There has always existed within the space between two iconic franchises a fight. A fight in which hardcore fans sally forth to prove the future their franchise espouses is more awesome than the other. In 2010, the fight will be brought to a new arena: the MMO, in the forms of Cryptic’s Star Trek Online, and Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Star Trek and Star Wars have been a part of gamer culture since the beginning, so it’s wonderful to see both having a significant presence within this upcoming generation of MMOs. Both contain living, breathing universes that fans have wanted to explore for quite literally generations. Both have exciting potential for gaming: epic conflicts, deep storytelling opportunities, and much-needed A-list sci-fi entries into a genre flooded with fantasy.

However, that’s about where the similarities end. Cryptic and Bioware, given the same basic amount of time so far in development, have gone in two entirely different directions and approaches to create their new properties. Cryptic’s Star Trek creates an experience that attempts to create gameplay within the framework of an episodic story. Your experience takes you from the bridge of a powerful starship, to planets’ surfaces and starbase interiors, back to the starship once again.

Cryptic’s starship game proves already to be something special. They’ve clearly taken inspiration from Activision’s Bridge Commander, going for a more tactical style taking into account weapons firing arcs, shield rotation, and resource allocation. Your bridge crew has a direct affect on the performance of your vessel, contributing their skills to squeeze out potential from the starship that could not be had without them. However, the current difficulty Cryptic appears to be facing is how to make their Away Team missions as inspired – and how to distance them from Cryptic’s other offering, Champions Online.

Bioware’s approach is much more non-traditional, their offering looking more and more akin to their single player titles than any MMO to date. Voice acting, a focus on immersion, and meaningful dialog choices are the main draws here. It appears the budget is higher here as well, as evidenced by the voice acting, and how much more polished the game looks than its counterpart at the moment. From beginning to end of their presentation, Bioware makes it clear that they’re here to deliver the player the best character and story driven immersive experience, all while developing innovative new MMO game mechanics, such as the smuggler’s ability to take cover.

So far, it seems of the two games, the Star Wars fans are in possession of the bragging rights. While Cryptic’s starship system looks incredible with screenshots easily being mistaken for polished concept art pieces, and while it also possesses inspired bridge crew game mechanics, the game suffers in the Away Team portion of the experience, looking very undeveloped thus far. Meanwhile, Bioware has an epic cinematic trailer and very polished, engaging gameplay already in place. The world your character inhabits looks lived in…and more than that, the world just feels right, like you’d stepped into a scene out of Star Wars Episode 2.

So what does the future hold? This columnist, who was cheering for Star Trek Online, believes that if Cryptic doesn’t hunker down and seriously develop their Away Team game, Star Wars will have won this round, and rightly so. If Bioware can deliver what they’re promising, they’ll have earned every subscription they get, including mine.

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