Reviewing Star Trek Online for Eurogamer, Oli Welsh wrote at the time, "Players are miserable, and Klingon chat channels are among the most dispiriting places to hang out on the internet right now. Cryptic made it to retail before deadline, but the game they put out was more or less unfinished. Crafting was cumbersome, raids were non-existent, and the Klingon faction was almost entirely limited to player-versus-player arenas. Leaving your beautifully rendered starship and venturing down to a planet typically meant boring missions that involved fighting waves of enemies while your NPC crewmembers fell all over one another. The game that emerged had notably strong space combat, but not much else. They also shifted the balance away from exploration and diplomacy and more toward action by putting the Klingons and the Federation at odds once again. Perpetual's plans were scrapped, with Cryptic deciding instead to make every player a starship captain a decision derided by some critics and praised by others. With only two years to push a full-formed Star Trek MMORPG onto the market, Cryptic went into overdrive. A few months ago, Massively posted an article detailing the rise and fall of Perpetual, which goes into more detail. Comparatively little is known about Perpetual's plans for Star Trek Online, but there was talk of large starships like the Enterprise-E serving as hubs, with players controlling small ships and shuttles. Instead, Perpetual disintegrated in 2007 and the rights to Star Trek Online went to Cryptic, who had earned praise for their work on the popular superhero MMO City of Heroes. Star Trek's still formidable popularity made it an obvious candidate for an MMORPG, and Perpetual Entertainment obliged, with speculation being that a beta version would be available by 2006. Star Wars Galaxies launched in 2003, with World of WarCraft following in 2004 and Lord of the Rings Online appearing in 2007.
Star Trek Online has existed in one form or another since at least 2004, when Perpetual Entertainment commenced work on an MMORPG set in Gene Roddenberry's universe.Ī few years before, Ultima Online and EverQuest had kicked off a gold rush among developers eager to capitalize on the concept of persistent online worlds. And that's why I'm back in for the first time since 2012, feeling like Scotty aboard the Enterprise-D. After all these years, though, there's still not a lot like it. But unfairly or not, Star Trek Online's improvements have gone mostly unnoticed, overshadowed by its poor reputation and other, more popular MMORPGs. Given all of that, it's fair to say that Star Trek Online has survived and even thrived to a degree outside of the public eye. Within the past year, they've released the Delta Rising expansion, which opens Star Trek Voyager's Delta Quadrant while raising the level cap for the first time since launch. The past five years have brought with them a large number of high-quality missions, many more ships, a new faction, and guest appearances by the likes of Michael Dorn (Worf), Garrett Wang (Harry Kim), Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar, Sela). This overhaul may come as a surprise who remember Star Trek Online as the sad and rather barren MMO that launched in 2010 with a surfeit of bugs and almost no endgame to speak of but since then, Cryptic has been working quietly behind the scenes to make their trek through the stars one worth taking. I have no idea what most of the icons on my hotbar mean anymore.
I was, for all intents and purposes, a beginner. I was Lieutenant Uhura trying to regain her skills after having her mind wiped by Nomad. And there were the new systems-reputation, fleet contributions, and more, all of them coming on top of a dramatically overhauled user interface. The quest status log was loaded with missions that I had accepted back in 2012. My screen filled with accolades and status messages as I tried to remember how to fly my ship. Last week, I dusted off my Star Trek Online account and logged in for the first time in three years, where I found myself confronted by a harsh reality: I barely had any idea what I was doing.
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