01.16.10
Star Trek Online beta
Downloaded the beta, and played it this afternoon. It’s had a lot of hype, plus it’s Star Trek. Sorry to be negative, but my gamer instinct tells me this won’t be around for long. Why? Here’s the list:
Bug1: I’m a tiny spaceship at Starfleet docking station (you’re supposed to see your character, not your ship), then I’m my own tiny character out in airless space (supposed to be ship, not character). Oh, and I can’t move.
Actually, this one was amusing. According to general chat, quite a few people found it funny.
Bug2: I want to move forward dammit, not jog on the spot! Oops, just moved several yards apparently and now I’m dead.
Sadly very inconvenient. Getting stuck in scenery was the reason we stopped playing Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes in its early days (and a host of other MMOs that have come and gone in the last 5 years). When getting stuck means you get killed, it’s not fair the first time. Second time and thereafter, you start thinking this game’s got a lot to sort out before beta finishes.
Major Problem: Scaling of diffculty is practically non-existent. No way to tell (like in so many other MMOs) whether the quest is too hard for you to solo at your level. So you blithely go in and get pummelled, death, respawn, pummelled… etc. It’s just not fun! To add insult to injury, you have a team of other players in your instance who also get pwned by these all-invincible npc mobs.
Another Problem: Respawn point. Respawning away from combat area is good. But does it have to be so damn far from where you were? After running through the same ol’ passages time and again to get back into combat (see Bug2 and above paragraph) I got bored and abandoned the quest.
The manoeuvrability of your ship… now that sucks. Maybe I’m not used to it, sure. But half the time, response is so damn slow you may as well not have pressed anything. It’s the frantic button-mashing that’s getting quests done. And why oh why is it so boring to do quests? It’s not as if there’s an interesting backstory here and I’ve completed less than 10 quest chains, but I can safely let you all know if you’ve done 5, you’ve done all the variety there seems to be!
Yeah, it’s in beta stage. I get that. But they’ve got a long way to go. It needs to be a bit more bug-free to be enjoyable.
Oh and Cryptic, you guys need to check out those ’supply aid’ quests. They’re seriously bugged – undoable. In fact, all of the chat in the area was about how bugged it was, never mind quest help. (I was on there for about 4.5hours straight, and most of chat was of rumours about how Cryptic’s not going to iron out the problems before releasing it proper.)