Honestly Trash...why do you play a game, where every thing which every happened in the ST universe is taken for granted, but you can't stand it?
Because of all the other stuff from ST that I do like?
Well, if you hate the sci-fi elements and the writing (not to mention the core MMO-grindiness of the gameplay), that means you must
really like ripply foreheads and pointy ears.
In any case, I gave the game a try and used some time I had off of work to power through the story missions (and the character levels). I gave some of the end-game content a try, and kept up with The 2800 series as it was released. I then set the game down and feel no real desire to pick it back up again.
I will give credit to the developers, as they appear to have some true passion for Trek, but I had a concern going into the game. I was worried that a genuine Star Trek experience would be incompatible with the demands of the MMORPG genre. Ultimately, those concerns were pretty well borne out over the course of my experience with STO. As a Trek fan, I felt that STO sat in a really uncomfortable part of the uncanny valley. It
resembles Star Trek, but concessions had to be made to shoehorn the aesthetic into the MMORPG mold. STO
looks like Star Trek. STO
sounds like Star Trek. STO
feels like WoW with some slightly interesting variation in the realm of space combat. Star Fleet has to be combat-focused, and everyone and their dog/targ has to be at war to ensure that there is a component of excitement. Phemomena that were incredibly powerful and encountered once or twice in a Trek series are made into character abilities to ensure some variation of
spells capabilities. (Example -
A Tyken's Rift crippled the Enterprise-D, and an episode was dedicated to the ship trying to escape. Meanwhile,
the USS Pavlov, my ironically-named recon science ship, can pop off a Tyken's Rift every 45 seconds as a mild AOE energy and speed debuff that lasts a whole 15 seconds.)
Maybe if I was raised on DS9, instead of TNG, STO wouldn't feel
quite as odd.... That series was, after all, given a strong focus on the war between the Dominion and the Alpha Quadrant, so the combat-heavy approach of STO wouldn't be quite as alien to the setting, if DS9 had been the series establishing the setting in my mind's eye. As a TNG fan (and I'm sure this holds for TOS, Enterprise, and Voyager fans as well), it's off-putting to see exploration and diplomacy turned into a very repetitive and often combat-focused set of daily quests. Trek, to me, is about launching into the unknown, expanding the star charts, discovering scientific phenomena, and defusing diplomatic tensions (Cardassians and Romulans were insideous Cold War-style opponents, and the alliance with the Klingons often felt tenuous, throughout TNG). In STO, all of that is reduced to the bits you grind through to gather experience, dilithium, or crafting materials, which will ultimately be used to improve your capabilities in combat.
In fairness, the space combat mechanics are pretty fun. If you had dorsal and ventral shield sectors and six degrees of freedom of movement, I'd say you'd have a near-perfect set of mechanics for a capital ship-focused space combat game. I'd love to see those mechanics transplanted into another game, because I did have a measure of fun with the space combat. It's ultimately the grind and the misguided layering in of the Star Trek aesthetic that lets the overall experience down.
All my other gripes with the game are pretty minor and easier to look past (and are therefore omitted from this post!). As someone whose been hungry for a good Trek game, since the 1990's, I wanted STO to suck me in and not let me back out, but it just doesn't. They got the aesthetic right, and they have some really strong gameplay elements at work, but those two components work against each other in the overall evaluation. If you're a non-Trek MMORPG fan, STO's a fine game that will offer you something a little different from what you're used to. If you formed your conception of Trek around DS9, STO may provide a better experience for you than it did for me. If you are a Trek fan looking to boldly go, where no one has gone before, then the whole experience of STO is going to feel a little off.
(Footnote - Okay, I am going to bring up one of my larger 'minor' gripes, since it further plays into the uncanny valley thing. Star Fleet has a uniform code, goddammit. Yes, it was loosely enforced, allowing for culturally-significant accessories to be added to the uniform (e.g. the Klingon baldric sash and the Bajoran earring), and yes, Roddenberry objected to it as an apparent militarization of Star Fleet, but it's there. The only person who flagrantly and regularly violated the Star Fleet uniform code was Troi, and I suspect that was because her Season 1 TNG persona was so ****ing whiny that nobody wanted to hear her ***** about her cleavage needing ventillation, until she started showing aspiration for promotion. In STO, the uniform code seems to be entirely absent. The default uniforms look like they're made of fetish film-quality leather/latex, and in lieu of those, I've seen people opt for anything from the TNG film uniforms to 20th century suits to humans in Orion casual wear to **** that looks more at home in a truly awful anime, pink hair included. I know that customization options are the heart of the microtransaction MMOG business model (we'll leave the definition of microtransaction for another time), but no two people in Star Fleet appear to be wearing the same uniform. The end result is that you have no hope of maintaining a suspension of disbelief when gameplay requires you to step foot on a busy installation. Also, there will be nausea, when you walk past someone who tried to pass off Rei's plugsuit as a Star Fleet uniform.)
