Cryptic announced recently that Champions Online will be going free-to-play early next year, and many immediately wondered if their other MMO title, Star Trek Online would follow suit. Cryptic's boss, Jack Emmert, has been speaking out in a recent interview about Star Trek Online's chances of ditching the subscription fee, and about plans to introduce a City of Heroes style mission editor to Champions Online.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Emmert said “I’m sure people are wondering whether we’ll do it with Star Trek and the question is really how well it does for Champions. Does it work or doesn’t it? We’re not sold one way or the other with Star Trek yet. If people want Star Trek to go free-to-play then get in and play Champions and help make it a great success, because that would send a strong message.“

Emmert cited Turbine's success as one of the motivations for considering the free-to-play option. Turbine recently moved adopted a free-to-play model with Lord of the Rings Online, with impressive results. Emmert says that while Cryptic are hoping for a similar jump in players, he "wouldn't say we're betting on it".



“I’m not going to say we’ll do or die if we don’t get five times our revenue or whatever the stats were that Turbine did. We’re just hoping to open it up and increase the fanbase, and we’ll just wait and see – I’d love it if we got their results, but hey, if that doesn’t happen it doesn’t happen."

Cryptic also recently announced that they were releasing a set of mission editor tools for Star Trek Online called the Foundry. When asked about whether we could expect to see these features making their way over to the superhero MMO Champions Online, Emmert said "Ultimately, yeah. Eventually we would like to do it. User-generated content has always been part of our strategic plan for years and years and years. Ultimately I'd like to have it in every game we do in one version or another."

I had a great time blasting Klingons in the Star Trek Online's beta a while back, and would be mighty tempted to get involved again if it went free-to-play. Have you been playing Star Trek Online? Would you be tempted to check it out if it was free?

Cryptic Studios, creators of City of Heroes and Champions Online, are gearing up to release the Foundry toolset to players of space borne MMO Star Trek Online. The toolset will allow players to create their own missions, and then submit them to a database for the community to rate.

Players will be able to create entire star systems and planets from scratch, or edit pre-made versions created by Cryptic. Objectives, objects and characters can then be placed to create missions that span entire sectors of space. Cryptic are also putting aside some open world areas to allow for community made quests. In these areas, characters and objects associated with the community made mission will only be visible to those who are playing the episode.



Players won't be able to add extra models or artwork to the game, simply create missions using pre-existing content. Once an episode is created, others will be able to rate it using a five star system, and Cryptic are going to let members of the community sign up to be reviewers.

Superhero MMO City of Heroes received a similar editor called the Mission Architect. On the day it was released, users created more quests in one day than the development team had in five years. This could be a great way to give a flagging MMO a new lease of life. The toolset is currently in open beta for Star Trek Online players. For more information, check out the Foundry Q&A.