Where approximately 60 million have gone before
Well, let’s file this one under “Things I absolutely didn’t see coming,” shall we? When the folks at Cryptic began teasing a “big announcement” related to Star Trek Online, I figured it would be more news related to last week’s big announcement of a new expansion pack for the game, the Original Series-themed Agents of Yesterday. Except they were going bigger. Like, console-port-announcement-bigger.
So yeah, Star Trek Online will debut on PS4 and Xbox One this Fall. Like its PC version, it will be free-to-play, and all the fruits of its continuing mission will be available to console players, including the content from all 11 seasonal updates and both the Legacy of Romulus and Delta Rising expansions.
The game will also get a complete overhaul in the UI and control department to make it play nice with controllers (the current PC iteration can take up the whole keyboard), as well as graphical and lighting upgrades across both console and PC to prettify the game’s six-year-old engine.
This is all well and good, as I really do like Star Trek Online, and having a new audience to tap can only really help the game as a whole. On the other hand, though, playing the game since its 2010 release has given me unique insight.
That in mind, I really hope Cryptic polish up some of the ways in which STO is absolutely janky as all hell before it gets to consoles. Seriously, if I hadn’t been there to see the changes happen between 2010 and now, some of the jank in STO would make me think it was some kind of early-access joint.
However it turns out, I’ll at least give it a look.
