Star Trek Online is under new management

by Samuel Axon Jan 14th 2008 at 3:45PM

Filed under: Sci-fi, MMO industry, New titles, News items, Star Trek Online

According to WarCry, The Studio Formerly Known as Perpetual Entertainment -- or just "P2 Entertainment" if you want to be less facetious -- has passed or sold ownership of the Star Trek Online project to a new studio headquartered in (fittingly) the Bay Area. This comes after a rocky history for the title, starting with the cancellation of Perpetual's other title Gods & Heroes, all sorts of corporate maneuvering, and a lawsuit.

WarCry did not reveal the name of the new steward, but it did learn that while the game's license and content (such as artwork, one presumes) were transferred, the code wasn't. So the new STO team is starting from pretty close to scratch. If you were hoping for a 2008 release, it's time to be disappointed; though at this point none of this is a huge surprise.

We don't know if the new owners are related to P2, if any of the old team will be moving with the project, or anything else, really. More info and some clarifications are sure to come eventually, though, so sit tight.

Tags: breaking, business, p2, perpetual-entertainment, star-trek, star-trek-online, sto, warcry

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

RogueJedi86 said on 4:18PM 1-14-2008

Does this affect the original intended free-to-play gameplay mode?

Jester said on 5:24PM 1-14-2008

LOL Where did you hear that horrid rumor?

Any plans for the game have essentially at this point been scrapped its starting over.

mmolab said on 6:15PM 1-14-2008

Ain't rumor but fact. Google for it.

Dave said on 7:47PM 1-14-2008

my first reaction was "awww crap".

Then I realized that every single aspect of the game they'd been talking about so far seemed like a heaping pile of crap in the first place...

So maybe this is good! Maybe they'll re-think the idea to have a bland "terrans vs klingons OH WAIT YOU CAN ONLY BE TERRANS" game and go ahead and open up some brand new universal war scenario, where you can be Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian or maaaaaybe even Borg.

I hope there's actual PVP in the game and I hope to hell that the "missions" don't end up being amazingly boring semi-tactical ship to ship combat. In the entire history of the Trek Series, I don't think there were more than a dozen real ship to ship fights and very few of them were anything to write home about. (the only exciting ones I can remember were the Enterprise-D vs Borg battles, and even then it was more of a mind problem over tactical maneuvers). We've got two (3?) pretty awful ship vs ship combat simulators, and none of them are very much fun at all.

However, i'd really loooooove to see an epic ground war of Federation vs Romulans. Maybe they're fighting over some massive cache of Dilithium, i dunno. Maybe there's some prehistoric artifact of amazing power, hopefully they'll hire a top notch story guy to flesh it all out and make it interesting and able to work with the existing Trek lore.

All I know, is that if the game is "you can only be part of the Federation, and that's it" the game is going to be a total failure. Good for them if they have to start from scratch, that at least means they can get it right this time. Don't pull a Star Wars. Please?