Star Trek Online?

I played it and while starship combat is fun as hell, it's a bit repetitive.  Pretty much all of the space and "ground" combat is exactly the same with little deviation.  It also doesn't/didn't take that long to reach Admiral.  Someone dedicated to playing can do it in a few days.

Later,
LAR 

As a long term investment? No.

As a game you can pick up and play one month? Sure. You can pick it up for $10-$20 and play for the free month. In that amount of time, you'll have no problems hitting max level and finishing all the content. Then you can cancel your account and perhaps try it again for a month 6-12 months down the line.

The game is good.I did exactly what Decypher00 said. It took me a couple of weeks(thanks to annual leave from work) to reach max admiral level then..that was it. other than team missions and player v player there aint much else to do. Dont buy the lifetime membership it's not worth it just yet.

Over all the game is good and addictive as far as reaching the next rank goes because you get a new ship and new missions and ship parts etc,  yes it is repetitive and in some cases not exactly startrek-ish.

I thought that was only available when pre-ordering.

Later,
LAR 

I'm going to mirror what those before said. It's good for about a month. I really enjoyed space combat in the game, I think that was damn well near perfectly done. But when everyone runs around in the same 3-4 ships with the same 2-3 weapons with the same overpowered 2-3 officer skills (ship abilities), it gets boring fast.

Edit: Just to be clear; space combat was FUN, not necessarily star trek though.

It's fun for a while but it's not what I'd call a "Real MMO". There's Way Too Much "Instancing". Even on the large Starbases you can only have 25-50 players at a time.

The ship battles are the best part but even that gets old pretty quick. I was so stoked for STO, but Craptic/Cryptic ruined it. I would say hold off until the game is ridiculously cheap. I still get the urge to play every now and then. Luckily a friend of mine bought a lifetime sub and gave me the account info so when I get that "itch to play" I can still fire up the game and play for a day or two before I get bored again.

Personally Im more into small scale gameplay... like... 2 player co-op gameplay. World of Warcraft is perfect for this. I find most other MMOs don't really support that kind of thing. Which is why we havn't tried STO yet (and the fact it was rushed faster than a fat kid to a cake store).

Seems like they brought it back. It's a good deal for Cryptic, given how sparse and shallow the game is. People pay for a "lifetime" membership, and get bored in 2 months. That's a lot more profit then a short term paid subscription.

HA!  How hilariously horrible.

Later,
LAR 

You will most likely enjoy the game immensely for the first month (maybe two), then the real flaws will show.  There is very little content for anyone who reaches max level and the crafting is mostly non existent.

There are some interesting quest arcs that do a good job of tieing up lose ends in the Star Trek lore.  For example one arc explains the change in klingons from the original series to the movie and beyond klingons.  However they really dropped the ball with end game content.  You can pvp, do a daily repeatable explore mission, or participate in one of the 4 special task force 5 man instances.  It is really sad considering they could have really taken this and made it a wonderful game.

The space combat is excellent, but the lack of anything to do once you max your character was a game breaker for me.

For small groups, STO is perfect. As long as you like the gameplay. The Starship combat is great. The planet-side ground battles and on foot missions get kinda repetitive.

If you're looking to play with just you and your wife or brother or what-ever though, and you love Star Trek, then this game is for you actually. In that case I'd say go for it.

I would have to disagree with the above responses. I got tired of the game after a few days, tried to stick with it but gave up after barely a week. It's the worst game I've ever bought. Space combat consists of slamming the space bar over and over while slowly spinning your ship in circles. Ground combat is a joke and feels like an after thought. Most of the content is randomly generated by a crappy system that gives you the same objectives over and over again in small poorly generated systems or planet areas. There is no community, people are spread out over 10-50 instances of the same tiny zone that only holds a dozen or less people. Oh, and a lot of the content people have been asking for is being sold to players on a cash shop. Half the patch notes are usually additions to the cash shop. I just wouldn't recommend the game to anyone. If you absolutely must play I'd suggest waiting for a free trial, assuming the game lasts much longer as I heard it's already dying.

it's a shame really I was looking forward to it.

Half the patch notes are usually additions to the cash shop.

It honestly blows my mind why people even bother playing a game with a triple cost.  You have an upfront cost, monthly fee, AND microtransactions.  And from I've heard of Cryptic, they don't put in trivial junk to their cash shop like shiny mounts, they make you pay cash for respecs (and constantly mess with the balance via patches so respeccing is unavoidable).  I see Bill Roper still has no concept of customer satisfaction, despite everything that he's touched since leaving Blizzard turning to shit due to his greed.

Considering the insane potential of a Star Trek MMO and what Cryptic did with it, I'm surprised the shareholders haven't demanded the execution of the entire senior management team.  What massive waste, both in gaming potential and money making potential.

Why would they? They got a bunch of pre-orders for lifetime subscriptions. That's decent profit.

Cryptic is making money off it, so the shareholders are happy. The quality of the game doesn't matter in the slightest to those people unless it impacts the bottom line.

Except that it's a shadow of what it could have been, and I'm not talking about the gameplay.  This thing should have been a perpetual motion machine of money for years and years like WoW, but I haven't heard a single person who bought it say they'd go back to it.  The way thing are going, it will likely be dead in a year unless it gets console ports.

Yeah, it should have been. But Cryptic isn't exactly a top tier MMO developer. They churn out games quickly, milk it for a while, then move on.

(Can you tell I played Champions Online?)

Do you think there is any chance of them reworking it, or possibly seeing it off for another company to rework?  Or do you think its just dead?

Only the new Cryptic. CoH is actually a great game and Cryptic supported it for a long time and sunk a lot of resources into making it better in every way. When they sold the game to NCsoft most of the people with any sort of skill or moral standards stayed behind and formed Paragon Studios. This new Cryptic is a monster, they designed a quick engine and are now churning out games as fast as they can. Apparently they are working on like 5 others games right now at the same time.

Ya I wasted money on this game and beta tested it... I only played it for less than a month after release. Really disappointed with it...

I mean I still have Eve Online which is really fun and this year is going to be some big changes in it!

The only new mmo I am interested in is The Old Republic and what ever CCP's other mmo they are baking! And I'm not talking about Dust 514 (which I will probably get)...

Well, if I recall Bill Roper is in charge of the new Cryptic, so there goes the company.

Anything's possible, but I wouldn't bet on it. It would take a lot of money to do a rework, and the game's reputation is already cemented. It's really hard to recover from early failure of this scale in a MMO.

I missed this. STO already went through 2 other dev studios IIRC. I know one of them (I think the second one) was Perpetual Entertainment who got pretty far along in development before they were shut down. Cryptic then bought the rights for the game and essentially scrapped everything PE had done and started over from scratch using their engine and resources from Champions Online. When STO dies it's highly probable somebody else is going to pick up the license and build a new ST MMO at the very least. I don't think Cryptic, or I should say Atari, is going to sell the game itself though, not unless they are out of business (which is actually very likely, Atari is in a death spiral). It's also possible whoever gets the license will buy the work PE did on their version and start from there.

By 'seeing' back there i meant 'selling'

I know about all the legal junk PE went through.  Ive been following this game from the begining.  So sad no one could do it justice.  Though to be honest i wasnt too thrilled with the way PE went about their build.  From what I read it was bassed around Ship crews.  You joined a ship as a crew member and had responsibilities.  Not stupid stuff, but like as an ensign bridge officer.  You went on missions with your crew and had to work together.  It sounded more first person, "ground based" then space based.  You could explore the galaxy on your own but it intailed getting a ride on different star ships.  Or possibly eventually getting your own.  I could be wrong; it was a long time ago and I have slept since then.  I was glad to hear that Cryptic had baught the game.  I wasnt too eager to be ordered around by someone who had been in the game longer, and I like the idea of every person being a captain of their own ship.  But that has changed the more I've read... 

I have never played an MMO and honestly have never really had the urge to, though EVE and more recently Jumpgate have intrigued me.  This game however I have been eagerly anticipating for a while.  I still think im going to get it, especially if it has a free month subscription... We will see...

What have you heard about Jumpgate?  I know its still in Beta, have any of you played it?

I was actually hoping PE would fail because I was really looking forward to Gods and Heroes (I'm glad somebody revived it), and when they canned that to focus on STO I was very upset. At the time I thought it was good news Cryptic picked it up from them, but ya...

I've not played JG but I've been following JGE for what seems like forever. EVE is more a MMOSim, I wouldn't really call it an RPG, where JGE sounds like it's going to be much closer to normal MMORPGs. I dunno, there's not too much info released yet as they keep redoing things, but they are going to have some announcements at E3. JGE is the space game I'm really looking forward to, I'm not a huge fan of EVE (though I'm playing it now anyway) because it's too much of a sandbox and unless you enjoy PvP there's really not much to do.

Another similar game to watch is Black Prophecy, which again starting from EVE goes the opposite direction of JGE and is much more Sim.