Star Trek Online gameplay trailer debuts

by Ross Miller { Aug 10th 2008 at 7:40PM }

Welcome, Trekkies! [Insert clever Star Trek reference here] Cryptic Studios has beamed up (har) a gameplay trailer for Star Trek Online as it debuted today at the Star Trek Experience Event in Las Vegas. All footage is in-game, according to the developer. As revealed earlier, you'll be able to create your own alien species to play as, possibly even a Super Smurf (our conjecture). We imagine the cartoony art style will have a better reception than, say, Diablo 3.

The trailer is available via the official site; we've also made a new gallery of images from the trailer if you're too impatient to download. (Update: Video embedded after the break.)

Gallery: Star Trek Online (First Trailer)

Gallery: Star Trek Online

[Via Massively]

Tags: star-trek, star-trek-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)

Nutchos @ Aug 10th 2008 8:01PM

Wow, graphics look really good. Sounds like an interesting game... however I'm probably the only person in the world whose never seen a single episode of the show so I'd probably get lost and fall behind playing it.

Tony C @ Aug 11th 2008 12:20PM

Yesh, the graphics DO look very good! I don't really understand the blogger's quip about it being "cartoony"... WoW is cartoony. Toontown Online is cartoony. This is decidedly NOT.

Jakka (Not sure why he got banned?) @ Aug 10th 2008 8:07PM

Ground control to major tom
Ground control to major tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

(If you can't think of a witty comment, quote a song.)

NukeAssault @ Aug 10th 2008 8:11PM

Borg in your Star Trek mmo? Its more likely then you think. Click here to... (lolz couldent help myself)

Looks pretty good visually... Also needs more Phasers.

Obie @ Aug 10th 2008 8:19PM

Is that Ensign Ricky in the middle? Poor guy, he is so gonna get pwnd!

Draconis @ Aug 10th 2008 8:19PM

Looks surprisingly good. I wonder how they are going to set up the starship control though. Will it be first person simulator or more of an rts point-&-click kind of thing?

Snowblind @ Aug 10th 2008 8:27PM

I really like the new uniform design :)

Jhongerkong @ Aug 10th 2008 8:28PM

This game fucking sucks cause I didnt make it.

Jhongerkong @ Aug 10th 2008 8:30PM

Hahaha. Sorry bout that but my jerk friend wanted to type that under the name Miyamoto but firefox saves my email and password and he forgot to delete it.

Obie @ Aug 10th 2008 8:59PM

hahaha no one cares..

-1

Jhongerkong @ Aug 10th 2008 8:29PM

Mr. Spock. Fire proton torpedoes!

And that is the extent of my Star Trek knowledge.

dramamoose @ Aug 10th 2008 9:25PM

Hate to be this guy, but.....
It's photon torpedoes. You're thinking starwars.

Jhongerkong @ Aug 10th 2008 9:30PM

Just goes to show you how little I know

Divector @ Aug 10th 2008 10:31PM

Actually, Spock was a science officer. He never fired the ships weapons.

Tom18230 @ Aug 10th 2008 10:35PM

The moar you know.

Santo @ Aug 11th 2008 8:17AM

You're both wrong. By this point in the timeline, they don't even use photon torpedoes anymore. They're all quantum torpedoes.

Am I king of the nerds now?

Maverick128 @ Aug 11th 2008 8:28AM

Well, since it's 30 years after Nemesis, they may be using the Transphasic torpedoes seen in Endgame(Voy). That would help with all the Borg they show in the trailers. NOW who's the nerd. Oh wait. Dammit.

GenBanks @ Aug 11th 2008 8:54AM

This is why Star Trek is the perfect setting for an MMO.

Gavin @ Aug 10th 2008 8:33PM

The blue skinned race are Andorians...jesus do a search, it isn't like you are on the internet or anything.

LaughingTarget @ Aug 10th 2008 8:38PM

I like Super Smurf better.

Poisoned Al @ Aug 10th 2008 9:34PM

They are pretending not to know so they look cooler.

It failed of course.

Poke4Christ @ Aug 11th 2008 3:37PM

I put the over/under at 10 posts before someone made this post. You didn't quite get in under the 10 post mark, but you didn't dissapoint ;)

Jim @ Aug 10th 2008 8:33PM

dope

Gavin @ Aug 10th 2008 8:34PM

Well it is PHOTON instead of PROTON so you don't know much.

Detobu @ Aug 10th 2008 8:49PM

I predict this game to fail. You start out as a captain, you cant have real players as your crew, there seems to be an economy which Ive never heard of in the federation, I doubt you can play as a Klingon in the federation which sucks, and is looks way too combat oriented...

Snowblind @ Aug 11th 2008 8:55AM

Again, you don't start as a Captain, you're in command of a ship, but not a captain. Also, if you listened to the conference, he made it sound extremely tactical and mentioned a lot about the exploration and diplomacy side of the game.

I don't think you can blame them for making the trailer "exciting".

Corbo @ Aug 11th 2008 7:20AM

Whether or not the Federation has a currency is a bit vague. The show often explicitly says it doesn't but the characters still often need/spend money. They usually avoid the subject as all the Starfleet characters can just get what they want from replicators, but it sometimes comes up when they need to deal with civilians or aliens.

I'm hoping that the focus on combat was just the way they edited the trailer to grab people's attention. Doesn't really explain why the Klingons are suddenly attacking Federation ships though.

GenBanks @ Aug 11th 2008 8:55AM

I think it's too early to judge.

ElNeebre @ Aug 10th 2008 8:59PM

Holy christ this looks awesome!

Only got into 'Trek recently, and can't wait for this game to come out already!

Batzarro @ Aug 10th 2008 9:00PM

Setting phasers to shun...

Vcize @ Aug 10th 2008 9:10PM

Not really a star trek guy, but this looks pretty cool. Huge space battles are awesome.

Habbo @ Aug 10th 2008 9:16PM

For those of you who watched the presentation on the website this afternoon:

Kind of lame that the game only ships with the Federation and Klingons, and other races (Jem'Hadar, Romulan) are going to be added in an "expansion pack". I don't want to play as a Federation person or a Klingon. I want to play as a Romulan.

Duke @ Aug 11th 2008 10:15AM

Seems that releasing more races and places in the future would give people a reason to keep playing the game. If you just drop everything at the start, and of course tack on years of development time before being able to release the game, people will not keep coming back for more.

Also, there's probably some tool who wants to be a Ferengi, should the rest of us have to wait for the game to be released because of him.

Poisoned Al @ Aug 10th 2008 9:37PM

I wonder if wearing red increases your chances of horrible, horrible death in this game.

Xoviet chiK @ Aug 10th 2008 9:47PM

All this talk about galactic federation of the planets really makes me want to check in and see how Captain Anderson is doing as Human Ambassador to the Council.

Never got into Star Trek, but it was always my understanding that it was mostly tame and there wasn't much action? Looks like it could be a fun game, certainly has the visuals down at least.

UltimateQ @ Aug 11th 2008 8:20PM

ToS had action nearly every episode. However, TNG and later series were much more diplomatic, and had very few fights. I am curious to see how they approach this. Chances are I'll be one of the first to buy the game, regardless of what they do to it.

WedgeTalon @ Aug 10th 2008 10:08PM

I say this as a long-time Star Trek fan:

Meh.

AdamJZ @ Aug 10th 2008 10:29PM

Im a bit more excited for Stargate Worlds myself, but this looks like it could be good.

AdamJZ @ Aug 10th 2008 10:30PM

looks different.

Wiinterfang @ Aug 10th 2008 10:31PM

I don't like Star trek and I hate MMORPG but it sure looks nice.

The Doctor @ Aug 10th 2008 11:42PM

OK, so it looks like there's a massive Borg War going on in the Federation in this game. Which makes sense, because to have any kind of grouping in a Star Trek MMO where every single person is a ship, you're going to need a massive war.

Cryptic doesn't know much about Trek though. Saying that the United Federation of Planets was created to explore strange new worlds is like saying the United States of America was created to Serve and Protect.

Now, graphics look awesome. The design is great. Hopefully there will be a good game, and a good Star Trek game, behind that. I am not getting my hopes up though.

Senor Facekick @ Aug 10th 2008 11:58PM

If this game lets me play as Patrick Stewart I will buy ten subscriptions. Perhaps twelve. Those two will watch as the other patrick stewarts have battles to the death.

The devil seems to be in the details for this one- Trekkies won't buy it unless they can play as every single race there's ever been on the show/movies/games/novels/comics/pen and paper RPGs/cartoon spinoffs..you get the idea.Really it all depends on how much they try to make "WoW with spaceships". If you can choose a race and a faction- say, Vulcans, and the federation, or the romulans..Well, it still probably won't be good but it's a fun prospect.

paralipsis @ Aug 11th 2008 12:02AM

The heavy emphasis on combat in the trailer just seems a bit un-Trek-like, but then again, without combat it would probably be an agonisingly boring game. Maybe Trek wasn't such a good franchise to make into an MMO.

Geoffrey Sperl @ Aug 11th 2008 12:02AM

I have a hard time thinking that this is going to be a successful MMO if everyone gets a ship. Everyone is a captain, everyone gets a ship, and you get to customize the ship and the crew. I would be more impressed if no one got to be a captain at first and everyone had to start off as an ensign and work their way up the ranks. Make it possible, if not eventual, for everyone to become a captain... but starting off as a captain seems like there is little to move forward with.

I'm not saying that a new take on the constant grind in MMOs wouldn't be nice (and this may be what Cryptic is doing), but this sounds a little like Star Wars Galaxies (everyone gets to be a Jedi!), and that's not a good thing.

Kael @ Aug 11th 2008 1:01AM

Sadly, the trailer has done nothing to allay my fears. There's still no telling how the game, as an MMO, is going to work, and it's likely impossible to for it to play like episodes of the shows.

Ironically, the most Star Trek-y game ever made isn't a Star Trek game, it's Mass Effect. You get to be a captain of your own ship, cruising around the galaxy, going on away missions, talking with people, discovering new lifeforms, peacefully resolving conflicts, blasting through huge spaceship battles, and shooting a whole bunch of aliens. Will Star Trek Online manage to do all that? I hope so.

Kael @ Aug 11th 2008 1:17AM

As for the artwork, when a team decides that none of the target audience has upgraded their computers in half a decade, they have to try to get away with the fewest polygons and the smallest textures they can. Then someone points out that it's easier to make such a low-detail game not look terribly outdated and awful if it's a cartoon. Voila, the secret rationale behind Star Trek Online, Stargate Worlds, Blizzard games, Battlefield Heroes, etc.

I won't say I hate games being cartoony, it's just too bad the art direction in these cases has to (for understandable financial reasons) be dictated by and forced into what most suitably masks the intentional lack of detail. Again, the stylization is fine, but I think that in a perfect world, characters in a Star Trek game wouldn't be stylized caricatures, if only because characters were played by real people in the shows the game is based on. Same with Stargate Worlds. And also, in a perfect world, Diablo 3 would have the same style as Diablo 2. Anyway...

It occurs to me that console-only releases aren't affected by that issue. Oh, except downloadable games. But I'm just rambling like I always do; I'll shut up for now.