Hands-on | Star Trek Online

Format: PC | Genre: MMORPG | Publisher: Atari | Developer: Cryptic | ETA: Q1 2010

By Greg Giddens

Creating an MMO is always a tall order. Creating an MMO in the Star Trek universe is truly venturing into a new frontier.

With so many fans to please, the pressure is really on Cryptic to deliver an authentic experience that will appease the majority of the fans while attracting newcomers to the MMO and Star Trek scenes. From what we’ve seen so far, everything is fitting together in a very positive way.

//To boldly go
Space MMOs are nothing new, but for Star Trek, the MMO genre is completely unexplored territory. The premise sounds interesting – sticking to the Prime universe, you get to experience the aftermath of the destruction of Romulus, as explained in the eleventh Star Trek film. The universe will not be effected by the timeline-altering events of the eleventh film; instead, the original films and TV series will form the back story.

This seems to be a clever move by Cryptic, allowing them to explore scenarios that are unlikely to be compromised by any future Star Trek stories, as well as giving them the opportunity to experiment with new alliances and enemies. As it stands, the Klingon Empire have drifted from the Federation and war between them has sparked. The demo we played didn’t shed any light on how or why this rift between the two has formed, but it’s a safe bet that the episodes that make up the MMOs missions will fill players in at full release. What we did get to experience was a very short mission involving ship combat and ground combat, showing off each to great effect.

//Batliffs at the ready
The ground combat is a fast paced run-and-shoot system. You run across the area targeting enemies, in this case Klingons, and press one from a number of different attack keys to deal out damage, with your NPC away-team following your lead. The system is easy to use, with targeting either requiring you to click on the enemy or simply fire and let the auto-target system choose your victim for you. And the weapons themselves look, sound, and feel authentic.

The only real concerns are the camera, which lacks dynamic movement and proves tricky to manually control, and the general ease of wiping out each enemy, but hopefully both issues will be addressed before release.

One of the most noticeable aspects of the ground combat is the competence of the friendly AI. Your away-team proves very successful at targeting and dealing with enemy threats, meaning less work for your character and less for the player to worry about. You can even stand back from battle and allow your pals to deal with the threat themselves.

//Klingon wessels off the port bow
Ship combat is shaping up brilliantly. The 3D environment allows for full 3D movement and, as with the ground combat, everything already looks, sounds, and feels like it should. Nothing fundamentally changes in the space combat over the ground – targeting and firing weapons remains the same, and we had no opportunity to experiment with the proposed power management from ship systems to enhance things like the shields and weapons. But even on its own, the space combat is great. With the addition of power management, it can only get better.

Mechanically everything seems to work fine, and it’s all warped up in fairly impressive presentation. It looks great, with high levels of detail in everything from the planet’s surface to the characters uniforms; the sound effects are also effective at immersing you in the Star Trek experience. Letting down the presentation slightly was the lack of voice work, facial animation, and ambient music, but it’s safe to say that, on the ambient music front at least, the full release will see its inclusion. Immersion suffers from a slight break by one simple thing: the mouse cursor animation remaining as a standard mouse cursor. Here’s hoping this is replaced by a more fitting animation for release.

Star Trek Online isn’t due for release until 2010, so with plenty of time left to tweak the formula there’s no need to be concerned with the current omissions or flaws. In fact, considering how impressive the demo was, Cryptic certainly seem to be on track to creating the Star Trek MMO fans have been so patiently waiting for.