Visuals and Sounds
The first thing you'll notice about Star Trek Online is the sound. Cryptic would have had to go out of their way to screw this up, and naturally they didn't. From the first loading screen, the music is dead on what you'd expect. Once in the game, the voice of the computer, the sound of phasers and doors is all exactly what you'd want it to be. The computer on your ship, which provides helpful tips like "Enemy's shields are down" either is the voice of the "computer," or someone who did a bang on impression.
In space, they did a reasonably good job too. Space, by definition, is a boring black void, but the environments of Star Trek Online rarely feel repetitive or bland. They've used light to great effect and done a lot with the distribution of asteroids, space stations, space clouds, rings around planets and debris to really make the space environments pop. It's not realistic, sure, but neither is sound in space. These work.
On land, they suffer an age-old 3D MMO problem. Stuff is just really, really big. To do a third person game, it's long been accepted in MMO circles that the environments need to be a bit bigger than normal. Thus, doors are giant, archways are frequent and stairs really wide. It all has a bit of a "Mario in Big World" effect to it, but it's become so common that at first I didn't even notice.
;)
That said, given the IP, I'd have liked them to at least try and do it a little closer to scale. Assassin's Creed, for example, has the same camera angle and has all sorts of realistic sized buildings. In that game, however, you spend almost all your time outside (travel is on roofs, not inside most of the time) and the streets of Ancient Jerusalem or Renaissance Italy were, I promise you, not nearly that wide. So, while it's unfortunate everything had to be so big, I'd rather deal with large environments than bad camera control.
The characters are generally pretty solid and I saw a huge variety of looks during Beta. Some races, such as the Ferengi, could probably use a bit more diversity, but that's likely a detail that will soon be ironed out (they were the most recently introduced Federation race).
The animations on away missions are also pretty good. The game has a full array of emotes and tends to blend the animations very well. It doesn't break any new ground, but it is what you'd expect from a AAA MMORPG.
The ships also do a good job, from the first tier at least, and are absolutely in line with what you'd expect from Star Trek. The only complaint here is that since the majority of gameplay in space requires the camera to be zoomed pretty far out a lot of the visual impact and even sound is diminished.
;)
Sector Space, the map area that represents a lot of warp travel, is also nicely done. It's one of the better map systems, at least from a visual perspective I've dealt with.
Artistically, from a sound, environment and overall "feel" point of view, Cryptic nailed it. They didn't make the mistake of going hyper realistic. There is a style to this game, but I'd call it something closer to accented reality. Photo realism can be creepy and never seems to get pulled off. They found a nice middle ground here.
Until Next Time
There is a lot more to Star Trek Online than I've outlined here, so consider this part one of two. In a future article after the holiday I'll go into PvP, character progression, the skill system, customization (ship), items, the user interface, and offer a broader impression of where STO is at and how it stacks up against other MMOs out there.
