Star Trek Online: Is it an MMO

Should Cryptic Re-Classify Star Trek Online?

When it was officially announced in September 2004 that the epic space saga ‘Star Trek’ would be made into a MMORPG, gamers and trekkies alike rejoiced with anticipation. What better foundation could you ask for to build a massively multiplayer online game with? Thoughts of a huge persistent world filled with clashing Klingons, Romulans and Federation fleets delighted even the casual gamer.

These hopes of course started to dim with the drama that was Perpetual Entertainment (P2) and all hopes of this great mmo making its way to market seemed to be gone when P2 announced it would lay off its entire development staff and close its doors.

Star Trek Land Then, in 2008, Cryptic Studios came to the rescue by acquiring the rights to the game and put together an aggressive development timeline that many thought could not be met, considering they would build everything from scratch.

Well, Cryptic did it! They stormed through the concept and design stages at record pace and in just over 1 year created a stable, playable online world. But, the question remains. Did they actually build an MMORPG? Aside from the fact that most mmorpgs of this class take up to 5 years to develop (and at times this shows) anyone that plays the game can see that it certainly plays more like console style game.

Missions are nearly auto-progressive such as resident evil and nearly all multiplayer battles are instanced. If you were dreaming of massive 1000vs1000 pvp warfare, you are certainly going to be disappointed as your typical instanced battle may take you against just 50 opposing ships. There is no doubt that many players see this as a huge drawback and in fact are discounting the game as just a larger scale multiplayer game, not massive.

This leads me to consider three things; what exactly does Massively in Massively Multiplayer really mean; do players understand this; and does STO fall into this classification? Well, most of the gamers I have talked to believe that “massively” means that the game allows thousands of players to interact freely with each other in a sandboxed world. EVE online, is certainly one these kinds of games.

But honestly, these gamers are only 50% correct. Yes, Massively certainly would be a classification given to a game that allows all of its server population to carryon in battle against each other, without limitations of instanced game play.

There is another side to “massively” which, when placed in a perpetual world, allows the entire server population to have interaction with the world that shapes it as a whole. Sure a battle may be instanced, but its political and economic consequences effects the entire server even if only say 50 people were able to actually be involved directly.

combat A mission may be instanced, but the effect on the character and its team will certainly have an impact on the world as whole, even if it is miniscule. STO truly sandboxed? No. STO an MMORPG? Absolutely. The game has its shortfalls with large scale battles, but these are certainly expandable.

The point of a MMORPG is to allow thousands of players to effect the evolution of a world that progressively exists even while you may be logged off. All players of the server are affected by even small acts by players they may never even meet in the game.

What is interesting here is that gamers have been asking for a different kind of mmo for years. Now that Cryptic has built one, some players are attempting to discredit it because it is not “traditional”. Make an mmo traditional and you are a “certain kind” of clone. Make one that takes a different approach and you get the Tabula Rasa effect.

My hat goes off to Cryptic for doing a great job with limited time to build a mmorpg that can help bridge the gap between console, single player pc, and online pc players. This MMORPG has without a doubt moved us in the right direction.