I have spent a little under twelve hours over the past three days beta testing Star Trek Online. It has been a very interesting experience to say the least, with its ups and of course downs as well.
This is Gidon, a Trill male Federation Lieutenant (and should I muster more time to play, maybe even a Lieutenant Commander one day). Want to know more about his adventures in Star Trek Online beta? Read on.
A word of note. Yes I did play it at 1024×768 at reduced graphical details. Because believe it or not, Crysis ran much better at 1680×1050 on medium details than STO. Especially on the jungle planets, and given that Crysis was pretty much one large jungle, this baffled me slightly.
This here, obviously, is a loading screen and at certain points in the game (namely playing around/in Sol) I got the impression that I spent more time looking at loading screens than I spent on doing anything else. And when I say that I cooked my dinner during two of these loading screens, I’m not kidding. A proper cooked dinner.
I’m pretty sure everyone could do this though, because from what I’ve heard from other players, they have also sometimes ran into loading screens that just never end. The little hints and tips at the bottom get updated, music and sounds continue playing, but it never finishes loading.
It all starts out rather well. Character creation, uniform customisation and such are for most parts very well done, and there are lots and lots of options. The instructions are easy to follow and the early quests fun. There are voice overs for the people you talk to (at least early on), and everything points to this being a very well crafted MMO.
That is until you start running into all kinds of bugs, annoyances and things that make you wonder if Cryptic were forced to cut corners all over the place. Even the login process has its flaws. Namely, there’s no queue system. If the servers are full it will not place you in a queue and tell you when you can roughly expect to play. It will throw you out and tell you to try again later.
I’ll admit that I’ve never really been a great fan of Star Trek (in fact I’ve only seen about ten episodes put together, and the new movie), so you’ll have to excuse me if I make claims about Star Trek universe that aren’t accurate. But the “Sector Space” reminded me more of Babylon 5′s hyperspace than Star Trek’s warp drive technology.
But that might have been just a gameplay decision, and to make things easier for players. And it’s not really so bad anyway. Until you are hailing the Starfleet to wrap a mission and suddenly see a loading screen because of a random encounter.
Here we have one of the before mentioned jungle planets. To be honest, with the reduced graphical details and the relatively low resolution it doesn’t look all too bad, but it doesn’t look great either. And it runs at about five frames per second on my PC. Whereas Crysis would almost never drop under 20 frames per second.
One thing that I noticed the first time I ran across a jungle planet was that even after reducing the settings from medium to low it didn’t seem to help at all. So I’m wondering if setting those settings to high will at least enable me to see a pretty slide show. But then I suppose the other locations won’t run any more at a playable speed.
I really wanted to love Star Trek Online. There aren’t that many good science fiction games out there. Especially the MMO kind. Yes there’s Eve Online, and I used to adore it, but I grew tired of it, and stop playing it months ago.
Speaking of Eve Online and Star Trek Online. The two games share a few similarities, especially when it comes to missions. They are for most parts exactly the same. Go to System X. Destroy all the bad guys. Scan some objects. Destroy more bad guys. Maybe beam on to the planet and destroy even more bad guys. Beam back up and maybe blow up a few more bad guy ships.
That’s it, that’s what the majority of missions were like for me. Yes there were some non-combat missions along the way as well. But I think that was one mission out of about 30. At this point when I log in, and get a new mission, I play through it, and then I’m bored already. I just can’t bring myself to play another one. I just go do something else.
Bugs. Have I mentioned those already? Sadly there’s an abundance of them in STO. Starting from simple things like animations not playing correctly, or effects not happening, all the way to the interface plainly showing you the wrong information. Dialogues being bugged so that when you select the Exit option the NPC thinks you picked something else.
Star Trek Online is currently in public beta test, and it’s set to be launched in just 16 days, give or take. I just can’t imagine how Cryptic Studios, the creators of City of Heroes and City of Villains could release something so unpolished, so unready, so something that needs quite a lot of work on it still.
I wonder what the closed beta testers were doing all this time. Some of these bugs are quite obvious and they are still there. Or maybe they did report them all and it’s the developer that didn’t take care of them. Or maybe it was CBS who didn’t give the developer enough time and resources. Who knows.
Ideally I’d love to re-visit Star Trek Online in say six or so months and see what they’ve done with it. The game has potential, but in its current state I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the biggest Star Trek fans.
Maybe in six months most of the bugs will be squashed, the performance improved and new diverse content added. I certainly hope so anyway.
10 replies to “Woes of Star Trek Online Beta Testing”
Kev said on January 18th, 2010 at 23:24
This game looks and sounds painfully bad, KoTOR MMO all the way for me since I stopped playing WoW like a month and a half before I went uni.
rihards said on January 19th, 2010 at 09:26
It’s not very bad, and can be fun, but it can also be very frustrating at this point with so many things glitchy and buggy.
As for TOR, sadly the release date for it is set to be 2011 summer. Yes, that’s 2011, not 2010. But in some ways that’s good as well, by then I should have a better PC which will actually run it.
moiraesfate said on January 23rd, 2010 at 05:33
Honestly, I agree with your review. I’m actually pretty disgusted with what I’m seeing. They’ve succeeded in nearly destroying this. People won’t stand for this when its released. Which is really sad. It’s Star Trek. It should be one of the best games on the market.
Frankly, all you do is go to space battle and kill stuff, then go to planet and kill stuff. There are very very few quests that do anything else.
Just to give an example of what a good quest really is…
I’m an avid EQ2 player and have been for years. Recently, they released the “introduction” quests. This has got to be some of the best series of quests I’ve seen in a game.
Now, I’ve only played the Qeynos part but I’m going to tell you what happens so you get an idea of what good “quests” or “missions” mean.
In the port area of Qeynos, you encounter one of the librarians of the palace who mentions that he’s missing an important book about the history of the Bayle family and he thinks it might have been fenced. Of course, you go to see if you can find the fence.
Speaking with her, you find out that she actually borrowed the book legitimately and forgot to return it. You take the book back to the Librarian who finds some letters mentioning that Queen Antonia Bayle is going to be attacked. He then sends you to the Captain of the Guard, Murrar Shar.
Murrar is a very old character that has been with the game since opening. So if you don’t want the secret, don’t read further.
Murrar sends you to back to the Libarian, who sends you to speak with the Queen of Kelethin and to deliver a note to her. Only the note is very insulting and she’s angry, though she mostly just tells you leave. When you return to the Librarian to tell him what happened, you find him dead behind the inn where you were talking to him, and that he’s been robbed.
You then speak with Murrar again who sends you to question the fence who he thinks is the one posing danger to the Queen. He sends some of his men along with you, only his men attack you outside the hideout and you’re forced to kill them.
One of the guards has paperwork containing orders to kill you, the fence, and the Librarian.
The fence gives you a potion to help with the Librarian’s body. Arriving back, you attempt to put the potion into his mouth, but you are then captured by some royal guards who take you for questioning. Eventually you manage to convince them that you didn’t kill the Librarian with the help of magic and the ring.
The problem is that the ring reveals the Queen is going to be attacked while hunting in Antonica.
When you arrive at her camp, all her guards are killed and she’s been captured by none other than Murrar Shar himself who has been possessed by a long dead member of the Bayle family.
You can kill him yourself, but you’ll probably get stomped if you try. If you release the Queen, she’ll defeat him easily. She gives you a title for your service to her.
You can then go speak again with the fence who tells you where to find the Qeynos Claymore. In the most unlikely and most obvious of places. The problem is… once you arrive, you find its gone. And the Queen and her advisors are having what they think is a private conversation on what exactly they should do about the disappearance of Lucan D’Lere who is the Emperor of Freeport (and the focus of the new expansion).
The Queen proposes the least likely thing imaginable… she wants to rescue him and reinstate him because he is the only one that can keep the evil side in line through fear.
And THAT, people, is how you do a damned good quest/mission.
And STO? Can’t even remotely imagine something that creative. All they tell you to do is kill stuff.
rihards said on January 23rd, 2010 at 10:22
Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of an MMO that has such a mission/quest. It reminds me of single player RPG games where quests are long, well thought out and are generally more than go to point A, kill everyone and then go to point B.
Thank you for the lengthy comment, and I’m thinking about checking out EQ2 actually. I knew about it, and the first one as well, but was always more of a Ultima Online player myself.
moiraesfate said on January 24th, 2010 at 00:34
Yeah, that quest is for the new expansion coming out. You should see the betrayal quests. They are widely considered to be the best quests in the game.
Kev said on January 24th, 2010 at 03:21
There’s similar quests like that in World of Warcraft, though probably not as long but they give the stories to why some factions and splinter groups are acting as they are and what not, and some let you play through the quests. A good quest line for me was if you start the hero class of Death Knight as a character, you play through a whole quest line from serving the lich king up until your rebellion and thats when you’re allowed to start doing other quests.
I know TOR isn’t out until 2011 but I can wait, I just hope WoW doesn’t release its next expansion around then or else my attention will be torn =/
rihards said on January 24th, 2010 at 11:21
You really think that a WoW expansion will be able to hold up to TOR? This is BioWare we’re talking here about :D
moiraesfate said on January 25th, 2010 at 02:20
Uhhh Star Trek is Cryptic, not Bioware. When TOR is released, its will probably kick the butt of any other game company out there since Bioware is the best game company in the world.
Kev said on January 25th, 2010 at 03:15
The next expansion to WoW looks very promising, and shiny so I will probably be playing my way through both of them instead of doing my uni work :P
rihards said on January 25th, 2010 at 08:39
I was talking about TOR and BioWare. Not STO and BioWare ;) I know that Cryptic is responsible for STO.