Gaming
Cryptic’s Upcoming Star Trek Online Expansion Features LeVar Burton
In general, fans of Star Trek Online and Star Trek will be pleased to hear that famed Star Trek actor LeVar Burton will reprise his role of Geordi La Forge in the upcoming expansion for Star Trek Online. However, that isn’t the only major feature of this expansion, known as Season 14. It will (obviously) continue the story from the previous Star Trek Online expansion (Season 13) and introduce several new pilotable ships and a strange, new world for players to explore; sorry, but there won’t be any new life or new civilizations to seek out…that we currently know of. Furthermore, the expansion will include plenty of new missions and even new levels of character progression.
For those of you who aren’t Star Trek fans, you might wonder what’s the big deal of one Star Trek alum starring in a Star Trek Online expansion. Well, to understand the importance, we need to back up a bit and talk about the game’s developers, Cryptic Studios. The company started off strong with the fantastic City of Heroes/Villains, a unique superhero-themed MMO many fans want to resurrect. However, the company had a falling-out with publisher NCSoft and was picked up by Perfect World Entertainment, a company that had varying degrees of success publishing Chinese MMOs but has become one of the bigger names in MMOs thanks in no small part to its acquisition of Cryptic. The company’s most recent titles, Neverwinter and Star Trek Online, are hailed as excellent celebrations of their respective properties. Both games were successful upon release, and their successes have attracted numerous famous names associated with Dungeons and Dragons and Star Trek to work on various collaborative efforts, which leads to even more success. Unlike other licensed games, the people who made those properties great are helping make Neverwinter and Star Trek Online stand out and feel like genuine Dungeons & Dragons/Star Trek experiences.
Unlike Neverwinter, which tends to stick with whatever expansions and modules Wizards of the Coast develops for the pen-and-paper version of Dungeons and Dragons (even though Neverwinter has attracted famous D&D names such as Christopher Perkins and R. A. Salvatore), Cryptic is free to do whatever it wants with Star Trek Online, and the company tends to create some crazy and brilliant stuff. Not only does the game use old, one-off species from throughout Star Trek history, including the Bluegill parasites from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Conspiracy,” Species M-113/Salt Vampires from the Star Trek episode “The Man Trap,” and the Voth from the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Distant Origin.” In fact, a lot of what the developers at Cryptic Studios make is considered canon, such as the Solanae (a previously unnamed species featured in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Schisms,”) creating the Bluegill and serving the Iconians, an ancient race that has only ever been mentioned in Star Trek and never seen. But that’s not where the influence of Cryptic Studios ends, as LeVar Burton is not the first Star Trek alum to act in Star Trek Online. Leonard Nimoy (Spock), Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar and Sela), Michael Dorn (Worf), Tim Russ (Tuvok), Robert Picardo (The EMH Doctor), and Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), just to name a few, have all reprised their roles in the game. In other words, LeVar Burton is the latest in a long line of famous actors who help make Star Trek Online the de facto Star Trek experience, regardless of players’ opinions on the inclusion of lockboxes in the game.
While I haven’t played Star Trek Online in a long time, writing about how the game’s devs creatively use alien species that were once merely throwaways makes me want to revisit the game. Well, that, and playing ingame quests that feature my favorite Star Trek actors who reprise their roles; I just love actors who are dedicated to continually portraying a particular character, regardless of the medium.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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