I'm the biggest Star Trek fan I know. It's not even close. I've gotten over half my friends heavy into the franchise despite none of them growing up with it, and I love that we share this connection now, but if anybody ever has a question about Trek, they come to me for a reason. The first thing I ever "watched" was new episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as an infant. I've seen every single episode of every single series since. That's, well, nearly a thousand.
I won't regale you with further needless statistics to demonstrate my adoration for Star Trek, but the point in all of this is that Star Trek is, for the most part, woefully undermined for video game adaptation value. There have been some great games, but certain stories could work fantastically in the gaming medium, and if it's all the same to you, I'd like to rant and rave about it for the remainder of this very article.
6The Earth-Romulan War
If your first thought when reading this one is that I'm going to wind up listing far too many combat-oriented ideas, rest assured, I've got more diplomatic thoughts en route. The Earth-Romulan War, though, if done with modern visual flourish, would patch what is largely a massive hole in Star Trek canon.
Books and other fare have adapted the legendary confrontation between an alliance of minor powers and the mighty Romulan Star Empire. It's possible that Star Trek: Enterprise, had it gone for more than four seasons, might have tackled it; they'd have needed to skip a few years, sure, but the fourth season provided some building blocks toward that end. Had the feature film idea for Star Trek: The Beginning gone forward afterward, we'd have gotten it there, instead.
None of that has ever happened. It doesn't need to happen, but it'd be swell. This is the major event that directly preceded the formation of the United Federation of Planets. You know, the most important organization in Star Trek. If we're never getting a TV show or a movie on this, a splashy game with a saga-style story centered squarely on a Human/Vulcan/Andorian/Tellarite crew would be a pretty rad way to tackle it.
5Odo's Investigations
I'm going to be talking about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a few times on this list, and I won't deny it, I'm an unabashed Niner. I know where my loyalties lie. One fun idea for a Star Trek game would be a string of episodic mysteries set aboard the lively space station with the wonderful Odo in charge of each investigation. As well he ought to be.
Maybe an old-school point-and-click adventure style would work best for this. There was a DS9 game way back in the day that had similar elements, but we're talking, gorgeous artwork now, high-definition as all get-out, and heaps and heaps of conversations with witnesses, suspects, crewmembers, fellow investigators, and even Morn.
Morn would never shut up.
4Star Trek: Enterprise Season Five
No, really. Like, an entire fifth season of Star Trek: Enterprise. This show was cut short. It went before its time. It was really coming into its own - I love the Xindi-focused, hyper-serialized, third season, but even if you didn't, there's a good chance you loved the fourth season. The two-parters and three-parters galore, the vigorous focus on the stepping stones toward the foundation of the Federation, it's all there. It's pretty much what the show ought to have been from the start.
Obviously, 22-26 individual stories isn't feasible for a Star Trek game. Not with modern production values, not even with the sort of modest budget that I reckon would be necessary. And would this even sell? Would it actually be profitable? I don't know. Maybe. Probably not. But even if the goal is to do, say, ten "episodes" worth of story, it could be the epic finale arc that Enterprise never got.
It could "erase" the lasting stench of that terribly ill-advised notion of a last-minute series finale with William Riker and the holodeck nonsense. I mean, I'd settle for a video game centered on a single story, so long as it gave the wrap-up for these characters that they were completely robbed of. I'd rather a return to TV, but let's be real, Star Trek: Enterprise is never coming back.
3Dealing With Sela
Bringing Denise Crosby back to play Sela, the half-Romulan surprise villain daughter of the late Tasha Yar, was silly stuff. But the writers on Star Trek: The Next Generation were desperate to get her back, and I guess there are worse ways they might have done so.
The problem is, they never completely committed to the bit. Sela was in several episodes, but she slinks into the shadows. Her arc is never resolved. We never see what happens to her after Picard and Spock fumble her efforts in the "Unification" two-parter. Noncanon sources bring her back, but nothing more of Sela is ever shown on TV or in a film.
2The Burn
Opinions are certainly mixed on the Burn, the quadrant-wide blackout on warp technology that occurs very late in Star Trek's chronology. It happens so that the crew of the USS Discovery has something colossal to contend with when Star Trek: Discovery's third season opens with them thrust forward 900 years into the future, and I get that, but I do agree that it could have been handled better. The revelation of how it happened is... not great.
Still, I do think that the years prior to Discovery's arrival in the 3180s would make for great gaming. The Federation has fallen, and the first few efforts at gathering together again to give it another whirl, despite the relatively slow speeds involved, could be a good hook for an interactive world. Maybe you could play as a courier, too, but I'd definitely like to see surviving starship crews toughening it out together along a new frontier, a frontier that up until very recently had been business as usual in the Alpha Quadrant.
1The Dominion War
Yeah, here's me with war again. I know, I know, it's not what Star Trek is ultimately about. But the crises that the Federation and its allies endure can only strengthen their resolve in the final telling, and frankly, the Dominion War and other major conflicts further enrich the depth and breadth of Star Trek's worldbuilding finesse. Plus, it's just peak Deep Space Nine, and I'm always here for more of that.
There could still be diplomatic elements. Minor powers brought into the fold via peaceful means, out on the fringes, the borders with the ever-increasing Jem'Hadar presence. An effort to liberate one such world from within, that might be fun. You've got some bad-faith characters involved in the Dominion's conquest, even despite being natives of the conquered lands, but you can help the oppressed folks rise to the challenge in the name of democracy. You know, something like that.
