As a total and complete trekkie – yes, I remember watching TOS way back when I was a kid, I was pretty excited to hear that there was a MMO set in the Star Trek universe in the works. Having watched every series – and yes I include the animated series as well – remember when Uhura ran the ship? – including Enterprise (yes, I know), I thought, how could they possibly keep to the mythos of Star Trek in an MMO.

Well I have to say that its pretty good – it works. From what little I’ve seen of it, its pretty cool, from both the ship battle and away team views. The tutorial puts you through both situations.

  1. First you build your character. Nothing new here, just like Warcraft or any other MMO, except you do have a choice of races and you can create your own, but most of them are still humanoid
  2. Then you name him/her and your ship
  3. Then you are thrust into a few missions, first beaming over to a ship attacked by the Borg, then a ship battle or two, then a rescue mission, then another ship battle, then you are promoted and then its on to free play

I’d say that the graphics are pretty good, having played on two systems, one better powered than the other. The slower system was still playable, but some of the resolution suffered. Still early days yet, not ready to plonk down for a monthly fee, but theres still 2 weeks in the beta for me to make that decision.

Oh boy does it have bugs though. First, really tough to log in, get kicked out at the login  and character creation a lot over and over – they say on the news that they are working to add new servers etc but I mean really, they should have realized that with a franchise like Star Trek that they would have huge demand.

Star Trek Online is produced by the same group that did City of Heroes, while a decent MMO, does not have the draw of this one. They should have taken their server estimates and increased them by at least one order of magnitude.

Funniest bug: sometimes, your ship appears where you should be, and you appear where your ship should be. So there you are, walking around deep space, or a mini version of your ship appears in the mess hall, tooling around on thrusters. It rights itself eventually, but its pretty funny while you are seeing it happen.

More to come…