Star Trek Online often does some very fun things to add new ships to the game, but its newest trailer is a step above—less of an ad for shiny new starships and more of a faux documentary about the evolution of interstellar exploration and galactic civilization.
Timed as part of celebrations of not just Trek‘s 60th birthday but also STO‘s 16th anniversary as well as the 25th anniversary of Star Trek: Enterprise, the 14-minute documentary highlights four Enterprise–era ships coming to the game: two Starfleet vessels, the NP Miracle Worker Light Escort and the NV Multi-Mission Temporal Cruiser, as well as some Andorian and Vulcan ships, the Kumari Pilot Light Battlecruiser and the Suurok Intel Science Destroyer. But instead of simply highlighting what the new ships look like and what their capabilities are in-game, it instead frames it all as a retrospective, in-universe documentary about these ships’ historical role around the time of the birth of the Federation.
It’s a clever way to explore a period of Star Trek continuity we’ve never really seen on-screen—the period between the end of Star Trek: Enterprise and the start of the classic original series, where the nascent Federation begins in earnest, covering things like the Earth-Romulan war and so on. But it’s also fascinating to frame this from the perspective of Star Trek Online‘s own contemporary continuity, an early 25th-century setting after the Federation has endured so many more existential threats. It creates its own sentimental reasons for a retrospective, beyond the actual real-world ones!
Considering Star Trek Online‘s own symbiotic relationship with the current era of Trek on TV, it’s a fitting way to flip things around—and certainly suitably special for the way all these real-world anniversaries have aligned.
The 16th Anniversary Enterprise Starship Bundle—which includes all four ships, alternate skin variants for each, the NX-class escort and its refit and an exclusive new skin for it, as well as extra ground gear inspired by Enterprise‘s weaponry and equipment, and more—is available in the PC version of Star Trek Online now.
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