Red Storm Entertainment will soon add the ship and bridge from Star Trek: The Next Generation to the Star Trek: Bridge Crew game, along with several other TNG-themed additions like the Borg.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog, Red Storm Entertainment designer Hunter Janes outlined all the new features and content coming as DLC to the game. Bridge Crew started out as a VR game (hence the PlayStation blog's specific interest; it's one of the top-selling games on PlayStation VR), but it was recently updated to be playable outside of VR as well.

Whereas the current version of Bridge Crew allows you to pick between a bridge inspired by J.J. Abrams' recent reboot of Star Trek and the bridge of the Enterprise from the original '60s TV series, the DLC will add the Enterprise NCC-1701-D from the '80s and '90s Star Trek: The Next Generation. The blog post even says you can be a "Soong-type Android." The Borg will join the game as an enemy, as will the Romulans as seen in TNG.

When Bridge Crew came out, I was very excited, but it just didn't deliver on the fantasy. That's because, for me, Star Trek is the 24th-century trifecta of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and, to a lesser extent, Voyager. I did watch TOS growing up, but it didn't resonate for me the same way. And Abrams' action-oriented alternate universe with nary a philosophical monologue or a diplomatic solution to be found read to me more like Star Wars wearing a Star Trek skin than actual Star Trek. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but it's not Star Trek to me.

I wanted the Enterprise-D. After all, my Facebook profile photo for six years was of me sitting in the captain's chair on the original Enterprise-D set. So this is an exciting addition, especially in VR.

That said, it needs to be more than just a cosmetic update to make the game enticing. Bridge Crew's gameplay could get repetitive, and it didn't focus on diplomacy and creative solutions so much as constant combat. In that sense, it was more akin to Abrams' Trek than Roddenberry Trek. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that all of that will improve with this expansion, but the blog post does suggest that the update isn't just about cosmetics.

The Enterprise-D's bridge will come with a new station for players to control—Operations—which will incorporate some of the same functions that the engineer's station does in the current game, while it also "focuses on crew management and maximizing ship buffs." New mechanics will be added for precision-firing phasers and shield modulation, too.

Further, the DLC will add two new "Ongoing Voyages"—randomly generated missions intended for replayability. The new missions, titled Patrol and Resistance, will come "complete with new voice work and unique mission mechanics." The latter of those is inspired by Roguelike games and sees the player crew evading Borg ships across multiple systems "to retrieve scattered anti-Borg prototypes to fight off a Borg Cube that's happily assimilating and slaughtering everything in its path." There are more details about this mode in the blog post.

The new DLC, which seems to simply be titled "The Next Generation," arrives on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR May 22. It will hit Oculus, Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality a bit later on July 21.

Listing image by Red Storm Entertainment