Editing Star Trek (section)

=== Star Trek Online ===
''Star Trek Online'' is the free-to-play online game built by Cryptic Studios and run by <s>Infogrames</s> <s>Atari</s> <s>Perfect World</s> Gearbox. With an official license CBS, recurring characters voiced by various Trek alumni, and a license to include references to both the reboot chronology (officially known as the "Kelvin Timeline") and recent shows, it's the closest existing thing to an "official" continuation of the "Prime" timeline, and contains history and fluff extending nearly 30 years from the end of Star Trek: Nemesis.

Taking place in the 25th century (around the year 2409-2412), the Hobus supernova (the event that kicked Nero and Spock into the past alternate timeline during Star Trek 2009) has devastated the Romulans, resulting in the near-collapse and fragmentation of the Romulan Star Empire. This causes tensions between a resurgent Klingon Empire and the Federation which blows up into a war. Members of the new (and nicer) breakaway Romulan Republic play both sides in exchange for development aid.

There are six possible starts for characters.
*Current Starfleet - The standard starting point.
*Klingons - You are a warrior of the Empire! Qapla' warrior! Today is a good day to die!
*Romulan Republic - Part of a breakaway state after the destabilization of the Star Empire, you get a choice on which major faction (Starfleet or Klingon) you can join later on.
*Dominion - Quite possibly the least played, you do start at level 60 (basically right at end game since levels cap at 65) and you pick which major faction to join too, but you're part of the Dominion so...
*TOS Starfleet - With all the redshirt shenanigans that entails. A time anomaly and weird mission later and you're now in the standard timeline for STO.
*DSC Starfleet - Similar to TOS, comes with a series of starting missions that are possibly the best any of the starts have. Drawback is that it is couched in the Discovery era.

The game contains deep cuts from all over Trek lore, and answers questions about what happened to various key characters, including Data (took over the Enterprise-E, then retired), the Enterprise (now an even bigger ship run by Andorian captain Shon), and the Voyager crew (it took Harry Kim 30 years to make Captain lol). Raises barely-shown, unnamed, and otherwise obscure races to new prominence as big bad foes, including the Iconians (ancient aliens with god complexes who mutated into energy beings, currently live in Dyson Spheres and were only defeated by a predestination paradox), Tzenkethi (4-armed halo guys whose weak points are the FRONT of their shields), and Na'kuhl (the alien nazis from Enterprise as time-traveling terrorists who blame the Federation for a throwaway event that happened in TNG's beach episode).

The two most recent major arcs center on a Klingon power struggle and civil between mostly TNG-era Klingons and some DSC-era Klingons (and you also go to Klingon Hell) followed very quickly by a Terran arc with heavy tie-ins to the original Star Trek movie's V'Ger. While the Klingon arc made some players more than a little irked due to not only its length (spread out over several "seasons" of play) and it's attempt to shoehorn in the controversial Discovery era, the Terran arc has been widely praised and brought back a very notorious character from the TNG era.

Ostensibly free to play, but don't let that fool you... the ''not-so-micro''transactions are the only reason the lights stay on.

That said, the game does get really decent updates and now is in a groove of running two seasonal events ("Summer on Risa" and "Q's Winter Wonderland") as well as a year-long campaign, as well as a smattering of smaller ones throughout the year. The seasonal ones tend to give you really good shit (often a ship, other times major equipment that can help define an entire character) but the year-long campaign gives you a choice of 3 options to pick from - a shit ton of in-game currency known as Lobi (enough to get a Lobi ship and a little extra), TWO regular Zen Store Tier 6 ships (these unlock for all characters, by the way), or one of the "Premium" ships (ones you typically get from lockbox drops). The only major stipulation is the Premium ship can't be one that has been released in that specific year, but previous years ones are fair game to grab.