So I got into the beta for the star trek online (STO) mmorpg game and well not very impressed with what they got going. I understand that it is a beta and as such there are bound to be bugs, glitches or other anomalies with the system. Except that by todays standards when a game is only about a week from release then maybe the vast majority of the bugs should be fixed before the game goes live and well they likely won't be. Bugs aside the game wasn't very fun either and had a real feeling of just being slapped together. I guess some of my disappointments range from the game systems to the bugs to some of the design of STO.
The first thing of course is character creation. Was a little disappointed right off the bat as you could only make a federation character and all the models were slightly modified human models. It did have the neat idea of being able to make your own race, but it was also limited to a slightly modified human model. Also the ability to only have 2 characters so far was a little lame, especially for me since I don't usually have main characters just lots of alts. The class selection was limited to three: Tactical Officer, Ops officer and engineering. Which ironically would be dps, healer, and tank with the classes depending on if they were on the ship or on the ground. In the game there are skill points that allows one to specialize in specific areas, but from what I noticed there was no end to skill points so it is feasible to get all the skills at some point in time.
The forced upon tutorial was a bear to get through. It took hours and was boring, didn't really introduce the game systems really well. The first part of the tutorial is an away mission, then it takes you up into a ship. The away mission showed how ground combat was going to be like, slow and painful. The ship combat was about the same unfortunately. The only time that it got remotely entertaining is when there were more than 1-2 ships involved in the fights and even then. Now after spending a couple hours I was only vaguely familiar with the combat system, in fact it wasn't until I took a quick trip to the forum that I found out that weapons can be set to auto-fire.
Now I finished the tutorial and was sitting in the Sol space station when I figured out there was an Auction house, vendors and hey a monetary system in the game. Trying to sort of semi watch the chat but at this point it has already turned into the trade channel in any major city of world of warcraft minus a couple of Chuck Norris jokes. At this point, not being able to purchase any equipment or anything really I got the first quest after the tutorial. This quest involved going to 5 different systems on "Patrol". The first couple of systems it was all in space, destroying other ships. The other parts were on the ground doing various things, like one was find out all the miner's issues then answer a bunch of questions regarding what the miners issues were. It wouldn't have been that bad I except it took a really long time to do all this, like 4 hours to complete the one quest and no that wasn't because things were bugged.
I figured that the slowness in the combat was due to the game being more tactical and less twitchy. That wasn't so much the case as it was just infuriatingly slow combat. Like it taking a bit to get into combat range with a ship, then flying around in circles to try to distribute the damage being done across all the shields while trying to "broadside" the enemy to be able to use both phasers or face the enemy to fire torpedos. Sorry but that doesn't denote tactical placement and fighting with more thought, it is still just fly in and open fire on anything and everything that moves. Ground combat wasn't much better just a poor excuse really.
Now it makes me curious as to why game companies are still insisting on doing this whole pump out as much crap as possible and have these really tiny player bases. Instead of really spending some time and really hashing the a game out and the game systems. There isn't a cookie cutter recipe to make an awesome game, and so what if a company can make a MMORPG it still doesn't mean it is going to be worth anyones time playing. I wish they would quit trying to be like World of Warcraft and really make something original.
