I’ve written on Star Trek Online (STO) many times before. My general thought is that the game is largely a failure. Rather than dragging Cryptic over the coals again, let me point you to this review expressing exactly what I felt after playing STO. I’ve taken my final cruise Deep Space Nine (deeply disappointing, virtually empty, and way out of scale), walked around a bit, got nostalgic and then cancelled the subscription. I’ve had enough. I had screenshots of my final moments in the game, but apparently part of the STO exploration experience is cruising your hard drive looking for the damn things. Just another poke in the eye from the Cryptic stick. All of this got me thinking and actually chased me back to an old friend I hadn’t seen in awhile.
The more I played STO, the more I missed EVE Online.
I will admit that EVE is not for everyone. It doesn’t lend too well to casual players, it’s complicated, nearly impossible to play solo, and is home to some of the biggest egotistical douchebags in the known universe. However, it has one of the best and most helpful communities in gaming, it has free updates every six months (none of this money grabbing in-game content bought with extra money on top of your subscription…I’m looking at you, evil C-store), and allows you to make a difference in the gaming world. Specifically, let’s look at some major failings of STO and where EVE shines.
Exploration: in STO, this is a joke. You fly around in your ship scanning down anomalies by pressing a single button which either will get you meaningless minerals for equally meaningless crafting, or it will trigger one of approximately four cookie cutter missions. Whoop-de-doo. Who knew that exploration was so dull and boring.
In EVE, you use probes to scan down special sites that are not on the known map of the system you just happen to be. Considering there are 7500 systems available and the devs are constantly updating and improving, it’s a fluid, fun thing to do. Wormhole space has opened up new areas to discover and defend. Most ingenious about this system is that it allows smaller corporations to finally get their toe into more dangerous areas of space without having to deal with holding that space or complicated space sovereignty. It also allows some people to set up in wormhole space as a home without the entanglements of the large alliances. It’s excellent especially since these wormholes open up randomly during the day and can lead to other wormhole space, lawless space (known as 0.0) or back into known, relatively safe empire space.
Pictured: an exciting wormhole find that took more than a button press
Crafting: STOs crafting system is not only broke, it’s completely pointless. It centers around gathering countless items to craft statistically better items–barely–which might have come in handy several levels ago but is far worse than what you can normally get from item drops from the thousands of ships you’ll end up blowing up running your linear path storyline missions. But the pain of crafting comes with the collection of “anomalies” which may drop something useful or not, only to take them to a single system in space, craft items that have already flooded the exchange system, which makes the crafted items worth very little. On top of this, to craft higher level items, you need to make x-number of lower level. That’s a common game tactic, but STO never tells you what progress you’ve made or how many more of x-items you need to craft to get to the next level. Cryptic…and I’ve noticed the name irony just now…essentially turned a crafting system which is a larger time sink than the actual game itself.
EVE online, the crafting system, indeed nearly the whole exchange system, is player driven. You want some cheap fittings? No problem, there are players who make them and sell them all over the universe and that direct competition drives the price lower. You want that special part for your ship? Okay, it’ll cost ya…one way or another, it will. But that’s how it should be. The market is fluid and some players make or lose millions or billions ISK (game currency) a day through trading player crafted items.
Buy/Sell/Make at hundreds of available stations
Variety: STO will force the player to march down their pre-conceived path and play out their storyline. This might be a bit of an advantage especially since it’s very possible to solo the entire game without ever teaming up with anyone. Of course, they did release what’s essentially a raid system similar to what you would find with World of Warcraft, but it’s much the same. Find the appropriate formula and repeat as necessary.
EVE is different every day. Depending on what you want to do, you can mine to get some minerals to sell or build items, you can fight NPC pirates out of the asteroid belts, you can fight piracy in lo-sec space, you can pirate people, you can run missions, fleet up with people, etc. Granted, PvP (player vs. player) is where EVE shines and their PvE (player vs. environment) can be lacking, but nothing is scripted. In the more dangerous parts of space, you always watch your back, even when you’re work is mostly benign.
Subtle hilarity randomly found in one of my missions
Another STO failing is that they missed the massive part of massively multiplayer by throwing all players into smaller generated instances, none of them consistent. That helpful player that got you through one mission is unlikely to be on the same server instance as you ever again, even if you’re in the same quadrant. Hell, you could both be standing nearly in the identical same spot on the same station and wouldn’t see each other because you’d be in different instances–like multiple universes, except not as fun. Makes it hard to make friends to jet around space when you don’t ever see the same person twice. STO would have done themselves a favor by having server shards like the vast majority of all MMO games available instead what they very loosely define as a “single server” environment.
Again, EVE is truly a single server environment and when you’re in the system Jita, you’re there with the other 400+ people at the same time. You will see the same people hanging out in similar systems. You will see the same pilots camping the same gates. Meeting up with others requires no tricks or unintuitive instance transfers, just get to the right system.
The most damning thing about STO is really what specific steps it locks you into performing. Combat is resolved not through any type of clever manipulation your engineering crew discovered, or a brilliant new tactic your Number One worked out. No, combat is just shoot beam-related weapon followed up with torpedo-related weapon until bad guy goes boom. Repeat until bored (too late).
Again, EVE is a different beast. Those weapons and modules you fit to your ship that just chewed through your enemies? They won’t work on everyone and someone will beat you down for your lack of vision.
My drone returning from a job well done...an enemy ship explosion.
I could go on, but I’d just be beating a dead horse. EVE is a more complex game, but being so, it offers more to a player willing to put in the time and effort. It requires you to interact with players and the people you hang out with is significant and can make a big difference to whether you enjoy the game or not.
Farewell, STO. Here’s hoping you pull out of this gaming death spiral. Seriously, I want STO to succeed, but as the game stands, the only thing it has going for it is Leonard Nimoy’s excellent narration. Till then, I will be flying the dangerous space of EVE.
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