Star Trek Online

So I picked up Star Trek Online to play around with it and see how they managed to do the MMO experience.

The intro quest is very good. No rats! Instead you fight the Borg, which is at least a creditable 'bad guy.' They may have suffered serious villain decay over the course of the series but they're not vermin.

The mission is basically broken up between space and ground missions. This means there's a lot of loading, which seems counter to 'best design' of MMOs. Fortunately the loading isn't long, but it is there.

For ground combat, I'm not enamored yet of the NPC group you have. Maybe I'm just too used to other MMOs but basically having pets for every class doesn't seem a good idea. The fact that there's no simple and helpful UI to 1) Know what they're doing and 2) give them quick instructions like "target my target" or "use buffing/healing skills" seems a significant oversight. You can give them a 'stance' to do things like that, but I'm not sure it works. (Also, I just hit a server not responding screen when trying to beam up. It doesn't boot you back to where you were or anything, it just stops the game.)

For space combat...well, I should really be comparing it to Eve, but I've not played Eve very much. You have various weapons with various firing arcs, as well as four quadrants of shields. This makes orientation relative to your target fairly important. Unfortunately your ship handles like a cow so this is frustrating. They seem to have made some fairly poor UI choices, though. If there's a button to fire all phasers (and there's no reason why you shouldn't, every time), why are they on different hotkeys, with fire all bound to spacebar? Same for photon torpedos, fire alls should be your hotkeys.

They don't tell you the default bind for full impulse (Shift-R), which they should since you're going to be using that a lot. You can manually adjust the amount of energy going to various subsystems...but that just seems a needless complication. They have several presets which probably would be more than enough for combat. Admittedly I haven't gotten to the high level min-maxing, but providing all these buttons just makes min-maxing more important and annoying.

There are a lot, a lot of skills. While everyone enjoys buttons to press, giving people who know nothing about the game literally fifty different options, with brief descriptions but no knowledge of what is actually useful in the real game is a bad idea. It also decreases the differences between the three "classes" (Tactical, science, engineering). Apparently these roughly relate to the MMO Holy Trinity of DPS, Heals, Tank, in that order.

Also, you stop moving entirely in space when you get a communication. Yikes.

And, items. They seem to have done something weird with items. On one hand, sometimes it's straightforward. Most weapons have DPS and some secondary effect stated on them. On the other hand, kits have some absurd scripting detail rather than "Throws a photon grenade that does X damage in X area and knockback."

My biggest item issue though is components you get (like minerals or alien artifacts) that are part of the crafting system...but there's no way to tell for sure without Googling it. And there's no immediate way to figure out how to use them. Pretty much every MMO has done this. Even WoW is guilty as it throws crafting nodes at you without stating "oh you need this other skill to use what you harvest."

Now for all this griping I'm not saying it's not fun. I really haven't gotten that far in it to tell yet. And no matter what the early levels are like, it's the endgame (or lack thereof) that makes or breaks an MMO