Pagoda of Gaming

I suppose I should begin by saying that I’m talking about the current beta test, which for some may debunk everything I’m about to say – but in my defence, Cryptic’s small track record hasn’t left me with a lot of trust regarding their previous product – namely Champions Online. It launched last September after a two week open beta period, bugs galore, and a near complete lack of high level content and even holes in the usual player progression path, and it launched with practically the same build as finished off with in Beta. Though what I consider their main offence: complete lack of a European server base. What I mean is that despite the positive effects of having a single united server front – it really doesn’t fucking help that I can’t play the damn game because all the American players are lagging me out of the game. Not to mention that the gameplay wasn’t all there.

But what of Star Trek Online? Well let’s get the good things out of the way first. They’ve done a pretty fantastic job of pulling together a game that is uniquely “Star Trek” from the look of the game – despite it’s cartooneyness, to the super-nostalgic perfectly recreated sounds, to the host of ways you can customise your ship and character. You feel very much like a Starfleet captain. But it’s also fair to say that without the licence it’d be a pretty crap game.

The space combat – what I was up to 75% of the time – is probably the crowning jewel of the game. It’s extremely far removed from EVE Online’s take on the experience. Instead of having waypoints that your ship ‘swings’ from in space, you practically have 1:1 control over what’s going on. The crux of the combat comes from manuvering  your ship so that both your weapons’ firing arc is within what you want to shoot at and at the same time keep your opponents firing arc within the strongest 90-degree section of your ship. Within that the basic strategy is to use your phasers to deplete a section of your opponent’s shields then shove some torpedoes through said hole. And despite some odd control issues it’s all very satisfying.

The ground combat however leaves much to be desired. It’s your standard affair of target and shoot. But you only ever have a couple of skills on you at any one time. Phasers usually have a maximum of two damaging abilities, and then you gain an additional ability from an equipable kit – something like a grenade throw or a “summon turret” and a final ability from whatever your character learns along the way. You’re only ever hitting combat with about 4 skills on your hotbar, but I found that it’s just easy to sit there and make with the pew-pew of your weapon’s abilities. Each section of on-foot combat is like a small instanced dungeon and you go through it in a linear fashion, killing off groups of enemies like a standard WoW-affair. The game gives you an away team of AI characters – cherry picked from your bridge crew and a selection of Red Shirts – when you aren’t auto grouped with around 4 other captains. The AI has a lot of problems with sticking to geometry and in a case from my experience – when I had to leap through a section of fire, they dumbly followed and instead of jumping out of the way,  stood in the fire cooking to a useless Vulcan crisp.

And there can be problems with auto-matching too. Most players I’ve seen have stuck to the Tactical officer tree of skills so apart from additional AI Engineering/Science officer that may get thrown into your team, chances are that no-one will have any healing skills on them. But it doesn’t really matter. Most of the time I spent on the ground was 10-20 minutes max – and the objectives are usually easy enough for a team of DPS to take down. And ground missions have you going to point X and collecting/activating/deactivating objective Y then beaming the fuck out of there. Honestly, all the time I would just rather be back on my ship. And I should mention that despite the space sections of the game running extremely well on my computer, the frame rate took a major hit as soon as I transitioned to ground – and turning the graphics settings all the way down didn’t even help.

After the time I spent with the game I still don’t fully understand the levelling system. Essentially there are for some reason two experience bars. One that is increased by the spending of gathered ‘skill points’ that you get from doing pretty much everything and the second I think is gained fully from completing objectives and missions. The problem here is that one bar can overtake the other and you have to do stuff to make the other catch up. For example at one point I found myself playing at a Lt. Commander level but I didn’t have enough of the other type of experience to reap the rewards of being at that level (in this case a new ship). THIS page attempts to explain it all but I’m still not clear on the point of having the two bars. Why not just simplify it into one?

Money is also an odd issue in the game. Missions give you very little money – infact they give you the Starfleet equivalent of Disney Dollars instead – which can only be spent on specific rewards - similar to reputation rewards or Honour rewards in WoW.  I found myself replicating pretty much everything I got in order to get enough ‘energy points’ to save up for some decent rewards – which is to say a lot of the loot that drops is pretty crap – instead favouring the equipment that is buyable from the earth starbase.

As a side note, the Crafting required a hell of a lot of materials to be gathered for a single object, and I are always fighting other players for nodes. To the point that I just gave up and sold all my materials on the Auction house.

In closing I have to say that this game is definitely going to suffer from the same problems that Champions online had at launch and still has to this day. It’s laggy, buggy, and will definitely lack a local EU server. There’s frankly no point in playing the game right now, or maybe even ever if cryptic doesn’t get it’s act together. I did have some fun with the game, mainly the space combat – but all of that falls apart with the game’s bugs and balance issues that cropped up. The game is also somewhat incomplete from what I have gathered – content wise. Cryptic have said as much – the Klingon portion of the game is relegated to a PVP only experience and there is certainly something wrong with the overall structure of the game.

It’s no wonder really that WoW is still the king of the jungle, especially if developers insist on releasing half-finished products to a crowd of players that are already being sold lifetime subscriptions. It’s alot of bullshit on Cryptic’s Behalf. I’m glad that I got to play in the Beta and got to subsequently bring my experience to the rest of you as a warning. If I still haven’t convinced you – you should check out Giant Bomb’s somewhat satirical look at the game: entitled “Set Phasers to Fun”. So far they has gone through all of the opening tutorial and aim to keep going until the beta ends in a week or two. You may find that a better experience than downloading the disgustingly huge 8GB beta client and fishing for a beta Key.

I hope that Cryptic pulls it’s act together at some point and offers the world the Star Trek Online we all want, and that truly gives homage to probably the best Science Fiction franchise of all time. So let’s end this look at the game with something supremely retarded.

I’ve put off WoW for the week to get a go of Star Trek Online, and I’m really excited to get back. My new rogue is reaching the level where I can start running dungeons and my Deathknight is just about finished in Borean Tundra. Thanks to the increased XP gain from Quests and all the little boosts they’ve given lowbie characters – I’ve been having a great time levelling my Rogue and just levelling in general. I think I’m going to add a character tracking page to the Blog – since the new Armoury Updates just hit. And I wonder if they’ll bring these same updates to the iPhone Armoury too?

I know some of you may think it’s a bit stupid levelling up another character when I’ve got 3 Northrend ready characters sitting there. But this is really the last chance we’ll all get before the Cataclysm comes and Classic WoW is gone forever. Here’s a look at my Rogue as he is so far:

Next time? Well I’ve got nothing planned for next time. I’ve been on and off With Bayonetta the past week and I think between her, Darksiders and WoW I’ll have enough games to keep my busy until Mass Effect and MAG hits. Speaking of MAG, I think I’m going to grab it after all. I put in my order for a XCM Cross Battle Adapter yesterday and picked up a wired 360 controller to use with it. I’m hoping this will actually solve some of the problems I have with the PS3 in general. I’ll let you all know how that works out.

Here’s to the finest crew in starfleet