The update, entitled “Call to Arms” adds a range of new missions for both the Federation and Klingon sides as well as a range of new features such as the much anticipated “Duty Officer” system.  Here is a summary of all of the new features:

• The Duty Officer System – Since the birth of the Federation and Klingon Defense Force, there have been countless unsung heroes that work in a vessel’s lower decks. No matter which department they are in, these officers have pledged their lives to their ship and fellow crewmates. For the first time ever, as their Captain, you will actively manage their activities as you delegate their assignments aboard and away from your ship.
• The Borg Advancement – For the past several months, Starfleet and the KDF have been confronting the Borg armada as they make their advance on the Alpha Quadrant. Recently, a Borg fleet was able to break through the Defari blockades in the Orellius Sector Block, land a probe on Defera Prime and begin assimilating its inhabitants. It is up to you to beam down and eliminate the threat of total annihilation of this important race.
• Klingon Gameplay Updates – Season 5: Call to Arms enhances Klingon gameplay and introduces an improved way to level up your KDF warrior. Not only will your character start out as a Commander (level 21), you will experience a compelling storyline that will allow you to move more easily through the ranks by completing episodic content. It is a glorious day for battle!
• Skills Revamp – Over the course of Season 5, the way you choose to specialize your captain will be updated. Phase One of these changes, the Space Skills Revamp, is now live and provides a clearer understanding of where to spend your Skill Points and which tree affects which innate and Bridge Officer powers.
• Missions Revamp – Season 5 also introduces a more streamlined way to play through the game’s episodic content. Captains will utilize the completely redesigned mission journal to find the latest Starfleet or KDF assignments available, including an option to transwarp instantly to the mission’s starting planet.
• Lore Missions - Along with the release of the Starfleet and Klingon Academy maps, an entirely new type of non-combat play is being introduced. Participate in daily events surrounding the game’s lore by venturing to these social zones and test your knowledge of the rich history behind The Path to 2409.
• Economy Restructuring – Many of the old currencies you have come to know have been converted into a single monetary-form known as Dilithium. Whether you are playing through episodic content, participating in Duty Officer assignments, or completing daily missions, earning Dilithium will allow you to purchase upgraded equipment that can help you more easily defeat your foes and bring you the ultimate bragging rights. For the first time ever, this update is going to allow players to acquire Cryptic Points without having to spend money.

Celebrate Season 5

Season 5: Call to Arms is now live and we would like to reward all of our players who jump in to check it out with two free ships. All you have to do is log into your account, visit the C-Store and redeem these ships. Federation characters will be able to claim the TOS Enterprise, and KDF characters will be able to claim the brand-new Qorgh Refit. This promotion lasts through the entire month of December so log-in today and boldy go.

Subscription Sale

To celebrate the release of Season 5: Call to Arms, we’re having a gigantic subscription sale. From now until December 18th, take 15% off the regular 3 and 6 month subscription prices, and a full hundred dollars of the normal lifetime subscription price!

3 Month Was $41.97     Now $35.97
6 Month Was $77.94     Now $65.94
Lifetime Was $299.99  Now  $199.99

These special prices on subscriptions will continue to renew at the discounted rate automatically for as long as you remain subscribed to Star Trek Online. However, these discounted packages will only be available until December 18th, when subscription prices will return to normal. So what are you waiting for? Subscribe today!

Dan Stahl Rejoins Cryptic Studios

Several months ago, Dan Stahl announced that he was stepping down as executive producer of Star Trek Online to take a position at social-gaming specialist’s “Zynga”.

The good news is, Dan Stahl has now returned to Cryptic Studios and has taken a position as Senior Producer on the Foundry System which is used in several Cryptic Studios projects.  Here is his statement, posted to the Star Trek Online forums several hours ago:

As the snoops have deduced, yes I am back at Cryptic Studios! My time at Zynga was fun and interesting, but I really missed working with my colleagues here. There is something magical going on at Cryptic these days and I’m very happy to be back working on the MMOs that I personally love to play. Being a part of Perfect World is having such a great positive impact on this company.After talking with Jack about returning, I accepted a position as a Sr. Producer managing the Foundry (UGC) tools at Cryptic Studios. I’ve always been passionate about User Generated Content and Community Developer involvement. Whether it was community deckbuilding software at Wizards of the Coast, the Xbox Community Developer Program at Microsoft, or more recently, the Foundry on STO, I’ve been a strong believer that if you build the right tools, game developers can partner with the community to build amazing content and applications.

That is why I’m excited to be back at Cryptic working directly with the highly talented UGC team to begin working on future updates for the Foundry, especially with the development of Neverwinter which has its own deep history of User Developed Content.

Today is a great day to be back at Cryptic. Season 5 is here! Stephen D’Angelo has been doing an awesome job as EP on STO. He’s been able to rally the team to deliver on the many tasks needed for Season 5 to prepare the game for F2P. He and the STO team have been working from a solid plan and everything is on track for an awesome F2P launch. For those who have been asking, I’m in full support of the changes that have been made in Season 5 as they will contribute to the continued success of STO into the future as it brings in a whole new host of players.

So big hugs to everyone in STO land. I’m happy to be back and looking forward to contributing to the future of the Foundry.

Free to Play Launches January 17th

Season 5 is the last big update to Star Trek Online before it goes free to play next month on January 17th.   This update is surely going to see a huge influx of new players into the game, so with these latest updates today, now is no doubt a good a time as any for many of you head back into the game and try out some of the cool new stuff!

Be sure to tune into the amazing talent over at Star Trek Radio whilst you play the game – check it out at www.startrekradio.com

Back in September, FleetOps leader, DocaCola, posted the following:

Armada 1 has problems running on newer systems. I was unable to run it at all so i begun debugging and fixed some of these problems. Besides bug fixing the patch has two new features for Armada 1. The first is widescreen (all resolutions) support.

The second feature allows to activate the map editor mode in a ‘live’ game (similar to Armada 2). This can be useful for debugging purposes (modding) and of course people who ever wanted to command a fleet of Enterprise Ds in their skirmish games.

The bugs fixed include:

• Game would not start on some systems with more than 2GB of memory
• Game could crash on systems with a very long PATH environment variable

You can download the Armada 1.3 patch and get installation instructions, over at the FleetOps website by clicking here

GameForge previously indicated that Infinite Space would only have a future if a co-publisher could be found to help bring the game to completion (relativly speaking) and today, one possible contender has been revealed.

Earlier today, german gaming website OGLabs reported that BigPoint Games, most famously known for games such as Battlestar Galactica Online (BGO) are in discussions with GameForge to come on-board as a co-publisher!

According to the report, GameForge has not yet responded to the offer from BigPoint, but if the deal is succesful, it will see Infinite Space launched sometime in 2012.   The game would continue to be developed by Keen Games, with GameForge and BigPoint acting as co-publishers, however, the partnership would also likely need to be signed off on by CBS Consumer Products, who tend to be quite fussy with regard to who they give access to the Star Trek license.

This is good news for fans of the game who were worried that it may be completely dead.   Hailing Frequency will continue monitoring the situation and will publish updates as and when they become available.

Some Transparency: One big advantage for Excalibur’s ship framework is how well it supports transparent parts of a ship. This album describes some of the interesting uses we have found for transparency over recent months, and shows just how far it can be pushed.

You can see the full update at: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150474332529810.435249.349086809809&type=1

Its a couple of weeks later now, the official MACO website has launched and with it, the very first Media Release for the game!

In the media release, the project leader, Trip Tucker, had the following to say about the storyline for MACO:

Set one year after the events of Season 4, the modification aims to portray the events leading to the Earth-Romulan War in a linear, story-oriented fashion. The story arc itself would be told from the perspective of an operative of Earth’s elite military organization known as Military Assault Command Operations, or M.A.C.O. Unlike its predecessor, STE:M aims to follow the footsteps of the Elite Force FPS-series in these episodes: gameplay would consist roughly 75% combat and 25% puzzle-solving, sometimes interrupted by free roam sections during which the player can explore the titular starship within reasonable bounds.

The full media release contains a tonne of information, several screenshots (which you can see below) and promises of much more!

Interestingly, as this mod is a ressurection of the Temporal Cold War mod, its important to note that this mod is not starting from square one.  Dozens of object and character models, animations, scripts and sound effects have been brought forward from TCW into the new C.E.3 platform, ensuring that MACO gets off to a running start!

In addition, the team is adopting a more realistic and bite-size philosophy with regard to the release of the mod – rather than trying to complete the entire storyline prior to the release of the project, it will be released in one-hour episodes every few months, thus ensuring that the community can play the mod much sooner than might otherwise occur and, hopefully, keeping fans coming back every few months to experience the next episode in the storyline!

We here at Hailing Frequency are excited to see this project resurrected and moving forward with new life, and we cannot wait to play the first episode.

Those of you with a more technical background should note that the team is currently recruiting and seeking help with the project – Character Modellers, Animators and Coders are all beign activly recruited, so if you think you may be able to help, check out the projects recruitment forum at http://enterprise-tcw.info/forum/viewforum.php?f=14

In the meantime, please visit the projects official website at http://enterprise-tcw.info, sign up on their forums and show your support and most importantly, keep your fingers crossed!

The team had this to say:

Norkova Class: This week we have some shots of our Norkova Class transport which is seen throughout TNG, DS9 & Voyager and is seemingly used by many species for transporting cargo. The ship was modelled some time ago by Tvrtko (Newman) and was textured by Jonny (JB06)

Here are some pictures:

See more at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150439991359810.429188.349086809809&type=1

Those of you who got the game also probably remember that it was riddled with issues that pretty much crippled it from running on anything but a very specific hardware and software setup.   If you had Windows XP or above, you pretty much gave up on your dreams of playing this game and now, a decade later, if you told your friends you were trying to get this game working, they would point and laugh at you ironically.

The good news, nay, the FANTASTIC news, is that these days are over.   Thanks to a fantastic community effort, it is now possible to get Dominion Wars working on almost any setup.   Today, I succesfully got the game running both on my Windows 7 x64 laptop (GeForce 540M 2gb Graphics, Quad Core, 6gb RAM) and my Desktop also (AMD Phenom 6-core, 12gb RAM, 2gb GeForce card) – need proof?

How I hear you all asking?  For the answer, go here: http://hailingfrequency.com/boards/star-trek-games/dominion-wars-technical-help/msg21133/#msg21133

So, this is your perfect chance folks, jump on eBay, purchase an old copy of the game, install the patch as above, and rock on!  Post your screenshots!  If you have any issues, post in the thread above and we’ll help how you can!

This means that there is still a small chance that the game may survive and one day be released.   With CBS heavily backing the game, it is possible that they may assist in locating a co-publisher for the game.  One possible contender for a partnership could be Zynga, where former exeutive producer of Star Trek Online, Dan Stahl, recently became a staff member.  Zynga is a large and well-loved developer and publisher of online and social games in the United States.  This is just speculation of course.

All things considered however, its logical to conclude that CBS would not want to see this project die, so there is some hope to be had, however small it may be.

At least two of our contact within GameForge who were directly on the Infinite Space development team have been laid off – this information was gleaned from their public Facebook pages which now solemly say “Worked at Gameforge” in the past tense.

Some of you may be aware that I am/was a part of the moderation team over at the Infinite Space official forum and I can reveal that internally, we have no more information than there is externally.

However, given that it now seems likely that swatches of the Infinite Sapce team have been laid off, as well as the fact that GameForge specifically used the word “discontinued” when referring to the game in their press release, it would seem all but certain that……

Star Trek Infinite Space is Cancelled.