Star Trek Online gets Foundry tools

By Robert Purchese Published 1 April, 2011

Have a Jean-Luc at this.

The make-your-own-missions Foundry tool has now officially launched for Star Trek Online.

Beta testing had been ongoing since December.

The Foundry equips gamers with the same tools Cryptic Studios uses to make Star Trek Online content. When built, missions can be shared with the rest of the community, and Cryptic pledges to "periodically" feature your work as "Spotlight Missions".

Excitingly, The Foundry represents a base alteration to the engine under-pinning all Cryptic's work, including Champions Online and upcoming online co-op RPG Neverwinter. Theoretically, then, the Foundry tools will head to those games as well.

Jack Emmert alluded to as much back in November, telling Eurogamer that "user-generated content has always been part of our strategic plan for years and years and years". He added that, "Ultimately I'd like to have it in every game we do in one version or another."

Cryptic details the Star Trek Oline Foundry.

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About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds. @Clert on Twitter.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (9) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Kami #1 1 year ago

    This could either be a massive surprise smash hit, or it could fundamentally balls it all up.

    Still, the idea of user-generated missions in Champions Online is interesting, if nothing else...

  • scoop #2 1 year ago

    Well I got to admit, I've no interest in STO but I do fancy a bit of Kill The Trekkies with impossible to complete missions.

    I think it deserves to be a big draw - modders delight!

  • Vixremento #3 1 year ago

    I enjoyed watching the Star Trek tv series and I've yet to try STO but I have to agree that the idea of playing through missions that were based on the TV series (i.e. some of the better episodes) does sound like it could be a lot of fun (if they haven't already included something like that currently).

  • jonfon #4 1 year ago

    Is this going to work or is this going to go down the same route as the Mission Architect did in City of Heroes when it was added: ie lots of people very quickly figured out the quickest / best way to make missions to maximise their rewards and exploit certain game mechanics meaning the Devs had to constantly run around fixing things and stopping people exploiting loopholes.

    Could work great if they do it right, but in general when its a team of developers vs thousands of avid players and there's rewards involved the thousands of gamers quickly find things to that the developers never even thought of.

  • IronCladChicken #5 1 year ago

    @jonfon
    Hopefully the've learnt from that?

  • IronCladChicken #6 1 year ago

    @jonfon
    Hopefully they've learnt from that?

  • jonfon #7 1 year ago

    Well they're two separate sets of developers and have been for years (Paragon Studios are the people developing City of Heroes, a lot of them used to be Cryptic devs but stayed with City of Heroes when Cryptic sold it to NCSoft), so the Cryptic devs won't have direct experience of what happened with the City Mission Architect. But I'd imagine they certainly had a look at the issues Paragon Studios had when their MA went live.

    The easiest solution is of course not to have rewards at all for User Content, but that risks turning the feature into an unused and unloved one within a few weeks.

  • Dave_McCoy #8 1 year ago

    Might be time to dust off that Star Trek Online account!

  • dirtysteve #9 1 year ago

    I am hoping this game goes FTP like Champions. I want to play it, but this year, I don't see it being among the games I'm willing to subscribe to.