I've been playing regularly for the last week, trying to get a feel for it. I like the premise, but the execution is lacking. And then of course there's Cryptic itself...
Let me explain the last part first. Being an old City of Heroes/Villains veteran from the days when Cryptic was still responsible for its development, I jumped aboard the Champions Online bandwagon hoping for "City of Heroes 2" with somewhat better execution after all of the issues that made CoH garbage in my eyes. Following along CO's development, out comes the beta and things were niiiiiiice. It was fun; yes things needed a few tweaks and balance passes, but all in all it had a nice concept and feel to it. I pre-order the 6-month subscription at this point feeling like this is a game I could definitely play for 6 months if not more, and the STO Closed Beta key was a nice perk too.
Then it happened. (Are you paying attention folks? You should be, because this is likely to be exactly what happens to STO after launch...)
The game was ultimately rushed out the door in order to meet Atari's publishing deadline and start generating revenue. The beta testers all begged Cryptic to hold off and take more time. But they didn't, so we had the Day 0 patch. Champions Online was irrevocably altered for the worse with the Day 0 patch.
This patch did fix a few items, but more importantly it completely changed game play across the board for a metric shitton of power sets and builds. Basically everything was nerfed into oblivion in the name of PvP and dragging out content by slowing the pace down rather than putting in more content. Powers were utterly broken and/or no longer doing what they were originally designed to do. Over the course of the next month or so, there would literally be dozens more patches both fixing some of these ills, usually for the worse, or nerfing even more parts of the game.
Finally, after about 2 months, the patches and balancing pretty much just stopped. "Ooh, they fixed everything then?" you ask? Nope. They didn't. They dropped it like a cheap whore with an STD and shifted everybody to work on their next release title: Yup, you guessed it, Star Trek Online.
And then there were broken promises. The original pre-subscription purchases to Champions Online which supposedly included Priority Access to the Closed Beta (as soon as it's available), Cryptic also screwed it's customers over. For example, myself having been promised access had to wait nearly 2 and a half months from the start of the closed beta before receiving my closed beta key. Cryptic addressed this by stating the devs on the CO community forums that stated "As soon as the beta starts" was wrong, and also fixed the issue by updating the pre-subscription details, removing the "as soon as it's available" part.
There's no reason to not believe this exact same scenario will happen with STO. STO is being rushed out the door far before it should be, simply to make a publisher's marketing deadline. The game features about 1/2 of the content originally promised at launch, and is missing a lot of fundamentals still. Hell, even the core of the game isn't stable (should a game this far along crash every 15 minutes?). There are some bright spots, but the game is a shell of what it's supposed to be. There's been great strides in the last two weeks, but it's still not ready for a February 2nd launch date. Players agree, and have again urged Cryptic to back off and test/refine more. As usual, Cryptic refuses to listen (Hey, you guys are lucky STO got the crap implementation of bridges in the game).
Why is this likely to repeat itself? Cryptic has a full 3rd title already being worked on. Odds are it too will require another rush publishing release. The Champions Online folks were promised to have a full dev team working on it through and after release. Guess what... there's no one home.
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Okay, now to STO itself. First, rush job. They're trying to get it out the door so that they can meet Atari's deadline and collect a bonus. Because of this, you can expect a similar Day 0 patch treatment that Champions Online got, fundamentally altering the entire game you thought you were playing.
Now, the mechanics. STO plays like a console game. That's all there is to it. In fact, don't be surprised when STO makes its way to the XBox.
There's very little depth or "content". They've just recently started adding in what seem to be mission trees/arcs, but just like Champions Online, their mission arcs are linear and pretty much take you in a straight line from level 1 to level X without letting you see the sights or take time in a given area. Patrol missions do force you to explore a bit per sector, but it's more of a choice to patrol versus do sector hopping. Mission depth is rather small, except on the larger arcs. Even then, a mission is broken up into stages. Really, this game absolutely shines on the huge away mission maps. These maps are perfect for team play or solo play both. Mobs everywhere, multiple objectives... they simply are great. The little random missions, not so much and very lacking. Beam to a planet with an entire away team... scan 5 objects and interact with nothing else (because there literally is nothing else to interact with). Yes, those are a variant on the "go collect X" quests, but really? You have a mission without any chance of incident that ends with mission text saying a saboteur was caught, but you never even see him?
All in all, away missions are underrated in the game. Everybody raves about the ship combat. Yeah, it's good. Away missions are equally as good - provided there's something to do. There's very little in terms of tactics though (this holds true for ship combat too). Beam down, find target, crouch and start blasting till everything is dead. No need really to find cover or get better position. It doesn't really make a difference.
Ship combat. As I said, EVERYBODY raves about the ship combat. What is it? Well, it's essentially Star Fleet Battles (old board game) or naturally by extension Star Fleet Command (old PC game, which was a rather faithful representation of the previously mentioned SFB) with more caveats: Energy and weapon management is extremely simplified to accomodate what are essentially "console" style controls - as I said, expect to see this game on the 360 if it garners enough reputation. It's pretty much a 3D space shooter, slowed down a good bit of course (hey, you got big ships moving around). That by no means is a bad thing. Think Wing Commander, but instead of a Scimitar, you're flying around the Concordia herself against other capital ships rather than fighters.
About the only real tactics in ship combat to be aware of is making sure you're putting a working shield up between you and your opponent(s), and making sure that you're getting yourself into position against said opponents weakest shield and taking them down. Pretty much that's what combat involves in real life too. I've gotten it down to more of a science personally, able to take out one if not two frigate class ships before they get to 5km of me. NPC cruisers and not much more difficult, and NPC battleships only become a nuisance because they are capable of regenerating their shields in an annoying efficient manner every couple minutes.
PvP combat shines somewhat in STO with one glaring issue: It's canned. Yup, battleground-style queued combat zones that have absolutely no impact on the game. Mind you, this is good in my eyes because I'm a PvE junky - and content is something that this game sorely lacks. However, the setting of this title is an all out war, and as such there will be some open PvP zones, but they will not affect any outcome of the game - this is the only reason I would have to partake in such tasks (at least in EVE, PvP can actually have a meaning - not that I'm saying EVE is better/worse, just saying). In PvP, things have indeed gotten a bit more balanced thankfully, through it's still skewed. And unfortunately, PvP balancing has major ramifications to PvE, and Cryptic has proven they do not know how best to handle both at the same time.
All in all, STO is a great platform - don't get me wrong, I find myself wanting to play this. But its implementation isn't great enough right now to warrant paying a subscription fee for, or more importantly justify the inflated lifetime subscription costs. If it's any indication, I played Champions Online for perhaps 6 weeks before I got bored and fed up. 6 weeks out of a 6 month subscription plus purchase cost of the game - which incidentally includes 30 days of game time. So 2 weeks of a 6 month subscription. I logged into Champions a few weeks back just to patch up. I wasn't on for more than 2 minutes, but I got a good look around. None of the Super Group I am part of were on, whereas back in the initial month there would routinely be a dozen or so people on. I didn't bother to look around the world, I just logged off with no desire to play.
One the novelty of Star Trek wears off, pretty sure that most people are going to put the game down within 3 months or so out of sheer boredom. That's the one thing Cryptic excels at: Lack of content. The only reason City of Heroes is still around is because it's the granddaddy of Super Hero MMOs. Not because of content.
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