Taking My Time In Stars Reach

Last Saturday saw two significant changes to the Stars Reach pre-alpha. The topline feature was a substantial new build, including the first iteration of the housing system, but perhaps equally as important was the first extension to the duration of the testing window. We got three hours.

Well, two hours and forty minutes. The servers were playing up at the beginning so the test started late. And of that, I got less than the usual two hours, about three-quarters of an hour at the start and half an hour near the end, thanks as always to Beryl. 

For me, the whole testing schedule is proving increasingly untenable. In almost a quarter of a century of participating in alpha and beta tests for MMORPGs, I think these sessions have been the most difficult to fit into my daily schedule so far.

There are any number of problems from my perspective, all mitigating against my being able to get anything meaningful done in terms of either testing or playing. The tests are both very short and at fixed times, most of which, being designed to suit a team working on the American Pacific Coast, fall at an impossible - or at least improbable - time of night for me here in the United Kingdom.

I don't recall these pale trees from previous tests.

I'm grateful there are at least a small number of windows allocated for the relative convenience of European testers but even there the agreeably reasonable hours just happen to coincide with the time we take our evening meal Chez Bhagpuss, meaning my absence is noticed in a way it wouldn't be just about any other time of day.

That means I have to advise Mrs Bhagpuss of a test well in advance so alternative arrangements can be made and even then, it's difficult to keep to those arrangements because dogs can't use either clocks or calendars. Although Mrs Bhagpuss is perfectly amenable to having our evening meal a little earlier than usual now and then, Beryl's schedule is far less flexible.

Beryl finds it very hard to understand why her evening routine needs to be disrupted. She's used to being fed, having a game or two and then going for a short walk all at some point between seven and nine in the evening, the exact slot the EU-friendly tests occupy. In every test so far, she's come into my room after about forty-five minutes to let me know it's time for her evening to begin. If I try to persuade her to wait a while, she becomes quite insistent. 

Provided I log out and do whatever it is she wants, she generally settles down for a while, so I get a couple of opportunities. There's usually a grace period at the start, when I've been able to get some testing done in the first hour, before she wakes up, and another towards the end, when she takes a nap. A three-hour test ought to have made things easier but with the missing twenty minutes and Beryl being even livelier than usual, things didn't entirely work out as expected.

A little on the lonely side but I sense the potential.

What time I did get wasn't nearly enough for what I had planned but then neither would have been the full three hours. I have mentioned this before but now, with the addition of housing and the gradual ramping-up of available activities, the temporal shortfall is becoming impossible to ignore. 

Stars Reach, as I understand it, will, by design, be a game that allows for both short and extended play sessions but if you want to make substantial progress then, as in any MMORPG, it's going to take some commitment. The intention being to simulate life in an alternate universe, by necessity, even though every action will be vastly simplified in comparison to its counterpart in the physical world, getting stuff done will take time. 

Set against the extreme acceleration we're all accustomed to in most modern video games I suspect that's going to feel like a lot of time. Even at this very early stage of development, the complexity involved and the effort required to make anything resembling meaningful progress is already very hard to ignore. Achieving anything requires a number of steps and those steps can feel pretty steep at times. 

Housing is one example and perhaps one of the more taxing. As a longtime supporter of the concept of housing in games, I was very keen to get stuck into whatever new opportunities the current build offered. 

There! That's the spot!

For once, I took the trouble to read the patch notes so I had a fair idea of what was required but even though it seemed clear that timescales had been heavily truncated for testing purposes (The xp required to claim three Homesteads, for example, is minimal, which I doubt will be the case when the game goes Live.) the time involved to get up and running had by no means been reduced sufficiently to let me get anywhere at all before the test was over.

The short testing window and my personal problems with making the most of it were the main roadblocks but there were plenty more. Put simply, it's hard to get anything done if you keep dying all the time.

I complained in a previous post that the wildlife was a bit too frisky for my tastes. Apparently I didn't know when I was well off. The patch notes listed a slew of tweaks to both combat and mob behavior which, on paper, looked like they would make life more difficult for anyone who just wanted to putter around peacefully. And boy, did they!

My intention from the start has been to fight as little as possible. Before I got into the pre-alpha, I hadn't been thinking of Stars Reach as a combat-oriented game, more one where you explored and built and behaved in a broadly social manner. I was also under the impression that choice of playstyle was going to be left largely in the hands of the players, with peaceful gameplay being fully supported.

I might want to put up a fence on that side, though...

When the game goes Live, I'm sure that will be the case but it sure as hell isn't now! If you don't go looking for fights, they come to you in the form of packs of roving predators. I've had less griefing in full PvP games. 

You don't have to fight, of course. You can always run away. The recent patch improved leashing, so mobs do now give up chasing after a while. Unfortunately, there are so damn many of them, it's hard to run away from one pack of predators without running into another. 

Or you can turn and fight, which does at least sometimes net you the loot you need. For reasons I don't claim to follow, mobs drop crafting mats. It makes no sense to me that bottles of inert gas drop from animals but then it made no sense when wolves dropped rusty weapons in EverQuest, either. Sometimes you just have to look the other way and whistle.

Currently, I find combat to be a damned-if-you do, damned-if-you-don't affair. Running can pay off, sometimes. The Grav Mesh helps, provided the creatures chasing you can't fly and the critters do give up reasonably quickly now. 

Where did I get that Neon? I have no idea...

The Catch 22 is that the more successfully you make your getaway, the further you end up from where you wanted to be and what you were trying to do. When all I wanted to do was see the sights and take some screenshots, that wasn't too much of a problem, but now I'm actually trying to get things done, it's frustrating and disheartening to have to keep dropping everything and legging it.

I've generally found fighting to be the preferable alternative, which is why my highest skill by a long way is now Combat, even though I never wanted to raise it in the first place. It was that or never knowing where the hell I was, of which more later. 

Of course, since all mobs seem to come in packs of at least three and frequently a lot more than that, even being good at fighting doesn't keep you alive for long. And it's when you die that your problems really begin.

You lose a substantial amount of your inventory every time and although I imagine the choice is random, sod's law means it will inevitably be the exact items you just spent ages gathering. Your stuff isn't lost forever, at least theoretically. It's there on your corpse marker, so you can go retrieve it, but that takes more time and there's a good chance you'll die again on the way.

Looks like I lost them! Now, where the heck am I?

If this reminds you of playing MMORPGs around the turn of the millennium well it does me, too. It's not as bad as that but it's bad enough that I wish it would go away. And I say that as someone who's on record as having enjoyed corpse runs back in the day. Then again, I enjoyed listening to Black Sabbath when I was fourteen. Doesn't mean I want to listen to them now.

While it's true that the potential losses involved and the length of time wasted are trivial in comparison to a corpse run in EverQuest c. 1999, in those days I played anything up to forty hours a week and I didn't die anything like as often, not even at low level. Scaled up, the time I spend on corpse runs in Stars Reach might even be longer!

Then there's travel. This time it's not so much the usual throwback of it taking forever. It doesn't take long at all. The test planets are tiny and travelling between them through space is fast. The problem now is working out where you are, where you need to be and how to get from the one to the other.

I'm a fighter, not a planter.

I believe cartography is, or at least will be, a skill and making and selling maps of planets will be a job opportunity. That'll be nice. For now, though, if there's a way to see where you are in the pre-alpha, I haven't been able to find it. I am perpetually lost.

In the last test, I couldn't even find my camp or my homestead. I had one for while but I made the mistake of leaving it and couldn't find my way back.

To avoid the hyper-aggressive wildlife, I chose to claim a nice, flat piece of grassland, bordered on two sides by cliffs, on the third by the edge of the map and on the last by a lake filled with lava. It seemed nice and safe so I thought it would be a good spot to set up home.

It might have been, too, if it hadn't been for a couple of things:

1. Like Wilhelm in the previous test, I couldn't even get the mats to craft the Instaformer, the basic tool required to raise Civic Engineering, the skill you need to build anything at all.
2. When I went looking for the mats to make it, I died and was never able to find my Homestead again.

I just know someone's going to pop into the comments and tell me how to access a map and how to find my homestead and that'll be great. Thanks in advance. I could, of course, have taken the time and trouble to look it up for myself. The pre-alpha comes with quite extensive in-game documentation that explains a lot of this stuff. The problem is, finding the relevant entry, reading it and figuring out how to apply it takes time and it's time that's not in sufficient supply just yet.

It sounds like I'm complaining and in a way I am but very little of what I've been complaining about is a design issue. I would probably not have the wildlife behaving quite so aggressively, I'd drop the corpse runs and I'm not wholly on board with the concept of obtaining inert gasses from living animals but all of those are matters of taste as much as anything. Other than that there's nothing going on that being able to play for as long as I wanted wouldn't fix. 

This is a test and a pre-alpha test at that, meaning the focus is and should be on finding and fixing some fairly basic, structural problems rather than proving the game can be fun. Testing the fun comes later. Probably much later.

Payback time, you glorified beachballs!

Except, here's the irony: Stars Reach in pre-alpha is already too much fun. It's a paradox. Yes, there are plenty of bugs, but it all works well enough that you find yourself just wanting to get on and play. I've played enough alphas and even betas where so little worked that it was hard to imagine any of it ever being fun. Stars Reach is fun right now.

What there is of it, that is. It may be only a microcosm of the finished game but it is a game already for all that. There are skill trees just begging to be filled out and goals just asking to be completed and now there's the enticing prospect of homes just waiting to be built. It makes you want to just get on with it.

Granted, if you could play as much as you wanted, it wouldn't take long to do it all but for me, I'd guess it would still probably take the equivalent of twenty or thirty of these time-gated tests where I get to play for an hour, if I'm lucky. I am quite slow and I'm very easily distracted.

For all the problems I've been having, I'm far from not wanting to carry on. The opposite, really. Most of my frustration comes from not being able to play as much as I'd like. If I'm finding myself feeling like I might not want to bother with the next test, that's because having to stop when I'm in the middle of something I'd really like to finish is potentially more annoying than never getting to start it in the first place.

I'd say that was a good problem for a game in early development to have. It certainly contrasts very favorably with other tests I've been in, where I could barely summon the enthusiasm to finish a session let alone look forward to another.

If nothing else, being able to see the game in pre-alpha has convinced me of the potential the game holds, something I was not wholly sure of from the promotional material alone. I look forward to the time when I get to spend a whole day or even a weekend just pottering around at my own pace without feeling the ticking of the clock behind everything I do.