Foundry Farewell

It was via The Ancient Gaming Noob of all places that I found out that Cryptic is finally closing down the Foundry for good in both Neverwinter and STO. I say "finally" because it's been down so often by now, I wasn't even sure whether it was still functional to begin with. The official subreddit received the news with a resounding "meh", and few people even considered the announcement worthy of an upvote. I'm clearly not the only one who never really cared about this particular feature.

I only ever made two posts on this blog that carry the Foundry tag. The first one was a brief explanation of what it is, while also mentioning that I didn't use it much, and the second one just mentioned as a brief aside that astral diamond rewards were being removed from Foundry missions.

While I give kudos to players who used it in creative ways and also to Cryptic for how hard they initially tried to integrate it into the game (what with the harpers advertising it in pretty much every zone), I just never developed much of an interest in it. Even back when there were some rewards for running Foundry missions, they seemed like a very time-consuming way of earning them, and the quality of the missions could be hit and miss. Both Telwyn and Roger also talk about just how this sort of player-created content has frequently ended up being abused, which resulted in Cryptic having to add more and more restrictions over time.

I do have some fond memories of a few missions I played. There was the one that Telwyn's partner created, the one with the NPCs that were wannabe Power Rangers (or something?!), or the one where the creator had had a lot of fun with the editor and made the player go through a whole section where everything was upside down. I also remember Wilhelm writing about doing some missions that were basically recreations of popular WoW dungeons.

Ultimately though, even when they were decent, Foundry missions always seemed like a distraction from the "real" game to me. So it's a sad day for those who actually used the Foundry, but I suspect I'm part of the majority when I say that these news don't elicit much more than a shrug for me.