I can't help but wish there was a game based off TOS. Where it was highly influenced from the Mass Effect games. Think about it. Having control of the Enterprise, being able to pilot it in space. Visiting planets, picking up missions at star basses, hails and Starfleet messages. Spacebattles and much like in Mass Effect, choose who to go with when exploring planets and such. I'm a console gamer, and it'd be the best game ever if done right. Thoughts?
Maybe my memory is clouded, but don't the 25th Anniversary game and Judgement Rites have most of this?
Judgement Rights and 25th Anniversary has some, but not other things.
Missions are handed to the player from Starfleet Command, which makes perfect sense. However, an open world aspect would fit right in, since plenty of Star Trek episodes revolve around spontaneous events.
They lack a real open world; the map is actually a security measure to prevent game piracy.
The two games do have ship control, and space combat. However, the space combat is mediocre at best. It actually can drag on the gameplay because of its design, and fortunately it is rare.
They also have some ground combat in a very rigid manner.
The thing is, combat in any case is not usually the focus or solution to the problems in Star Trek. Not even in the space combat episodes is a straight fight ever the solution, it always revolves around out thinking the enemy. On the ground things are usually simpler.
For space combat I would avoid an action based gameplay, and instead make it closer to a dialog choice. If you want to shoot it out, that would be an option and it would be taken care of automatically. But if you take a scientific or engineering approuch you get to play with systems and talk to specialists.
For ground combat, that would be action based, like Mass Effect. Except it would involve shorter fights. Combined with a true open world and transporters, it should be perfectly possible to beam straight to a goal, so a lot of wondering and retrieve missions, and grinding through a maze of enemies would not be options, thankfully. There would also be the shuttle but it probably wouldn't be needed.
They way I imagine combat is, the player, as captain, plus five other officers, who open up dialog and actions depending on specialties form a squad of six. When ever a hit will land on the captain the hit instead goes for another squad member; they are ablative redshirts. It's great, because the penalty are the player losing options for completing the mission optimally. Sure, you can beam down more specialists, but you probably already brought the best person, so you will get someone less capable at best. It's a best case, because if they're the only specialist then you are out of luck.
Combat itself is fast paced, and requires a lot of maneuvering. Since the NPC's only get hit if the player will get hit, the player does not need to micro manage the squad. They just follow and take the best concealment possible while constantly laying fire.
The other element is destructible terrain. If the player is willing to put the phaser setting high enough they can cut through just about anything. But instead of weeks of kill shots, or months of stun shots, you get seconds worth of vaporize shots.
To top it off, you can to order the ship to bombard locations while on the planet, or while off the planet. The magnitude depends on the desired result. Anything from vaporizing a bolder, to vaporizing a continent. The thing, is the Directives can be programmed in, so if the player acts out of line with the directives and general orders and specific orders, then they could get in trouble once the mission is over. Game over.