In 2010, at the launch of Star Trek Online, the spacefaring MMO opened on the Klingon War. In typical fashion, the Federation was desperately trying to sue for peace, while a klingon ambassador was doing everything he could to thwart it.
STO has always been a massive theme park full of nods to the classic shows, so naturally this arc was rooted in Star Trek’s legacy. At the centre of the story was Miral Paris, daughter of Voyager’s Tom Paris and B’Elanna Torres—a Federation officer who also happened to be the Kuvah’magh, a prophesied holy figure who was meant to bring the Klingon Empire back to its glory days.
If you’ve played through the arc since 2018, though, you’ll have noticed Miral’s absence. She was a victim of updates. The tutorial had been remade, and new seasons were going hard, which left this old storyline feeling a bit creaky—resulting in half of the episodes being cut.
That’s going to change today. After many years away, the Kuvah’magh is returning to the Klingon War, with a completely remade story that also features another Voyager throwback: the Doctor.
“We felt like it really wasn’t as representative of where the game was, as it needed to be,” says executive producer Thomas Marrone. “Because people were still playing through that content, even after adding the Discovery-themed Federation stuff, people were still, by and large, making what we call ‘normal Starfleet’, like 25th century Starfleet characters.”
Star Trek Online lets you create a captain from the Klingon Empire, Dominion, Romulan Republic and three eras of the Federation, but the TNG era start remains the most popular—unsurprisingly. This meant, post-tutorial, most players were jumping into ancient missions.
Thomas Marrone
Thomas Marrone has been working on Star Trek Online since 2010, serving as art director before becoming executive producer. His ship designs have also managed to escape STO, and you can see his Voyager B Pathfinder-class ship, along with the Enterprise F Odyssey-class ship, in Picard.
With today’s Undiscovered update, Star Trek Online is pausing its new storyline to dive back into this ancient one—but we’re not talking about some tweaked cutscenes and new VO. This is a full remake, with new dialogue, new maps and new rewards—including “some really advanced technology that allows the player to pick up a rock and throw it,” Marrone jokes. This is a nod to the classic Kirk vs Gorn fight in TOS, which you’ll soon be able to recreate.
But the Kuvah’magh storyline is still firmly rooted in classic Trek, in this idea of a character with a foot in two worlds, something that crops up time and time again, starting with Spock, and continuing with Data, Worf and Seven of Nine.
“I think the best examples of Star Trek are when we see characters wrestling with parts of themselves,” says Marrone, “and then finding the better angel of their nature, and moving in that direction.”
Marrone’s favourite Star Trek film is Undiscovered Country (obviously the Undiscovered update is a nod to that), where we see how Kirk is “so flatly racist against the klingons”, but he’s still able to find the root of that prejudice and overcome it. Like so much of Trek, there’s this potent thread of optimism. And that’s an important facet of Miral’s storyline: as the Kuvah’magh she could plunge the galaxy into war, but instead she’s using her klingon and human legacy to bring these warring factions together.
Flo McQuibban
Flo McQuibban has been working on Star Trek since 2020. She was the main writer on Paradox’s Star Trek: Infinite and now crafts STO’s narrative as well as directing veteran Star Trek actors like Jeri Ryan.
“It just feels very quintessentially Trek,” says senior narrative designer Flo McQuibban. “For me, when I got into it, I was baffled at how much it’s about first contact, diplomacy, empathy. It really set itself aside from lots of other things out there in that it always provided a moral of the story. It got into topics like ethics and the other, and you need understanding and empathy, and things like that. And I think you definitely have a head start if you’re multicultural or bridging gaps between two worlds or societies.”
Marrone accepts that there’s a bit of “ludonarrative dissonance” in this, since Star Trek Online’s primary method of interaction is blowing stuff up in space and on the ground. The action needs to persist. Ultimately, though, at least if you’re a Federation character, the end goal is still peace. “Ultimately, the thing that solves the problem is not violence.”
As a Star Trek fan who’s been devouring the shows and movies for nearly four decades, part of the appeal of Star Trek Online is getting to see Star Trek actors reprise their roles. In Undiscovered, Miral is once again voiced by Lisa Locicero, who played Miral in both Voyager and STO. This time she’s joined by her godfather, Voyager’s Doctor, which sees Robert Picardo return to his most iconic role.
“He just went right back into it,” says McQuibban. “Robert Picardo is very cool and he just is and embodies the Doctor—it was an awesome experience.”
Getting to see these actors jump back into their beloved characters is one of the perks of working on STO, which Marrone calls a “privilege”. And there have been so many. Leonard Nimoy provided a ton of narration back in 2010, and since then the game has brought back Kate Mulgrew, Wil Wheaton, Gates McFadden and so many others.
The deep cuts feel just as special. Lisa Locicero played Miral for a single episode of Voyager, Endgame, when we got to meet a grown-up Miral from an alternate universe. That was almost a decade before STO launched. 25 years later, she’s playing Miral again.
“Man, Lisa Locicero knocked it out of the park,” says Marrone. “She did such a great job. This episode, I’m really excited for people to see more of her, and I’m happy to say that we’ll be having her back in the future as well. It’s a lot of great stuff to look forward to, but just also a lot to be proud of.”
Miral’s role on Voyager had a lot of implications, but because she was a baby, with the exception of one episode, there’s so much room to develop the character. “It gives us room to work together with Lia to understand how we want her character to be, and if this story had continued, what does that look like,” says McQuibban. “The kind of path I took is trying to do justice to the existing material and work with the talent who embodied that character to make sure we really deliver on what already exists and make everything that comes after feel natural, natural and seamless, like it could fit into the IP.”
Undiscovered introduces another deep cut, too: a very large Bird of Prey known as the K’vort. Players will be able to earn this ship by participating in an event for 20 days. It was originally introduced in TNG as a klingon ship that could realistically go toe-to-toe with the beefy Enterprise D. It’s basically a massive Bird of Prey that has a hanger with regular-sized Birds of Prey chilling inside it. It’s a momma bird.
It’s cropped up a few times since, including in an episode of Lower Decks, but the design was tweaked a lot over the years. The good news is Cryptic is providing variants. My klingon captain is going to be so pleased.
The Lower Decks version wasn’t actually given a designation, but because of its size it definitely seemed like a K’vort to Marrone. “So when I saw that, I was like, ‘Finally, here’s our shot to get the K’vort in the game’, because we’re just going to take this shit from Lower Decks and we’re going to call it the K’vort, because it is a giant Bird of Prey. And then, and we’ll bring that, we’ll make it a player ship in Star Trek Online. And so that’s exactly what we did, and that became the event reward for Undiscovered.”
So the update has something for people keen to play more classic episodes, and for the ship fiends, but what about captains who just want to have some fast-paced fun making things explode in space? That’s what the revamped Deep Space Encounters are for.
McQuibban says these escapades are “narrative light”, though Cryptic is introducing mission givers for both the Federation and KDF, new characters created just for this purpose, who you’ll get to know as you jump into new space adventures. Primarily, though, these are short, repeatable missions that represent the day-to-day activities of a captain.
“As a kid, you want to be Captain Kirk, my hero, but sometimes I just want to live on the Enterprise and hang out,” says Marrone. “That’s kind of what I see the Deep Space Encounters like, fulfilling that part of the fantasy of, ‘I’m just like a Starfleet captain, and it’s time to go on my patrol, what’s going to happen?'”
Cryptic has tinkered with old episodes before, and over the course of the last 16 years it’s changed, shelved and introduced all sorts of systems. Undiscovered is not a novelty in that regard. But at the same time, it does feel like part of this new chapter of Star Trek Online. The studio is no longer part of Embracer, former CEO and MMO veteran Jack Emmert has returned, and there’s just a feeling of optimism about the game’s future—something I’ll be digging into more in another article.
In the meantime, though, the Klingon War is beckoning once again.
Read the full article here
