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STO's Foundry makes "Top 5 Best UGC Systems"
valoreah
Member Posts: 11,726 Arc User
MMORPG.com has a new article up listing their picks for the Top 5 Best User Generated Content Systems in MMOs. STO came in Third on their list.
Link to article.
Very cool!
Hats off to the Devs for creating this set of tools and to all the talented authors out there making some truly great stories with it.
Adventuring in the final frontier is a truly exciting experience. With galaxy at your feet, the options can seem unlimited. However, as is the case with most MMOs, the game world is finite and not unlimited like outer space itself. Because of this, Cryptic has crafted one of the best and most detailed UGC systems in all of MMOs. If it werent for the other two games on this list, then this one would probably be #1.
The Foundry in STO lets players create content that truly rivals anything that the games actual developers could have put out for the game. In fact, The Foundry almost resembles a game development environment more than it does a traditional UGC system. Things can get very complicated and hard to understand, which results in a much steeper learning curve. All things considered though, its a great addition to the game and has surely been a huge part of its continued success over the years.
Link to article.
Very cool!
Hats off to the Devs for creating this set of tools and to all the talented authors out there making some truly great stories with it. Post edited by valoreah on
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I do hope this spurs more development of the foundry!
Granted, my opinions are based on about 3 hours of messing around over there and saying, "Huh?"
But, in a lot of ways, their tool is more limited as a story-telling tool, since we have dialogue popups and dialogue blue bubbles that can be tied to triggers. Their foundry community is also in shambles, due to the lack of CM support for a long time. And players don't play the missions when the only incentive is a green drop and an often empty chest.
No dilithium tie ins to their foundry at all (regarding their crystal currency), last time I checked. So there is zero connection between the game's main currency and playing foundry.
And the tool is choked full of bugs when I tried to actually build something like a custom set. Falling through platforms, unresponsive xyz coordinate editor, and all kinds of issues that were not planned out very wisely.
Their foundry is a mess, and authors are livid over there.
We have a bug-filled mess too, and we can get angry. But our tool is superior for telling stories. Their tool is superior in techie ways for combat and stuff. And we've built a community here. We couldn't even find many NW authors to admin Tavern UGC, which is a dead site due to lack of interest by NW authors in admining or doing any kind of NW podcast, etc.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Actually, one of their biggest Astral Diamond dailies is a Foundry Daily. And its only one mission per day.
And some of their overlooked tools are much better for storytelling. Telling an NPC to go in a straight line and stop stands out in my mind. God I want that for STO.
STO's foundry has more potential and has a better dialogue system. Honestly, I dont think NWO's could improve beyond what they have.
TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
Actually, the foundry daily scales in NW. By max level, you have to do 4 of them to get your Astral diamonds.
Is that why all the authors over there attempt to make their missions exactly 15 minutes long, since people have to do 4 a day to get those diamonds?
They are all limited to like 15 slots and the system makes them use 4 slots for 1 longer story. They might as well have 5 slots for stories.
Even if this faking isn't perfect you can make people move on command with patrols and triggers, despawning the static NPC and spawning the single patrolling NPC etc. However it is much easier in NW.
However, NW's issues are with dialogues. The don't have a "map" equivalent dialogue type. This is to do with the fact that their dialogue system is completely different and is linked to the physical NPCs and their locations on the map.
However I am sure there are ways to fake map-type dialogues, anyway. NW has a few things that STO just can't do.
1. Triggers based on "skills" Nature, Dungeoneering, Arcana and Religion skills are usable to gate interactions. I would love to use the same tech, based on DOFF ranks.
2. Items. Foundry items are tokens, nothing more. Items that take up physical inventory space but can be, dropped by objectives, interactions and such and then required/removed by interactions and objectives. Unlike current triggers, items can be used to reflect choices over different maps.
These 2 things plus the other fakable but not quite working things, combined with the modular interior map designer for me are the things that make NW's better than STO's. Even though I hardly use it.
Maybe we need more games with UGC, to challenge STO and Neverwinter. But maybe that would be useless, because UGC is never used by enough people?
Technically, a hell of a lot of games have user-generated content, that being game mods. Don't forget, the reason we have the Foundry in STO in the first place is because Cryptic wanted to put a level editor in Neverwinter because BioWare and Obsidian's preceding Neverwinter Nights series was famous for its fanmade campaigns. STO was already up and running so they used it as a testbed for NWO's tech.
However I'm reasonably sure the number of MMOs, specifically, with official UGC systems is quite small.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
Probably at some point, though it's also a general-interest item about the game so there's a bit of latitude there.
I'm actually going to dissent with the article a little bit. I've tried working in the STO Foundry myself. If you're building a dialog-heavy mission with simple interactions or a straight up pew-pew, and you're not too worried about building interiors, it's fine. If you want to do anything Spotlight quality, the learning curve and time investment is huge.
Mission Architect in City of Heroes did not allow players to create their own custom maps, so it is inferior in that sense. But it was way easier to combine elements to tell a story with complex interactions. It also had something that STO Foundry does not and may never have: the ability to create custom mobs and bosses.
Sure, you can reskin the mobs and contacts, but you can't custom design their abilities or script how they respond to the players. STO mobs in the Foundry only know how to pew-pew a target until one or the other is dead. They don't hunt down the players (which would be an excellent behavior for a Hirogen, don't you think?), bosses don't try to escape when they're at low health, and contacts will not follow you around and are non-combatants. You can trick the system into making some of these things seem possible, but again the learning curve and time investment to do that is prohibitive for casual players.
STO (and NWO) Foundry has a lot of potential... even more than Mission Architect. But it needs more Dev love than it's getting.
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The variety and ease of use of triggers, NPC behaviors, and objectives in MA is what I miss the most. STO Foundry currently doesn't come anywhere close to that.
Also, it should be simple to designate that 'Actor #1' is a tac officer, 'Actor #2' is a sci officer, etc. or that 'boss' ship you're fighting is actually a Scimitar and not just looks like one.
The ultimate would be to set up a boss ship and be able to specify officers for each station. But that would certainly require a lot more complicated AI than the game has right now. I'd settle for just being able to pick and choose the composition of the mob (exact ship or mob type).
Anyway, I'm going to shut up about Foundry feature wishlists now. It might seem that I'm bashing the Foundry -- I am, a little bit, but not because it doesn't deserve to be mentioned as one of the best UCG systems out there. MA set the bar really high and I don't think the potential of the Foundry is fully realized yet.
It wasn't an MMO, but there was a game a few years back called "Freedom Force". I think it had one of the most powerful modding systems I've ever seen; a lot of the gameplay could be controlled with python scripts written against their API and that API was exposed to the players. It could even create custom powers and custom AI. Too much power to give MMO players, really, but that game took UGC to a level I've never seen before or since.
(edit: Well, Minecraft, maybe.)
I bet a lot of Foundry authors would sacrifice tribbles to the Iconians if they could just script NPC behavior like that.
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek