Why Are Star Trek Online Designs Coming to TV?
This isn’t the first time Online designs have made their way into the continuity of Star Trek’s movies and TV—in fact, it was Picard itself that lead the way last year with its season two premiere including four designs from the MMORPG in a fleet of Starfleet ships, marking the first time content from the game been canonized in the Trek TV timeline. Continuing that for Picard’s farewell is unsurprising.
But it’s also just a nice way to honor what Star Trek Online did for the franchise in almost a decade of operation with no contemporary Star Trek series running alongside it. For many, even now, its version of a post-Romulan-supernova timeline in the early 25th century is still the definitive rendition of Star Trek’s future instead of the glimpses we’ve seen in shows like Picard so far. If the shows and future movies that could be set in this time period can’t bring over story elements from Online, canonizing generations of the game’s ship designs is a nod to its world—one that kept Trek ticking in people’s minds when it wasn’t on screen.
