Cryptic Comparisons

This is my second Cryptic MMO in a row, or third if you count City of Heroes. No, I'm not going to make it four with Champions Online.

To follow on from my last post, if there's one game I should compare Star Trek Online to it's surely Neverwinter. Yet for all that they have in common the moment to moment experience of the two games is very different. In Neverwinter the focus is on heroic action - my Rogue can, and routinely does, take on multiple enemies with little effort. STO, by comparison, is more understated and, for a certain definition of the word, realistic.

It's a slower paced game. There's actual travel time between worlds, unlike in Neverwinter where you can move from one zone to another instantaneously. STO is also more deliberately paced on those worlds - there's no mounts for one thing, though sometimes there is a network of transporter pads that can be unlocked. This is one of the rare instances in an MMO where there's an in-universe explanation for Fast Travel.

(Though it doesn't beat Fallen Earth's explanation of FT, where you use Lifenet to clone yourself in new locations, killing the original you in the process. You even take gear damage as if you had actually died.)

STO's combat animations are nowhere near as showy as those of Neverwinter, but that makes sense. Star Trek Online has to feel like Star Trek, and it does deliver that small screen action experience. However I do find most of the music - in and out of combat - a bit flat. It's authentically Trek-ish, but rather like a lot of Trek's music from TNG onward it's only rarely memorable in its own right. The only way STO could measure up to Neverwinter's furiously bombastic soundtrack would be if it scored every encounter like it was an episode of TOS. Which would of course be amazing.

There actually is a mission in STO that uses the iconic fight music from "Amok Time" but the encounter is awkwardly scripted and the music stops and starts several times throughout the sequence, which rather spoils the effect. It's a nice idea that doesn't entirely work, and that's a recurring theme of this game.

I can't fault STO for its ambition, but it does overreach itself. The game's engine just isn't up to long, dialogue heavy sequences but there they are anyway because there's a story to be told. There are in-game cutscenes on New Romulus that aren't much better than the ones in City of Heroes, and the ones in CoH weren't very good.

As I've mentioned in the past, the game can also be glitchy. None of it is game breaking, but small glitches in the animations and graphics show up way more often here than in Neverwinter. I suspect it's because STO is trying to do so much more with the same limited tools.

I've had a few issues with this run: the balance has felt somewhat off, with ground encounters having rather suddenly become a lot more lethal. The pacing of the episodes has also been very uneven. The New Romulus arc is entirely ground based and I haven't had a straightforward space battle since back in the Borg arc, and that was something like 20 hours/10 days ago. I have played through several space missions since, but always with allies, which isn't nearly as interesting. It's odd how often STO holds back on delivering what is the best actual gameplay in the game.

Despite this I've enjoyed this 24 hours of the game a great deal. As uneven as some of the ground encounters have been - especially certain boss fights - it has given me reason to spend more time on my away team's skills and gear loadouts, and there's a lot of fun to be had tinkering with all the parts that make up my character. I've put hours into that, especially after I got my T5 ship.

More broadly, STO is in a similar place to Lord of the Rings Online in that it realizes its setting so well I shrug off a lot of what doesn't work as well as it should. I wouldn't describe myself as a hardcore Trekkie by any means, but the instalments of the franchise that I like I like a lot, and there's no doubt I give this game more slack than I do The Old Republic, or Elder Scrolls Online for that matter, because I have a greater affection for the sights and sounds of the Star Trek universe than I do for the galaxy far, far away or for Tamriel. The game isn't perfect as a game, but does that matter when I've got my Orions running around the galaxy in their cool ship? It does not.

Though it's still weird to me that my favorite part of this particular run was my adventures on Nimbus III. Almost makes me think better of Star Trek V.

But not quite.