Bay Area-based MMO firm Perpetual Entertainment is working on both the sandal-totin' Gods And Heroes: Rome Rising, and the 2007 or later-bound Star Trek Online, and it's just released the results of a Nielsen study conducted in September 2005, interviewing around 600 gamers of 'online gamer', 'Star Trek fiend', and 'vanilla gamer' persuasions on the forthcoming Trek MMO.

Particularly interesting was discussions of in-game race: "Our current slate of playable Federation races is Vulcan, Bolian, Human, Trill, Bajoran, Andorian, and Tellarite... As you can see, players overwhelmingly want to play Humans, Vulcans, and Klingons when playing as a Starfleet officer. In retrospect, I wish we would have included ex-Borg and Android as choices in the survey." And, really, who wouldn't want to be an ex-Borg? Also worth reading in the development logs is lead designer Glen Dahlgren's introduction, in which he suggests: "this project is the vehicle that is moving [the Trek franchise] into the future." Boldly?