Pstemarie wrote...
I've been playing with Foundry a bit and, although the potential is there, in its current state it just doesn't measure up to Aurora. You can't design custom exterior areas - the raw map anyway, and you're very limited with regard to characters. You can't really customize those either
So while the intent is clearly there its a disappointment.
I was a Foundry beta tester. I made and published a 4 "module" "campaign" in two weeks from start to end while waiting on beta testers for my NWN2 work. Below you'll see why I put module and campaign in quotes.
None of these "modules" has more than a few hundred words of dialog in them. It took about two weeks to make the whole campaign. In NWN terms, the entire "campaign" would barely be a sidequest. Each "module"'s length and number of maps is typical of Foundry "modules". 3-4 maps, 15-20 minutes, a few hundred words of dialog. (Each of these is counted as a "module" by Cryptic, so when they talk about how many thousands of modules they have, keep that in mind.)
There are some longer modules that take 45-60 minutes. From the two I played of this length, these mostly mean
significant running around on large and conspicuously empty maps (the two authors did not have a good understanding of map content density, and fortunately I have a freebie horse as a Foundry beta author to get around quickly). Because the Foundry gives you a resource budget (and the budget was cut by around 80% during beta) you can not make a large map and have an appropriate detail density unless you are making a plains area where it would naturally be low, or using one of the pre- detailed prefab maps.
Finally, getting anyone to play your work requires serious pandering and "play my quest-whoring", but once you get plays people jump into the content whether it's good or not because it's popular so it shows up at the top of the Foundry quest lists. I didn't do any pandering or quest whoring on purpose as an experiment to see what the experience of the typical author would be.
As a Foundry beta author, my content was available day 1 of open beta so I had a big headstart on most content simply from a visibility standpoint of having content on day 1 before everyone could get in the Foundry. Since open beta started my first quest has been played less than 10 times, the fourth quest in my campaign has never been played. My entry into a Foundry beta contest, which meant it was listed in two different posts by Cryptic employees and on an official NWO publicity page, was played one time during the contest. The contest authors who did the "play my quest whoring" got a couple hundred and won the contest. Last time I looked, the contest winners had 10k-15k plays, my contest entry has less than 10 (The people that did play my contest entry have loved it and a few even sent me ingame mail about it.). One of the contest winners is a xp farming mission dressed up with extra lines of dialog and running around in between to hide it, they even sic the monsters on unkillable npcs for a while so the monsters don't react to you killing them.
The most popular Foundry quest is currently a beat-em-up xp with by dancing bikini girls at the end (not kidding, the author fills the room with 30-40 female npcs playing various dance animations and wearing only the minimum clothing Cryptic requires on the character models). While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's probably not the type of content a NWN author would want to make.
I released a campaign for NWN2 at the same time as my Foundry content. As "dead" as NWN 1/2 are, the NWN2 content has gotten roughly 2500x the playtime as my Foundry content. I spent about 20 hours making Foundry content and while it obviously took more time it certainly didn't take 2500x the time I spent on my Foundry content to make my NWN2 content.
Modifié par kamal_, 10 mai 2013 - 03:55 .
