STO EUROPE

MMORPG.com's Jon Wood continues our inside Star Trek Online's beta test series by answering the question of whether or not that game has managed to capture the overall feel of the IP.

Star Trek Online, since the day it was first announced, has been steeped in controversy, from the days when it was in the hands of another development company right up until now, in the closed beta of Cryptic Studios' version. Much of that controversy has revolved around the idea of whether or not the game would "feel like Star Trek."

With that in mind, I made my way into the Closed Beta test with a single question in mind: Has Cryptic managed to create a game that feels enough like Star Trek to appeal to the legions of fans that particular franchise carries.

Let me preface this by saying that I've played a number of Star Trek games over the years, from Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity all the way up to Star Trek Legacy, and up until this point I have yet to really enjoy any of them. They've always felt a little bit like poorly designed games with a Trek skin. Logging in for the first time to Star Trek Online I'll be honest in saying that my hopes were high, but my expectations were low. Also, I'm a huge Trek nerd.

So, the question remains, does STO actually feel like Star Trek?

Soundtrack

It's amazing how important a role sound actually plays in determining mood and setting. I hadn't really thought about it until I logged in with the express purpose of determining the game's "trekkieness." That's when it really hit me: If the music and sound effects fail to impress, this game just won't feel like Trek.

Fortunately, the sound in the game hit the nail on the head completely. Right from the get-go when you're introduced to Star Trek Online's theme, you feel at least lightly immersed in the universe. For those who might be curious, the theme starts off sounding very much like the opening to the original series, so much so that you almost expect Shatner to break in with "Space... the final frontier." It doesn't happen though, and instead launches into the same kind of high energy brass instrument and drums music that became iconic with The Next Generation. It's a nice blend of the styles without actually sounding like either. On a side note, I'd like to commend the powers that be for resisting the urge to implant their own version of the "space, the final frontier," speech into their theme. That kind of thing works when it's William Shatner or Patrick Stewart. There's nothing worse than hearing those iconic words come from an unfamiliar voice.

Sticking with music, I was also impressed by the score that went along with ground and space missions. It swelled and got appropriately angsty at the appropriate moments. Seriously, go back and watch your favorite episode of TNG with the score removed. It doesn't work very well. Cryptic's integration of this here was well done.

I can gush similarly about the game's sound effects as even the ambient sounds will spark thoughts of Trek in even a casual fan of the series. Phasers, communicators, doors, warp drives, they all fit the lore perfectly.

Lore and Dialogue

One of my colleagues is going to tackle the lore in more depth, so I'll just say that I was impressed with how well bits and pieces of lore from the various Star Trek series were integrated from the way that you are at one point hailed by a damaged ship's EMH to a conversation with Akira Sulu on a space station.

In terms of dialogue, the writers have obviously spent some time in studying scripts because the way that the NPCs talk to and otherwise address your character always seems to feel like it was lifted from the Trek universe. It's one of those things you might not notice right away if it's done right, but if it was done poorly, it would kill the immersion factor almost instantly. You can say what you want, but there's always the risk with an IP like this that you'll wind up feeling less like you're taking part in a franchise's canon and more like you're taking part in someone's poorly written fan fic.

Ground Missions

I was pleasantly surprised when one of my first missions was to bean down to a planet to find, diagnose and repair some seismic regulators that were malfunctioning and causing earthquakes on a random planet. This made a welcome addition to the more typical MMO kill x number of these and fetch and retrieve quests that, while present at least felt reasonable as part of the overall franchise being created around me. Had I not come across a mission that wasn't combat related, I might have been more concerned but at least on the Starfleet side, it looks like Cryptic has paid enough attention to the IP to know that not every time you beam down to a planet has to involve combat.

Space Missions

Honestly, this was the area of the game that I was most concerned about. Like many people, I have always believed that the core of being in space in Star Trek wasn't about flying the ship, but the interactions of the crew on the bridge and in other settings. I'm not going to say that I didn't miss this in the game. Now, with all of that said and addressed, the space flight is actually far more fun and gives more of a Trek-like feeling than I would have first thought.

In the early stages of the game you are, by necessity, surrounded by many, many other Starfleet ships. It does a great job of making you feel like a part of something big and as a Trek fan, I have to admit to getting a little bit giddy looking at everyone's ship configurations. Being able to see what's going on around your ship is great and controlling it both in combat and out of combat gives you a nice feeling of really being in command.

Mixing of Space and Ground

Very few episodes of Star Trek take place entirely on board ship or entirely on the ground. It's the back and forth nature of the shows that allows for a) good storytelling and b) a nice feeling of exploration.

By trying to mimic that convention, the STO developers not only provide a feeling of Star Trekkiness, but they also allow you to never feel like what you're doing is tedious. You're always off onto the next thing and it's quite different from the thing before it.

Complaints

I did, with all of that said, have a few complaints about how trekkish the game felt. The first was in the area of customization. While ship customization makes sense, and so do character customization, I felt that uniform customization brought me out of the universe a little bit. Uniforms are supposed to be... uniform, not "whatever the officer thinks looks cool." Sure there are examples of this in ST lore, Picard's boss suede coat or Beverly's pregnancy concealing medical coat but the level of customization (which is great) took me out of the setting a bit. That said, the game as a game would suffer without it. I can see why the decision was made.

Next, there's the size of everything. Once again, a concession to the fact that it's a multiplayer game, but the doorways, panels, staircases and other objects just seemed to be overly large or a least bigger than they looked on TV.

I also thought that the way that interactions were presented was a bit lacking. I felt that when I was being halied, I should have a visual on my ship's viewscreen, not just a typical MMO dialogue box with a picture. This, I'll admit, may be something they're looking to fix before launch.