Stars Reach My Destination

On Wednesday evening I spent two hours testing Stars Reach. Well, I say "testing". It was mostly running around gawping, taking screenshots and trying to figure out how everything worked. There was a note on Discord suggesting new testers check out a thread that explained the basics before logging in but naturally I didn't pay any attention to that.

Which was fine. I got the hang of things, eventually. I'm all for reading the manual but in this context the settings kind of are the manual. Getting to grips with the controls did take a while but at least now I know enough about the UI to find my way around. If there are specific instructions in another test, I might have a fighting chance of following them.

There will be further opportunities for me to test the game because not only am I now in the current phase but, thanks to a recommendation by Wilhelm, I'm also in the Stars Reach Content Creator Program. That's a first, although maybe not a last because I just got an email from some other game, one I'd never heard of, sending me a beta key and telling me I'm in their program too. I have no idea how or why that happened but it doesn't look like a game I'd have any interest in playing so I won't be following it up and we'll say no more about it.

What I will say is that the Stars Reach pre-alpha is definitely one of the more focused, organized testing programs I've been in. It has schedules and goals and everything! It even has teams, who can have separate testing schedules, although my first test was for both my team, Team Green, and for Team Blue as well.

My character. Yes, he's a cat. Also, yes, he's a he. That's a switch!

It had a nice, easy introduction to the program. There weren't any specific goals. The test was all about "improving server performance and addressing feedback from our previous sessions" so I felt free to do my own thing. Presumably I was doing my bit just by being there.

I will be sending in my bug reports and feedback when I get into the swing of things, I'm sure, although I am a little rusty on that sort of thing. I used to do a lot of it back in the day but it's been a while since I was in a test that amounted to much more than a marketing exercise. I didn't send any specific reports this time, partly because of the aforementioned figuring stuff out but mainly because not much went wrong. 

Other than some major lag that required rebooting the server, it all went pretty smoothly. For a pre-alpha, things both looked good and mostly seemed to work, although obviously what's in the current build is only a very small subset of what there will be one day.

There were a couple of glitches I probably should have reported. At the start of the test I had a tool for setting up camps but it vanished from my backpack sometime after I swapped it out for the one that digs holes. Also, all my tool-belt icons vanished for a while, which was a tad disconcerting, although pressing the keys still worked. 

Dude! Where's my icons?

They came back after I relogged, so I just accepted it and carried on. Probably need to not to be quite so forgiving in a test. I'm just so used to things like that happening in live games I barely think about it any more...

The lag at times was ferocious. Most people seemed to find it a lot better after the server reboot but for me, it actually got a lot worse. I hadn't had that much of a problem with it before then but when the server came back up, I found the game all but unplayable.

The cause was definitely at my end. I logged right out of everything, Steam included, and after that all was fine. My tool-belt icons came back and I had no more lag to speak of for the rest of the two hours. The camping doohickey was gone for good, though, so that might have been a genuine bug. Or maybe I dropped it somehow.

Either way, it turned out to be a good thing in a way. But I'll get to that later.

Now this would be a great spot for a camp. Oh, wait...

The main thing I have to say about the two hours I spent playing Stars Reach last night is that it was a lot of fun. More fun than I expected, considering it's at such an early stage of development and also that it's a sandbox, which isn't my favorite genre.

Fortunately for me, there are lots of goals to latch onto if you prefer some nebulous sense of purpose, as I do. As an Explorer in the Bartle sense, naturally the main task I focused on was chasing down Survey Points and scanning them. I didn't do it to an extreme, not being any kind of completionist, but I was happy to have found about two-thirds of them by the end of the test.

I also tried out all the tools - the aforementioned camp device, the harvester and the pistol. 

Actually, I know what they're all called except the camp one - I have screenshots - so I might as well use the proper names. Also, going through them in turn should give a vague impression of what there is to do in the game so far.

One thing you can do is fight stuff. You do that with the gun, which is called the Omniblaster, which is a really nice word to say out loud. Go on, try it. It seems to fire arcs of electricity in short bursts and I found it quite effective and yet nowhere near effective enough. I kept getting killed.

Uh, guys... can we talk about this?

I hadn't planned on doing any fighting but after I got trampled to death by a herd of Owldeer I decided I ought at least to find out how to use the only weapon I had just so I could defend myself  from the wildlife. Someone in voice chat said the owldeer wouldn't attack unless provoked but that was not my experience. It felt as though they went for me every time they spotted me. For that matter, so did every other damn creature, of which there were many. 

About the only things that ran away from me were regular deer. Everything else was hyper-aggressive. I got killed by owldeer several times, by a pack of Skysharks, by some floating eyeball things, by something that spat poison at me from above that I never even got a look at... 

I did manage to take a few of them with me but their numbers overwhelmed me every time. Someone in chat was talking abut crafting a shield but I'm not convinced that would have helped much. A tank, maybe.

Half the time I got trampled, I was just trying to pick some flowers using a device called the Harvester. I know! Catchy, right? Shouldn't it be the Omniharvester, at least?

One day, someone will put a mushroom in a game and it won't be red with white spots but I don't imagine I'll live long enough to see it happen.

Maybe, if it actually did harvest everything, but it doesn't. It's a picky picker. I started off pointing it a tree, expecting to get logs, but it didn't do anything so I aimed it at flowers and mushrooms instead. Some it stripped of all useful parts, others it ignored. I imagine there's some visual clue to let you know which is which or maybe it needs an upgrade to handle the tougher stuff.

I collected quite a few plant parts but I didn't have any crafting recipes to use them in so I put away the Harvester and got out the Pathfinder out instead. I liked that a lot better. 

The Pathfinder lights up Survey Points all across the world so you can go scan them. They glow bright pink and you can see them for miles. There are sixty-four to collect although what happens when you've scanned them all I'm not clear. I know several people did, because when you complete the set your success is broadcast to the world. 

I think I found about forty in all so my name was not broadcast to anyone, which I have to say would always be my preference. I'm not big on these kinds of global announcements, ubiquitous in so many Free-to-Play games. I do think at the least you ought to be able to set permissions on stuff like that. What if you were in a witness protection program or something?

So, who put these things here, anyway? And who am I doing this survey for?

Getting to some of the Survey Points was fun. I found a few clinging to cliffs and I could see one way, way up high on some kind of floating island. I'm guessing the gravity device you can craft would come in handy for that one but although I did get as far as buying the recipe for that, I never got to make it. I didn't find the mats until the test was ending.

That was because the mats were in space and a) I didn't know and b) I couldn't get there. I knew how to get to space because several people in chat had explained it but I didn't find the supposedly unmissable portal until ten minutes before the end. I kept looking but I never saw it until the devs created a waterfall of lava right next to it. I could see that alright!

Before I made it into space, I became very familiar with the last of the five tools, the Terraformer. I can well believe there are people who do nothing but play with this excellent toy for the whole two hours. 

It's a chunky, hand-held contraption that looks uncannily like a golf bag. It fires a purple beam that rips anything apart. It also never runs out of juice so you can just keep blasting away until either your hopper fills up and you have to go empty it or the roof of the tunnel you're digging collapses and kills you.

Pass me the nine iron, Jim!

As I found late on, the Terraformer is how also you get ores and metals and suchlike for crafting. As for where you find them... in space, of course! And maybe elsewhere although all I got on the surface of the planet was mud and rock. 

Next time, I'll make a point of going to space at the start so I can get the mats to make some different tools and devices (And replace my camp-making tool, which is craftable.) although quite honestly just digging the holes is fun enough to keep me entertained on its own. If mats happen to fall into my packs while I'm digging, that's a bonus.

All of the things I've mentioned doing so far gave me XP. Everything you do gives you XP. The catch is, the XP is specific to the activity you're engaged in, so because I was swapping about all the time I ended up making a small amount of progress in half a dozen talent trees but not enough to get very far  in any of them.

I also found out quite quickly that to swap tools from your backpack to your tool-belt, where they have to be placed before you can use them, you need to be in a camp. You also need to be in a camp to craft anything. Since I'd lost the thingy that allowed me to set up a camp of my own, this looked like it was going to be a problem.

That's a camp over there in the distance. Right next to where someone's set that tree on fire.

But it wasn't. Not being able to make a camp of my own turned out to be the exact opposite of a problem, something I might not have realized if I hadn't lost my own dibber (Not the actual name. I didn't take a screenshot when I had the thing so now I have no clue what it was called.) 

There were camps all over the place that people had set up and some of them had crafting stations. I thought I'd see if it was possible to use someone else's camp to swap stuff around and do some crafting. I felt a bit uncomfortable doing it so I sidled up to an empty camp and stood just barely inside the big, yellow fence, fiddling around in my inventory to see if I could swap out tools. And it worked!

As I found out soon afterwards from a conversation in chat, that is precisely what you're supposed to do. You can use your own camp but you're strongly encouraged to use someone else's. Camp owners get XP from people using the crafting stations they set up or even just from people standing around in their camp, so they're hoping for visitors.

This is apparently all very familiar to veterans of Star Wars Galaxies, a sub-group that seems to make up a large portion of current testers, at least based on the number of times the game gets name-checked in chat. I gather that's how this stuff worked in that game, meaning people are both used to it and like it. 

Cats In Spaaace!

I did not play SWG, at least not until after the NGE and even then only very briefly. I'm neither used to it, nor am I convinced I like it all that much. 

I think I'd be a lot more comfortable with the mechanic if the spaces were clearly designated as "public". At the moment it feels too much like walking into someone's kitchen uninvited and making yourself a sandwich without asking. Now I understand what's going on, I can deal with it for practical purposes but I suspect it may never feel either natural or comfortable for me. 

That, though, was probably the only thing I didn't entirely enjoy during the test. Oh, and the lag, obviously. And being killed by angry deer, which was funny the first time but less so every time after that. (You know they're angry because they flash up emojis to show their mood. That's weird, too and I'm not sure I like it much, either. It's kind of immersion-breaking. I think it would definitely need a toggle when the game goes live.)

Mostly, though, I had a great time. Two hours is actually a long session for me these days so the fact that I didn't start to flag until close to the end is a very positive sign. Even in the games I think I've been playing obsessively recently, like Once Human and Wuthering Waves, I tend to feel like I need a break after about ninety minutes. Two hours is pretty much a marathon at my age.

I'm not sure when the next EU-friendly test is likely to be but I'm looking forward to it. I believe there will be a new build by then although I have no idea what's coming. 

Maybe I should read the instructions next time...