Star Trek Online ‘Season 11: New Dawn’ Goes for Exploration

The war in Star Trek Online is over, if you want it.

With the end of the 5-year Iconian War, Cryptic Studios’ Star Trek free-to-play MMO STO will be moving on from warfare to the standard modus operandi of Trek with Season 11: New Dawn, according to Kyt Dotson at SiliconANGLE. Up until now, STO players have seen a great deal of conflict and combat and soon, sometime this year, all that will come to an end.

Amid the additions coming in New Dawn, players can expect a focus on exploration over conflict.

This means that STO will be moving towards a new exploration system–and something to replace the old one, removed in 2014, is most welcome.

The old exploration system provided a much-needed respite from other portions of the game, but it also had some odd flaws:

The system worked by asking players to fly around unexplored spaces and visit planets. At these planets a number of pre-scripted events could occur: a civilization might ask for aid and the captain would deliver medical supplies or perhaps entertainment provisions (the latter felt a bit silly), perhaps foes threaten a colony or planet that needed to be fought in space or on the ground, and sometimes strange energy readings would be detected and an away party would go down to scan them.

In all, the number of scripted events were extremely limited and repetitive. And sometimes—due to the mad-libs style of randomization—the scripted events were extremely silly. Why exactly would the Borg—a hypertechnological collective that destroys what it cannot assimilate—be messing in the petty politics of some backwater city in a distant star system?

Season 11 will also introduce new voice acting from Chase Masterson to reprise her role as Mirror Leeta. It will bring a new system called the Admiralty System that will allow players to send ships out on missions (similar to the Duty Officer System but with longer missions and greater rewards.)

News tip via SiliconANGLE.