Games | Superior Realities

Star Trek: Online Thoughts:

It was recently announced that the MMORPG Star Trek: Online will soon be free to play. Being the cheap bastard I am, my ears immediately perked up when I heard this. While I no longer consider myself a Trekkie (long story), I still have enough lingering interest in the Star Trek universe to render me mildly curious about this.So, I promptly contacted one of my Facebook friends who plays, and being the awesome person she is, she immediately gave me one of her referral codes for a free trial, and I dove in as the proud captain of the USS Varian Wrynn (*nerdly snicker*).

But my interest in the game did not live long or prosper. The friend who referred me absolutely adores this game, and I feel guilty to say anything bad about it–it almost feels like I’m insulting her kid. But hiding from the truth never did anyone any good, so Teri, I’m sorry, but I have to say it:

Star Trek: Online is not a good game. At all.

There were little things that annoyed me right out of the gate. The interface is just a little too big and little too clunky, leading to a claustrophobic feeling. I rapidly began to miss World of Warcraft’s bare bones interface, especially when I discovered that a giant message pops up in the middle of your screen every time you’re near someone or something that can be interacted with. Dear god, did that get old fast. To be fair, there might be a way to turn this off–I didn’t feel like trying to find out which of the game’s many options tabs it might be under.

There is also an option (which was automatically turned on for me) that for reasons unclear puts the graphics on a setting I can only call “terribad.” The game actually looked great once my friend told me how to turn it off, but it didn’t leave a good first impression.

I’m an experienced gamer, but this game made me feel like a complete newbie. I spent a great deal of time getting lost; while quest givers and the like are tracked on the mini-map, so is everything else, and I couldn’t find any way to filter out the clutter. There were a lot of different currencies and complexities related to gear that were never clearly explained to me. I never even figured out how the leveling system works. It didn’t seem to have levels like a traditional MMO, but yet I had an XP bar. There were several times where I was automatically grouped with people, but these experiences mostly amounted to them completing my objectives for me while I wandered in circles in a vain attempt to figure out what I was supposed to do. I know the mindlessness of WoW may have spoiled me, but throw a guy a bone.

The game is split between ground missions where you command your character and NPC allies and space missions where you pilot your vessel. The ground combat is okay, I suppose. Nothing to write home about. The ship combat is actually a little interesting and involves careful positioning to maximize your firepower while trying to protect the damaged portions of your ship from further harm. But the space portions also suffered from clunky controls and seemingly needless over-complication. They also seemed to be the opposite extreme from WoW’s “LULZ FACEMASH KEYBOARD AND INSTAKILL AL ENEMEEZ LOLOLOL” questing; the fights seem to drag on forever.But my biggest complaint was the game’s load screens. Simply put, it has an absurd number of them. That may seem like a silly thing to pick on, but this number of load screens would be annoying in any game, and in an MMO, it’s just unforgivable. One of the thing’s I love about WoW is the way I can stand in Rut’theran Village and see the World Tree four zones away and know that I can hop on my drake and fly there (and far beyond) without a single second of load time. ST:O, by comparison, required a load screen just to get from one section of a space station to the other.

Hell, even Dungeon Siege III, a single player game sometimes criticized for its lack of scale, would put me through fewer load screens in a week than ST:O did in a day.

It’s flagrant false advertising to even call ST:O a massively multiplayer game. There’s nothing massive about it.

But in the interest of fairness, there is one thing about ST:O that I really loved, and that’s its customization. Every imaginable aspect (and some unimaginable aspects–the boob size option on the females kind of creeped me out) of your character, your NPC helpers, and your ship is fully customizable, from fine details of their uniforms to their height to scars and tattoos. The game even lets you pick your character’s body language, an idea so amazingly cool that I’m doomed to spend the rest of my life wishing every game had it.

Still, the fact remains that I uninstalled the game after just one day. There’s no single, critical error that ruined this game (except maybe those icky load screens), but it’s so plagued with small annoyances that there is no room for anything resembling fun.

The one good thing to come out of this is I have a much greater respect for what Blizzard accomplished with WoW. I’ve often criticized its basic gameplay, but only now do I realize how many pitfalls they evaded.

I feel bad for my friend. ST:O is her only real experience with modern video games (so far as I’m aware), and she has no idea what she’s missing out on. But on the plus side, I’ve gained a greater respect for her abilities as a gamer. If she can wade through the mind-numbing confusion of ST:O and succeed, she could probably dominate WoW.

In other news…

My contributor’s copy of MOG #33 arrived yesterday. Seeing my name in print is a very bizarre experience, but gratifying, too.

Horde Stereotypes: Are They Really True?

I’m one of those rare people that plays both factions in World of Warcraft. Back in Wrath of the Lich King, I mainly played Horde. Since Cata’s come around, I’ve switched to focusing on Alliance–in large part because I have a nice guild over there–but I still play my Horde toons regularly, and I still enjoy the Horde’s more colourful nature.

I never liked the faction rivalry in the game, and it especially bugs me when people actually buy into it and legitimately hate the other side. It’s just a game, dude! It always amuses how each side claims the other is made up of children and immature idiots. It’s just ridiculous that an aesthetic decision based on personal taste would dictate the maturity level of players. Right? The official symbol of the Horde

Lately, even though I still find it an absurd idea, I’m starting to wonder if the Alliance might not be right after all. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with people on the Horde side.

I’m a guild-jumper. My first Horde guild was nice, but it was essentially three people–including myself. I eventually left in the hopes of finding a larger guild. The first one I got into was, simply put, disgusting. The guild channel made the Trade chat anal [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker] spam look highbrow by comparison. Furthermore, despite their billing themselves as casual, some of them were surprisingly elitist and would absolutely eviscerate you if you failed to live up to their high standards.

I wound up ragequitting that guild.

My Horde characters are currently split between two guilds, and I suspect I will eventually quit them. In both cases, the litmus test came when I mentioned my Alliance characters. In one case, someone mentioned he would “rather be dead than [slur for a homosexual] Alliance.” In the other, when I mentioned that half my Alliance guild is female, someone wondered how they had found their way out of the kitchen. Face, meet my good friend, palm.

I’m only staying in the first guild for its high level perks, and in the other because I’ve only been a member for a few days and I’m hoping they’re better than they seem (somehow I doubt it). I’m about ready to give up on guilds altogether on that faction, honestly.

And it’s not just my own guilds. The other day, I joined a Firelands trash run on my Blood Elf mage with a group that was mostly made up of one guild. Now, to amuse my nerdly heart, I created a few macros that make my mage /say incantations in Thalassian when he uses his cooldowns. For some reason, the group took offense to this and began yelling at me halfway through the run, telling me to shut up and pelting me with homophobic slurs.

And for the record, it’s not as if I was filling the chat log and interfering with raid communication. They weren’t even using chat–except to harass me. I think they must have been talking in their guild channel or Vent.

If they’d been polite about it or given a good reason, I’d have shut off the macros happily. But I will not “stfu.”

This run honestly damaged my faith in the human race. To see so much bile and hatred spewed towards someone because they occasionally use fantasy words in a fantasy game… It boggles the mind.

It doesn’t so much offend me that they insulted me. It offends me that such small-minded, hateful people exist in the first place.

And to cap it all off, my random Horde dungeon groups as of late have been filled with sniping, insults, and people treating each other horribly.

I can’t help but contrast this with my experiences on the Alliance side, where my Dungeon Finder groups are polite and pleasant more often than not, where I have a kind and supportive guild that doesn’t feel like it’s made up of disturbed 15 year-olds. That’s not to say I don’t encounter immature and occasionally disgusting people on the Alliance side, but it doesn’t seem to happen as often as on the Horde side–despite the fact that the Alliance vastly outnumbers the Horde on my server.

I still find it hard to believe one’s maturity and one’s choice of faction might be linked, but it’s hard to ignore the (circumstantial but strong) evidence before my eyes.

What do you think? Is the Horde really less mature? Or am I just spectacularly unlucky? If you have any tales of Horde people behaving like, well, people, please share them in the comments. I would love to have my faith in my Horde brethren restored.