Star Trek Foundry Community Sends Distress Signal Through Space
Do you still remember the Foundry? That’s the super-intriguing and in our opinion heavily underutilized UGC (user generated content) toolkit. In theory, such a system could provide the game with endless content created by its gamers. In reality however, the Foundry has been widely abandoned by Cryptic Studios due to the lack of resources and severe maintenance issues. With every module launch the Foundry is down for weeks and there’s always this awkward feeling that this might be the time that it’ll never come back up again. Additionally it doesn’t really help that one of the few guys showing passion and coding for the Foundry has recently left the company.
The Situation in STO Seems Even Worse
And if you think the situation in Neverwinter is miserable, just look over to our sister game Star Trek Online. Yesterday the Foundry database and community site StarbaseUGC released what feels like one last try to get Cryptic’s attention regarding the broken and dying system.
Does this sound familiar? Absolutely! It also sadly feels like the folks over at STO do indeed suffer even more than us Neverwintans. Started as “beta” feature back in 2011, multiple websites, blogs, and communities formed around the UGC. There apparently was a time when Cryptic would actually hold conference calls with Foundry authors, and actively feature story missions. StarbaseUGC even had a booth in the vendor’s room at Star Trek Las Vegas in 2012! It feels absolutely weird that something that once had been such a vital part of a game’s community now is completely left to slowly rot.
No Update Since Months
What might hurt even more are those periods of multiple months in which there is literally no status update. Yes, we had that David “Miasmat” Anderson sighting at the last “State of the Game” stream in January, but generally requests regarding the Foundry are only sporadically answered, if at all. Unfortunately it’s one of those situations where the devs don’t want to admit that something is dead and sing that “it’s definitely something we want to get back to in the future” song that still gives the community some hope when there actually is little. Vague statements don’t cost the devs anything and on their end it’s better than completely shutting the door.
But the truth is that the Foundry is dead until proven otherwise. We have reiterated that since months. So a lot of sympathy goes out to the Star Trek Online crowd that seems to struggle as much as we do over here.
Ain’t that the truth?
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