Cryptic officially announces Star Trek Online

by Elizabeth Harper Jul 28th 2008 at 4:00AM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Galleries, New titles, Star Trek Online

We may have spoiled Cryptic's little surprise, but even though we were pretty sure we knew what this whole countdown business was about, when midnight pacific time rolled around, we headed over to Cryptic's website to see what would happen next. We were immediately met by errors saying the server failed to respond as geeks world-wide attempted to do the same thing, but when we finally got through, we received the exciting launch message above and the count-down link had been swapped for a banner linking to the Star Trek Online homepage. For those of you concerned by the thought of your favorite sci-fi franchise being shoddily moved to MMO territory (and, come on, if you're Star Trek fans you must be used to the name being a bit abused), we were reassured by Jack Emmert's letter to the community:

There are few other fictional backgrounds that fit the MMORPG medium so well. After all, Star Trek was never about a single character, ship or even planet; Star Trek was always about an entire universe. And MMORPGs are uniquely suited to create such a thing and allow players to explore every inch. Admittedly, Star Trek has its challenges. We want to make a game that best captures the real essence of Star Trek. We see Star Trek as much about exploration as combat. As much about the variety of alien civilizations as it is about the core Vulcans, Klingons, Humans, etc. It's going to be an exciting ride over the coming months as we begin to unveil STO. I can't wait.

For those of you who can't get enough STO news, on August 10th Cryptic will be unveiling the first gameplay footage at the Official Star Trek Convention in Vegas (if you aren't going to be there, never fear -- they'll stream it on the web, too!) and there are new forums packed full of fans for you to geek out with.

Gallery: Star Trek Online Gallery

Tags: countdown, cryptic, cryptic-studios, jack-emmert, star-trek, sto

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

coprolit said on 5:57AM 7-28-2008

From the "About" page on the homepage the overall gameplay sounds a lot like Pirates og the Burning Sea: exploration, vessel combat and a bit of avatar combat.

MrJuliano said on 7:51AM 7-28-2008

One of our community members found a very interesting STO picture I've put on our front page showing a Klingon officer giving orders to a Vulcan, a Human and a Ferengi. The picture is originally found at the STO website.

Link to original picture: http://www.startrekonline.com/gallery/screenshots

Link to enlarged screenie: http://www.sto-zone.com/blog

MrJuliano said on 7:54AM 7-28-2008

Sorry, meant to add that it is the background picture behind the screenshots on the STO page. Kinda hard to see unless you look for it.

Krystalle Voecks said on 10:36AM 7-28-2008

Amusingly enough, we'd actually pulled that one and another of the backing images and played with them a bit. You'll see them later today in the One Shots feature. ;)

(Yes, we've got some total fanboys and fangirls on staff. hehe)

MrJuliano said on 10:39AM 7-28-2008

Woot! I love this site :)

Krystalle Voecks said on 12:40PM 7-28-2008

Correction: We decided to break it off into its own post which will run at 3:00. Too good to run under that header with all the "oooh, maybe it's this race!" talk. hehe

I'll add in a link to your site for some linklove, though. ;)