Chardish Games

I managed to get my hands on a beta key for Star Trek Online before the game’s launch. I approached the game with a sense of cautious enthusiasm. On the one hand, the game had switched developers, design paradigms, and guiding concepts during its development cycle. On the other hand, if the game carried through on its promise to offer the experience of being a part of the Star Trek universe, it would be impossibly incredible.

Obviously, some things are too good to be true. I knew the game was in trouble as soon as I heard one of the lead designers, in a video interview, describe the player as being able to choose between piloting, essentially, a tank ship, a healer/buffer ship, or a DPS ship. Ugh. All of the detail of the Star Trek universe - the dozens of races, the cavalcade of fascinating technology - and Cryptic chose to stick with the “holy trinity” of MMORPG combat?
When I watch Star Trek at its greatest (most of Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation), what I see on the screen is a motley crew of representatives of various cultures working together to solve unusual problems in unexpected ways, with a healthy dose of drama and plot twists. When I watch it at its worst (most of Voyager and Enterprise), I see a few uninteresting cardboard cut-outs investigate a problem only to discover that someone or something needs to be blown up, and there’s a big special effects fight to serve as an unsatisfying finale. I’m not saying classic Trek can’t have great action (consider the tense fight against the Borg in The Best Of Both Worlds), but the most interesting Trek problems are solved through cleverness rather than brute strength.

Star Trek Online, in short, does not feel like Trek. It feels like a World of Warcraft clone dressed in a Trek uniform - it’s got all the uninteresting fetch quests and “kill X number of Y” missions you would expect in a cookie-cutter MMO. Most problems are resolved through combat, nothing has a lasting impact on the universe, and gone are the serious moral dilemmas that made the best moments of Trek great.

So why did Cryptic do such a horrible job of translating Star Trek to the MMO genre? It’s certainly not an easy problem, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Let’s look at some of the design challenges in creating a Trek MMO.

Crew-Based Gameplay Is Difficult To Balance

The ideal Star Trek game would allow players to recreate the Star Trek experience of working with a crew to solve problems. But who are the members of a typical starship crew? The Next Generation, for example, provides us with Picard, Riker, Data, Geordi, Dr. Crusher, Worf, and Troi. If we’re designing a class-based game, as most MMOs are, their classes would sound something like Diplomat, Coordinator, Scientist, Engineer, Doctor, Warrior, and Counselor. A good mix of skills, to be sure, but can we really build a game that utilizes all of these skills in separate player characters?

Two options are possible here. One is to break up roles in different missions among the crew members. For example, in one hypothetical mission, Crusher, Riker and Worf might beam down to the surface to rescue hostages while Picard tries to negotiate with an alien ship to distract them and Data and Geordi try to work on a way to penetrate the aliens’ shields. The problem with this approach is that for every encounter the designers have to create, they really have to create multiple scenarios that utilize the talents of the whole team. If the designers fail at this, scenarios will typically be boring for one or more of the classes.

The other option is to give the whole crew a common goal (for example, take out an enemy base) and translate the characters’ canonical-world skills into skills that aid the common goal. Unfortunately, flavor is often trampled when this occurs. (What kind of skills would you give Troi to turn her into a combat-viable character? The ability to use telepathy as an attack? Wouldn’t that kind of ruin the premise of the character?)

Team Fortress 2, while not an MMO, handles crew-based gameplay wonderfully. I’d like to write more about the brilliance of this game later, but suffice it to say that they have solved the difficult problems of not always having something for everyone to do at all times, requiring diversity of skills to succeed, but not allowing any individual player to be the lynchpin of the team’s success.

Fun Trumps Reality

The fiction of Star Trek tells us that a large crew of at least several dozen is required to operate a starship. Even if we get rid of all non-senior officers, as well as senior officers who aren’t explicitly involved in the operation of the ship’s controls (Picard, Riker, Troi, Crusher), we’re still left with Worf at weapons, Data at the helm, and Geordi in engineering.

Are three people really necessary to fly one ship in a game? What would the engineer even do? All we see Geordi do in the show in times of crisis is adjust the ship’s power levels. In TIE Fighter, managing your ship’s power (lasers, weapons, shields) is just a matter of hitting a few keys. You don’t need a separate player to do that. And almost every video game requires you to move and attack simultaneously - those aren’t exactly complex tasks that need to be relegated to separate players.

The two options here are to either make manning a station intentionally complicated in order to make it interesting (which seriously risks destroying fun), or to take Cryptic’s choice, eliminating unnecessary crew positions and letting one person control the entire ship (which destroys flavor.)

Cryptic’s failure here is that they didn’t keep the idea of a cohesive, semi-permanent crew as a game mechanic. Why not build off the idea of the saucer separation from The Next Generation and have modular ships that can split off into multiple ships for individual players to control? Why not introduce new ship types that offer different levels of control tradeoff depending on the players’ preferences (2-man ships, 3-man ships, 10-man ships, etc.)?

Starfleet Is The Military

And then, of course, there is the biggest problem in really allowing players to be a part of a Star Trek episode. Star Trek is military science fiction, and not having the captain making the big calls, well, doesn’t feel like Trek. And while opportunities for teamwork make multiplayer games great, who wants to take orders unquestioningly? Who would rather be the first officer than the captain?

If you want to have a crew of people on one ship working together and you want it to still feel like Trek, you can only have one leader and a bunch of subordinates. MMO guilds often have leaders and command hierarchies, to be true, but who wants the game mechanics to enforce those rules? What if, for example, the doctor is also the best leader? Don’t you want the doctor calling the shots then? Yet, on Star Trek, doctor and captain are always two separate roles. (Okay, All Good Things aside.)

To be true to the source material (military science fiction), players need to feel like they’re a part of a military hierarchy. And while MMOs tend to attract a more obsessive player base than most games, it’s not many people’s idea of escapism to get on their computer after work and get ordered around by their captain rather than their boss.

Boldly Going

A Star Trek MMO isn’t impossible, certainly, but Cryptic’s offering just doesn’t feel like it. Even moreso than with the tired joke about Starcraft, Star Trek Online truly feels like Warcraft in space - World of Warcraft, to be precise. There should be no illusions that staying true to the source material while remaining fun is a very difficult challenge, but the correct solution isn’t to discard the idea of a crew-based game as Cryptic did. Hopefully we’ll see better results from this IP in the future, or perhaps an MMO that feels like Star Trek without bearing the license. BioWare, are you listening?