A row of bright orange boxes, quietly humming, and a discreet “Cryptic” logo on the vest of the bloke loitering nearby, were all that indicated that I was about to get a look at one of sci-fi culture’s most anticipated titles.

I had managed to get in ahead of the teeming thousands still gaping in awe at Assassin’s Creed II back in the other half of the expo, and even to buttonhole the Cryptic rep along with one of the demo machines for a good long preview of Star Trek Online. Hurrah!

The demo dropped me straight into a mission. It kicked off with my starship warping into orbit around a deserted planet, only to find the surface – and more pressingly, the skies – teeming with Klingons. After a perfunctory comm. message from an outraged Klingon commander, I found myself facing off against three Bird of Prey warships.

As I randomly mashed buttons and accidentally alt tabbed to the desktop, the enemy ships blew me to pieces. The Cryptic rep charmingly advised me that space combat takes some getting used to, and offered the useful advice, “hammer weapons and move”. With direct control over our course reduced to pointing my ship’s nose in what I hoped was the right direction with WASD, I sought out the correct menu and ordered full impulse from the helmsman. We were off.

Despite the rep’s expert guidance, I had to come back to the demo two or three times before I started to appreciate space battles. Cryptic have done an excellent job conveying something that no Star Trek game or film, or any other sci-fi franchise for that matter, has managed to capture: the vastness of space. In the demo’s starter ship it would probably take an hour to circle the planet below. Even at full impulse, you’re not exactly zipping along, and for gamers used to rapid turns and strafing, destruction is imminent. The rep explained:

“We used to give them a faster ship, but they found it difficult to control, so we went back to the early one. Later on you get much faster ones,”

I glared at my beginner ship’s barely perceptible movement, and was blown up again.

“It’s more tactical,” the rep eplained, taking the controls and manoeuvring my damaged vessel behind a nearby asteroid. The Klingons blew us up again. “This is a pre-alpha build, though,” he added. “So the rocks don’t do anything yet.”




I gave it another go. This time I paid more attention to the discreet HUD, and discovered that I could divert power from other areas to boost shields on the most vulnerable areas. I also realised that whether I had photon torpedoes, front or rear phasers, or a combination of two, depended on where I was in relation to the target.

Once I had that sorted, I began to enjoy learning how to take advantage of it; by arcing towards the approaching enemies in a graceful curve, I could bring front phasers and torpedoes to bear on them, then blast them with both sets of phasers as they swung behind me, then continue my turning motion to bring my torpedoes back into action. All the while I kept on eye on my shields, leeching power from the dormant sections.

The resulting explosions provoked a little cheer from both of us. It was neither the heady rush of a flight sim nor the in-depth strategising of a war game but something between the two: tactics in zero gravity, with a kind of ponderous pace that somehow provided a taste of how it would feel to swing a truly gigantic structure through space with lives hanging in the balance.

Skipping through the frantic communications of the plot, I beamed my away team down to the surface. Having not paid much attention to the starting menus, I was surprised to find myself in control of a blue, antennae-bearing humanoid named Leeds.

“What am I,” I asked, non-plussed, and wanting to be a Vulcan. The rep explained that as well as the races familiar to Trekkies, characters could create their own species using an in-depth character customisation menu not unlike BioWare or Bethesda’s examples, but with more variety of facial prostheses.

I examined my shore party critically, noting the presence of two vulcans, a human, and one of those ones with crinkly noses, which neither of us knew the name of. Later I was shown how to choose my own tailored away party, selecting a mixture of different classes from amongst the canonical Starfleet specializations. I had two security fellows, an engineer, and a scientist, all perfectly up to the task of shooting the Klingons that came storming towards us, and in fact started doing just that while I was furiously scribbling down notes.


Check out the first STO developer diary right here

My character was armed with the equivalent of an assault rifle, which I spammed through several corridors of Klingons, and was also capable of a sniper-like special attack that I regularly forgot to use. A smack with the butt of the rifle made up my melee abilities. Use of the mouse was relegated to dragging the camera about and selecting targets; my character did all the aiming himself, probably to much better effect than I could have managed with the plodding camera tracking.

Having to drag the camera everywhere slowed combat down so much that I ended up just standing in place, holding down fire, and rotating the camera to watch my party members leaping acrobatically around, strafing, and ducking in and out of cover. Presumably all these actions were available to me but until the controls are tightened up a bit, we shall never know.

Suddenly my eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. An item drop pop up offered me two options, and suggested I press either A or B on my Xbox controller to make my decision. Had I just uncovered Star Trek Online’s console future?

No, says Cryptic, but the demo I’d been enjoying uses some assets from Champions Online, which supports the Xbox 360 controller. Are there any plans in that direction? Not right now, was the rep’s response, but also that it is just a matter of striking a deal with Microsoft, so it’s possible. No possibility of a Playstation 3 appearance was his verdict.

Platform doubts aside, I walked away from Star Trek Online with a sentiment echoed by many other players around me; still deep in development, it has a long way to go to live up to the potential of the franchise. But it glimmers with the potential to do so, and given enough time and love could fulfil its assigned role of being the engaging, deep, and - most importantly - fun MMO that fans are craving.