Star Trek Online: The Foundry Officially Released

SBFord

Cryptic Studios has announced that The Foundry has officially left beta. The Foundry allows players to create their own custom missions and share them with other players. Devs have also announced "Spotlight Missions" where they will feature content created by players using the tools contained in The Foundry.

"The Foundry is a type of tool all of us here, as Star Trek fans, have been eagerly anticipating for a very long time," said Daniel Stahl, Executive Producer, Star Trek Online. "The universe of Star Trek Online is constantly growing and improving, but now we are empowering users so that they may finally create their own Star Trek stories, missions and memorable characters inside our persistent game world. This is something truly special and we couldn't be more excited to see what creative fans come up with."

The Foundry is a proprietary addition to Cryptic’s internal game engine, which powers Star Trek Online, Champions Online and the recently-announced Neverwinter.

Read more here.

korvass

Bioware, take notes and add this feature to SWTOR!

On-topic: this is a very cool feature to have in a game. The one they added to SWG was also great, but alas, came way too late. Kudos to Cryptic for this.

Reizla

Oh WOW! Cryptic does something good for once. I think this option will allow the trekkies to make STo the way Star Trek online was meant to be and not the way Cryptic shoved it up our ...

montin

I forsee some really bad missions being added to the game. I wonder if there is any form of quality control or proof reading? Do you get to rate missions on how enjoyable they were so that other players know which ones are worth doing? But regardless I think its a damn good idea and almost makes me want to sub again. I did say almost.

jedi_night

If it goes anything like COH it will be a disaster and destroy the game even more.  COH had the same system.  The players could rate missions, and top rated missions would be shown at the top of the list.  However, no good story missions were ever created, and all of the top rated missions were along the lines of "hello kitty slaughter house" or "what what in the butt", and they typically were simply large maps with huge groups of enemies, the sole purpose to cram as much xp into 1 mission as possible in order to speed level.

 

Huge mistake imo.

AG-Vuk

The restriction are pretty significant , in that you are not allowed to refrence or use any aspect of material that is copyrighted. You can refer to an event or character, but can't include them in any storyline. Everything , must be original , pretty well.

  This thread addresses the issue. Look for the Dev or Community Rep statements.

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=208078

TwwIX

Cryptic's being lazy as usual. This is going to be abused by their playerbase just like in City of Heroes.

MMO.Maverick

It depends what kind of limitations and checks are in place.

 

But as a tool you can't deny that it is a great one to have in an MMO, beats only being able to do the same dev provided quests over and over again, or players only being able to create some bland run-of-the-mill armor and weapons that everyone of the same crafting level can make.

 

I guess time will tell how creative players can be or how abused the tool will become.

I read up on some player generated missions and saw some youtubes, personally I definitely saw the potential the Foundry had to create intriguing missions.

 

edit: as for the argument that player created content will always be less than dev created content, I read several comments that the best of the Foundry missions were found to be better than many of the usual ingame missions.

Also, I've played mods and player created content in other games like Warcraft 3 maps (eg Dota, Tower defence, great stuff), Neverwinter Nights player made worlds, and Starcraft's Natural Selection mod, so in general I disagree that players or non-devs can't create stuff that's as interesting or even more fun than the designers and devs from game companies itself. It all depends on the strength and flexibility of a toolset and the skill and enthusiasm of the creators.

Xero_Chance

*yawn* A clone of mission architect (HOW UNLIKE CRYPTIC TO COPY PARAGON STUDIOS AMIRITE?), and I doubt it will be fixed the same as Paragon was able to. It will be introduced as, and will remain, a game-breaking farming-oriented feature.

This game is dead, they need to bury it, seriously. There hasn't been a harder fail for a long time in mmo history and the poor thing's still kicking. Put it out of it's misery already.

MMO.Maverick

Originally posted by Xero_Chance

This game is dead, they need to bury it, seriously. There hasn't been a harder fail for a long time in mmo history and the poor thing's still kicking. Put it out of it's misery already.

A bit selfish and shortsighted, don't you think?

Because you don't play or enjoy STO, doesn't mean that this should apply to everyone else. I can imagine that for those playing STO the Foundry is a fun addition, especially since it doesn't come instead of other content updated but next to it.

 

The eagerness of some groups of MMO gamers to have all MMO's they themselves don't like closed down is dumbfounding sometimes.

Courage_Wolf

I cant even describe how much I love the Foundry. I now have a new mission to play every single time I log on, and thats more than I can say about any other MMO I play.