After concluding the Mirror Universe arc earlier this year, Star Trek Online is set to begin a new multiverse story arc.
Get “Unraveled”
Gearbox Publishing and Cryptic Studios just announced Star Trek Online: Unraveled, the latest season of the long-running MMO launching May 9, 2023 for PC.
Here is a quick summary of the new story:
Following events from the conclusion of the Mirror Universe story arc, “Terran Gambit”, your Captain will embark on a humanitarian scientific mission with Captain Kuumaarke (voiced by Kipleigh Brown) to stabilize the Na’kuhl sun. However, this mission is interrupted by a discovery; a transdimentional Reality Vortex is disrupting space-time throughout the Multiverse. A conflict ensues with the Tholians, who reveal that constant use of time and dimensional travel has caused these vortices – and your Captain is partly to blame.
They also released a new announcement trailer prominently featuring the USS Enterprise-F. The ship recently seen in season 3 of Star Trek: Picard was based on a design from Star Trek Online.
UPDATE about the Enterprise F trailer. Gearbox has sent us the following note:
Correction: We wanted to feature the USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-F) as a celebration of the ship that was introduced in Star Trek Online, and also announce Star Trek Online’s new season, Unraveled. The ship is currently in the game, however, players can look forward to an updated model of the ship next month. More details will be revealed soon! We apologize for any confusion.
Star Trek Online Unraveled includes the following content:
- New Episode – Wish Upon a Star: While on a scientific humanitarian mission with Captain Kuumaarke, your Captain will discover a group of Tholians interacting with a Reality Vortex. Their intentions and goals are unknown.
- New Task Force Operation – Leviathan: A five-player space Task Force Operation simulating a Trench Run exercise across “The Other” in a “What if?” scenario if the “Terran Gambit” arc had ended differently.
- Two new Patrols: Jupiter Gauntlet and Bringers of War, based off of the “Terran Gambit” story arc. New Hard Mode is included as well for an extra challenge.
- Lockbox and Lobi Store Items: Strange New World items and the T6 Gorn Hunter Pilot Raider have been added to the Infinity Lockbox. Starfleet and Majalan items from Season 1 of Strange New World have been added to the Lobi Crystal Consortium.
Star Trek Online is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game that allows players to explore the Star Trek universe from within. It is currently available on PC, PlayStation®4 and Xbox One. To download and play Star Trek Online today for free, visit playstartrekonline.com.
Keep up with all the Star Trek Online news and updates here at TrekMovie.com.
Overdesigned and ugly
I mostly agree. I don’t dislike the overall shape, but it does look like overstretched toffee. I don’t understand this 2-color scheme started with the Enterprise-E. A ship’s hull should be white, like the refit enterprise of TMP. I don’t like the stern of the ship, where the captain’s yacht docks. Just too much going on there. I think overdesigned is the perfect word.
I agree on the color scheme. Popular video games like Mass Effect have ship designers incorporating more random color paneling. That’s great for those franchises, but I like my starships looking like starships.
For a 24th century flagship looks good. But why not bring in Captain Shelby and give us some of her adventures?
Also cool… that the 24th century ships give out to ships based on 23rd century designs like the neo-Connies from back when space was really wild. The Ent-G is pretty much what the Ent-A or B (and TNG) should have been from the start!
I liked the ships from TNG, DS9, and Voyager. Liked Roddenberry wanting to move on and get a different aesthetic.
Don’t play the game, but I’ve seen some cut footage and the bridge for this class of ship is evidently gigantic — something akin the Andy Probert’s early ideas about what the bridge of the D might look like, until he faced up to the fact that there just wasn’t the room onstage for it.
Unfortunately the bridge Shelby was on didn’t amount to much, visually. I understand that money was at a premium, but given that her scene was mostly seen on the Titan main viewer anyway, a virtual set might have been better.
Shelby wasn’t the long-term captain of the E-F. The tie-in videos from the beginning of the season established the F had multiple captains during her lifetime. Shelby was just in command for her decommissioning.
I like to think she got a couple awesome adventures in. The character deserved it.
“why not bring in Captain Shelby and give us some of her adventures” – or, here’s a wild concept… how about a BRAND NEW character? Wouldn’t that be a funny concept for new Trek.
In the game Star Trek Online an Andorian character was Captain of the Enterprise. The show kind of f’d up the games chronology.
What a weirdly ugly ship design.
Terrible music. Terrible voiceover. Step it up people, this is the Enterprise.
So much better than that mediocre Enterprise-G, what a downgrade that ship is
Look, I think it’s great the Enterprise-F and many Star Trek Online ships made it onto TV, but some of the freak out I’ve seen on Twitter about the F’s brief cameo from the STO community is just ridiculous. The ship was acknowledged, and it’s officially part of the Enterprise lineage in official, on-screen canon. That is a win. Getting upset that there will be no continuing voyages of that ship is pointless now that they’ve moved on. Accept it.
Interesting interview. You can see the enthusiasm with Al for Star Trek and the game. Sadly though, there is more to this story than this interview describes. Star Trek Online has some serious problems around content release and quality control. It seems the people who write the game don’t play the game they developed, and who, having finished the coding, abandon every system within it for all time due to no obvious monetization options, disinterest and a moribund imagination. Obvious examples are the DOFFING system the Admiralty System, the Fleet System (although there have been some minor updates here, half of which still don’t work). The quality control in the game is appalling. There are bugs which go back 10 years and brand new bugs after almost every patch. An obvious one you can see right now if you login is 80% of the player ships are called InvalidEntityName rather than USS whatever. Disconnections are rife amongst players from all over the world, you can have two accounts running on the same PC going into the same event and one of them will disconnect, the Devs themselves get disconnected from their own game during live streams. Only a month ago the entire login system failed so nobody was able to login to the game for 3 days. Their blogs are full of inaccuracies and typos, the livestreams are very unprofessional and get interrupted by phone calls and cats! Even the Premiere of their new season announcement yesterday at 2pm was delayed by 45 minutes, 500 people were waiting to watch it and nothing happened. It’s sloppy, very sloppy. Content releases are very few and far between. The stories, when we do get them, are very well made (assuming they work, they are often bugged on release), however, their last arc of 6 episodes took them 16 months to release fully, that’s about 6 hours of content in 16 months. Most of what they add to the game are ships from the Star Trek shows, most of which are locked behind a gambling paywall deep inside a lock box. Star Trek Online is kept alive by players who are thoroughly devoted to the ideals and lore of Star Trek, much to the surprise of the developers who find they can continue to maximise profit and minimise effort, occasionally adding a small nugget of content whilst continually pushing sales of their ships and promoting gambling mechanics with insanely low odds of winning. Such is the love for the genre that players will continue to throw money at the game for the chance to captain their favourite starship whilst negotiating the myriad bugs and disconnections the game presents on a daily basis. STO continues because it has a type of plot armour and because fans unreasonably expect the developers to do what they haven’t done year after year. As Albert Einstein said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so it seems therefore that all the fans of Star Trek Online are a little bit insane or at least not paying attention. The game will continue as long as there are Star Trek fans, but it will always be a subpar experience for the most part and a low tier MMO. For it to really shine and for the masses of missed opportunities to be realised will require serious investment. This is something fans of the game were hoping for when they were bought out last year by Gearbox/Embracer, sadly things have only deteriorated on the quality front since then and it seems clear that they were bought out as a profitable going concern, Gearbox skims off the profits and throw scraps back to the devs to keep the lights on. I am certain that Al, Thomas, Jonathan and many of the other devs would love to improve the game in a thousand different ways but their hands are seemingly tied and I don’t see anything changing. They will continue to do little for player retention whilst attracting new whales and gambling addicts to their game to buy the latest gamble box ship, whilst the devoted fans are left kicking their heels with little to do. I run many fleets in the game and have over 30,000 hours of playtime, retaining players is our number one difficulty, even those who come onboard and spend a shed load of cash on the game often disappear within a month or two after they’ve finished the 60 hours of content the game has to offer. Star Trek Online is the best and worst Star Trek MMO because it’s the only Star Trek MMO, if another Star Trek MMO is released tomorrow and includes really good content, is a relatively bug-free experience and includes things that STO doesn’t… Read more »
I play Star Trek Fleet Command. It’s on PC now after starting as a mobile game. Yes it has some of the same problems, I’m level 26 and have to reload the game every so often when I get reset to level 1 for example, and the prices you have to pay for some of the characters is ridiculous but there’s new content monthly and they work on most of the bugs.