Massively Exclusive: Star Trek Online announces EU relaunch, double XP weekend

Star Trek may feature universal translators, but the crew at Cryptic has to make do with old fashioned techniques until the future catches up with us. As such, the studio has announced that it is relaunching Star Trek Online in Europe to support its French- and German-speaking players.

Starting right now, the game, website, forums, and game support will be available in all three languages. To further cater to European players, Cryptic has vowed to add more EU-friendly event timeslots.

Executive Producer Dan Stahl hopes this will spread STO across the world: "The launch of Star Trek Online in Europe is the culmination of our efforts over the past several years to bring gamers the Star Trek universe on a truly massive scale."

All players can benefit from this European relaunch, as Q's coming back to celebrate with a double-XP bonus weekend. Anyone who logs in from today through Monday, April 2nd, at 1:00 p.m. EDT, will not only benefit from the a skill point and bridge officer point boost but can claim a free IDIC Tribble of his or her very own. The Tribble provides a unique buff to your character based on his, her, or its class -- and if you manage to get all three buffs on you at once, you'll be granted an additional boost to damage, resistance, and health regen.

[Source: Cryptic press release]

Reader Comments (18)

Good news!

But will the forums be separated like they used to be? I know there was a German and French Forum (and it was text in those languages) or will they be combined?

It's good to see an international effort once more in any case!

I guess this is good but what I'd really like is voice acting throughout the game. I still don't see how games like DCUO or even TOR can have full voiceovers while STO barely has anything past Leonard Nimoy's narration.

@Vic Fontaine It's called "budget" Vic. TOR and DCUO have *gargantuan* amounts of money behind them compared to Cryptic. STO is a VERY small game compared to them. Paying for a full contingent of union VO actors is NOT cheap and when looking at spending money on VO actors whose fess could easily fund a new mission or two in-game? Yeah - the choice is pretty clear I think. It's why the game uses so many of its employees as VO actors and why they don't come off as polished as the pros.

@Vic Fontaine I thought they had it right with just VO at the start and end of the featured episodes. Their cutscenes in general and those including a lot of VO just look cheap and don't work for me.

Anything that increases STOs surprisingly low EU population has to be a good thing after years of mistakes which started before the original launch with the EU publisher shambles.

@Vic Fontaine Atari lowballed the hell out of STO from the start and until they sold Cryptic off. Although the remastered eps and the last two featured series do have a lot of voicework.

@Vic Fontaine

Not every company has an 8-9 digit budget, Vic.

@Vic Fontaine
Geez I was not expecting so many people to jump at me.
Nonetheless, budget concerns aren't the problems of the consumer, and even if it were just employees reading lines I'd still prefer the option (assuming it can be turned off of course). That aside though, they got what I would think would be a very expensive license, and with so much Star Trek talent over the years it's a shame we don't have the voicework to go with it. It would be different if this were a new IP, but it's not.

I don't think most people understand what a difference that can make to many people, including people like me with dyslexia. Immersion issues aside it makes it SO MUCH EASIER to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the game.

@Vic Fontaine The IP isn't really a factor in their funds, CBS doesn't support or put any money in to the game, PWE are holding the pursestrings now, and before that, it was atari, notorious cheapskates.

They really can't be blamed for the situation, They clearly work very hard and achieve a lot with a smallish team in terms of studio size.

The game has a lot of other things it needs more urgently than vanity stuff like Voice acting right now, They're still trying to crank out episodes 'and' fix the lack of klingon content.

@Vic Fontaine I hate it when a game uses voice only occasionally or very piecemeal. It makes the game feel incomplete and cheap. Either give me full voice, or do away with the voice completely and just go with text.

Maybe I missed something. But couldn’t you play STO from Europe before? I have seen players from the UK, Germany, and France since launch.

@MickieeMack

Yes you can play it from anywhere. There is in fact only one cluster of servers and that is in America.

All they are doing is some forum translations and calling it a european launch ;)

@MickieeMack http://startrekonline.com/node/3018 Apparently the localization of the game wasn't complete.

Wow, as a guy with two lvl50 characters what do I care about this?

@(Unverified)

And as a reader of a gaming site why would I care about an announcement of how many characters you have? There are people out there who care about multilanguage support in STO to make it easier/more fun to play. There are people out there who want to see the STO userbase grow so there are more chances for the devs to make some money and push frequent updates.

@Chumpette
I signed up when the game went F2P but I am still just at the Lt. Cmd. lvl. Too much to play, not enough time, and as much as I love Star Trek this hasn't been high enough on my list to play outside of the 2 year celebration. So I do appriciate the news of this "double experience" weekend.

Fortunately we'd already planned an "MMO party" this weekend after the gang and I had so much fun with DCUO last weekend, and we'd already settled on STO for this weekend so the timing of this will be perfect for me. My goal is to level enough this weekend to get to make a KDF character ^_^.

@(Unverified) One word: tribble. :)

@(Unverified)
Two level 50s in STO is like saying you have one level 40 in WoW....not that big of a deal.

I'll just say that I've been pretty pleasantly surprised with STO. Never played it before it went F2P, but it seems fine at keeping my interest so far. Being a sincere TOS fan, I squee every time someone flies up in one of the Constitution-class vessels.

Massively Exclusive: Star Trek Online announces EU relaunch, double XP weekend

Reader Comments (18)

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 9:42AM Space Cobra said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 9:46AM Vic Fontaine said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 9:51AM TerilynnS said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:12AM Renko said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:29AM Joaquin Crowe said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:32AM Omali said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 11:51AM Vic Fontaine said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 3:57PM Azules said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:51PM Daemodand said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:12AM MickieeMack said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:30AM Verus said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 10:49AM saintnicster said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 12:00PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 12:25PM Chumpette said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 12:41PM Vic Fontaine said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:13PM BluegrassGeek said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 8:35PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 30th 2012 1:56AM Spron said

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