If someone had told me Star Trek Online was single-player, I'd have been inclined to believe them. I didn't have a single interaction with any other player. I didn't even know how to interact with them. There might have been a couiple of them around in some kind of war zone I was forced into yesterday, but they could equally well have been NPCs. The whole event ended with me waiting at some animated yellow chevrons that were trying to tell me to interact with something, but nothing came along with which I could interact and the whole thing reset.
I did receive many, many invitations to join fleets. None of these were accompanied by any messages, they just appeared. I guess that fleets are the game's equivalent of guilds, but if it ever mentioned this to me at some point, I missed it. I didn't answer any of them, anyway. I could tell fairly early on that this wasn't going to be a game I'd be playing for an extended period.
Star Trek Online is a weird one. Half the time, you're a space ship; half the time, you're a humanoid. The gameplay for each mode is very different. The controls for each mode are very different. What's more, they're a mess. There were some icons I needed to click fairly frequently, especially in space battles, but I couldn't assign them to buttons on my gamer mouse: I did actually have to click them. Constant upgrades to my ship and to my character's gear meant that the action assignments I could change were constantly in flux, so in the first combat of the day I often found myself spamming new icons that had appeared, in the hope that they might do something good. Pick-up-the-loot buttons usually appeared over to the side where it was hard to spot them, except when they appeared in the middle of the screen.
The fiction is very Star Trek. They've really nailed that: it captures the feel of the Star Trek universe perfectly. That said, some of the quests would have made no sense at all if I hadn't watched the TV series. When I first encountered the Mirror Universe, the game seemed to assume that I knew what it was. Fortunately, I did, but I did meet presumably well-known characters from later series that I haven't watched who meant nothing to me. There were plenty of characters I did recognise, though, mainly from Star Trek: Voyager but also some from Star Trek: the Next Generation. These were invariably treated with fawning deference by the game.
Oh, and by the way: players play virtual worlds as a form of identity exploration and affirmation. If you're going to get them assimilated by the Borg or have them play as their evil, Mirror-Universe version, at least give them the option to progress the quest some other way. Removing player autonomy is almost always a bad thing (and yes, that includes in cut scenes) (which in STO you can't skip, by the way).
The timeline is all over the place, and I don't mean because of any temporal wars. I played as Federation, and at the start the Klingons seemed to be enemies, then suddenly they were allies. I met characters who were captains whom I had already met as admirals. Characters I'd accompanied through entire quest lines and praised me to the skies for helping them failed to recognise me in the next context we met.
Background NPCs were oblivious to what was going on around them. Citizens walked unperturbed through firefights.
Sometimes I arrived in a new location and the computer was describing it to me while at the same time Spock was talking over it and telling me something else. Even when this didn't happen, the well-meaning pop-ups instructing me in the nuances of gameplay seemed always to assume that I knew things already that I didn't. "Use the console to move the thing you need to move" — great! I'm standing next to the console right now: how do I use it to move the thing I need to move?
I kept being offered specialist upgrades to my shields that gave me a buff against transphasic weapons, or exotic particles, or disruptors, or any of a plethora of other options. I had no idea what these weapon classes were. I was offered upgrades that would buff my own use of such weapons, but couldn't tell if I had any of them or not (except disruptors, because they were actually called disruptors). Transphasic weapons could use exotic particles for all I know.
The graphics were very dated, but coming from a text-world background that didn't bother me in the slightest. What did bother me were the mini-games. Once I figured out what I was meant to do, they were a breeze, but making me spend six seconds matching wave forms every time I wanted to collect some kind of space gas quickly became tiresome.
My main complaint about the game was its accelerated progression. I don't know how many quests I missed because I shot past them. There appeared to be some dynamic difficulty-adjustment going on, too, because every combat I took part in seemed to have enemies eerily well-matched to my level. There's an argument that people like their massively-multiplayer games to be massive in scope; I don't really hold with this, but if you do like size, well, size isn't just about geography: it's about content. In a virtual world that has been operating for 15 years and counting, there's way more content than you could expect from a brand-new game, so that should put an older game at an advantage. I didn't get to see much of this at all, though, because I went through it like a rocket. New gameplay concepts added layer after layer of cruft. Ooh, now you can have more bridge officers. Ooh, now you can train them. Ooh, now you have junior officers you can send on missions. Ooh, now you can craft things. Ooh, now you can research. Ooh, now you have a fleet of spaceships you can also send on missions. Ooh, now you can replace a handful of junior officers with a better one. It just went on and on, and because the game had raised my level quickly but not the researching, resource-acquisition or offline-mission parts of play, I wound up as an admiral who had yet to make a level III (out of XII) bridge console.
Maybe I was supposed to pay real money for the rare gases or metals that I needed. I think there was some way to buy the pay-to-win currency with the dilithium crystals I got through regular gameplay, but I didn't try. I wouldn't have known what best to spend it on anyway.
Overall, Star Trek Online is a quirky game that I'm glad I played, but it was spoiled by a kind of desperate need to get players to the elder game (whatever that is) as soon as possible, yet in so doing leaving them ill-equipped to play it.
I think I'll play some non-MMOs for a bit now.
