Let me be clear about something: Star Trek Online is not, to the best of our knowledge, about to sunset. But it’s clearly not in a great place. Some of that is because DECA clearly does not know how to handle the game after Cryptic was shot out of a cannon, even if we don’t know exactly who is at fault for that beyond “someone at Embracer.” Some of that is other reasons which I’ll get to in a few minutes. The point remains that STO has had brighter times, and right now is one of the less bright times for a wide variety of reasons. Which makes me sad, because I love this game.

This is probably not a huge surprise because I love Star Trek in general, but it’s clear that you can make games about things I love which I do not love. No, I genuinely really adore STO for all of its warts and weirdness, and today I wanted to do a column about why. I hope that this is just a blip and the game keeps going and builds itself back up, but regardless, I want to talk about what made me fall in love with this game.

1. It was made by people who loved Star Trek

Among the enemies that players have dealt with in STO are the Vaadwaur, the Tzekethi, and the Hur’q. These are deep cuts into the lore of Star Trek, but not only are they deep cuts they’re also deep cuts that tie into what little we knew of these forces. These are not the sort of enemy groups you throw into the game with only a casual familiarity with the source material. One of the things that I frequently said about Lower Decks as a show was that it was made by people who clearly felt that Star Trek was simultaneously incredibly stupid and also really cool, and you feel that with all of this game. That is a good thing.

2. The space combat was something else

Fighting ship-to-ship battles in STO is incredibly fun. It’s incredibly fun with a wide variety of different ships using a wide variety of different tactics, which rules even more. You can focus on heavy cruisers unleashing broadsides or you can fight with nimble escorts or esoteric science ships and it always feels fun and unique to take part in these fights. Yes, ground combat was always janky, but we’ll get to that. Space combat was always a highlight.

3. It was a last link to an era that was gone

Part of what made STO feel special when it came out was the fact that at that time, it felt like a real open question of whether or not we would ever get another series set post-Voyager. We still don’t have another “main” series following the crew of a new Enterprise at this point. That kind of feels weird, especially if you became a fan of this franchise during a period when there were literally 21 seasons of hourly dramas based in this universe. And while that is no longer totally the case, it’s actually part of what has made things kind of weird. It’s one thing to have a game where all this stuff is happening in an era that is otherwise unseen; it’s quite another when the game constantly has to shift around the latest episode of Picard, so to speak.

4. It really wanted to tell contiguous but different stories

There was clearly an intent to make STO’s storytelling a sequel to what had been happening in the live-action shows, but it also was clearly doing things that would be difficult or impossible to do in that format. These were larger stories that focused on a more sprawling cast rather than the usual tighter focus of the shows. They could take a different perspective, which was engaging in its own way.

5. It kept a spirit of exploration and novelty

There were problems with Klingon content in STO, don’t get me wrong, and they still exist, but part of what did make that content work is that unlike in the shows, the Klingon content could be happening in a Klingon environment instead of finding a reason for the crew to be dealing with Klingons this week. I remember in one interview a designer at Cryptic was talking about how the team had learned players wanted to explore Star Trek, not the team’s totally original content, but they found ways to make Star Trek different and unique and novel along the way just the same.

6. It always remembered where it came from

You can walk along the Promenade in DS9. It looks like the Promenade. It feels right. Even as the developers and writers wanted to take the game in new directions and tell different kinds of stories, it was always with a focus on feeling like Star Trek. That’s important.

7. The ship variety was always insane

So remember what I said above about space combat and how I broke it down into three basic categories? Well, those are just basic categories. You can have carrier ships that swarm enemies with lots of little targets, or special engineering-focused ships, or intel-focused ships, or whatever. You have Warbirds that have a unique sort of resource build and spend that gives them a very different style of play even while it roughly maps to familiar archetypes. And that’s not even getting into the array of different kinds of weapons from cannons to arrays to laying mines. The options available to players have always felt expansive and unique to ensure that you are not just piloting A Spaceship Thing.

8. Its monetization was bad but consistent

I have long, long been critical of how Cryptic has monetized this game, and I am not about to change that. However, I am also a Star Trek fan, and that means I spent a lot of episodes of Deep Space Nine watching Quark. Quark was, at nearly every turn, a petty, venial, mean, selfish, avaricious little gremlin who would hurt almost anyone if he thought it would make him money… but once you understood that was who he was, you stopped getting annoyed when he acted that way. That’s how I feel about the monetization. It was always bad, but it was bad in consistent and comprehensible ways. I never liked it, but I was never surprised by how I disliked it.

9. The game looked good

STO had two masters to serve. It had to look authentically like Star Trek, and it also wanted to look good. I think it accomplished both rather deftly. It’s never been perfect in that regard, but by and large the character designs are solid and NPCs based on major characters from the show resemble their actors, the vistas and settings look good, ships look gorgeous, and the effects feel right. It looks correct in the best of ways, at least to my eyes.

10. All of the jank felt authentic

So ground combat always has felt janky and unresponsive and kinda sloppy, with long-telegraphed hits that still don’t feel like they quite connect. Which, y’know, also authentically makes it feel like an actual fight in an episode of Star Trek. Yes, the tooltips are often terrible and unclear about how these stats affect your abilities and a show full of technobabble about reversing the polarity of the primary deflector array to send out an inverse tetryon beam that will hopefully detect the presence of tritanium residue would fit with that. It may be janky, but if you can’t love jank… why are you invested in Star Trek? What are you doing? Why are you here?

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