I logged into Star Trek Online for the first time two nights back and made my way through the first set of missions.
The introductory mission featuring combat with the Borg felt almost deceptively easy, but understandably so. Given a choice between an easy introductory tutorial and a trial by fire for new players it’s easy to see why Cryptic opted for the gentle introduction. The novelty if space combat and the fun of blasting Borg with a phaser more than made up for the lack of difficulty, but a small part of me worried about the rest of the game being a similar cakewalk.
That worry grew as I went out on the first real mission in the game. It was a simple exploration mission straight out of an episode of Star Trek or the mission log of an old Wing Commander game. Starfleet sent me to visit four star systems and check for any trouble.
The first system I visited involved escorting a damaged mining vessel back to its base. The second involved beaming down to a planet and solving some dispute on a diplomacy mission, which translates to walking around and talking to a few characters.
That’s all talking and no killing, for those of you keeping score at home. That mission was a definite and pleasant surprise given the MMO trappings and speaks volumes to me concerning the great potential offered in the game if they keep doing more Star Trek-feeling things like that instead of opting for a generic MMO with Star Trek graphics. But it was still incredibly easy to complete given the lack of talking.
The third mission was where things started getting interesting. I entered a star system to discover it had been taken over by Orion pilots or some such nonsense, and Starfleet wanted me to introduce them to Federation space on the business end of a phaser and some photon torpedoes. Easy enough, right?
Except that I found myself being bombarded by neverending waves of escort ships and battlecruisers that were really giving my poor little ship a pounding. I was able to defeat the first group of escorts easily enough and outrun the battlecruiser so that I could move in to destroy the shipping platform that was the real objective of the mission, but by the time I got around to destroying the platforms a second fleet had closed in on my ship. And when I turned around I was maneuvering straight into the waiting crosshairs of that first battlecruiser that I’d escaped from.
There’s no death penalty in the game at this point, but simple gamer’s stubbornness left me beating a retreat for open space to retry the mission the next day. I was also happy that there was at least a small difficulty curve and something to provide a challenge so early in the main body of the game.
Then I tried the mission again the next day and realized that the three battlegroups were in there because I’d joined the instance with two other players who had just warped out. The second time I tried completing the mission was with a group that didn’t leave immediately, and we were able to mop the system up with little effort and breeze through the quest in about ten minutes. And as I thought about this it dawned on me that the night before I’d managed to destroy half of a battlegroup that was intended to be fought off by two or three players all by my lonesome.
Star Trek Online is a blast to play, but these experiences don’t leave me with much confidence about the difficulty curve in the early game. Only time and more playing will show if things improve at all.
