… or Lieutenant Commander as the case would be with me.
Okay, so I finally hit the Lt. Cmd. rank in Star Trek Online today after struggling through the tedium that is the STO mission structure and I was all set to have my mind absolutely blown! So what does it feel like having received a promotion within the Star Fleet command structure?
Meh...
Yeah, kinda meh, kinda how it felt when I first started out the game. Sure, I got a new ship (I decided to go with a cruiser which is what contains the famous Constitution class starship from TNG), I got a new tier of skills, access to new items, and the ability to promote my Bridge Officers (amusingly referred to as BO in STO parlance. Guess there are no showers on board), but none of that really cried out, “The game as you knew it has changed for the better!“. It could have though, if Cryptic didn’t seem to be so terrible at designing MMOs past the character creator (just my opinion, yeah, but there is something seriously wrong with this studio).
The thing I was most looking forward to was my new ship. I was expecting it to provide me with an entirely new battle experience with the addition of extra weapon slots as well as further customization and ability options beyond that of the starter ship. It may have just been the ship class I chose but I ended up with one extra Aft (rear) weapon slot and one more Engineering console at which I could station another Engineer. Whoopie! The ship itself even seems smaller than the starter ship to boot!
One of the more enjoyable aspects of EVE Online lies in upgrading to a higher tier of spaceship and part of this enjoyment stems from the focused anticipation that builds up prior to your upgrade (or sidegrade as the case may be). Rather than simply grinding out levels through tedious missions you have to wait for your skills to train up (which is in itself tedious, but a passive tedium which doesn’t leave you feeling quite so burned out as a mindless grind does) and gather enough ISK (the game’s currency) to afford the ship plus all the weapons and other augmentations you wish to attach to it. I honestly don’t know why I’m telling you this because it honestly doesn’t sound much better than what happens in STO outside of the fact that you are guaranteed to upgrade your ship in STO if you simply continue to play (it being a level driven game despite it having a skill system) whereas in EVE you have to plan well ahead in order to upgrade which makes the goal that much more satisfying when you reach it. I suppose I’m also telling you all of this because talking about EVE helps me forget how lame STO is.
What’s really important to note is rather that new tiers of ship in EVE come with new forms of equipment as well as new ways in which that equipment can be arranged, whereas when I got my new cruiser in STO I basically swapped all the parts out from my starter into the new one. The other advantage EVE has over STO is how it scales the reward with the accomplishment, and I mean that literally. When I got my new cruiser in STO I was so excited to undock from Starbase 01 and witness the magnificence of my fine vessel as it dwarfed all of the lowbies crowding the surrounding space. Instead I gazed upon a dull, unimpressive starship that honestly seemed smaller than the starter vessels crowding around me.
In EVE, on the other hand, when I finally upgraded to my Destroyer I was just awestruck by how much larger it was than my previous vessels and that feeling continued with each subsequent upgrade (though it is also possible to upgrade into a smaller ship this is only for higher tiers of the same class, the cruiser class in STO on the other hand is supposed to be the largest of the three ship classes from what I could gather though you can gather from my earlier remarks that it doesn’t really live up to this reputation). In fact, I would often just sit in my home stardock and switch between my many starships and revel in the constant zoom adjustments the game would have to make to account for the wildly variant sizes, from my lowly starter to my imposing Hulk (which, by the way, is far from the biggest ship and is also one of the higher tiers of the specialized mining vessels in EVE. Yes, I was primarily a miner, and for those of you not in the know, mining in EVE Online is the very height of tedium, yet somehow STO is even worse for me). It may not seem like much, but that sense of scale, of grandeur, is almost as big of a reward as the improved capabilities themselves, and reward is a prominent facet of MMOs.
... to play EVE Online instead.
Another big gripe I’m having with Star Trek Online is its itemization (technically I should talk about the new skill tiers next to follow my originally plotted progression but all you need to know is that having a new group of skills to choose from hasn’t changed my opinion one iota since the last time I talked about them). None of the Lt. Commander items feel like much of an upgrade to me. Apart from most of the stats holding absolutely no meaning to me because their effects never seem to elaborated upon (again, this is coming from a guy who honestly enjoys EVE Online) the incrementing of power itself just seems pathetic. I bought a new ground weapon for my character and the DPS boost was a grand total of 3! Before then I had stumbled across a merchant who was selling a lot of nice weapons and bought one that had a DPS of 30 (my DPS at the time was 18) but when I went to equip it I couldn’t because I needed to have Admiral rank (the end-game rank)!
Are you kidding me? Doesn’t anyone over at Cryptic get that players like to see big numbers come out of their enemies and show up on their gear? Apparently not, because an end-game weapon has less than double the DPS of a weapon I was using at the beginning of the game! Progression like that hardly feels empowering. And why in the hell was I able to afford what essentially amounts to an end-game weapon before I even hit level 8? This may seem like a really juvenile complaint but this is a major sticking point for me and I have been known to dabble in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons where doing 200 damage is considered an amazing feat.
That really highlights my major issue with this game: something about it just feels off. I’m sure they have all these amazingly deep interactions between statistics going on in the background of my battles (well, I assume they do) but none of that matters because combat is just an all-out clusterfuck. Sure, I win far more often than I lose, but then it doesn’t matter if I lose because I’ll just respawn in 15 seconds! I’m not saying it should be like EVE Online where having your ship destroyed means you gotta buy a new ship which could set you back weeks, but having absolutely NO consequence for failure just means there’s absolutely NO tension.
Same goes for non-combat missions (which are fucking sparse). There is NO possibility of failure. NONE! It’s an MMO so I don’t expect a Game Over screen but it doesn’t even restart the mission for me, I just respawn, and when there’s no combat all I have to do is press the ‘f’ key to achieve victory (although I suppose I could stroke out from reading through the dialogue which could count as a failure… okay, that was a bit unfair, the writing isn’t that bad). Couldn’t there have been branching mission structures? In one mission where I have to investigate a crime why not give me the opportunity to blame the wrong guy? You don’t even have to work out any repercussions for my actions, just make it seem like there’s something for me to do beyond pushing ‘f’. I guess for now the only failure I’m going to experience in STO is server failure. Hiyooooo!
I don’t even know why I’m complaining about the tedium of the STO mission structure but it’s just so damn predictable. I mean, at least when you’re killing ten rats you’re generally forced to navigate an open world; in STO it’s almost always linear corridors or the vast expanse of space. You get into a space battle, you beam down and fight some nazis, er, klingons (sorry, rewatched Inglourious Basterds today, such a good movie), you beam back up to your ship and have another space battle then warp back out to Sector Space (which is also getting on my nerves, but I’ll leave that rant for later), rinse, wash, repeat. For some reason this feels more tedious to me than grinding out Slayer deeds in LotRO and I don’t know why that is!
I guess Cryptic just has a knack for boring me to death.
I’m gonna stop myself right here or I might just lose it, but the thing is I really want this game to be good! I love Star Trek (well, the Original Series and some of Next Generation anyways)! And even though I have been heaping the praise on EVE Online throughout this rant/review I know full well that many people hate that game and find it boring as all hell and I personally could not find fault with their appraisal as it’s a very niche game. That being said, is there anyone who could elucidate for me what makes Star Trek Online worth playing and can anyone possibly give me a reason to keep trying with this one? Because I’ve almost given up hope.
Are you sure that smell isn't coming from Cryptic?
I loved your blog theme! Did you develop it yourself or is it downloadalbe from somehwere?
The theme I use is called K2 which you can find via a link at the very bottom of every page on this blog. The visual style (i.e. colouring) is my own design however just using basic CSS, though it seems that I need to re-do it as it’s not displaying properly in the most recent version of Firefox.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Because it was Star Trek, people wanted to be able to play in their Constitution Class ship from now until forever. And because it was drawing people who haven’t played many MMOs before, people demanded that they be able to play with their Admiral-level Sovereign class friends… flying in a tier 2 tactical. For both of those reasons, Cryptic designed the game so there was only a 45% or so power difference between the beginning ship and the end game ship (at least according to earlier dev interviews). Now, maybe that 45% becomes 55 or 65% when all the mods are made to the ships, but they’re still relatively closer in power compared to, say, a level 30 character in WoW versus a max level one.
A lot of your problems with the game seem to stem from being a fan of EVE… and this game is different than EVE. There’s nothing wrong with that. But I will agree that there should be *bigger* differences between the low-tiered ships and the high-tiered ones. And the ships should be far more dynamic, with different things to do inside them (minigames, holodeck, etc.) so it’s not just staring at space and it’s not just a different avatar.
You’re absolutely right about my admiration for EVE colouring my opinion of STO. Furthermore, because the IP has such strong meaning for many people (including myself) I have been criticizing STO for not being the game I wanted to see and my desire is also for a TOS-centric style which obviously wouldn’t work for a broad encapsulation like STO attempts. Still, there are many glaring problems with STO just as an MMO all on its own and as soon as I’m ready to give my final verdict on the game I’ll try my best to separate my (oftentimes) unreasonable expectations from how I really feel about it as a game and nothing more.
Until that time however, I’m going to have fun ranting and raving.
You do make a good point regarding the power differential between the different ranks, I hadn’t thought of it like that before. It does make a certain kind of sense, though I’m sure there are more elegant ways to satisfy their customer base’s demands than with their current solution. I think it all boils down to STO just not being my kind of game, which is a shame. It is nice to see people enjoying it though. After all, that’s why we play games in the first place!
“Cryptic designed the game so there was only a 45% or so power difference between the beginning ship and the end game ship ”
I don’t think that’s true. As an example, I ran into a random encounted while I was Lt. 6 in my newbiew ship. For some reason, that deep space encounted had a level 34 bird of prey mixed in with the other level 4-6 birds of prey. That ship 2-shot me. First shot took down my shields and about half my armor. Second shot did about 28,000 damage.
If the top ship is only 45% stronger, it would be 3 shot. That’s not the case. Sure, gear might only have 2-3x the stats, but it’s the skill assignment that makes all the difference. By the time you stack skills that affect beam weapons + phaser-type weapons + a specific phaser type, the multiplicative effect is huge. So getting an item upgrade in the end-game that gives just a few dps more, is really much better due to the multiplicative effect.
Take WoW as an example. People grind out badges for days and then go ape when they get the new purple shiny that has just a few stat points more than the previous item. The overall dps increase might have gone up from 3000 dps to 3020 dps. That’s a whopping 0.6% jump.