I’ve been checking out the Star Trek Online open beta for the past week. I like it more than I should. And I get to fly around in space blowing things up, an activity that nicely coincides with my own interests.
I think I’ve been away from PC gaming for too long, though. The controls for walking around are seven times more complicated than actually physically walking around. If I use mouselook, I can’t access half the interface. If I don’t use mouselook, the cursor keys will sometimes rotate me left and right, and sometimes strafe. The mousewheel allows me to zoom in and out, but doesn’t ever really put my character in a helpful part of the screen. He always seems to be in my way. Holding down the right mouse button acts like mouselook. Holding down the left button is exactly the same but my character doesn’t turn around. All this is confused slightly further by the game occasionally ignoring keypresses.
And yet I like it for all the terribly, nerdy, wrong reasons. The uniform customisation, for one thing. Cryptic have designed some quite nice Starfleety-looking future uniforms that can be customised with up to four colour areas (that’s just for the shirts - the trousers, boots etc. all have their own colour options too). After going through a selection of changes, from aping the Deep Space Nine/First Contact uniforms, to artfully tweaked variations of the future uniforms, I finally settled on this for the remainder of the beta:
Yes, that’s me, Ensign Justice Powerwood, standing among my crew, who I also get to choose individual styles for. I hate myself.
Character customisation is fairly thorough too. My first act in the beta was to create a female character in order to see if breast size could be selected. For your information, it can, via a slider. Yes, I did it so that you’d know. I used this new found knowledge to increase this slider on every female bridge officer I acquired. Again, for research. Not because I’m weird.
All the different uniform styles and types makes me feel like I’m playing a game adaptation of Star Trek: Generations. And if you got that joke, congratulations, you are a huge geek.
Ship customisation allows you to mix and match parts from ships of similar design. You start in a Miranda-class starship, chosen vengeance-chariot of everyone’s favourite genetically engineered villain. You can swap parts between the equally weedy ships that make up that class range. The others are, I believe, new for the game. You can also tweak colours, ship name, surface pattern and registry. It’s a fairly so-so level of customisation, but it’s probably about as far as they could take it and still keep it Star Trekky.
Ground combat is okay, not very new or exciting-feeling. Animations are loose and rushed, and look like a game from 2000. The beam-up animation in particular involves your characters going from a ready-to-shoot pose to a standing-to-attention pose as they tap their comm-badges, and then back to the ready pose all in the space of a second. It looks pretty dumb.
Space combat is totally where it’s at with this game. Many people have claimed Star Trek Online is a reskin of Cryptic’s older game, City of Heroes. This confuses me, because I don’t remember any spaceships in City of Heroes. More than half the game is spent in space, and the combat is reminiscent of the Starfleet Command games. This can only ever be a good thing. Weapon arcs, shield facings and special abilities all come into play, and battles feel like they involve more skill and timing than tedium-simulator Eve Online.
STO isn’t a revolution in MMOs, but considering Cryptic had to start this game from scratch a mere 20 months ago after the previous developer crumbled, the fact they’ve made something fun at all is astounding. And it’s not just a bit fun, it’s above-averagely fun.
That actually sounded like mighty faint praise, didn’t it?
