Forum Overview :: Star Trek Online

Still running up against the core MMORPG flaw by Lizard_King 02/13/2010, 4:05pm PST Time invested is still the key variable in success. They managed to make the combat moderately challenging, but only at the expense of making death essentially consequence free. That's not a decision I begrudge them, but it is indicative of the fear of traumatizing those who who have become conditioned to expect the mandatory increase in power over time. The main point in its favor is that someone who doesn't give a shit about the setting can still enjoy it, which puts it far ahead of the elf and furry worlds. + -3d space combat is really great. Shield management, facing, power management, etc are mostly well designed and interesting, and can make for some tense struggles (if you pretend that death is more than an annoyance). The scale of battle mostly feels right, but I expected more "star destroyer moments" which so far only the borg cubes have delivered. The timing/cooldown stuff is made much more interesting by the frantic importance of placement in a 3d space, which I think puts it dangerously close to creating the impression of an action game -PVP is great, and death does count there to some extent. The downside is that most everyone who's really good at it has gone Klingon. -Ship design is ok at first and looks to get a lot more interesting at the next rank increase (10 levels in). -Some of the missions are really well designed -Crews, ships, and items make interesting if initially intimidating layers for your character. - -Ground combat is boring a lot of the time. -Class differences and statistics are inscrutable to the first time player, and it is strongly recommended that you latch on to someone who already knows the system a bit -Documentation is crap -Server stability has been mostly good with a few big hiccups. -Multi stage missions are not explained as such in advance with enough transparency. It is hard to tell if you are in for minutes or an eternity until you get the tenth "The princess is in another castle! Fuck you" for that mission. -Hub areas could easily be replaced with a menu for those of us that could give a rat's ass about role playing. As it is, they are too large and filled with vague directions to your next mission giver/completer. This is x9999 for the still very rough Klingon character path. -UI interpretation requires a translator who speaks MMORPG. The game isn't finished and appears to be selling well, so I would give it a few weeks and let the other chumps take the fall. The space combat essentially sells it, for those of that understand Space Rangers 2 is unlikely to get much better as a single player endeavor. Positive!

Still running up against the core MMORPG flaw by Lizard_King 02/13/2010, 4:05pm PST