i recieved the below e-mail announcement from hailing frequencies, earlier.. and although not anything concrete, it does offer the faintest glimmer of hope that the dream is not dead.

Since the shock announcement in Janurary that San Francisco based P2 Entertainment would be ceasing devlopment of Star Trek Online, the internet has been ablaze with speculation about who exactly P2 Entertainment were refering to when they mentioned that devlopment rights to Star Trek Online had been passed to another bay area devloper.

Evidence seems to be mounting that it is in fact Cryptic Studios who have obtained the rights to work on this title.

Following the announcement by P2 Entertainment, Hailing Frequency - "The Internets First Podcast Dedicated to Star Trek Gaming" quickly produced a short list of developers in the bay area that might have the scope and manpower to produce Star Trek Online, and then proceeded to start calling these companys.

After an hour of leaving voicemails on answering machines, Hailing Frequency recieved a call from Cryptic Studios. The overall tone of this phone call was along the lines of - "Where did you hear that Cryptic might be producing Star Trek Online, and How did you get (refering to the person we spoke to) my name"

The phone call proceeded, and Cryptic enquired about what Hailing Frequency was and what we did. Cryptic then said categorically that they would like to appear on Hailing Frequency in the near future for an interview.

A couple of days later, the story broke that Cryptic was interviewing former members of the Star Trek Online devlopment team for an unannounced project. When asked if this project was Star Trek Online, they would not comment.

Most recently, Cryptic announced that they were shelving the much anticipated Marvel Universe Online, which was still in the early stages of production. This cancellation effectivly left Cryptic clear, with only one other project in the works.

On Febuary 21st at the Game Devlopers Conferance, Jack Emmert, Chief Creative Officer at Cryptic Studios, gave an interesting talk about using episodic content in the morning's first round of GDC sessions. During this talk, Emmert mentioned the recently announced Champions Online as well as what he called "a secret sci-fi project."

According to sources at the conferance, Emmert was wearing a sweatshirt that read "STARFLEET ACADEMY" across the front. Emmert also emphasized "secret sci-fi project" with some fairly large Air Quotes.

Taking all of this information into account, it is becoming gradually clearer to see a picture - a picture where Cryptic Studios is working on Star Trek Online - and, not wanting to announce anything officially yet, they are dropping tidbits of information here and there.

Of course, there is no concrete evidence that Cryptic Studios is producing Star Trek Online, and until they come out and announe it, there will be none, but with titles like City of Heroes and City of Villains under their belt, one has to hope.

We at Hailing Frequency will be attempting to talk to our contact in the next couple of days, where we can hopefully get some more information for this steadily increasing stack of evidence.

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You can view the full announcement by following this link:

http://www.hailingfrequency.co.uk/boards/index.php?topic=318.0

Regards,
The Hailing Frequency Team.

i just recieved the latest new mail from "Hailing Frequency", which stated the following

The official website for Star Trek Online, located at http://www.startrekonline.com - has reopened following its closure just a few days ago. Furthermore, visitors to the website are now greeted with a slightly updated logo with the words "coming soon".

This could signify a change in hands of the domain, potentially from perpetual, to whoever may be devloping it now, but, attempts to trace the domain back to its new owner do not give any results.

Hailing Frequency and STOzone will of course continue to try and find out the new devloper, as we have been doing in past weeks.

Stay Tuned for More Folks!

things are definitely starting to look more promising!

Latest news mail from hailing frequency, includes in more detail the order of events that have occured up until now with regard to the sto product. (updated as of additional info 12 Mar 08)

In January 2008, San Francisco based P2 Entertainment announced that they were cancelling their Star Trek Online project after almost four years in development.

This news brought about speculation throughout the entire community with regards to the circumstances surrounding P2 Entertainment's cancellation of Star Trek Online and the subsequent closure of the company.

Accusations of money swindling and fraud have been common place, with some people claiming that P2 never even produced more than basic renders and screenshots.

Hailing Frequency has been working very hard to investigate these claims, and we are happy to say that we have been unable to uncover the true chain of events that led to the closure of Star Trek Online.

Until a week before closure, development on Star Trek Online was progressing extremely well, and according to our sources both inside and outside of the former development team, the game was within a few months of a closed internal beta.

P2 Entertainment had, for a long time, not signed a publisher, and were running entirely using the money that had been provided to them by their investorys. When this money ran out, P2 started to search for a publisher and subsequanetly found one. This publisher has been unknown to the community; however we are now able to reveal that it was South Korea based NCSoft.

NCSoft have, as of late, been restructuring the internal workings of their company and have been refocusing allot of their efforts. Star Trek Online was not the only title to be hit by this restructuring - Several other NCSoft titles including Spacetime's Blackstar MMO project have been casualties of this restructure.

After loosing their publisher, P2 Entertainments investors understandably got cold feet about the future of the project, and instead of allowing a decent amount of time for P2 to seek out a new publisher - they allowed P2 Entertainment a mere seven days to find a new publisher.

The rest of the story plays out like a bad Hollywood Picture. P2 Entertainment were unable to find a new publisher in time, so their investors pulled out. With no money to continue development, P2 Entertainment had no choice but to close down the project, and subsequently, their entire company.

We can safetly say that if the publisher had not pulled out of Star Trek Online, we could all be signing up for a public beta right now.

Thankfully, P2 Entertainment was able to save the Star Trek Online intellectual property by selling it to another, as yet unannounced developer.

As always, Hailing Frequency has worked very hard to confirm the information that has been reported here, and we believe that it does represent the true chain of events.

Any further news on this story will be reported as and when it happens

It should be pointed out that while this report is as accurate as possible, there may still be errors in the chain of events that went down. We have sifted through alot of reports and e-mails from various sources, and made the best sense of it we can.