Star Trek Online - Is it Any Good?
After the sad downfall of one of the most promising MMORPG games last year, Aion, many players
looked for alternatives. Since there's a lack of quality online games and due to most gamers lack
of trust in Asian game developers, Cryptic Studios and their most recent title Star Trek Online
seems like an obvious choice.
Cryptic is well-known for several of their previous titles which have had
moderate success on the market such as Champions Online, but with such a popular sci-fi title such
as Star Trek it's obvious the put a lot more effort in the game than in others. It would be a shame
to waste such a good title on a mediocre game, but unfortunately it appears the developers haven't
quite achieved the level of World of Wacraft programming and interactivity status as of
yet.
However there are still some good things to be said about it.
One of my favorite things about Star Trek Online and what certainly makes it
a lot different than Aion or similar Asian games is the lack of grinding. Hurrah! Grinding is a
useless and time wasting ingredient as far as I'm concerned. IMO if there are not enough quests in
the game to get what you need then the developers need to go back to the drawing board and add
them.
Leveling in STO is done almost entirely via quests or as they call it
missions and there's definitely plenty of those. You don't have to look for places to find missions
or destroy dozens or even hundreds of random ships to earn little experience: it comes mainly from
quests and as I said there's no shortage of those. The Klingon faction on the other hand levels up
their characters primarily with PvP but that's hardly grinding either.
However, despite all the options in leveling you can get confused a lot
since it's quite different than in other games. You don't actually gain levels or experience but
instead you gain skill points and ranks which are further broken down into grades or several skill
and ability categories. New players find it quite confusing which is the reason for the extreme
popularity of strategy and leveling guides, but fortunately they aren't hard to come by.
Overall, Star Trek Online is definitely on the path of being one of the
most successful and entertaining game in the year 2011 so if you haven't tried it yet be sure to do
so.
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