Jump On Contact

Stevie from Planetside Perspective had a great find today – In the New York Times review of Star Trek Online (STO), Seth Schiesel compares STO to EVE, which he describes as “titan of cyberspace science-fiction games.” Aptly put.

His core complaint is that STO is fundamentally not a massively multiplayer game. The descriptive quip he uses (which it sounds like he’s pulled from the forums, or other player responses) is “moderately multiplayer”; players nominally exist in the same world but have very little interaction with each other. I haven’t played STO myself, but from what friends of mine have said this definitely rings true. This isn’t necessarily bad, though. We’re seeing a significant broadening of the “massively multiplayer” category. We’re seeing a lot more deviation from the World of Warcraft style design. Worlds like Guild Wars are somewhat less multiplayer than WoW; outside of cities, the world is entirely instanced. You can even skip the leveling process entirely and just start with a top level character for use in player versus player combat that looks a lot more like Halo or Counterstrike in format than WoW.

Coming from the other end of this multiplayer-ness continuum, we also see games like Sony’s new MAG, where teams of 128 players are common. MAG even has a lot of the character progression mechanics we expect to see in MMOs. As you play more, more possible combat roles unlock for you, you move higher up the command chain, your character begins to look more powerful, and so on. At that scale, MAG is essentially a scaled-up version of battlegrounds in WoW (which never have more than 40 players on a team). All that seems to be missing is a coherent world to live in between matches.

So what is it that actually makes a game an MMO, if what are nominally MMOs are looking less like what we’re used to, and non-MMOs are looking more than more like MMOs? Should we fault STO for not looking like the MMOs we expect? I don’t think the moderately-multiplayer place on the continuum that STO occupies is necessarily doomed to be un-fun. STO’s real sin is that having few opportunities for player interaction is just un-Star Trek. The world of Star Trek is one that’s very strongly focused on the interpersonal dynamics of the people involved, not relentless combat. A game that required people to work together to achieve common goals – or even just to peacefully coexist on a ship – would be a much better fit with the fiction of the world. EVE offers some of the social part of this vision, but it’s a cold, harsh, and deadly world. But I don’t think it would be at all unreasonable to imagine an STO where players served on ships together, worked towards industrial or combat goals that benefited their faction in different ways, and had some of the utopian flavor of the Trek universe. That’s the real tragedy, I think – Cryptic blew their chance to make a game that was more than thin Star Trek skin onto a game design that it just doesn’t fit.