Star Trek Online is in the midst of their Year of Klingon, and their newest story update, House Reborn, is about to launch on Playstation 4. On March 2, you can experience a brand new story starring the biggest collection of Klingon actors they’ve ever had – Mary Chieffo as L’Rell, J.G. Hertzler as Martok, Robert O’Reilly as Gowron, and Sam Witwer stepping into Kenneth Mitchell’s shoes as Tenavik. The Klingon Empire is shattered, in the midst of a civil war caused by the mad Emperor J’mpok. You must journey to Grethor, the Klingon version of Hell, to battle for the lost soul of the first Klingon Chancellor, L’Rell, mother of Klingons.
This is the perfect time to jump into Star Trek Online as an honorable Klingon warrior. The Year of Klingon officially kicked off with Season 20 – House Divided, last September. The entire Klingon starting experience has been rebuilt from the ground up, with high fidelity visuals, streamlined mission design, and new voice acting. If you start playing now, you’ll also become a Klingon Recruit, which gives you access to new rewards as you level your character.
To find out more about the process of updating the Klingon experience, we spoke with Senior Content Designer Jessie Heinig. Jesse’s been with Star Trek Online for ten of its eleven years, so he’s also got a unique perspective on updating the story, since he built some of it himself.
How did you get involved with the process of reimagining the Klingon starting experience?
We decided, “Okay, we’re going to do an entire year of Klingon, and that means we’re going to make some Klingon ships. We’re going to make new Klingon character art. We’re going to rebuild entire levels of Klingons and make Klingon-themed missions that everyone gets to play. Okay, since we’re redoing a lot of this Klingon stuff, we can go back and also redo our earlier Klingon stuff and include these updated characters and new voice work and new ships and so on.”
And I was tapped specifically for remastering and re-imagining all of the early Klingon content and bringing it up to new standards, which was a lot of fun. And it’s really, really amazing to see people get to make new Klingon Recruits and play through this, often for the first time. We encourage people, “No, go and play a Klingon. Now is the time. Today is a good day to play.”
You worked on a lot of these missions when they originally launched. How has your design philosophy changed now almost a decade later?
So, the market itself