STO - Genesis and Star Trex IX

If you ever wondered how the movie Star Trek IX and Star Trek Online interact you can now find out fo yourself.

How do Star Trek Online and the new movie interact, and where does the timeline diverge?

In the movie, two characters travel back in time from the year 2387. When Nero arrives in the year 2233, he disrupts the time continuum, creating an alternate reality from the point of his arrival. Star Trek (the new movie) takes place in this alternate reality. This is explained in the film in a conversation between Uhura and Spock on the bridge of the Enterprise.

Star Trek Online is set in the "prime" Star Trek reality. This is the timeline of the five television series and the first 10 movies. It is the world in which the Gorn attacked Cestus III, Kirk fought Khan in the Mutara Nebula, Picard explored the galaxy, the Federation fought the Dominion War, Voyager was stranded in the Delta Quadrant and Captain Archer and the crew of the NX-01 showed us how it all began.

Read more and check out the timeline here.

Furthermore producer Daniel Stahl talks about the Genesis program and how it helped them in game development in the developer blog at MMORPG.

In order to make a game universe where players can go somewhere no one else has gone before, we’d have to make more maps than we physically have time for and we would have to keep making them until the end of time. So how can we deliver on this concept?

To answer this question we turned to the Star Trek movies for inspiration and found the Genesis Program.

In the movie cannon the Genesis program used technology to convert nothing into something. “Life from Lifelessness.” This was the Creation device that Khan threatened to destroy the Enterprise with and what eventually spawned the Genesis planet.

Star Trek Online has embraced the concept of Genesis as a method to generate planets and systems that no one has seen before. But as with any technology it requires a lot of brainstorming, engineering, and testing to make it work right.

The core concept of Genesis in Star Trek Online is to create places for you to go without requiring hours of art and development time for each location. In a lot of ways, when we think of Genesis we think of the Holodeck computer.