Cryptic Studios and Atari are taking a two-fold approach to increasing the player base for their spacefaring MMO, Star Trek Online: First, potential subscribers can now download the game and play through the tutorial and first mission for free. Though they'll have an unlimited amount of time to tool around in their Federation vessel, players will have to purchase the full game to gain access to STO's other offerings.
In addition, former subscribers can play for free this weekend, and check out the new content that's been added as part of the game's first "Season" of updates. The "Welcome Back Weekend" ends Monday at 10 a.m. PST, so we suggest applicable parties should hop online ASAP, so as not to waste any potential Trekking time.
#desperation
Atari and Cryptic Studios have mounted a huge push for players in Star Trek Online, featuring a referral program, veteran rewards, a free demo, and an invitation to lapsed players of the three-month-old MMO to try it again for free. More »
#science
This is no video game. This is an image of a gigantic baby star inside a galactic bubble 4,300 light-years from Earth, captured by Europe's Herschel space telescope. Has video game space ever been so beautiful? More »
The next mission from "Season One" of Star Trek Online's free content updates will soon be added to the game. Titled "DS9 Under Siege," the new episode will bring about a massive invasion upon the typically peaceful space station Deep Space Nine. You might know it from the show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Remember? It was right there in the title.
Check out the trailer above to see what players will be up against when the new episode launches. (Spoiler alert: It's lasers. You're going up against lasers. So many lasers.)
#mmo
Like the console version(s) of Cryptic's superhero MMO Champions Online, Star Trek Online is having a hard time making the leap from PCs to consoles, as if it were caught in some sort of temporal distortion field, Captain. More »
In a move that's almost as shocking as a "red shirt" being removed from life duty on the original Enterprise, Cryptic confirms that Star Trek Online for consoles is taking the shuttle to retail reality at impulse speed. The studio told VideoGamer that STO is "pretty much in the same boat as the Champions console version right now." Cryptic had previously stated that the console version of Champions Online is -- as Miracle Max from The Princess Bride would put it -- mostly dead.
Cryptic claims that the technology is there to do the game "on certain consoles" and was ready to move, but "it's a little difficult to make that final leap on the business side of things." Well, if it's any consolation, this console generation appears like it's going to be around for a while. Perhaps the traction required for console MMOs will pick up before it's too late.
#clips
For Klingons, every day is a good day to die, but you might want to wait until Cryptic slips the new Klingon player-versus-enemy content into Star Trek Online, as seem in part two of the Expanding Universe video series. More »
If you've ever wanted to transport into the massively-multiplayer Starfleet of Star Trek Online, now is your chance to make it so.
Amazon's Deal of the Day features the game for $28 -- a better price than even a Ferengi could negotiate. (Mostly because Ferengi don't really exist.) Plus, the 44-percent discount off the list price should help take the sting out of the monthly fee.
Amazon has also temporarily discounted the Collector's Edition, from $80 to $48. Don't you want the little communicator badge? Of course you do. As with all Amazon Deals of the Day, this one's over at midnight PT or when the shop runs out of stock.
Announced last week, the first in a series of new raid episodes is now available in Star Trek Online. The first episode, entitled "The Infected," which tasks five players with assaulting a Borg-infected starbase and investigating a new Borg nanovirus that can "assimilate entire worlds at alarming speeds." Three more Borg episodes are planned, ultimately concluding with a direct attack against the Borg queen herself. If the trailer above is any indication, you can expect plenty of deep space confrontations, lots of ground action and copious explosions.
More raid episodes will arrive in the future, including one that revisits the work of everyone's favorite villain: Khan Noonien Singh.
Trekkies will soon have a chance to face off against a new, deadlier Borg adversary in the first wave of "Special Task Force Missions" in Star Trek Online. Federation and Klingon players alike will have the opportunity to tackle the difficult five-person PvE quests when the update hits the recently released MMO.
The first five STF missions include "Children of Khan," where an escaped Amar Singh GTA's the U.S.S. Asgard and races toward the remains of the Mutara Nebula and "Infected," where more than 400 Starfleet officers aboard a star base have seemingly disappeared off the galaxy and require immediate assistance to combat the new Borg enemy. More details and screens can be found at Massively.
Trekkies will soon have a chance to face off against a new, deadlier Borg adversary in the first wave of "Special Task Force Missions" in Star Trek Online. Federation and Klingon players alike will have the opportunity to tackle the difficult five-person PvE quests when the update hits the recently released MMO.
The first five STF missions include "Children of Khan," where an escaped Amar Singh GTA's the U.S.S. Asgard and races toward the remains of the Mutara Nebula and "Infected," where more than 400 Starfleet officers aboard a star base have seemingly disappeared off the galaxy and require immediate assistance to combat the new Borg enemy. More details and screens can be found at Massively.
#review
After years of television series, books, cartoons, movies, and video games for both consoles and PCs, Star Trek faces the final frontier: the massively-multiplayer role-playing game. More »
#clips
Here's the trailer for Star Trek Online's first major content update, in which the Borg decide to give the whole Borg Queen thing another try, since it worked out so well the last time. More »
Atari may not have published a ton of games in 2009, but that doesn't mean the company hasn't been picking up the bottom line. In a press release that reads like the exact opposite of those we saw from the company just a few years ago, CEO Jeff Lapin celebrates the €92.5 million ($126.25 million) in revenue earned in the nine months ending December 31, saying "the company has now strengthened its equity and is in a position to work on an expanded publishing plan." In so many words, Lapin's suggesting that Atari is financially bouncing back and maybe even gearing up to (dare we say it?) make more games.
The company cites sales of Ghostbusters, Chronicles of Riddick, Backyard Football, and Champions Online for bolstering revenues in fiscal Q3 and looks forward to a better 2010. The recent release of Star Trek Online certainly doesn't seem to be hurting his confidence in that department. Lapin says that he's "very enthusiastic about the launch" of the "promising MMO game."
But things aren't all gumdrops and money hats -- the Q3 revenues were still down by 1.9% year-over-year. We won't find out the full year's earnings until late May, but for now we'll comfort ourselves with the knowledge that the publisher's next title, Project Runway, is coming in a few short weeks. Finally!
Source 1 - Big Download Source 2 - Atari (warning: PDF link)
In the world of Star Trek, there's nothing quite like grabbing a few moments of R&R with your first mate on the holodeck or heading down to engineering to check up on your favorite ship's power core. Unfortunately, as we've been unable to explore the interior of our own ships since we first got our hands on Star Trek Online's pre-release beta program (nonetheless the final product), those wonderfully humdrum space activities will have to be postponed for a little while. But hey, they're coming ... or so says Cryptic executive producer Craig Zinkievich, at least.
"Anything we can do to make the game feel even more like Star Trek is something we want to do ... so, definitely, we want to give people more of their ship," he tells Inc Gamers, adding, "This is one of those things we want to get perfect before introducing it to players, though," indicating that the functionality likely won't be arriving in the near future. And us, well we just want to passive aggressively flirt with crew members -- is that so much to ask?
[Image via Times Online]
While we're certain you well-adjusted lotharios spent your Valentine's Day basking in the adoration of your significant other, 99 Star Trek Online fans spent the day breaking the most unapologetically dorky world record known to mankind: The most costumed Star Trek fans ever gathered in a single place. We imagine they also broke the "most depressing way to spend a Valentine's Day" record as well, but we don't have any way of empirically proving that.
No, you know what? We take back that mean thing we just said. 99 people chose to dress up like their favorite Star Trek character, suffered crummy weather to gather on London's Millennium Bridge, and celebrated this thing that they love. Hell, if we'd known Atari representatives were going to be there to distribute free lifetime subscriptions to the game, we would've happily helped to bring the grand total of participants into the triple digits.
A recently added hub page on the official Star Trek Online site has revealed that the nefarious Borg will soon make first contact with the MMO's players in an upcoming free content update, which will be rolled out over the next two months. The patch will add a series of high-level episodes (that's STO-speak for "quests") to the game which will throw players into a number of ground and space conflicts with the cybernetic species, leading up to a climactic raid encounter with the Borg Queen.
You can get an idea of the formidable foe you'll be facing off against in the video above and the gallery below. As a special protip from us to you, here's an instructional video which reminds prospective Borg-fighters exactly where the line must be drawn.
Are you somewhat satisfied with your Star Trek Online avatar, but wish he or she possessed more unsightly forehead ridges? Perhaps you desire a pair of ears shaped and sized like funnel cakes? Do you wish it looked like your brain was attempting to escape out of the top of your head? Good news -- the Federation Ferengi race can now be downloaded in-game for 80 Cryptic Points, which translates to a shiny half-dollar in real-world funds.
Federation players also have the option to download what we can only assume to be a reformed species of Klingon for 240 Cryptic points, or $1.50. We're still unsure as to why anyone would play Star Trek Online and not make their own race, since we wouldn't find the game so compelling without the adventures of Barbicane, the only surviving Bonerian in the galaxy.
Sure, we'd like a lot of things, too. Could we get a butterscotch waterfall in the back yard and maybe tiny, invisible robo-men with jetpacks to do the dishes for us every night? Or, better yet, could we get a better explanation for Champions Online's hold-up besides the "blame Microsoft" you said six months ago? But, we digress.
Cryptic's Craig Zinkievich told CVG that a console port of the com-pooter MMO is something the company is "definitely" interested in. "We would love to get STO to the console. At launch it will just be available for the PC but here at Cryptic we want our games across multiple platforms," he said.
However, before you break out your good Starfleet duds and crank the jamz up to eleven in celebration, know that should Cryptic pursue a console port, it likely wouldn't be available for quite some time. "But we'll have to see how Star Trek does and then secondly we want to do it justice and not hurry something along just to get it on the console."
