Star Trek Online (F2P) Review

When it was released in 2009 Star Trek Online was met with a collective 'meh' from the majority of the MMO playing community. While its Nimoy-voiced intro, turbo lift doors, communicators and beamings up certainly make for a fair distraction from the realities of not actually being a starship captain in the 24th century, it certainly didn’t have the muster to provide true fans with the experience they deserved. 

If there's one thing die-hard Star Trek fans are rarely accused of, it's being stupid. Sadly, Star Trek Online was, and still is, a bit stupid. It’s tale of woe doesn't quite unfold quite like that of fellow Free To Play convert APB, since Star Trek Online never went away - it's been pootling around its own corner of the internet non-stop since release. This, then, is less a re-boot than a fresh start. 

Though the original release was a shambles of confusing stats, broken ground missions, non-existent crafting and offered a complete lack of end-game content, to be fair Cryptic have released a consistent amount of new additions and improvements over the years.

Five ‘seasons’ of content have arrived in all, adding a multitude of much-needed fixes. Better PvP, high-level raids, playable ground combat (which, it should be said, is still a gaudy aside to the ‘functional’ space combat at Star Trek Online’s core), not to mention the ability for players to create and share their own missions among a multitude of other things. 

There’s little doubt Star Trek Online is a better game today than it was in 2009. Season 5, the content update designed to prepare Star Trek Online for its F2P re-launch goes even further to patch, fix and manhandle the game into a half-way appealing F2P experience.

The skills have been revamped to be more accessible and understandable (but in MMO tradition they’re still largely incomprehensible at first glace), the card-game-esque Duty Officer system offers excellent risk and reward incentive, epic gear sets have been introduced – in short, there’s plenty here to tempt a lapsed player. 

Sadly this check-list of improvements doesn’t tell the whole story. The developers have broken promises, failed to deliver in key areas and have shirked their responsibility to maintain regular community communication (the number one unspoken rule of any MMO).

We’re also sad to report that the reception of F2P players by long-standing players (read: ‘bitter vets’) leaves a lot to be desired, perhaps a product of a highly frustrated core community. This is galaxies apart from the transition for Lord Of The Rings Online, for example. 

Star Trek Online is still a far cry from the kind of experience Gene Roddenberry would knowingly embrace were he with us today. Socio-political overtones aside, at its heart Star Trek is about exploration, discovery and diving headlong into the great unknown.

To do the license real justice Star Trek Online should be a living, breathing economy-led sandbox game where the players themselves have the scope to become captains of legend and, by extension, an intrinsic part of game lore. Factions and alliances should rise and fall and great battles should be fought to the dying breath. 

Instead we have what essentially amounts to MMO-lite – quick access to meaningless PVP and PVE events, unwanted ground combat (beyond the odd phaser fight, Star Trek has never been about ground combat) and underwhelming and unfulfilling space-battles. Sure, you can tweak your starship to within an inch of a warp core breach, but its appeal to the Star Trek faithful is shallow at best.