Television. The first frontier. As of this night in 1967, Star Trek made its first voyage onto tv screens 47 yrs. ago. Since then it’s legacy is still felt across the sci-fi genre and few sci-fi films don’t owe something to Gene Roddenberry’s visionary wagon-train in the stars. What about its video-games? In light of this years Star Trek movie tie-in and others, Trekkies’ favorite series hasn’t exactly experienced the best of treatment. After my earlier blogging proposals to Star Wars’s future in the virtual world, I break down what I believe would piece together the Star Trek game for the ages.
From Star Trek: Conquest to DAC, most Star Trek games have made the error of focusing far too much on pre-built ship combat. Ideally, players would simply jump in as the character they’ve created themselves. In the manner of Star Trek Online’s attempt at this, your character’s race, gender, build, and other essentials would be up to you, but think about expanding it much farther. Every Star Trek crew’s essentially one big family, so why not customize your entire staff as the captain? From your first officer to your communications officer, engineer, doctor, security chief, transporter tech, etc, you’d be the boss. Further, they’d have deep, complex options for each player to have a very personalized back story that involved their age as much as their degree of training. All of these characters could be dropped into the game and encountered in any way you see fit to eventually join your crew when it coincides with the story just like a tv show episode.
By allowing the player to create just about everyone on their team, the emotional connection to each character is easier to establish which would aid the developers in telling a compelling story. This would also draw in more players interested in creating an NPC and watching them develop. What if you fall in love with your first officer? Or develop a grudge agains your engineer for those late repair estimates? Or how ‘bout that saucy nurse?. . . You’d build the story as the writer of your own show and that would make each player’s experience unique compared to everyone else as the ultimate water-cooler discussion.
With that said, we still play Star Trek games expecting to play with the established characters we all love. Assuming it was set in the 24th-century, you could easily interact alongside Captain Picard, Sisko, or Janeway, whether as a colleague on a vital story-mission or even as their friend if you got to know them well enough. Heck, even throw in time-travel and have Kirk and give William Shatner a priceless voice-over gig. That way players would never have to worry about developers screwing up their sense of control with established series canon yet keeping a big draw for series veterans.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Star Trek game without a devotion to exploration. Developers should cram the game with constantly evolving new species and planets that the player can discover and interact with. It’s an understatement to say that the universe is a big place and it’s always a bitter disappointment when developers don’t open Pandora’s box and limit restrictions on travel. This is easily a no-brainer, but games tend to create the perception of infinite travel and exploration while hog-tying the player into specific zones and instances through story elements and lazy excuses.
Star Trek is hugely vast in its scope, so developers would have to pick an era and go with it. The Next Generation seems the most logical. There’s a considerably high number of species by this point, it’s the most popular, recognized, and still has large stretches of space unexplored. Voyager occurs after TNG and plays up the unexplored space angle, but the dilemma of needing the United Federation to provide certain expected game mechanics like upgrades and purchases would be a sticky wicket. It’d be a bit lame to feature a game where the player was essentially alone in a vast sector but somehow managed to buy parts for their ship and the like. There’s also TNG’s design aspect that would appeal to fans. The Holo-Deck would provide nearly limitless possibilities, from multiplayer “death match” mini games to even clever Star Trek cross-overs that fit into the game itself. Also consider the inclusion of John de Lancie’s Q character popping up for a challenge mode of fighting ridiculously tough enemies with a hilarious narration.
First and foremost, the story a Star Trek title should have no real super objective, instead featuring a number of wild, untamed worlds and a few civilized ones in the manner of MMOs like Final Fantasy XIV or like Star Trek Online had in a deeper, larger way. Developers could focus on filling the world with tons of adventures waiting to be activated and the player to feel like they truly exist in a world where any number of things can happen, not simply treading water until they trigger an event that forwards the story, instead they are the story. If there were instructions at all, they could be included in an entertaining, character building way via a prologue with your crew mates at StarFleet academy or even a Mass Effect 2 style action-sequence of a starship being blown apart in an emergency as the opening credits roll.
When faced with a non-linear sampling of choices, that choice should be quite real complete with linear consequences in a Star Trek RPG. This helps developers create tension, drama, replay value, and even more reason to care about consequences and even check them all out. Like Telltale’s The Walking Dead, these consequences could best be done in episodic sequences.
(Make it so or not to make it so?)
In a typical “episode” of the game, a planet’s distress signal says that a nasty creature is devouring people by the dozens and farting toxic gas! Will your captain look the other way and keep on ‘till morning, or lead an away team yourself with your First Officer and Chief Engineer? Or maybe you take a bunch of your dumbest red-shirts just to seem them die horribly in that lost episode of “Everyone Died.” Or maybe you stay behind on the ship and watch the carnage from your command chair and delegate ship responsibilities. But what if someone does die on your watch? What would the fallout look like with their peers, friends, and families responses?. . .
Often players never seem to get what they want in one game, instead having to play several to enjoy one aspect of a game here and there. Star Trek could combat this issue by implementing a sliding management system. Is the player a detailed micromanager that must control every aspect of the game and its characters? They adjust the slider accordingly so that every decision requires their input. What about the player that just wants to shoot stuff without all the pretense? They would adjust their slider to allow the computer to manage none essential issues like character development, combat scripts and tactics. This would allow the player the option to let the computer research and implement upgrades, create weapons and apply training, or take the wheel and be creative. Or simply oversee the different projects and approve or disapprove the various efforts.
If the player was able to create, train, and cultivate every aspect of the crew and equipment, then those pieces can move about autonomously from the player’s direct input. That could create the Star Trek experience of watching in horror while men and women under your command are butchered because you’re curious.
Lastly, the inevitable amount of Star Trek DLC (hopefully fairly priced) should basically be modules of self contained stories that take place within the universe. It’ll introduce a new race, a new dilemma, and other goodies. It could start off as an emergency message that’ll send the player and their crew rocketing off to the rescue. If the story itself isn’t pushing the player toward some universe ending event one would assume should be the primary focus, then the DLC could be included at any point in the player’s story, not just a bit extra to do after the player has saved the crap out of the universe.
It’s easy to say that I love Star Trek at this point, but such proposals for licensed video-games always come with a difficult balancing act for developers. Though much of my love of Rocksteady’s Arkham games come from simple concept of gliding around as Batman, it’s indeed the story, setting, and characters that matter as much if not more than gameplay. It must be playable and it must be enjoyable, but above all it must be definable as Star Trek. That’s the kind of formula that Rock Steady succeeded with in this gamer’s mind and if someone, anyone, could do that with a Star Trek game, I’d be more than a happy camper. I’d literally show up on that person’s doorstep with gifts. More than my own fandom aside, it’d be another bit of proof that the licensed game can be done right and that video-games can still reach a wider world. That’d be, in short, sweeter than a pile of gold-pressed latinum.