Daniel Stahl is back in town!

Yes!!! Daniel Stahl, ex-Executive Producer at Cryptic Studios has posted on the Celebrate Season 5 topic on the STO forums saying “Congrats to the STO Team for all their hard work to get Season 5 live!” But the question, why is he posting as a DEV? Is Dstahl back?

The short answer is….. Yes, our beloved Danny boy is back!

Daniel’s tenure at Cryptic Studios ended in September of this year. He was recruited by Zynga Game Network as Executive Producer involved in the pre-production of a yet to be announced Zynga titles. According to LinkedIn.com, that all ended in December. But that’s not all…confirmation was made on his personal Facebook page when a friend noticed a status change to his job title. The following comment was posted by Stahl on his wall in response:

“I missed the Cryptic Family. Excited to be back working on MMOs. You should come back too! :)”

Interestingly, his Facebook page lists his position as Sr. Producer. So what does this mean? Just moment ago, he posted this amazing update on the STO forums that is sure to thrill the Foundry folk and the rest of the community.

Daniel Stahl: Greetings!
As the snoops have deduced, yes I am back at Cryptic Studios! My time at Zynga was fun and interesting, but I really missed working with my colleagues here. There is something magical going on at Cryptic these days and I’m very happy to be back working on the MMOs that I personally love to play. Being a part of Perfect World is having such a great positive impact on this company.

After talking with Jack about returning, I accepted a position as a Sr. Producer managing the Foundry (UGC) tools at Cryptic Studios. I’ve always been passionate about User Generated Content and Community Developer involvement. Whether it was community deckbuilding software at Wizards of the Coast, the Xbox Community Developer Program at Microsoft, or more recently, the Foundry on STO, I’ve been a strong believer that if you build the right tools, game developers can partner with the community to build amazing content and applications.

That is why I’m excited to be back at Cryptic working directly with the highly talented UGC team to begin working on future updates for the Foundry, especially with the development of Neverwinter which has its own deep history of User Developed Content.

Today is a great day to be back at Cryptic. Season 5 is here! Stephen D’Angelo has been doing an awesome job as EP on STO. He’s been able to rally the team to deliver on the many tasks needed for Season 5 to prepare the game for F2P. He and the STO team have been working from a solid plan and everything is on track for an awesome F2P launch. For those who have been asking, I’m in full support of the changes that have been made in Season 5 as they will contribute to the continued success of STO into the future as it brings in a whole new host of players.

So big hugs to everyone in STO land. I’m happy to be back and looking forward to contributing to the future of the Foundry.

As of yet, there is no confirmation or comments from Cryptic Studios or Zynga Game Network at the moment, but the spark of hope is spreading across the Star Trek Online community that our Dan is back in the Captain’s chair!

(Source: Holosuite Magazine)

by Deyvid