Star Trek Online

Constant grind, 15 year old graphics, broken economy. Not worth it anymore.

maybe its me but i had an awfully hard time trying to find a fleet to join... and when i did it was dead as a doornail... my next problem was finding a fleet in game that played late into the night (east coast of USA here) Maybe this is just and old game and its dying ... I played some years ago and back then people were crawling out of the teleporter to get you to join their fleet.... i liked the game, but as a returning player ... i do not.

One of the most incredible MMOs I have ever played. I became a lifetime member at launch and never regretted it. I come back for a few months every few years and play through several new episodes, and they keep just ramping up the quality.

this is one of those games that have lived far longer than it has any right to.

I like the story, and that's pretty much it. Mechanics, maps, combat, and so on are a confusing, jumbled mess. I did the Discovery era start. Contrary to some popular opinions online, I actually liked Star Trek: Discovery and thought the first season was really good. Dark, sure, but good. And also contrary to popular opinion, I believed that it was indeed not just a good story, but also a good Star Trek story. What I played in this game delivered on the same feelings of wartime, of the Klingons being basically always ahead of the game, and the conflict between winning a war and staying true to the Federation's values. So the story was great, and kept being great even after the intro section was done. The problems are mostly technical, and many other games (like Star Wars: The Old Republic) don't have nearly this many problems. I met Agent Daniels at level 6 or 8, I can't remember which. Told to go visit Admiral Quinn, and he gave me a list of missions to do, so I took the top one. "The Calling." I thought I was getting regular story content like most games do, that was consistent with my level. Then I met Ilia (the Deltan woman from Star Trek: The Motion Picture), who had just woken up after I apparently had saved her... despite never having done anything involving her in any way. That was the first real sign of trouble for me. But then it got worse: I was to fight against Terrans, whom everybody in the room (including me, having never seen one before), was fully familiar with. Went to fight some bad guys on a planet, didn't get killed but came pretty close a few times. Then had to fight a fleet of bad guy ships in orbit. Massive fleet, all hitting like a truck, and I spent an inordinate amount of time just trying to prevent my shields from collapsing. Saw that I wasn't going to survive, so I did an Alt-F4 since the game wouldn't let me exit the normal way. I went online, spent about three hours cursing and screaming at the various search engines because apparently "level recommendations" for this quest don't exist. I did finally find an "order" in which to play the various questlines, and lo and behold, I discovered through that, that "The Calling" is end-game content. Gee, Cryptic. Thanks for letting me know BEFORE I did the quest. Oh, wait. You didn't. This turned out to be a pattern in this game. I got promoted to Lt. Commander, was told to use a requisition token to purchase a free ship. Tried to do so, all ships were paid ships that required dilithium. I spent another couple of hours trying to figure out how to make it work. Someone said click on my rank, so I did, and got a pop-up window that didn't resemble anything like what they had described. Tried the wiki, and it was a hot mess trying to figure out how to use, let alone understand. Finally, I asked in-game on the chat a second time, explained in detail my problem, and someone finally explained it to me. The original explanation was correct, but out of context. I was indeed supposed to click on my rank... WITHIN THE REQUISITIONS WINDOW. Originally that detail was left out and I kept wondering why I couldn't find what they were talking about while clicking on the rank in the upper left-hand corner of my screen. Ugh! Maps are confusing, a lot of the time map markers don't show up in the middle of a major battle so you spend more time running around the interior of a starship looking for a door that isn't marked while the ship's getting blown to bits by bad guys, than you do actually fighting said bad guys. The final straw came when I finished the quest where you rescue researchers from the Gorn. I finished the quest, warped into sector space, and there was this other guy in my "group." I hadn't joined a group, hadn't received an invite to a group, so I was scratching my head wondering how in the world this guy was grouped with me. And like with the other things, I had an absolutely terrible time trying to find any results online about this behavior, let alone how to make it stop. I have spent *checks* 9.6 hours playing this game. I have spent almost as much time online trying to figure out basic things that are easy to understand and easy to find information on, in any other MMO. Plus, the missions are all basically the same. Go to planet, blow enemy ships up, beam down, kill enemy bad guys on surface, beam up, blow up more enemy ships, have a wrap-up convo with your bridge crew, and then warp out. Most missions followed this exact same formula, with the differences consisting of how hard the bad guys were to kill. At one point, I felt like Darth Baras from SWTOR, shooting lightning at the Republic spy he had tied to a chair, yelling more and more loudly with each word, "Tell. Me. What. I. Want. To. KNOW!!!!!!!!!" And this is all because basic functionalities were poorly explained, if they were explained at all. Like I said, the story is great. If it were only for that, I would easily recommend this game. But because of how hard it is to simply navigate things like the user interface or the quest log, I can't. Cryptic seems to think that players should "just know" how to use their confusing and clunky UI. People don't work like that. We need explanations. This game gives none, or if it does, it's non-stop pop-ups and other annoyances that harass you incessantly about how to do things you figured out how to do several hours ago. So the story is good, but the UI is confusing and many basic functionalities are never explained. Not recommended.

I really wanted to love this game, as I've been an ardent Star Trek fan since I was eight years old, and have been playing Star Trek video games for almost as long. But this is far too repetitive and clunky to be enjoyable.

A badly ageing game built around timers, loot boxes (with undisclosed odds) and many different currencies including a premium one. Worth playing for that old Star Trek feel but that's about it.