[This was begun before the release; hence the now slightly outdated time reference]

With the release of Star Trek Online due tomorrow, we’re currently working through the Head Start period. This is the second phase of “bonus” time for pre-order cusotmers, the first being the Open Beta period that ended on 26 January.

The good news is that I’ve found a great deal about the general user experience has improved significantly. Controls work more smoothly, and rarely fail to work when expected.  The GUI has been cleaned up and streamlined a bit, to good effect. I haven’t once materialized on a planet as a starship, or in space as a person, since toward the end of the Beta. I’ve seen far less rubber-banding and other such network and server lag effects.

The bad news is that the game is still not as polished as it really should be with general release less than 24 hours away. The other bad news is that there’s still whole areas of potential Star Trek content that are either missing or just not done in a convincing way.

That said, I plan to keep on playing, as much to see how it evolves as anything else. Read on for more details after the jump.

As I mentioned in my first article about STO, the emphasis in this game is very much on combat. There’s nothing new about that in Star Trek game properties. Almost all of them have been combat focused, some of them just as explicitly so. All of the Starfleet Command games, for example, are about space combat. Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force is about ground combat.

So in some ways, this game can be seen as the marriage of both, matched with a flexible character creation system that allows you to spec out your own avatar and specialize your abilities, and of course, multiplayer.

The problem, of course, is that, while many Star Trek games are combat focused, Star Trek itself is not. Star Trek certainly involves combat, because Our Heroes have a strong sense of both self-preservation and preservation of their way of life¹. However, Star Trek is really about expanding the sphere of human² knowledge, meeting new people and, hopefully, making friends with them.

Now, that aspect isn’t entirely missing from this game, but even where present it mostly winds up just being another excuse for combat. You can, for example, explore the Delta Volanis cluster fairly early in the game. In the process, you come across star systems that are, purportedly, not yet explored³. Every time you do, though, it turns out they’re under attack from one of the factions antagonistic to you (Orions, Naausicans, Gorn, Klingons; presumably later exploration missions will bump you into the Borg, the New Dominion, or the True Way faction of Cardassia).

So basically, you make new friends by saving their asses. Which is valid as far as it goes, but it doesn’t really go far enough, and it’s more or less the extent of interspecies diplomacy in the game.

A truly innovative approach–and one that even some first-person shooters, such as Deus Ex, have included to good effect–would have been to make it possible to succeed and progress in the game without ever instigating combat, and when in combat, to disable or intimidate rather than having almost always to kill your opponent⁴. It would have been harder to write well, to be sure, and probably also harder to actually play the game that way⁵. You never get the chance to decide, as Kirk himself says, “…but we won’t kill today!”

Instead, they opted for a wartime scenario where you are not only permitted but expected to shoot first and never ask questions. And you know, some days, I have to admit, that’s exactly the sort of game I’m in the mood for, and being able to do it in a Federation Starship is kinda nifty, it’s true! But then I think about what Star Trek was really trying to accomplish, even with more warlike incarnations like Deep Space Nine, and I sigh for an opportunity not only missed but apparently not even strongly considered.