Summary
Star Trek Onlinepays homage toStar Trek’s proud video game legacy by releasing the Starship Heritage Bundle. Featuring starships from pastStar Trekvideo games, theStarship Heritage Bundle is available forStar Trek Onlineplayers on July 25th.
Star Trek Online’s Starship Heritage Bundle tributes classicStar Trekvideo games from the early 2000s, includingStar Trek: Armada, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars, andStar Trek: Invasion.Available for the first time ever inStar Trek Online, the Starship Heritage Bundle consists of the USS Premonition fromStar Trek: Armada,the USS Achilles fromStar Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dominion Wars, and the USS Typhon and Valkyrie Mk II fromStar Trek: Invasion.Each starship comes playable with its unique abilities from the previous games.
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Screen Ranthad the pleasure to speak withStar Trek OnlineArt Director Thomas Marrone, as well asStar Treknovelist and screenwriter James Swallow, who wroteStar Trek: Invasion25 years ago, about the Starship Heritage Bundle, designing starships forStar Trek Online, the challenges of writingStar Trekvideo games, whether Star Trek novels are canon and more.
Check out the launch trailer and full interview below:
Star Trek Online Introduces The Starship Heritage Bundle
Screen Rant:Star Trek Onlineis releasing a bundle that includes some classicStar Trekship designs. That’s pretty cool. Thomas, what can you tell us about it?
Thomas Marrone: We call it the Heritage Starship Bundle? Because it’s, you know, I consider it Star Trek Online’s homage to the Star Trek gaming heritage that we have. Gowing up as a kid in the 90s days of Star Trek, there was Star Trek everywhere. There was TNG, DS9, Voyager on the air. There was a Star Trek Experience in Las Vegas, which I never got to go to, sadly. And there were a lot of great Star Trek games that came out during the show. Some people call it the Activision era.
But I even think before the Activision era with Interplay, there were some real gems there too, with the 20th Anniversary, and Starfleet Command, Starfleet Academy, Klingon Academy, all that stuff. Anyway, we get to the Activision era, and we have some really cool games. We’ve got Star Trek Armada, we’ve got Star Trek: Invasion. You’ve got Star Trek: Away Team, Star Trek: Dominion Wars, and some really cool stuff. And then, Bethesda published Star Trek Legacy a few years later. And so I just played all of them, I was a gamer, I was a huge Star Trek fan.
Fast forward to now, I find myself as the art director for Star Trek Online, and I decide it’s finally time that STO pays homage to these classic Trek games.So we selected three ships: the Typhon from Star Trek: Invasion, the Premonition from Star Trek: Armada, and the Achilles from Star Trek: Dominion Wars.And these are all ships, by the way, that our players have been asking for forever. There was constantly requests for these ships. We got clearance from Paramount, and they said it was okay for us to incorporate stuff from these old games as long as they were new assets, which obviously, we want to do anyway because we have a very specific, technical way of building these assets for our game.
It was finally time. All the stars aligned, and I jumped on the opportunity. I’m just really, really excited for players to see these ships becausenot only do they look like the ships from those old games, but they all have all of the abilities that those ships had.The Typhon actually has the fortress mode from Star Trek: Invasion where it clamps down. it actually animates, and closes up and then shoots a lot of anti-aircraft flak at the enemy. It launches the Valkyrie fighters from the game. The Achilles has the doors, the dorsal, quad, and torpedo launchers, and the Premonition can actually summon an Enterprise and splits it into two ships just like in the trailer for Star Trek: Armada. So we’re not just paying homage to what they look like, but players will actually get the abilities of those classic ships as well.
James, among your many works in sci-fi andStar Trek, you wroteStar Trek: Invasion. Do you have a new role in this as a writer, or are you here in terms of your previous work?
James Swallow: I’m here as a veteran of the old days of gaming, just to kind of put my stamp of approval on it, and just say, wow, how cool it is to see something that I worked on. I mean, it’s 25 years since I’ve worked on Invasion, and it amazes me that there’s still that much love for this title. I’ve had people regularly over the last couple of decades say to me, ‘Oh, you’ve worked on invasion? I love that game.’ So cool. And people show me fan art. And I see YouTube videos of people doing reimaginings of the ship.
For me, that’s really heartening, really rewarding to see people love it so much. And then to have it all come full circle. And now it appears in Star Trek Online, which is a game I play myself. To see that they’re in that game getting a whole new audience, as well as this kind of audience of classic gamers coming back and, seeing these new ships, these old new ships coming back. That’s just amazing for me to see that happen.
What Makes A Ship A Star Trek Ship
Most Federation starships hew to the basic model of theoriginal USS Enterprise. There’s some sort of saucer section, there are a couple of nacelles. But now there are hundreds of ship variations. Aesthetically, what’s the key to a great starship design? What are the determining factors for you about what makes a ship aStar Trekship?
Thomas Marrone: That’s a really great question, and something we certainly ask ourselves every day. Ryan Church and J.J. Abrams even said when they were working on the 2009 reboot: ‘You have to embrace what came before.’ But also push the boundaries, try something new. I think what that means is you find the character, the underlying character. The ships are characters. What is a character in a piece of fiction? They have agency, they move the story along, and they have a personality. They affect the tone and the mood of the piece. What does it look like? Is it heroic, is it functional? Is it a workhorse? And so, I tried to start from the question of, what is the ship for? What does it do? What is its character, its job?
That’s one of the things I really love about the Typhon because it doesn’t really look like a Star Trek ship at first blush. It’s blocky, it’s bulky, but once you lstart looking at it more closely, you see the classic Starfleet pinstripe, you see the nacelles. You see the bridge detail, the escape pods, and the windows. All those things come together that pull it into the universe, and it’s all built around this function of being a fighter carrier and escort carrier. And I think the visual style of a Star Trek ship is pretty elastic. As long as you build in that story and character, and you understand this is what it’s for, this is what it’s designed to do. And then you layer in the classic details on top of that. For Starfleet ships, every little detail has a function.
And so when you start to add those on top of whatever your weird shape is, like the Typhon, you see the blockiness, but then you start to see the phaser strips, the transporter emitters, and the escape pods and all that stuff. Then you’re like, okay, that fits in the universe, it fits next to the Enterprise, ie, it fits next to the Miranda class, or Excelsior, because it has all of these things. But it’s fulfilling this job that these other ships don’t do. So I think about it a lot. I could just spend an hour talking about what makes a Star Trek ship a Star Trek ship and how brilliant the original Enterprise was. Because it has a very unique silhouette, it has very simple shapes arranged in a very distinct way. And that made it really easy to read from a distance. And that’s why, the Enterprise is a huge part of Star Trek as a brand. Which is something pretty unique for a spaceship. If you see the Enterprise on something, you know that’s a Star Trek thing.
Why Writing A Star Trek Video Game Is Different From A Star Trek TV Show, Movie, Or Novel
James, I imagine writing forStar Trekvideo games is a very different beast from writing novels or screenplays that you’ve also done forStar Trek.Can you tell us a little bit more about the challenges of writing aStar Trekgame?
James Swallow: You’re absolutely right. It’s chalk and cheese. At the end of the day, it’s all a story, right? It’s all Star Trek. And it still draws from the same well, and you have to kind of ask the same questions about what kind of story it is and what kind of narrative you want to put out to the world. But the toolkit that you use to tell that story is completely different. So if you’re writing a screenplay, it’s very much upfront, and everything is right there on the screen. And all of the narrative has to be carried by the action and the dialogue that’s happening in front of you. If you’re writing something in prose, you get to have that internal viewpoint. You can go inside a character’s head, and you can live with their thoughts for a little while. And you can see the story expressed through nonverbal cues.
For a video game, it works completely differently. Because the player is the story, the player is driving the story, the player has to have agency in that narrative. You have to give them the toolkit to say, okay, we’re gonna put you in this world, here’s the story in front of you, but how you react to it, that’s up to you. It’s a completely different challenge, because you have to try and predict what the player will do, you have to try and guide them a little bit, but you have to give them that vital agency so they feel like they’re part of that world. And that’s what I love about it as a player and somebody involved in Star Trek games, I love the ability to be able to go right into that world and be a part of it, and just feel like I’m living a Star Trek life. Now, when I play games, that’s always the thing that’s in the back of my head, thinking how can I bring that experience to the player of the game? Make them feel like they’re part of that world?
Star Trek Online Incorporating New Star Trek TV Show & Movie Assets
Star Trekis continuing to expand.Discoveryjust ended,Lower Decksis going to end. But we’re getting two more seasons ofStrange New Worlds. We haveStarfleet Academycoming, and theSection 31movie coming. Thomas, how nimble isStar Trek Onlinewhen it comes to reflecting newStar Trek? And how much does the newStar Trekfactor into what you do with the games?
Thomas Marrone: We try to be nimble to a point. We do have a lag time where we want to have a whole season to come out before we start incorporating things from that season. We usually wait until the season’s over. For narrative content, the lead time is about six months to incorporate that stuff. For just ships and items, it can be anywhere from a few months to six months, usually, I’d say an average of six months. Ships are a little faster. A little spoiler: I would expect to see something from Prodigy season two by the end of the year.
For characters or for storyline stuff, that takes a while because we already have an established arc. And so, if we decided that we wanted to incorporate something in our current running arc, then we usually have to plan that for two or three episodes down the way, which is two or three releases, which is nine-ish months. We do a release about every four months. So usually, three releases a year, and there’ll be an episode in each thing. But certainly for all the cool gadgets and weapons and uniforms and stuff, we’re doing our best to incorporate that stuff.
We’re hoping to do stuff with the most recent season of Discovery early next year. It takes a while to watch it and then make the plan and then build all those assets. But we definitely want to incorporate all that stuff as quickly as we can. But we also want to ensure that we’re doing it right, that we have all the reference we need, that we’ve got the time we need to build it in a high-quality manner for a 3D game like STO. There’s a lot that goes into that. It’s not just building the model, it’s also building the animations.
Are Star Trek Novels Canon?
And the subject of theStar Treknovels, James, the novels tend to be their own kind of canon, not necessarily reflected by the TV shows, but that’s starting to change a little bit. Stuff in the novels has seeped into the TV canon. Can you talk a little bit about novel canon versus TV canon and how they’re kind of intermingling?
James Swallow: We basically have to be led by what’s on the screen. If it’s on the screen, the screen Trumps what’s on the page, that’s always the rule. So we have to try and ensure that everything we write on the page connects as closely as possible to the ongoing continuity. For a while, we pretty much had kind of carte blanche after Star Trek: Nemesis. It was like, ‘We’re never going to do another show. You can do whatever you like.’ And so we did.
For several years, we had what we call the Lit Verse continuity, and we built on stuff. We blew up the Borg, we killed off Kathryn Janeway and then brought her back, we married Picard and Beverly Crusher, and they had a son. And we did lots and lots and lots of stuff. And then Picard came down the pipe, and we were like, okay, the clock is running out on this now. The Lit Verse is going to have to eventually be closed down. And so we found ourselves in a similar situation to our friends over in the galaxy far, far away with the Star Wars universe when their extended universe continuity was being threatened by the new movies.
With Star Trek, we decided that we would end things. So that’s how we created the Coda trilogy of novels. And we brought the entire universe to a conclusion in sort of epic fashion. But beyond that, we’re still telling Star Trek stories. But now, the new generation of Star Trek stories hew much closer to what you’re seeing on television. And that is largely due to the fact that we have Kirsten Beyer working on the shows as a producer. Kirsten was a Star Trek tie-in novel writer before she went to work on television. And she is kind of the bridge between the tie-in fiction and the TV shows. Having her there means that we have a greater degree of cross-coordination than we’ve ever had.
In fact, in any tie-in project I’ve worked on, I’ve frequently had to do stuff where they say, ‘Okay, this is on the show, you have to reflect it in the book’. It very rarely goes back the other way. But in Star Trek it has. And that is really rewarding to see these little tiny details that we put in a book pop up in the background of the TV shows.
You also have a newStrange New Worldsnovel coming out called “Toward the Night.” Can you talk a little bit about that?
James Swallow: Yeah, that’s gonna be coming out in September. I am almost finished with that. I am so excited about getting my hands onthe Strange New Worlds characters, because I’ve really been absolutely loving the show. I can’t give away too much of the plot, but it’s set in the second season of the show, and involves the crew of the Enterprise chasing down a Starfleet vessel that has been missing for 96 years. And the crew finds themselves in a very interesting dilemma. And there’s some Klingon action in there as well. I’m really having a lot of fun with it and really enjoying writing the characters because they have such a different voice and different tone from other Star Trek shows. So I feel really, really lucky to be able to write a story based on that.
Who’s the most fun to write?
James Swallow: That’s a good question. The two characters I really like the most on Strange New Worlds are Pike and Ortegas. So, I said, okay, I want to make those two the lead characters. So I am indulging myself a little bit by writing Pike and Ortegas quite a bit in the story and having a lot of fun with them. I really wanted to kind of drill in a little bit with Ortegas and her background because she’s really great. And I wanted to know more about her. So I said, ‘Can I do a little bit of background and talk a little bit about her personal life and where she came from?’ You’re gonna see more of that stuff coming up in season three of the show. But I get an opportunity to do a little bit of that in the book, as well.
What’s Next For Star Trek Online After The Starship Heritage Bundle
After the Starship Heritage Bundle drops on July 25th, what’s next in the pipeline forStar Trek Online? You just had the massive Borg multiversal story that brought backDenise Crosby as Sela. What do you have coming up next?
Thomas Marrone: That story isn’t over yet. We’re still going to have more chapters, not just another chapter. We’re still working on that storyline. And so there’s more of that coming soon. I can’t really talk in too much detail about that. But certainly, I would encourage everybody to stay tuned. We’ve got our Twitch channel. We do streams every week. I think it’s just twitch.tv/crypticstudios, with our community manager where people can come ask questions, play the game, we usually make some announcements there.
But we’re working hard on new stuff. Like I mentioned, we’re bringing in stuff from Prodigy season two, we’re bringing in a lot of stuff from the latest Lower Decks season I’m very, very excited about. And then, further afield, we’ve got stuff from Discovery. So there’s a lot of really cool stuff coming up with STO in the back half of the year.
About Star Trek Online: Starship Heritage Bundle
Available for Star Trek Online players on July 25th, the Starship Heritage Bundle lets players captain cult-classic Star Trek video game starships from over 20 years ago and explore the intergalactic universe within Star Trek Online. As any seasoned Star Trek fan and even Star Trek newcomers know, starships are at the core of every extraordinary adventure, including embarking on exciting quests in Star Trek Online, and this bundle is yet another way to honor the beloved history of starships.
