Don’t abandon ship just yet, because Ubisoft is pushing out its first DLC for Star Trek: Bridge Crew (2017). If you’re a TNG fan, now is probably the time to toss out the synthehol and crack that hidden bottle of Romulan Ale in celebration.
Launching on May 22nd on PSVR and PS4, and on July 21st for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Windows “Mixed Reality” VR headsets, The Next Generation DLC expansion puts you on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701D, the very same that Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanded in the iconic TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994).
And if you know your TNG lore, you’d know the Federation and the Klingon Empire have a (mostly) steady alliance by the 24th century, so there aren’t any Klingon baddies anymore now. Instead, Bridge Crew is pitting you against those testy Romulan ships and the Borg Collective.
The DLC will offer players two new mission types—Patrol and Resistance. According to a press release, Patrol mode lets players roam the galaxy freely “while exploring random encounters and answering distress calls for hours on end,” which sounds a bit like the Ongoing Missions of the base game.
Resistance mode however is said to offer “more frenetic gameplay,” as you run from a Borg Cube while on the hunt for three prototype ship modules that will help you ultimately defeat them in a final battle.
In the expansion, Ubisoft is also bringing a new command role to the bridge, Operations, which they say focuses on crew management. Here’s what Ubisoft says in a playthrough with the Ubisoft news team.
“Operations combines Engineering with a new personnel management function, and it’s not a role that I recommend trying to learn under the pressures of a combat situation. On the one hand, it’s your job to charge the warp coils and distribute power between the Enterprise’s engines, phaser range, and shield level, which should feel familiar to experienced players. On the other, you’ll need to allocate a handful of crew between 10 different stations: thruster control, main engineering, torpedoes, shield generator, transporter room, astrophysics lab, computer core, phaser control, scanners, and sickbay. That last one, by the way, is where you can assign injured crewmembers to keep them from dying; if they do, they’ll stay dead for the duration of the mission.”
Just like the base game, The Next Generation expansion features cross-platform multiplayer for all devices.
In the meantime while you wait, check out our review of Star Trek: Bridge Crew for a better idea of what commanding the original Enterprise (NCC 1701) and the J.J. Abhrams-style U.S.S. Aegis is all about.