Star Trek Online: Bugs
“Captain's log, Stardate 5630.8. Today I fell out of my ship.”
All video games have bugs of some sort. It is impossible to release such complicated products without some technical issues getting past “quality assurance”. With regard to contemporary triple A releases, pre-sales and unmovable release dates means that games often launch in a quasi-finished state and are therefore marred by major problems. Hence we frequently see substantial “day one patches”. But such is the nature of the video games industry. Bugs, glitches and flaws are part of the landscape and we as gamers live in hope that they’ll get fixed over a titles lifecycle. Except they are often not. Take The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim for example. It has been released on multiple platforms since its release in 2011 and yet the same bugs still persist in every iteration. And it’s no different in the MMORPG genre. If you want further evidence of this, look no further than Star Trek Online.
Star Trek Online is a game that uses the licensed intellectual property that it is founded upon very well. At present, the game is re-running the Temporal Agent Recruitment event, in which if you create a new character from the 23rd century, you receive allsorts of account wide benefits. Being a child of the seventies, I was raised on repeats of Star Trek TOS. So this event is a major incentive for me. The story missions set in this era are extremely enjoyable and touch upon the lore from many classic episodes such as Galileo Seven, Arena and Journey to Babel. Yet the game is blighted with bugs. Bugs the developer’s Cryptic still haven’t gotten around to fixing. Dialogue doesn’t always match the in-game subtitles. Mobs will spawn or glitch into walls or other parts of the environment. And missions simply fail to advance. Sometimes a problem can be cleared by changing phases but more often than not, the player has to abandon the instance and start the mission from scratch.
Oddly it is the minor glitches, rather than the major issues, that prove to be deal breakers. For example, the latest episode Firewall has some technical issues. It crashed the entire game when I first tried to play it last night and many other players in my Fleet (Guild) had performance issues. Mobs were not spawning and checkpoints would fail to trigger. Now Cryptic will patch these problems ASAP. Broadly, the playerbase is understanding of these sorts of problems, mainly because they’re so common. Yet many old glitches remain overlooked. If I visit the interior of my ship, many of the crew who are seated, clip through their chairs and are embedded in the floor. Part of the wall in the shuttle hangar is missing and your character can fall through this. After a few moments of free falling they then respawn on the floor of the Bridge. Plus for some reason the game currently gets my alt’s name wrong with NPCs referring to someone else. To me, these long term environmental glitches are far worse than flaws in new content.
One of the reasons that Star Trek Online has never truly hit “the big time”, despite having a killer IP, is because it’s always been rough around the edges. Cryptic seems to have a reputation for creating products that lack polish. STO could certainly benefit from a long list of bugs being fixed, such as traits resetting, exchange filters not working and animation glitches. But such a task would mean not producing any new content for about a year. Sadly, development within the MMO genre has to be targeted and that often leads to either compromises or a hobson’s choice. It’s a damn shame that Cryptic can’t get the game’s house in order. Star Trek Online 2.0 could then be marketed a lot more proactively. But I don’t think the status quo is going to change and beyond immediate fire fighting, long term bugs are going to remain. Thus my 23rd century crew will remain embedded in the floor and I’ll just have to do my best not to fall out of my ship.
