Article Index
AbleGamers Guide to Star Trek Online
GamePlay
Controls and Accessibility
Final Thoughts
All Pages

Star Trek Online (STO), the latest offering from Cryptic Studios, was officially launched last week to a fair amount of buzz -- both positive and negative.  While certain of Cryptic's business decisions quickly earned the ire of many players (such as the selling of uniquely available race options through their "C-Store"), the overall opinion of most of the gaming community has been surprisingly positive.  That's not to say that the game isn't without its frustrations; like any MMO immediately after launch, STO has its share of buggy or incomplete content.  It's still a highly fun and unique gaming experience, though, and definitely in a league of its own for the time being.

Getting Started

Review for Star Trek Online

6.8

A great break down of the accessibility of Star Trek Online

Click here to read the review

When you first create a character for STO, you're limited to building characters for the Federation -- one of the game's two factions at the time of launch.  The second faction, Klingon, brings an entirely different, more PVP-centric style of gameplay, and only becomes available once a player has progressed to a certain point in the game with a Federation character.  This initial obstruction of a faction shouldn't feel limiting, though.  Players are offered an extremely high degree of character customization within the Federation faction.  One can choose from a number of pre-existing species from the Star Trek universe, each with their own set of two or three unique "traits" and the ability to add one or two more.  Alternately, a player can choose the "alien" species, which lets them craft their own unique species from the ground up using the game's impressive visual character creation system.

Beyond your character's appearance, the only other initial decision to be made is your character's career.  This is really STO's take on your average MMO's class breakdown.  While everyone who plays STO is a captain of a starship, there are three distinct career types that one can choose: tactical officer, engineering officer, and science officer.  Each of these careers puts its own spin on gameplay by affecting the type of approach your character will need to take to any given situation.  Tactical officers are somewhat analogous to your typical "tank" class.  They're concerned with maximizing how much damage they inflict on enemies and keeping an opponent's attention focused firmly on them.  Engineering officers, by contrast, may not be the hardest hitters out of the gate.  They make up for this, however, by being the best there is at short-term self-buffing to get every last drop of potential out of their ships and themselves.  Last, but certainly not least, science officers are STO's truest "support" class.  Whether they're healing party members, debuffing enemies, or providing tactical combat support by holding & weakening an attacker, science officers are arguably the most critical (and arguably the most challenging to play) class for any party.

Gameplay

Once you've completed the initial character creation process, you're dumped into your standard tutorial-style first mission which involves repelling attackers from a space station.  During this first mission, your character is on foot, and you can expect to spend 10-20 minutes running around and learning the ins and outs of ground gameplay.  STO is built on the same engine as Cryptic's previous offering, Champions Online, and for those who played Champions this will be most obvious during ground combat.  While on foot, combat is all about quick reactions (more on the negative implications of this in a bit).  The idea is to keep distance between yourself and your enemy, constantly pounding them with your standard ranged weapon blasts and intermittently throwing in a more powerful shot when cooldowns permit.  Melee combat is an option, but >realistically it isn't a feasible counter to the high-tech weapons and armor your opponents wield.  As a general rule, the primary function of a melee strike is simply to "knock back" (something Champions alumni will remember well) enemies that venture too close to temporarily disable them while you continue blasting away.

The idea is to keep distance between yourself and your enemy

When the tutorial's enemy ground forces have been sufficiently hammered, players get their first taste of what makes STO really unique: space combat.  When controlling your ship, STO has a completely different feel to it.  Rather than an emphasis on quickly hammering on a hotkey to fire your weapon as on the ground, space combat is all about tactics.  Players directly control the ship's movement in three-dimensional space, and you'll find that this is perhaps the most important part of space combat.  If a captain is able to deftly maneuver his or her ship, keeping it in a position where the enemy's weapons are minimally effective whilst maximizing his or her own weapons, it's possible to take out ships that are significantly more powerful than their own.  I won't get too far into the minutia of actual combat, as there are plenty of in-depth discussions out there already.  Suffice it to say that combat is a matter of keeping your strongest shields facing your enemy (note that shield strength in different directions can be controlled by the player) and battering them with your energy-based weapons until their shields drop, opening the opportunity for torpedo strikes directly on the unprotected hull.

Upon the completion of the tutorial mission, players can choose the first of their "bridge officers" from any of the three career types.  This is a very central element to STO, and makes it very unique in my opinion.  Bridge officers are basically NPC party members that can be greatly customized by the player (in terms of their skills, their appearance, their equipment, and even their behavior in combat).  During ground combat, these bridge officers make up your "away team" that will follow you around and assist you during your missions.  To an extent, they play out just like human party members of a given career type.  Science bridge officers will heal damage done to the party, engineer bridge officers will bolster everyone's shields, tactical officers will kick butt and take names -- everyone gets in on the action.  In space, these bridge officers serve a vital role as well.  Up to one officer of each career type can be active while in space, and each officer will make a unique "bridge officer ability" available to you.  This could be something as simple as temporarily boosting shields in the case of an engineering officer or firing a spread volley of torpedoes to deal damage over a vast area in the case of a tactical officer.  Whether on foot or at the helm of your ship, though, your choice of the bridge officers at your side are as defining to your character as your captain him or herself.

Controls & Accessibility

For the Mobility Impaired

As I previously mentioned, the gameplay system when on foot is almost directly lifted from Champions Online.  Character movement is achieved most practically through keyboard/switch input.  There is, unfortunately, no click-to-move option for those who typically rely on the mouse to play games, so the only way to control motion with the mouse is by holding down both mouse buttons to make your character move forward and moving the mouse to change direction.  This absence was largely anticipated as the feature was similarly not included in Champions Online.  At this point in the development process, it may not be something that could easily be implemented, but perhaps a future major patch would be an opportunity to introduce it.

Targeting of enemies can be done either by directly clicking on an enemy with the mouse or by "tabbing" through all available targets with the keyboard (this control can easily be switched to any other key, though).  To actually attack, one must either press the keyboard hotkey corresponding to a given attack or click on the corresponding function in the UI's action bar.  As with many MMOs, various skills and actions other than attacks are carried out in the same way.  For those who are unable to use the keyboard or a switch interface, combat on the ground can be a bit of a challenge.  Due to the fact that both mouse buttons must be held down to move the character around, those who can't simultaneously use a keyboard will be unable to attack or do anything else while moving.

In space, the control scheme is a bit more lenient.  Your ship's forward speed can be increased or decreased either by correspondent keyboard keys or by clicking on the throttle control in the UI.  Pitch and yaw can be controlled either with keyboard keys or by holding down both mouse buttons and moving the mouse similar to ground movement.  What makes this gameplay mode more mouse-friendly is the ability to have some of your weapons (e.g. your phasers) fire automatically.  That way, the player can focus on using the mouse to maneuver the ship and only need to worry about occasionally firing torpedoes or activating other skills.  Targeting in space is handled the same as on the ground, either by direct mouse selection or by cycling through available targets with the keyboard.

you are spamming your enemy with between shots from the more powerful secondary attack function

An interesting note here concerns the primary attack functionality of any given ground weapon (that is, what you are spamming your enemy with between shots from the more powerful secondary attack function).  The cooldown timer on these primary attacks is typically only one or two seconds, meaning that the player will need to be either pressing the corresponding keyboard key or clicking the mouse incredibly frequently.  For many with various types of mobility impairment, this repetitive task could very quickly become difficult.  During the open beta for STO, there was an option to right-click on this primary attack to set it to "autofire."  Once set, the player needed only to target an enemy and trigger the attack once.  It would then automatically repeat every cooldown until the enemy was defeated or the action was canceled.  This was an incredibly useful accessibility option as it allowed those who either had limited tolerance for repetitive clicking or lacked the mobility to switch between various attack types to focus on the secondary attack and other skills.  However, this functionality was inexplicably stripped from the game when it officially launched.  There seems to be no practical reason for this removal as far as I can tell, so perhaps Cryptic will eventually reimplement it when they realize the impact of axing it.

For the Hearing Impaired

There is very little voiceover work in STO, and what little there is always is transcribed -- either immediately as in the case of the tutorial pop-ups which are read aloud or archived in text format for later reading such as the brief lore elements read by Leonard Nimoy upon entering new areas.  Other than simple sound effects which lend nothing to actual gameplay beyond ambience, the only other significant audible elements are vocal notifications from your ship's computer when certain things happen.  For example, when one of your shields is about to go down, you'll receive an audible warning.  This is useful if you don't want to pay attention to your shields at all, but it isn't really necessary.  All of these notifications simply bring to your attention significant bits of information that are already provided in the UI.  Furthermore, these notifications are transcribed in the chat window, so their information is still available to those unable to hear them.

For the Visually Impaired

As with many games of this type, there is a lot of fine visual detail that may be difficult for some visually impaired players.  The icons for various skills are fairly small and at first could be difficult to map to their functionality.  Eventually, though, you grow accustomed to the layout of your interface and tend to remember actions by where they're positioned rather than what they look like.  For those who use screen magnifiers, a potentially useful feature of STO is the ability to completely rearrange the user-interface by positioning different modules (e.g. the action bar, the minimap, the area where pop-ups will appear) wherever you want them.  In this way, elements which most need to be magnified can be placed closer together to streamline the use of a magnifier.

The use of color shouldn't be much of a problem in STO.  The significant distinction between enemies and allies is designated by orange and blue respectively.  While red is used as a designator in various places, there is little to no use of green that could lead to confusion for colorblind players.

For the Cognitively Impaired

Depending on the degree of one's impairment, STO could either be fairly reasonable or frustratingly difficult.  This is primarily because of the same control issues that affect those with mobility impairments.  Because almost nothing happens "automatically" in STO, players must constantly be making split-second decisions to stay ahead.  As previously stated, this is most significant in ground combat.  The need to monitor one's shield status and health status, whilst doing the same for the entire party, can be taxing in and of itself in larger scale skirmishes.  Compounding that mental load by having to remember to constantly keep activating a primary fire ability while watching various cooldown timers for other abilities could potentially make this element of gameplay completely unfeasible for those with severe cognitive impairments.

One slight mitigating factor for ground combat's challenge to the cognitively impaired is the ability to pause -- not a common feature in most MMO games.  During ground PvE content, there is a button on the UI that can be clicked to pause the game for up to 45 seconds.  This is not enough time to "take a break" from play, but is certainly valuable to step back briefly from an intense situation and decide what to do next.

Final Thoughts

Star Trek Online is, for those who can play it well, an incredibly fun and engaging MMO with a novel take on the genre.  While there are certainly idiosyncrasies with gameplay and content left to be worked out, it's no worse than what should be expected with any fresh offering.  Where it fails to meet expectations, though, is with accessibility.  While certain accessibility shortcomings are to be expected, others are easily correctable and frankly shouldn't exist.  The obvious embodiment of this is, again, autofire on the ground.  For many disabled individuals I have spoken to that participated in the beta, this was the single most valuable element to let them feasibly play ground combat.  While it may not have been initially implemented as an explicit accessibility aid, that was undoubtably one of the things it had become.  By unceremoniously removing it from the game without warning or explanation, Cryptic alienated many a disabled gamer -- not to mention able-bodied gamers who simply found it a convenient feature to eliminate a repetitive task.  Hopefully, Cryptic will be willing to address this and other issues moving forward and make Star Trek Online's accessibility among the best out there.