parker’s desk

Star Trek Online…amazing game, if it was still 2003.

MMOs.  I’ve tried many, though it’s fairly safe to say that my real­iza­tion of the hor­ri­ble time sink they too often are has changed me over the years to where I don’t play them much if at all.  Unfor­tu­nately, the (what I now see as lazy design and a cop-out) design behind most all MMOs is to get you to waste tons of time lev­el­ing char­ac­ters instead of expe­ri­enc­ing story or amaz­ing game design moments.  I’d even ven­ture to say most have very lit­tle to offer in amaz­ing scripted sequences, it’s usu­ally more about cus­tomiza­tion or earn­ing items of sta­tus that meant jack and shit out­side of the game.

My first MMO was Anar­chy Online, way back when (what…2001 was it?), which I didn’t last long on.  Star Wars Galax­ies came out and I started at launch (of course, being a Star Wars nut), and I still find it amaz­ing I know work with a large chunk of the orig­i­nal art team from that game at Red Fly Stu­dio.  I played Galax­ies a lot, for a few years off and on.  That damn game.  In between I tried World of War­craft, City of Heroes, Tab­ula Rasa (I’m still bit­ter towards that one), Everquest II.  I came back to WoW sev­eral times, I grew to appre­ci­ate the sim­plic­ity of things in the game & it’s art but even­tu­ally grew bored with the forced group con­tent — I had a pair of char­ac­ters maxxed out, and yet never saw an ounce of the endgame con­tent because it was focused on the hard­core raid­ing types, a mechanic that’s truly bro­ken about MMOs I think and ready to change.  Too many games pun­ish those of us that just play the game to relax and have a good time, they’re about spend­ing hours on raids and grind­ing for max stat items, etc.

Cryptic’s hit three titles I’ve tried now.  City of Heroes I played quite a bit, even­tu­ally grow­ing bored with the game in gen­eral though enjoy­ing com­bat and lov­ing the cos­tume designer.  Cham­pi­ons Online I tried over Christ­mas and felt sorely let down from, it was quite lit­er­ally City of Heroes with updated graph­ics and felt like it addressed very lit­tle of the major prob­lems from CoH (like adding addi­tional game mechan­ics, say civil­ian life of your hero or vehi­cles or any­thing like that).  Third came Star Trek Online.

I was def­i­nitely right to wait for a demo, I grew really damn tired of buy­ing these games just to have wasted the money (Tab­ula Rasa!!!!!).  The trend I’m see­ing, look­ing at things as a game devel­oper now, is — and granted this is an assump­tion — a care­less atti­tude of “eh, we’ll fix it after launch” for these games.  Bro­ken sys­tems, pathetic immer­sion fac­tors, bor­ing design and flat out shitty envi­ron­ment art.  It plagues almost every sin­gle MMO out there (though WoW has nailed the envi­ron­ment art, and they do inno­vate quite a bit with expan­sions for how quests play out).

So we come full cir­cle to Star Trek Online (STO)…amazing game, if it was still 2003.  I played through the demo con­tent tonight, and I couldn’t help but feel like it was a hor­ri­ble reskin­ning job of Cham­pi­ons Online with a cou­ple of neat addi­tions to com­bat and then space.  Cham­pi­ons Online, which was just an upgrade of City of Heroes.  Which is an old freak­ing MMO. 

Being pos­i­tive first, though…the char­ac­ter art is top-notch and amaz­ing.  I’ve always liked the detail they put into their char­ac­ters and options for cus­tomiz­ing in their games, but Cryp­tic just went above and beyond with Star Trek both with their char­ac­ter creation/customization and just the qual­ity of the art in gen­eral.  The char­ac­ters are gor­geous, believ­able, and while going down a hall with my phaser rifle drawn the way the warn­ing lights shined on my character’s hair really set the mood.  It was awe­some and fun.

Combat…much as I’m start­ing to grow a dis­taste for what I see as generic low-quality work/design in Cryptic’s games, the com­bat is almost always fun to play.  In some ways I really hate the com­bat in STO — ene­mies rush­ing me and kick­ing it in front of me while I blast them adds +10 to the out­dated feel the game has for me.  The new “hit C to go into aim mode” bit is an excel­lent touch though, and really makes things a lot of fun.  I also like hav­ing to actu­ally have line of sight for my attacks to work, very nice addition.

Space combat…feels like it has poten­tial.  I had some fun with it, and while maybe it gets bet­ter later I’m skep­ti­cal.  I also like the addi­tion of hav­ing crew mem­bers, though the com­plete lack of any inter­ac­tion with them on a story level or char­ac­ter devel­op­ment level was disappointing.

That’s about it that I can say that’s nice.

The very first thing I noticed when I started the game was the hor­ri­ble envi­ron­ment art.  I mean freak­ing shit-tastically hor­ri­ble, the scale they used for mak­ing their rooms leaves you feel­ing like a child run­ning around in your parent’s room with dad’s shoes un for fun.  The ceil­ing is some­thing like 40 feet above your head, and instantly I felt like I was in some old ass MMO rather than on a star­ship in the mid­dle of a fire­fight.  The sec­ond thing I see?  I look out the win­dow to see the “space fight.”  Fuck that thing, right there I knew the game was going to be a let down…and I’ll explain.

Video games are not movies, we all know this.  But there are cer­tain rules that seem to work well across all media/entertainment items, like the con­cept of an intro “hook” to get you into the expe­ri­ence.  Films use it, books use it, music in it’s own way uses it on albums, the­atre uses it…games need to start using it.  Some already do, but when I’m going into Star Trek Online expect­ing at least a qual­ity level you’d expect from such a big IP and I get an out of scale room and 1999 qual­ity visu­als out­side of a ship win­dow?  Come on, Cryp­tic!!  This is where you shine and con­vince me to pay a monthly sub­scrip­tion for this terd, not admit that it is one!

The imme­di­ate prob­lem is — again — scale.  The ships out­side are so minute in size that when you move you can tell they’re super tiny.  On Force Unleashed II — run­ning on the pathet­i­cally tiny hard­ware that is the Wii, mind you — I built a full on space bat­tle hap­pen­ing out­side of a hangar bay and win­dows later on.  I quickly saw how scale could destroy the immer­sion of it, and so I focused on mak­ing the ships big enough & far enough away that they felt large to the player…this wasn’t days of devel­op­ment time kids, this was over a few hours tops by myself.  I don’t claim élite skill here, I call out lazy work at Cryptic.

It just went on from there.  Char­ac­ters stand­ing around, shitty ani­ma­tions, NPCs wan­der­ing and not mak­ing con­tact with the stuff they’re work­ing on, ene­mies spawn­ing while I’m read­ing a quest update or warp­ing through walls, no vocal act­ing save for a painfully bad actor read­ing for a med­ical holo­gram (not even bad actor, just bad writ­ing).  That made it the most painful, I would have at the least expected main quests — espe­cially in the demo — to have voice act­ing and lip sync ani­ma­tions on the char­ac­ters so they look like, I dunno…they’re talking?

Cryp­tic is a stu­dio I plan on steer­ing clear of from now on.  It’s frus­trat­ing because it’s obvi­ous there is some real tal­ent there, with the gor­geous char­ac­ters, amaz­ing cus­tomiza­tion detail and some design that’s mak­ing com­bat fun despite it’s hor­ri­ble flaws.  But the work just always feels lazy, not well thought out and done at a bare min­i­mum so it can get out of the door.  Hav­ing done two other MMOs now I would expect a lot more from them than…this.

Ugh.  G’night.

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