Thirty years have passed since the camp histrionics of Star Trek: Nemesis, the last Star Trek film. Star Trek Online's lead designer Jack Emmert, who also worked on office favourites City of Heroes and Villains, warns that "friends have become enemies and enemies have become friends."
You captain a starship right from the start, but you're not technically a Captain in rank: that's an accolade you'll have to earn, along with bigger ships. When you do earn a new ship, you can customise its nacelles, stanchions and saucer.
The regular cast of your space-faring adventure will be your Bridge Crew, heading up Science, Navigation and Security.
ZoomEmmert equates these guys to pets in other MMORPGs: they follow your instructions, but you don't control them directly. Like you, they level up in rank, but you're the one who spends their attribute points, and chooses their skills and equipment.
The rest of your ship is populated by General Crew: expendable red-shirts. These guys are more like a resource: different races confer different bonuses to your ship at large, depending on their natural talents.
You control your ship directly; space combat involves issuing nerdsome orders like "Security to deck 5! Hull breach on deck 6! Divert power to main shields!" Boarding actions are a part of combat, presumably once your shields are down.
Initially there'll be two factions players can belong to: Starfleet or the Klingons. That selection will eventually expand, Emmert promises, to include Romulans and the Dominion. We can only imagine that Starfleet will be the overwhelmingly popular choice, so let's hope player-versus-player combat isn't numbers-dependent.
The choice of races isn't limited to human and Klingon, needless to say: not only can you be a Vulcan, Andorian (antennae), Tellarite (hideous hairy pigmen) or Ferengi (shell ears), you can even design your own race.
Assuming you go with the Star Trekkers themselves, your orders come from Starfleet Central Command, in the form of Tours of Duty: sequential missions that take you to worlds explored or unexplored. Emmert claims his development team have created "A system of infinite exploration. We will be creating new planets, solar systems, civilisations that you as players might be the first to ever see."
Once you arrive at a planet, you get to choose which crew members you want to have beam down with you, and then you're planetside. The surface environments look lovely, and combat here is fast-paced and cover-based.
Emmert gives a few tantalising examples of the game's "dynamic content": the Borg might invade a sector, and you're tasked with taking it back. "Or who knows, the Tholians could get a bit uppity." Exciting!
The idea of walking around your ship, then piloting it manually, getting into a fleet battle, then warping out to some unknown planet and beaming down - it's the bottled dreams of a million geeks. Now that one of the few studios who can accurately boast they've made a fun MMORPG are in charge, optimism seems only logical.
If we can boldy go where no player has gone before, we're sold.
