Deeply Delving Dungeons

Okay, I swear that I will post the final part of my Mass Effect 2 review later today. I actually had it mostly written out already but ended up scrapping it because my lack of sleep had spilled out onto the page. But that’s not the real reason for my lack of discipline.

It should come as no surprise that STO is distracting me from my bloggerly duties, though not in the way that it should. Truth is, I don’t quite know what to make of this game yet. As of this moment I am almost a grade 9 Lieutenant and so far this game is boring me to tears. So why am I playing then, you ask? Well, like many that must be suffering through the early levels I am hoping there is a light at the end of the Lieutenant tunnel in the form of upgrading my ship (which is why I’m playing so much to the detriment of other activities, I want to get these early levels over with!).

As it stands right now I find myself sailing through battle (which is pretty much the only thing to do in this game), employing the exact same tactics every single time, coming out on top without breaking a sweat. I’ve only died once so far and that was because I was dicking around in a Fleet action (sort of like a raid) when I got surrounded by ships that warped in and blew me back to the Stone Age. Other than that combat has been relatively tame and uninteresting, which is a shame because it seems to have a great deal of potential what with the whole juggling of power distribution and balancing of shields and managing fire arcs and what have you. Maybe if there was something else to do it wouldn’t seem so bad but so far every exchange has been pretty well the exact same encounter every time.

This is how STO is making me feel right now.

Well, that’s not entirely true…

One of the first group instances I went into saw me with shields depleted and hull damage increasing at an alarming rate as I was being chased by a cruiser and some fighters when I shifted all power into my engines and took brief cover behind an asteroid, giving me the necessary time to recover and return to battle. But that’s the only interesting thing that’s happened so far and for some reason I’m just finding the experience even more boring than your typical lackluster MMO combat. It’s really helping me appreciate LotRO’s combat I’ll say that much. But maybe I wouldn’t feel this way if there was more to do!

Sure, there’s ground combat, but those encounters are shite, plain and simple. Sector space is kinda neat at first but quickly wears thin and doesn’t do a good job of conveying the enormity of the galaxy (EVE Online’s frighteningly large star chart does a much better job). Crafting is a joke and not a funny one either. The Bridge is just pointless, there’s nothing to do up there; if Cryptic knew anything about Star Trek they would have both made the Bridge the area you control the ship from during battle (sure, it wouldn’t be as easy to implement as their current solution but then who said making games was easy in the first place? Have some fucking pride! Unfortunately Cryptic seems content to just slap together an assortment of poorly realized game mechanics and justify their existence with a robust character creator) and allowed you to explore the ship itself which is where a great deal of time is spent in TOS and TNG (never really got into the other shows). Oh, and did I mention that the UI sucks?

Yeah, controls feel sluggish, tooltips are obnoxious (for some reason they decided to split up tooltips into ones that always pop up instantly and ones that you can configure to pop up after a specified length of time), for some weird reason that totally escapes me they decided to only allow you to move around items and abilities on your hotbars by using the right mouse button despite using the left mouse button for moving these same items while they’re in your inventory (I mean, what the FUCK Cryptic? Are you trying to be cool and ironic by flaunting your unique control convention or something? As far as I can tell there isn’t a single compelling reason for this implementation and no other MMO that I can think of does things this way! I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve accidentally used an item or ability when I wanted to move it instead), and for some reason they decided to make the ship hotbar 2 slots shorter than the ground hotbar and as far as I can tell those keys that are left out don’t do anything special in space!

Where’s our Banging Strange Lifeforms game play Cryptic?

They don’t do a damn thing to encourage Roleplaying either. I like to think of myself as being reasonably capable of feeling out game systems but for some reason I just can’t figure out the emote system in STO. At first I had no idea what syntax this system used as typing in /wave didn’t do a damn thing. Turns out you have to type /emote then your command which is just a completely unnecessary level of obfuscation. The real problem lies in not knowing how to access a list of commands which leaves me completely in the dark as to what options are even available to me. I tried to find some information online but their online manual is worthless and I gave up well before finding anything useful on the forums. I can’t use my frigging KHAN! emote! Fuck!

And what the hell is wrong with the skill system in this game? There isn’t the slightest amount of transparency here folks. I think I’ll just let the cat out of the bag here and reveal my ultimate opinion of STO thus far: it makes me want to resub to EVE Online. You see, EVE might be sorta complicated, but it doesn’t try to hide that complexity from you. From day one you can start planning out your character’s life of skill progression and (with a little research using their handy in-game wiki tool) you can even have a pretty good notion of what these skills do despite there being an overwhelming assortment to choose from. STO, on the other hand, not only doesn’t give you a clear indication of what these skills are good for (and I don’t just mean what they do for you now but what they help you to unlock as well) it also forces you to spend your skill points blindly in order to access the next rank. Which brings me to what is perhaps Star Trek Online’s biggest fault: a lack of feedback. Whether in space or on the ground (well, mostly on the ground), whether crafting or skilling up, nothing really gives you a proper sense of impact.

Ok, wow, this has been really negative so far, much more than I had intended. Guess I should mention some good stuff…

Customization is great, as per Cryptic’s norm. Battle sounds are awesome, very Trek. The occasional mix of classic Trek music is nice though most of the music is bland or annoying. I also like how much it’s making me want to play EVE Online again… Can’t really think of anything else…

Well! Here’s to STO getting better once I hit Lieutenant Commander!