I’ve never played World of Warcraft and have never really been into that style of games, but this one might get me to change my mind: There’s a new WoW-style Star Trek game on the way, and it’s in open beta testing right now, which means you can play it for free. The screenshots from the game, named “Star Trek Online” look pretty nice (don’t they always, though?).

And here’s the best part: The game is set in the “real” Star Trek timeline, not the alternate timeline set up by last year’s “Star Trek: 90210″ piece-of-crap movie. It’s set in the year 2409, 31 years after the end of the Voyager saga. The destruction of Romulus — which set in motion the events in the most recent movie — does occur in this timeline, but instead of jumping to that alternate timeline, we stay in the “prime” Trek universe. The mere fact that the game’s Web site has a page and a timeline specifically about this, along with a whole section of “historical logs” explaining how we got to the circumstances in which the game is set shows me that the game apparently cares a lot more about continuity than the movie ever did. That is quintessential Trek-level nerdiness and a good sign for the game.