Cryptic’s Star Trek Online is the game that many Star Trek fans have always wanted to play. You get to captain your own Federation starship and team up with like-minded captains in seeking out new life and new civilizations. And if rescuing survivors and following the Prime Directive isn’t your bag, you can unlock the Klingons (and the races allied with them) by completing a short quest chain. Then you can cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war against Federation and Klingon ships alike in your very own Bird of Prey.
Ditching the whole kill-ten-rats thing, the tutorial and introduction to Star Trek Online starts you out as an Ensign on a ship caught in a Borg attack in Federation space. Early on, you meet an emergency medical hologram, voiced by Zachary Quinto, who details the ins and outs of how to play the game while you take out the Borg who have begun assimilating the U.S.S. Khitomer. When you get back to your own ship, you are told that the Borg attack killed all the officers, and that you are now the highest ranking member of the crew. Through battlefield promotion, you are given control of the ship and eventually sent to blow up a square Borg monstrosity. Afterwards, you head to the Spacedock orbiting Earth and the Admiral congratulates you for your valor, promotes you to lieutenant and gives you your own ship to boldly go where, well, you know.
The starship battles of Star Trek Online are my favorite part of the game. It is undeniably cool to fire all your phasers and then let loose a salvo of photon torpedoes when the opposing ship’s shields have failed. And you had better damn well pay attention to how your shields are doing or a torpedo may sneak in and take out your hull. The animation is fluid and feels very Star Trek-like, and space features like stars, moons or even clouds of gas look fantastic. Battles can be hectic, with lots of ships swirling around to gain better position, or you can sneak around and try to launch a surprise attack. The first Klingon ship you get has a cloaking device, and it’s definitely fun to get close to an unsuspecting Federation ship before de-cloaking and firing all available torpedoes.
As a multiplayer game, Star Trek Online is a mix of old and new concepts. You gain levels by rising in rank; you begin play as a Lieutenant Grade 1 and you go up to Grade 10 until becoming a Lieutenant Commander, which unlocks bigger ships and better weapons. There are vendors where you can buy and sell the various ship components you loot from the weird orange shapes that are left behind by some enemies and ships (yes, you can loot in space). Each captain has a bank to hold various items and there is even an Exchange that serves as an auction house to facilitate trade between players. There is no crafting per se, but you can spend time tracking down various anomalous readings both in space and on ground mission which, when scanned, give you materials like “alien artifacts.” You can bring those materials to Spacedock and trade them to the scientists there for better items.
As far as I can tell from the open beta, there are no individual servers to log into and the whole game is instanced. You may be in Spacedock with a hundred or so different captains, but there are dozens of identical copies of Spacedock. Through the interface, you can change your instance so that you can meet up with your friend in Spacedock Instance #666 or whatever.
Grouping is handled largely behind the curtain; when you enter a planetary system that has a mission, you are automatically assigned into a group of other captains, which I imagine pulls from the whole pool of people currently online. This alleviates the need to spam LFG channels to run a particular mission, but that also means that the team assembled generally has no investment in the instance. It could be beta blues, but most of the players I encountered didn’t chat or coordinate tactics at all.
You can also queue for PvP from anywhere to fight the opposing faction in space on your ship or in ground combat arenas. This is largely optional if you are a Federation player, but most of the initial missions you receive as a Klingon direct you to, say, kill 10 player captains. My favorite Klingon mission though is called “A Good Day To Die” which rewards you for dying 25 times in PvP. God, I love Worf.
Missions often have a ground section, where you assemble an away team and beam to a planet’s surface or the decks of a different ship. This offers a completely different set of tactical gameplay decisions than the ship combat, and is really where choosing to be a Science, Engineering or Tactical officer really matters. There is a sort of holy trinity, where the Tactical officers tank, Science heals, and Engineering, um, also “heals” by fixing shields but can also drop turrets to deal damage. Aiming (or crouching), flanking and using Exploit powers after your target is the victim of an Expose power all increase damage and add a few tactical choices to the ground battles. In practice though, the ground sections are a bit laggy and hard to manage because of the aforementioned lack of communication between players.
As a former Trekkie who stopped religiously watching somewhere between Deep Space Nine and Scott Bakula, I’m surprised at how excited I am play Star Trek Online. Most of the time, it perfectly captures the essence of the universe that I loved as a kid and lets you inhabit the 24th century with other like-minded players. The game itself is fun to play and Cryptic innovatively expanded the confines of what we consider to be an MMOG. It remains to be seen whether Star Trek Online is as fun after 100 hours as it is after 10.
Bottom Line: Melding ship battles with tactical ground combat and a host of other MMOG innovations proves that Cryptic is not just betting on the strong license to sell Star Trek Online. The game is fun and the universe feels right, now we just have to see if it will hold subscriptions in a crowded market.
Star Trek Online launches on February 2 in North America and February 5th in Europe.
