Where is the life?

 It's in the red shirt, duh!

It's kind of refreshing to see a place that doesn't have a creature every 10-20 feet... :/

The disappointing thing about STO is that is not a full, open explorable, persistent area / world, its just some mission map.

Nice pic though.

 I agree it's disappointing, but given the limitations present, it honestly turned out much better than it probably should have. Despite the moaning, it does have potential if Cryptic can shape up and do what needs to be done to improve on it. The Genesis system works surprisingly well for what it's used for.

Open worlds would be nice, but each planet would be tantamount to creating an MMO in itself. So you have the problem of small scale variety vs a handful of large worlds. Given how broken up the star trek universe is into various planets and smallish stations, instancing is probably the better option, but ideally they should find some way to add a more permanent and traditional MMO space to some of the more prominent worlds. The problem is, do they focus on adding more content to what they have, or trying out new things with adding exploration to a large world map (which has limited success due to the nature of persistent worlds and things being data mined in minutes). 

Basically, the way I see it, the ball is in Cryptic's court right now. It's either going to stay where it is without much change, in which case it will stagnate and continue to be a disappointment, or they can do something good with it.