Star Trek has a long, weird history with video games, as a franchise that has spent a long time struggling to balance the scales between delivering an authentic Star Trek experience and delivering… well, what people actually want out of a video game. There’s been plenty of attempts, and plenty of successes over the years, but one of the most enduring of all is the MMORPG Star Trek Online. And now, it’s paying tribute to some of that gaming history by bringing a trio of new ships to players’ armadas.
Launching in the game on PC today–and arriving on Playstation and Xbox versions next month on August 22–Star Trek Online‘s new “Heritage Ships” bundle revives 3 unique Starfleet designs from a trio of beloved Star Trek games from the turn of the 21st century. Including the U.S.S. Typhon and the Valkyrie Mk. II fighters from Star Trek: Invasion, the Premonition from Star Trek: Armada, and the Achilles from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars, the new ships are a chance for Star Trek Online to pay homage to the legacy of Star Trek‘s gaming history, even as itself finds its own original ship designs being brought into prime Star Trek continuity in recent years, like Star Trek: Picard‘s canonization of the Odyssey-class Enterprise-F in its final season.
Check out a new trailer showcasing the ships and their unique abilities, inspired by their own individual games, below!
“You might frame it as abusing my power, but I wanted to take the opportunity–without having to justify myself to anyone else,” STO Art Director Thomas Marrone told io9 over Zoom recently about why now was the time to bring the the Typhon, Premonition, and Achilles-class ships into the game. “There’s a lot of people out there who love these old games, and who love these ships. What is Star Trek Online but a watering hole for all these amazing Star Trek ships, and Star Trek concepts and stories?”
Marrone’s hankering nostalgia for Trek‘s gaming history came at a perfect time in Star Trek Online‘s production cycle. Now more lockstep with the world of Star Trek media than ever before–there was a time, many years ago, when the thought of new canon Trek material appearing in the game was a twinkle in the mind’s eye, now, STO gets regular updates bringing ships from the latest shows to the game on a regular basis–as on-screen Trek found itself in a quiet moment, STO had a chance between releases to dig into the past.
“We just had Discovery season five ending, and we’ll be incorporating some of that stuff eventually as we always do,” Marrone continued. “We had a kind of window here between Lower Decks [season 5], and Prodigy [season 2] just came out too–we don’t typically like to add or even like to develop things for STO until we’ve actually watched the episodes ourselves, because we want to make sure that what we’re adding to the game reflects exactly what you see on screen. Really the only way we can do that is to watch the shows after they’ve come out, which is why there’s a bit of a trailing.”
“So we had a really nice window where we didn’t have anything super pressing from the shows that we needed to get in. What do with this window? And I thought ‘Hey, let’s take advantage of that and get some these classic Star Trek game ships. We’re calling it the Heritage Starship Bundle: that was the most concise way we could put that these are ships from classic Star Trek video games and that we’re honoring their legacy with what we’re doing in STO. That was really important to me, as someone who’s a fan of those games too.
One of the releases in the bundle is of particular interest to one STO player: James Swallow, the writer of Star Trek: Invasion who helped craft the crew of the U.S.S. Typhon and the ship itself for the game nearly two and a half decades ago. “It’s crazy for me to think that a game that I worked on nearly two and a half decades ago still has a fanbase, still had love for it. That was really, really cool,” Swallow told io9. “When the guys at STO reached out to me and said ‘oh, we’re gonna bring it back, I was immediately excited about the idea because [the Typhon] was such a unique design for a ship, such a fun project to work on.”
In Invasion players were cast as Ensign Ryan Cooper, a pilot in Typhon‘s Red Squad, a wing of Valkyrie-class fighters assigned under Worf’s command on the carrier vessel: a hulking brick of a design that was almost unlike anything fans had seen from Starfleet ships before. “[Invasion] was the very first video game project I ever worked on, the first Star Trek video game for a Sony console as well,” Swallow added. “We broke a lot of new ground with that project, and I have a lot of love for it. The design was so cool, and then seeing it reinvigorated and brought back to life, it’s just amazing. [In Invasion], it has that kind of fuzzy look to it, it looks like it’s been taken through a soft focus lens, and then here it is in stone, sharpened focus.”
“It’s the ship that we always wanted it to be, it’s the design that was always there, that if we could have done it back in that era in the Playstation, we would have,” Swallow reminisced. “But now seeing it, it’s just amazing. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and just kind of tool around–I play STO on and off myself, and I tend to ‘unplay’ the game. I won’t do any of the missions, I’ll just noodle around in my ship, listen to the sound effects. I’m going to go to DS9 for fun and just kind of be a tourist in that world for a little while!”
In bringing in not just the Typhon, but also the Achilles and the Premonition to the game STO‘s art team had to find a way to not just balance the aesthetic of classic ’90s-era Star Trek with the design language of its own early 25th century setting, but make sure they were being faithful to designs that were being made with much, much older hardware in mind. “One of the things that Dave Blass, the production designer on Star Trek: Picard said that I really loved was that he doesn’t see Star Trek as a science fiction show: he sees it as a period piece, the period just happens to be 200, or 400, years in the future” Marrone said of the process of bringing these new ships to life again. “We’re bringing [these ships] into Star Trek Online, and so we’re adding detail–these games were Playstation One, or early PC era gaming. The models weren’t super detailed. So we definitely add details, but we’re trying to drill down on the intent [of the designs].”
For Marrone, this process is as much restorative as it is anything else. “The analogy I use is sort of wiping the grease off the lens to bring it into focus. The shapes, the silhouettes are all exactly the same, and if there are details there, we honor them and incorporate them. But then we’re like ‘well, what if ILM built this model? How would they do it, what would they want it to look like?’ It still looks like that ship, it still has the same material treatment, it still feels of the same era that that ship was created for. We did the same thing with the Achilles and the Premonition. We made [the Achilles] look just like it looked in Dominion Wars, but, you know, plussed it up a bit. I want to shout out Tobias Richter, who did the Typhon and the Achilles models, he did a great job.”
But that doesn’t mean some ships in the bundle didn’t have opportunities for the art team to go beyond what came before. “We hired Eric Henry, who has a wonderful YouTube channel about starships. He’s actually done a lot of ships for us, where he’s created new designs, but he tackled the Premonition,” Marrone continued. “The model in Armada is a really basic, low detail model. It was an RTS from 2000, right? It was very low triangle count, very low-res textures. That was one ship where we felt like we had a bit more leeway to be interpretive, instead of just rebuilding what was there–we did a little more design flourish on it. Eric, he’s my go to guy when I have a hard design problem to solve. I think anybody who’s played Star Trek Armada will recognize it, but they’ll also notice we kind of sleek it out a bit, we added a bit more function and gave it it’s own visual identity. I’m really, really pleased with out this one turned out: it’s the closest to a STO version of the ship, aesthetically, but that fit in with the lore of the game, because the Premonition is a ship from the future. The Typhon and the Achilles are ships of their era.”
“We’re always thinking ‘How does this fit in with the lore? What’s the best way to balance that player expectation versus expanding on the look, and iterating on it, and making it feel modern?’,” Marrone concluded. “That’s something that everybody says when they’re working on Star Trek. You’ve got to honor the past and try to break new ground. I think there’s an appropriate time and place to do that–with us, it was for the Achilles and the Typhon. It was very much, how do we bring it in focus and create the high-detailed version of what you saw in the original games. The Premonition gave us a little more room to play with.”
Star Trek Online‘s Heritage Ship Bundle is available today, July 24, on PC. To learn more about how the Typhon, Achilles, and Premonition will work in-game, head on over to the official Star Trek Online website.
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