First I'd like to say that I understand my criticism may simply be a case of personal preference. This is art and one persons ugly is another's idea of beauty.

So I don't think STO is ugly actually. I just think the art design is...flat. The reason is that everything looks like a plastic action figure.

The fabrics in the uniforms, player characters skin, the hulls of ships all look like plastic. Ship hulls don't appear to be constructed of metal. The result is that everything seems to lack mass and disrupts game immersion for me.

Anyway just my 2 cents.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, however recent efforts on the part of the Art team have gone a very long way to improving the look of STO.

Your exact criticism of "Everything feeling like plastic" though, is to a Tee how I feel about ground combat and weapons.

Things Cryptic could do to improve the visual style of the game would be:

Add a toggle for engine trails

Add space movement particles/put them back in. What I mean by this is the little white specks that would give you an idea of how fast your ship is moving. Cryptic removed this from system space, but the streaks exist in sector space.

Redo the space backgrounds for Qo'noS, K7, Ganalda, Ker'rat, and DS9.

Rescale some of the ships...ideas below:

Make the Negh'var 30% larger.

Make the D'Deridex twice as big as the Galaxy class.

Make the Defiant/tactical ships smaller.

Those would be the first ones I would fix.

lol Yeah, I agree with the "plastic" part. More shiny/reflective metallic textures and coating would be nice. Some of the weapons do look like toy guns as well. I Would like to see them a little darker with less color, but just enough so that players can still can be able to identify by it's type.

An estetic artwork criticism to me is about how every habitable world has a debris field around it, a ring (that is normally associated with gas giants), and a few have such intense glows that the only association is a Venus type planet (there is no way anyone can live in a blast furnace). I know the art work is generic, but the same illogicial planet art should be reassessed.

+1 agreement. Especially for the Neg'Var and the D'Deridex Warbird