. You can’t ‘reboot’ one film. You can reboot a franchise. You can reboot something with some background and history. But a 1hr and 53min Stallone action vehicle? No.
I think Neal, we’d all feel a lot better if you just came clean and admit it. May 14th 2009 – The day ‘Hollywood’ finally became completely bereft of original ideas.
