9. Missions & Story
An important part of any Star Trek episode is the mission the crew are on. If it is a single episode mission or one that carries over an expanded story arc; without a mission that grabs your interest or seems important enough to warrant the crews time, then you end up with fluff like the much ridiculed, Original Series episode, Spocks Brain. The mission can sometimes be separate from the over running storyline but they link in the grand scheme of things. Take the Deep Space Episode The Ship where the Defiant is sent to capture the wreckage of a JemHadar ship. While that is the mission for the episode, the overall story about the Dominion War continues to run in the background. Rockstar has shown that they can balance between the two. If you take GTA V as an example, each mission is not just there to advance the story; instead some of the missions are there to make the overall story feel important. So Rockstar could write a gripping Star Trek story that makes use of all the different races, alliances etc. And within that give the crew missions to go on; much like the approach they adopted for Red Dead Redemption and the modern GTA games. You could be on your way to complete a task but then receive a com message (like Franklin does on his phone) asking you to take a detour to a nearby planet. It will give you a feeling that this a constant changing and living universe that you are part of, and that is something no Star Trek game has managed to capture properly.