Star Trek Online’s 15th Anniversary Celebrations are in full swing! Trek Central’s Captain Jack beamed down to talk with Art Director Thomas Marrone about the starships in the long-running game. During our interview, we explore the past, present, and future of Star Trek: Online’s Starship design, with insight into the upcoming Anniversary Starship and more coming soon.
The 33rd Season of Star Trek Online, titled “Unveiled“, is out now. Starting today, PC players can reunite with familiar faces to uncover the truths of the Harmony in the new featured episode “Axiom,” participate in a 15th Anniversary event to earn rewards including a Garret Command Alliance Dreadnought Cruiser, experience a new lockbox: “Discovery: Partners In Crime” and more! Console Version Launching on March 11th!
You can watch our interview with Thomas via the video below, or read an edited version here.
Thomas Marrone – Art Director for Star Trek: Online
Jack) Thank you for joining us here on Trek Central today. For those who may not know yourself from the Star Trek Online (STO) community, could you introduce yourself and tell us about your work on STO?
Thomas) Hi everybody. My name is Thomas Marrone. I’m the art director for Star Trek Online, so I manage the whole art team. So, every ship, character, effect, UI, art discipline and animation all live under my umbrella. As the art director, I’ve been working on Star Trek Online almost the entire 15-year run of the game, since November of 2010.
I started out in the UI world doing icons and things like that and then moved into ships, spent a lot of time making 3D models of everybody’s favourite starships, including the Enterprise from the original series, the motion picture era refit and, of course, I made the most recent version of the USS Enterprise-F from Star Trek Picard.
Jack) That leads me to my next question. I’m a big fan of the Odyssey-class USS Enterprise-F; as you mentioned, it appeared in Picard; what does that mean to you? What does that ship mean to you? To me, it’s a symbol of Star Trek Online!
Thomas) You know, as a kid, I always drew spaceships. I was always drawing the Enterprise, every version of the Enterprise, The Original series, The Next Generation, and the Enterprise-E from Star Trek: First Contact. In high school, I started to learn 3D graphics because I wanted to work on a modification where I worked with some other people, and we turned the classic PC-RTS called Homeworld into a Star Trek game, basically replacing all the assets. So that got me into 3D modelling and game development, in high school. I got a degree in graphic design in college.
Thomas) When we were designing the Enterprise F, based on the Adam Ihle concept, I think all of us had this ambition: Wouldn’t it be cool if this transcended the realm of a licensed tie-in video game and became the actual, real Enterprise? We all took the opportunity to design an enterprise very seriously in that hope, which was a pretty unreasonable one, to be frank. But for years, we would always say, “oh man, if they ever did a STO-era show, wouldn’t it be cool?” So, we would constantly look for opportunities to get Enterprise F out there in front of people. And you know, one of the biggest ones before Picard came calling and wanted to use the Enterprise F was our partnership with IDW Publishing.
Thomas) IDW started doing their prequel countdown Star Trek: Picard Comics. You know, we had a good relationship with them. We’d done some cross-pollination before, but we reached out to them, and they and we started talking about, oh well, we need these ships for this countdown comic. And so the Odyssey-class was, you know, at the top of our list. That makes the universe feel bigger. And so, you know, that was an excellent step for us.
Thomas) I was boarding a plane to the Star Trek convention, and I got an email from Dave Blass, and he’s like do you have the Enterprise F? That’s just all the email said. And I was like, well, what do you mean? Do we have it? Yeah, we have it. It’s an old model. As you know, I would need to rebuild it for you. And you know I didn’t ask any questions. I spent three weeks, day and night, double shifts, rebuilding the model from scratch so that it’s something that they could use.
Thomas) Our model was six years old at that point. Still, it was worth it because to not only have ships become canon, which Dave had reached out to us for that in Season 2, but for that to be the Enterprise, to have the Enterprise become canon; I mean, the Enterprise is my favourite character in Star Trek. I think some people might not think of it that way, but I believe that the Enterprise is a character, that starships are characters, defiant’s a character, the Voyager is a character, and so my favourite character in Star Trek and the one that I worked on when I contributed to um is, uh, you know, it’s an incredible, incredible honour and it’s a fulfilment of a dream that you know was basically, you know, 13 years in the making at that point, and so I know that was a long journey, but um, but it has been a long road getting from there to here.
The Heritage Bundle for Star Trek Online
Jack) Last year, you released The Heritage Bundle for Star Trek Online, what was it like going back to do older Star Trek ships and checking them out?
Thomas) That’s an ambition I had for quite a long time like there was something special about that era of Star Trek. We had the opportunity to have a new ship bundle in Star Trek Online. I thought, oh man, it’d be great to theme this all together and pay tribute to those games that I really enjoyed growing up, and I know a lot of our players also enjoy those.
Thomas) I mean, we had people constantly like are you guys going to do the Typhon? Are you guys going to do the Premonition? Are you guys going to do the Achilles? Those would show up on our subreddit over and over and over again, and so finally, when I was in a position to just kind of make that happen, I jumped at the chance to do it, and I wanted to do it right. Thankfully I had a great partner with Jeremy Randall, our lead designer.
Thomas) Now, we need to make sure that when we brought those things to life, it wasn’t just that they looked right, but also that they behaved the way you saw in those games, and we took advantage of their incredible powers. So people got not just the kind of the visual experience of flying them but the actual meat and potatoes gameplay experience as well.
Remastering Starships in Star Trek Online
Jack) Let’s talk starship remasters!
Thomas) I was actually going to show you a new remaster that’s coming up soon!
Thomas) It’s another launch-era Star Trek Online ship, four nacelles; it’s a variant of the Cheyenne-Constellation family. So what we did with the Stargazer is we looked at the Protostar, and because, if you remember the original Stargazer, these in the cells are pretty spot on to what original cells look like. So I thought this would be a cool way to take the Protostar family, like the Protostar design from Star Trek Prodigy, and turn that into a family of ships. This is using the Protostar material. You’ll recognize those engine caps from the Protostar.
So I’m really excited about this one. I think it turned out great. This was actually designed and modeled by Tobias Richter. I thought he did a fantastic job on it, so we’re starting to look at the Constellation family. There are a couple there, and there’s this one, the Stargazer. I think Dakota is another one that we’ll have to look at. But yeah, so that’s coming out soon.
Star Trek’s Pathfinder-class
Jack) I’ve got to ask about the Pathfinder-class, especially with its appearance in Star Trek: Picard Season 3!
Thomas) So the first ship I modelled for Star Trek Online that made it into the game was the Vaadwaur Fighter for the Vaadwaur, you know, for Delta Rising. The second ship that I modelled for Star Trek Online was the Pathfinder-class. The Pathfinder was also the first Federation ship that I modeled for Star Trek Online, and it was the first ship that I got to design myself. I looked at some of Rick Sternbach’s unused designs for the original Voyager. He had a lot of great concept art for that they didn’t use.
The New Starships for Star Trek Online
Thomas) If I can direct the conversation a bit, we’ve got the anniversary lockbox that went live. We’ve got the mission with the event, the anniversary event, and obviously, every year we have an anniversary ship right that you can earn. This is the Garrett Command Alliance Dreadnought. You can probably tell this is another Khitomer Alliance starship.
Thomas) So it’s got the classic sort of Galaxy-class layout, but you can see there’s a bridge inspired by the K’t’inga class and you’ve got these feather patterns. It’s very blocky and bulky and kind of brutalistic, and so this was designed by Hector Ortiz, who’s designed all of our Khitomer Alliance ships, and modeled by Keene Sin, who the player community might know or recognize his handle as Pundus. It’s great to have him on the team and I’m really proud of the work that he did on the Garrett.
A New Classic for Star Trek Online
Thomas) I’m going to show you a ship that I’ve actually teased already on Blue Sky, but I wanted to show it off in its full glory. Typically, we do the anniversary launch with the lockbox ship and the free event ship and then a few weeks later we usually have a big anniversary Starship bundle. This year will be no different.
Thomas) So I’m going to share my screen to show you this ship, so you guys are getting a better look than anybody’s gotten so far of the Ark Royal. This is a carrier from the video game Star Trek: Starfleet Command 2. For whatever reason, I’ve always loved this ship. It always grabbed my attention. I think it’s the conning tower up here. It’s like cruise ship vibes, almost.
Jack) This is amazing!
Thomas) So if you really if you want a more modern option for the Ark Royal, you have it. You can do the Picard early 25th century era and that just felt like a very natural fit in terms of updating this classic TMP era starship into the look to fit alongside the Sagan and the Constitution III and the Duderstadt. It was exciting. I mentioned before I love fleshing out these eras and these lineages and we’re still going to be making plenty of STO new kind of pioneering STO designs for the STO-era.
Thomas) We want to make sure that people enjoy the anniversary launch and get their hands on the Garrett, and then we’ll be talking more about that bundle in the future. There’s some really cool things coming with it, though I’m very excited for you guys to learn more about it. I really can’t wait.
The latest update for Star Trek Online is out now! Titled “Unveiled“, it arrives as the 15th Anniversary celebrations for the MMO Video Game take place. The 33rd season of the long-running free-to-play Star Trek MMORPG on PC sees Star Trek: The Next Generation star, Jonathan Del Arco, return to reprise his character of “Hugh”.
Star Trek Online is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online game that allows players to explore the Star Trek universe from within. Players can forge their own destiny as Captain of a Federation starship, champion the Empire through the far reaches of the galaxy as a Klingon Warrior, rebuild the Romulan legacy as the commander of a Romulan Republic Warbird or carry out daring missions on behalf of the Dominion as a Jem’Hadar soldier. Captains can also explore iconic locations from the Star Trek universe, make contact with new alien species and battle alongside other players in customizable starships. Star Trek Online is currently available on PC and PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
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