Tuesday 14 June 2016

First Star Trek VR game, Bridge Crew

Ubisoft have announced a new Star Trek video game, Bridge Crew, which will be the first virtual reality Star Trek game.

Due out in the autumn, Bridge Crew is set on a new ship from the nuTrek timeline, the USS Aegis, and allows up to four players to assume roles on the bridge, as either captain, helmsperson, engineer, or tactical. It will be available on PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

The game was announced at E3 (the Electronic Entertainment Expo), where a trailer debuted, showing game-play, with a special crew of generation spanning Star Trek actors: Levar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), and Karl Urban (Doctor McCoy):



StarTrek.com have described the mission of the USS Aegis as follows:
The overriding mission is as follows: Explore a largely uncharted sector of space known as The Trench, in hopes of locating a suitable new home world for the decimated Vulcan populace -- while coming into direct conflict with the vaunted Klingon Empire.
CNet have a good report up from playing the demo at E3, and note that the Vulcan mission is just the starting point for the game's story. Additionally the game will be able to randomly generate exploration missions.

Using the hand tracking the virtual reality environment will bring all players to life accurately, right down to lip-syncing. And if you don't have four friends with VR equipment, AI can fill in any unoccupied roles, right down to playing solo, in which case you will default to being captain, but can swap between roles as the mission demands.

Here are some screenshots released from the game:






Plus the crew of actors playing:





2 comments:

  1. Just what we need -- more horrible-looking ships!

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  2. I actually tend to like "ugly" ships a lot.

    Problem with a lot of the NuTrek designs, though, is that they're not ugly... they somehow manage to be both sleek *and* ugly, and horridly unbalanced, which just makes them not work well. Of course, there are exceptions: the Kelvin was super-sexy.

    ...

    Anyway... a VR bridge? Great idea. But how many fans really want to get on the bridge of a random starship, let alone a random NuTrek starship? You'd think most fans would want to see a VR bridge that they're already fond of, or at least familiar with. TOS bridge, the Movie Bridges, Ent-D's bridge, Voyager's Bridge, Defiant's bridge, etc., etc.

    And what's really weird is that a game could easily accommodate all of those bridge designs (and more) since they are all functionally identical.

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