I'm one of the supposed trolls since I defend Cryptic, so it's only fair I open myself to gunfire. As of February 16th, 2010:
Because I always pound on complaints about content size:
I play 1-3 hours per day on average and a bit more (as much as double) on Saturdays. MMO background is City of Heroes/Villains from 2004-2009; multiple level 50s on both sides, done basically all of the content repeatedly except the final raids introduced in 2009. World of Warcraft from 2005 on and off lightly, more seriously from 2007-on. Got about halfway into Ulduar, almost to the end of the Trial, and about 50% into Loremaster on my main before I cancelled my subscription in late 2009; almost 10k PVP kills, nearly all from Alterac, world PVP, and some Arena. EVE Online for about ¾ of a year before I burned out on a constant state of paranoia (miner/explorer). Tons of console (you name it, I've done it) and FPS experience back to the Quake/Quake II GameSpy days. Old veteran of the StarCraft battle.net wars.
Im an above-casual player that over long periods will go end to end in game content. Exploring the game and its limits is my thing. The shiny bell of leveling isnt quite as important, except the first time through. After that, I meander like mad.
That out of the way
The integration of the Star Trek IP: 10/10.
The game looks, feels, breathes, reads, and sounds Star Trek. As soon as I saw the year they set it in, I knew exactly when it would be in relation to the TV shows and films, and so give myself away as a big Trek nerd. Before anyone asks, its highly unlikely well ever see the direct likenesses of famous characters, because Cryptic/Atari would have to pay for them. Everyone and everything else is fair game. Setting things just a bit further into the future is perfect for this very reason and a clever way around that problem. Most of the core characters would be dead, retired, moved on, or so far up the societal rungs that we as players would rarely if ever interact with them. The stories so far as spot-on perfectly in alignment and fit with everything youd expect from 25th century Trek.
Visual design: 10/10.
I suppose its not ultra-bleeding edge visually, but you know what? Who cares. Its gorgeous.
The space combat game play: 8/10.
1. Theres no reason I shouldnt be able to auto-fire everything to focus on the tactical use of my various crew members. I think a 25th century computer system can handle targeting and firing.
2. Other than that, I love it. Im sure it will be possible to have full z-axis control and movement in space, but I can wait for that.
3. If Cryptic reads this, please take an eye towards borrowing a bit of the more realistic space-motion that we see in EVE, if possible.
4. I still wish we could do configurable, complex macros for our own standard maneuvers.
Other than that, the space combat is pretty ace.
The ground combat game play: 6/10.
Admittedly, I enjoy this more than the space game, despite the lower rating, which is entirely due to the fact we dont get as much of this as Id like.
1. The fact that I cant do it first-person shooter (which I would really love as an option visually).
2. Why no auto-fire in ground combat? At least let us keybind it as an auto-toggle.
3. Needs more granular control our BOs--not buttons or hot keys (Dear God no), but give us access to their behavioral traits. I want one of my TACs to always be up in someone's grill; she's my tank. I want my other one to hang back and snipe. That sort of thing.
UI controls: 8/10
My major complaints here are:
1. Not being able to bind keys to slots in trays easily. In WoW, I use a split ergonomic keyboard and bind R, T, G, F, B, V, C, X, and Z, along with 1-6 and F1-F6 for just about everything Id commonly use. The ALT & Control 1-6 system I know are fine for many people, but I prefer my own controls, thanks.
2. Not being able to trivially drag abilities from slot to slot (I know someone said this is changing).
3. We need more than 3 trays. I might recommend the Devs look at the Warcraft add-on called Bartender for an example of the level of layout control a UI should have.
4. The easy and basic simplicity of it all is welcome.
Quest/mission/Episode content: 5/10 General; 9/10 for the Storylines
1. Not a ton of variety in some aspects, but its version 1.0 of a new MMO; I clearly remember how monotonous City of Heroes 1.0 was compared to later, and how monotonous old WoW was (and how bad a lot of the Old World STILL is there). Dont get me started on the early level EVE stuff. Ugh. This will improve over time with simple expansion as it does in every MMO.
2. One thing that people need to remember is that in any MMO the bulk of the content has to come on the back end/End Game, for max level peoplebecause thats where everyone spends the bulk of their time, over time, mathematically. New content should always be 4:1 at least in favor of End Game, but you need to keep the low and mid stuff also growing still (but not as fast).
3. The actual mission/storyline content is an easy 10/10 in general for pure content. Miral Paris, Guardian of Foreverfantastic stuff. More of that please.
Direction of your play: 5/10*
*Speaking only as Federation; I have no desire to play Klingon (but Id be tempted to do Romulan as a faction).
1. You do have a fairly defined path, but you can skip it wholly and 100% explore or PVP to level upits just repetitive. Hopefully that will change.
2. I really, really, really would like the option to decide what sort of career I focus on, rather than EVER having a crafting system.
3. DEVS: Give us a career crafting system, rather than a pointless item/resource crafting system. See the Content Slider bit in my signature.
Documentation: 3/10
1. Like any new game/new MMO system, semi-TRIBBLE. But on gaming, the real quality stuff always comes from fans. I see
http://stowiki.org is already on the job; hopefully they dont sell out to Wikia like everyone else does.
2. We really need detailed, clear, and concise details from the Devs on the skill system. Its fairly obvious, but we need it in writing.
Price/value: 10/10.
The pricing for the purchase ($60 USD) and montly fee ($14 USD) is exactly in-line with other MMOs. 80 hours of play in the initial release before the 45-day patch? 19 days in, Im only Commander 2. Thats plenty.
$60 for 80~ hours is a bad deal in what universe? See how far that $60 gets you at the local movie theater.
If I Got To Be Chief Everything For One Change:
See "Direction of your play" #2 & #3 above and
"Why STO needs content sliders" in my signature. DON'T give us crafting of Stuff. Let us craft ourselves instead.
Thats all I have to say about that.
The major things I think need fixing or adjusting in Star Trek Online, in order:
2/22/10, one week later: I think I enjoy the ground combat even more now that I'm teaming more for it, as of Commander rank. It's definitely at least a 7/10 now. Teaming makes it more complex, fun and enjoyable, and the fact that we have ground auto-fire now makes prolonged battles much, much more pleasant, to focus more on positioning and tactics.
Comments
I'll check it out, sure.
I agree w/ you on some things. Stories like the Guardian of Forever are cool. Unfortunately there's not enough of that. Much of the game is grindy: kill so many enemy groups, scan so many objects. Very repetitive and certainly not in the spirit of grand ideas in some of the best examples/episodes of Trek.
So although I can tell people, like my brother (who's a bigger Trekkie than me but doesn't play MMOs much) and my girlfriend (who already wrote off the game because of the closed beta guaranteed access that was botched), about some cool things like the Guardian/Paris/Eugenics storyline, I can't recommend it at the moment. I won't be subscribing once my included month is up, certainly not to wait around for more content that should have been in if Cryptic hadn't rushed the release. I will try any new content during a free activation period, if they ever do those.
As a side note, I should say that waiting nearly six months after release for any substantial new content in Champions has soured me on how Cryptic handles game releases.
Well, looking at my Steam, other games with a 75-73 metascore:
FIFA 10
Ghostbusters
Warhammer
Manhunt
Unreal 2
That's some decent company, considering that the game will only improve over time, like every MMO does (except Star Wars Galaxies, but that was an aberration).
Actually, look at this:
http://cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline
Everything from 04/27/04 to 11/28/2007's Issue 11 release was Cryptic.
11 major content releases in 43 months was a VERY healthy pace, and I watched it all as I played City of Heroes from 04/28/04 onwards. That was one major release every 3.9 months, with arrays of bug fix and maintenance releases along the way, and various other things like events, and enhancements/changes tossed in randomly.
The IP integration, while fairly close, still needs much more in the way of real exploration and diplomacy before it will feel legitimate to me.
I just don't like ground combat very much at all. It's too slow paced, and there are often way too many mobs to kill. Couple that with the fact that there is almost zero danger of dying, and it gets very boring and tedious for me.
Your review is fair. It's hard to argue with it.
in truth I agree with it mostly. this game is a 7.3/10 for me, but that ( just like every review out there) is an opinion. but it seems a lot of people on an the same page.
Yeah. But like I said, it's 2 weeks into the project.
I wonder what WoW's metacritic would have looked like from 2005.
Imersion you score 10/10
okay whatever your smokin send some my way. The music is a travesty it sounds like Oblivion not star trek , think man think of all the great scores over the years and tell me this plink plink unoffensive carp has anything against Mutara Nebula or Latteral Run .... It doesnt end of argument
Characterisation is a good point, and its nice to see familiar names pop up but for the love of god VOICES !!!!! would it have been soooo hard to voiceover key characters like Miral or Quinn?
Visually there as some parts that are sexy, but bottom line, Bridge Commander had equally as good graphics and have we not come beyond that yet?
So for immersion i would give a MAX of 5/10 mainly due to laziness in the music and voice dept
Combat you score at 8/10 and 6/10
Okay first off head down to your local Game supplier or hit the web and find Bridge commander, i promise you will not regret it. Once youve played around with that for a bit think about what sort of combat you have ingame atm. yup doesnt compare. No bridge view, limited tactical options (MASH THAT SPACEBAR) and after the nteenth kill 6 mobs missions it becomes stale awful quickly
Ground combat?? Voyager Elite Forces nuff said but with worse Ai (if possible) and again mash button tactics (i really feel this was destined for the Console market from day one otherwise the controls would have been a hell of alot better)
So my own score 6/10 and 3/10
UI and Quests I think you have spot on, Epic Arc/Storylines and Fleet Actiions are what the game SHOULD be aiming at. The only comment Iwould make is the total lack of depth to normal missions and the lack of any real diplomatic missions
Character Development and Documention
Ill take these as one and the same because without a PROPER manual character development is haphazard at best
For me 2/10 is being generous
Value
Okay the bugbear time. I am not a lifer (thank god the car needed a new tyre that day) so i m looking at this from a pure subscriber point of view
80 hours of game play on launch is deceptive. what they mean is 80 hours of storyline non repeatable gameplay and that is the problem. MMOs need an endgame that is difficult to acheive and REWARDING
Even taking that 80 hours over the free period of 30 days - that equates to 2.66r hours of gameplay per day. Now that might be fine for the "casual" gamer who plays once or twice a week but i consider myself a little more active than that (5-6 hours per night 5-6 days per week). And i dont think im unusual!!!!! If you can understand that point then the rest is self explanitory, the game is "finished" in 3 weeks and then what? repeatable content is virtually non exsistent and is of the WORSE mission kinds. If this was a single player campaign you would move onto a new game and unfourtunatly STO PLAYS LIKE A SINGLE PLAYER GAME SHOVED INTO A MMO SUIT
So im afraid value hits a lowly 6/10
Cryptic need to decide if this is a single player game or a true MMO before people will take it seriously because as it stands its a right royal dogs dinner
My own score - 65/100 no where near to a game i would normally buy
STOP EVIL DOER.
You sir have been reported for trolling.
Flagged. That's right. Banned from the only good part of the game, the forum.
Had to get my fun in too. Isn't funny how the OP asks for trolling and the usual Rumpelstiltskins are nowhere to be found?
Well if the usual Rumpelstiltskins start trolling OP it would be too obvious and predictable right?
The only way to get rid of them beforehand is to announce it in title. Majority of trolls don't want to admit they are trolls and hide in shadows once openly given invitation for trolling.
OP is a genius!!
Just picking out this bit-- the music we know (I own every Trek score, so I know from the music) -- would have probably been prohibitively expensive to license for the game.
As for the voices, they can certainly be added or changed later as budget and time permit (I hope they do in fact do this--you can get decent theater or voice actors for reasonable prices). Warcraft just recently changed and redid the voices and appearances of some of their most popular characters, Jaina and Sylvannus.
You can all send me $10k energy each when Cryptic uses my Content Slider/Character Crafter idea!
you know that was his opinion just like this was you're opinion. they are both valid points, none of them are right, and none of them are wrong. but was the whatever your smokin necessary?
sorry to carry on
we have to compare STO to SWTOR, as they are effectivley going to be competing against each other
so far TOR has built in voicing and music composed with the JW OST as a basis for new work
as for budget/cost - thats the whole point im afraid this game currently feels like a rush job to raise income to develope it, a stratergy that will eventually fail (and i will say it i dont want it to fail but atm the iceberg is kissing the hull)
the whatever yoour smokin is a phrase i use alot in real life and no insult was meant by it
Alright, also we can't really use TOR until it comes out, because no matter how much we think we know how the game is going to be. we don't know how it will turn out. ( just look at STO a lot of people were speculating, and it turned out way different then those people. )so why don't we leave TOR out of it because there is to many unknowns, and any speculation is just that speculation. even what the devs have said can still change from here, to when it releases.
Agreed.
/10blahs
I agree with the OP to a tee. NO GAME is finished when it releases. It is the nature of MMO's to grow after they are released, and if the game is good, enuf players stick it out to support it as it grows. If the game is fail, well what happens to it doesn't even have to be talked about. We all know how that all works out.
This game is unique enuf to stand alone in a sea of fantasy MMO's all full of Orcs, and Trolls, and an assortment of various insects for players to mass slaughter. It has a small taste of Eve, with alot of Pirates of the Burning Seas thrown in. It has a vertual endless potential for growth. Many games don't plan that far ahead when they are developed, and once players hit endgame, the game dies. This game although with it's obvious endgame woes currently has someplace to go yet in the future. More playable races, more areas of space to explore, more pvp choices and an expanding storyline that has no limits.
I rushed thru this game on my way to level 45 on my Klingon main, and now I am dabbling in Klingon and Fed alts, to experience the game more fully. Right now I'm far from bored. And loving every minute I spend in this game. I ask my fleet every other day or so what they think about the game, and if they are still enjoying themselves, and the only answer I ever get is, yeah we love it! So I suspect all the negative unhappy people we see on these forums are the minority. And just seeking attention. They love to pee in others cornflakes who are having a good time. And only want to make happy people miserable as they are, which really is sad when you stop and think about it.
I'm glad to rarely find happy threads as this one, because I really think this game is pretty damn fun in it's current state. And I have high hopes for where this title is going in the coming months/years.
Full speed ahead!
I know CoH well, been playing it since Aug 2004, that's why I said Champions and not CoH as a comparison. In the same 5 months that we got 4 new zones and 10 new levels of content in CoH, CO has had very little added: 2 temporary holiday events (one of which is about to be recycled) and one lvl 40 lair. That's pretty much it.
The Cryptic of today is far different from what they were 5 years ago. They are deliberately doing very fast rollouts of unfinished games because their engine supports fast development. Much of what we see in STO is reskinned from mechanics and elements in CO. Starship flight is reskinned for example. It's why it seems so odd that in an airless void you can't just tilt straight up or down, but have to bank.
If you look at the CO boards you will find that many players there believe that game has been neglected, with almost total silence from the devs for two months. When they resurfaced with annoucements of new content, (with only four levels and one zone from lvls 37-40), they decided to charge for it as an expansion, this in a game that was launched w/ thin content to begin with.
Those of us who are lamenting the state of things w/ CO have referenced exactly what you mentioned to show what Cryptic was capable of in the past, but no longer it seems.
I wonder how much of it was them having to split the load between STO's creation and CO's maintenance because of Atari's deadline?
FYI, they have chsnged plans in response to the user outcry and the renamed expansion Champions Online: Revelation, will be a free expansion. They do listen to the community at least.
What I was saying was that when they came back to the game, they asked for more money, even though they didn't deliver enough content to even justify the advance money the lifetime and six-month subs invested in CO. But you're right, they did change their stance after the outrage and sub cancellations. Some players decided on principle not to sub to any Cryptic game, which had to have hurt STO's subs somewhat.
Many players believed, despite dev denials, that CO devs moonlighted for STO in order to help w/ the unrealistically short beta phase. CO suffered as a consequence, as many players felt the game was neglected and what minimal content was added was overhyped to compensate.
I have to say I like the auto-grouping function. It's good that you don't have to shout LFG for a hour, but go into system, and you usually find someone who will help you, also you can meet really good people that way. But... LFG system would be nice to implement.
Map travel times. It's boring, but it's in most of MMOs... try sailing from St Johns to Golden Lake in Pirates of Burning Seas (that's like full map) in opposite wind and you will get the point
Introducing the Staretrek things is nice - ensign Naomi Wildman, for example, or other things known from series and movies (Where is Morn dammit though?
I also miss some diplomatic / science / engineering missions. Like you'd have to repair something in time, or the station/planet will be destroyed, stop the war with words not phasers or just map anomalies. And make the meanigful choices - if you side with one option during a mission, it stays with you till the end of game. Like in Mass Effect 2 sidequest - you have 2 missiles launched by terrorists. One aimed at capital, second at spaceport, but there is one killswitch. You save millions, that will need to be taken from colony, or save a spaceport, but allow millions to die. Or like in ME1 addon - you let the terrorist go, but save hostages, or kill him and make hostages die. Choices, choices, choices, it's all the ST is about.
Would also like to see some controversial missions - do you break 1st directive to stop the war, by lets say exposing Undine hiding in some primitive culture, or you uphold the rules, something in way Sisko did when he "convinced" Romulans to join Federation against Dominium
But... so far I really like this game, call me fanboi if you want, but it won't change the fact that I enjoying driving my light cruiser (should be upgraded tonight tho :P) through galaxy
Thus far I only have a couple complaints. My first is simply that the grand story missions are on rails. It'd be nice if during those missions you could make some choices that alter the outcome, kind of like ME or ME2 and you could earn points towards, to use ME as an example, Paragon or Renegade. You could gain a reputation as one or the other, and depending you could be recruited by special organizations. The mission in particular that irked me about not having choices was where you butchered a bunch of Romulans at the behest of a Undine disguised as an Admiral. I mean, after the first bit where you were only finding medical items, you think you'd be given the choice to say something or go against the admiral, because it became quite obvious to me that this mission wasn't right. Instead, you marched on, killed everyone, and then found out, surprise surprise, that she was an Undine. So a little choice would be nice.
My other complaints are minor, mostly bugs and UI issues, but overall I do enjoy the game. I'm a lifetime subber, so my hope is that the game survives for quite some time and the content keeps coming. I'd hate to see the game fail in a year because so many left it. I think as long as the devs stay dedicated to improving it and releasing new content (which, IMHO, should mostly be free unless it's a major game changer a la WOW expansions) the game has a long life head of it.