01.17.10
Star Trek Online beta (part2)
I realise the launcher says they’re working on increasing server capacity. But I can well empathise with people complaining loudly on Twitter the last day or so, saying they can’t log in at all.
Never have I been more satisfied I’m in a different time zone to the majority of players. It means I get to play some of the game and have no problem logging in.
Considering my last night’s review was based on a ‘first impression’ of sorts, I decided I’ll try the game again. Only got to try for less than a half hour actually, since it decided to boot me off the ‘busy server’ in mid-loading screen and I haven’t been able to get back in since.
I’ve also looked in on the forums and what other players are saying. Aside from a lot of angst about the servers or fanboys being optimistic, there are a few good points raised by non-fanatic players.
1) Auto-grouping for group instances. Great feature or no? Great that you can go straight into it without waiting around for an age. But wait… the server’s booted half the team off mid-battle and we’re doing the ‘dead, respawn, pummelled’ routine again. And no more players coming into battle because apparently we’ve got a full group.
2) The game is unfinished! Well of course it is. It’s a beta. But this guy’s got a point: ["to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before."
3) The quests are strangely boring. Go near a quest giver, press F, click, click, accept. Go to flashing console/door/item, press F (to interact), click, and you’re done.
WoW-haters/rejects will always tell people that the quests are “collect this, kill this, how many of each, etc.” True. But at least they make them interesting with variety. Variety is what is sadly lacking to Star Trek Online quests.
Even Torchlight, with its strangely addictive “click, click, click, loot” pattern was more interesting. Because of the different types of things you could loot!
Oh, and apparently, variety does come into play when you’re above Lieutenant to Lt. Commander rank. If you’re lucky enough to stay logged in to level that much, that is…
4) Copy and pasted off a thread about busy servers:
“Seriously, you’ve offered the keys, now, have the servers. Period.
Otherwise, limit the number of purchases on the client side. But, don’t have a bunch of people buying software and no way to play the game.
That’s just dumb.” [according to a guy called Traim]
That’s it in a nutshell.
Sorry, my second impression of the game may have got slightly worse than my first impression. I think the game has potential, because it’s part of a huge franchise with a huge fanbase. But it needs to work on its debilitating flaws straight away or the same thing that happened to Vanguard (incidentally, a game that did have diplomacy – ST is supposed to have it, but don’t) is going to happen to this one too.