Things Begin To Take Shape In Stars Reach

Playable Worlds is running a fairly extensive round of pre-Christmas testing for Stars Reach. There's a two-hour test every day, Tuesday through Friday this week, with a double helping on Wednesday for some reason. The majority of the tests are in EU-friendly time-slots, too, mostly falling around teatime and extending into the early evening.

I was planning on waiting for the Thursday or Friday tests, when I'd be home all day and wouldn't have to come back from work and jump straight in, but as it happened everything aligned perfectly yesterday for a full, uninterrupted two-hour session. We'd finished eating and Beryl had stuffed herself to the point of collapse so she was flat out on the bed for once, sleeping.

I'd actually forgotten there was a test on but when I sat down at my PC a few minutes after seven and logged into Steam, the first thing I noticed was a 1GB update for Stars Reach. That jogged my memory, so as soon as the patching was done, I logged in.

The server was up and completely stable. All the disconnection issues and lag of the early tests seem to be over. There are also no wipes going on at the moment so my character was available and where I'd left her. Which would have been good if I'd had any idea where that was.

I seemed to be on the side of a hill, somewhere on the edge of the map. I imagine I got interrupted and logged out wherever I happened to be at the time. Not that it makes a lot of difference at the moment. I don't know where anything is in relation to anything else anyway.

The three available planets are all pretty small, maybe the size of something like The Feerrott or possibly Rathe Mountains in EverQuest, although with a great deal more verticality. If there was a map it would be very easy to find your way around but as it is you have to rely on landmarks, a dubious process in a world subject to terraforming and strip-mining at every turn.

I am just now beginning to recognize a few semi-permanent features, like the high plateau with the weird, ghost-trees or the big lava lake, but I'm a little hazy yet even about which planet I'm on. I can tell if I'm on the Desert planet right away but the Temperate and the Jungle look very much alike in certain areas so I find it quite easy to confuse them.

This time I was on the Jungle planet when I woke up. I think. I'm basing that mostly on an observation I made later, after I'd been into space and swapped planets. I remembered Wilhelm talking about a co-operative attempt to build a city using the new construction tools, something that was happening on the original, temperate planet so, when I came down from orbit to see a grid-like pattern of new buildings, I guessed that must be where I'd landed.

Traveling through space to get from one world to another was a first for me. Or rather, it was the first time I'd gone into space with the deliberate intention of using it as a transit station. I've been space-mining before and ended up back on a different planet from where I started but that was by accident. 

This time, I wanted to go to a different "zone" so I looked for the blue beam of light that spears into the sky to let you know where the spaceport is, gravity-hopped across the map to get to it, then took the space-lift to the asteroid belt. Once there, I went outside the docking bay, looked around for another blue laser beam, found one, engaged my jet-pack and flew across to it so I could go back down to earth.

As a means of getting from one zone to another, it's a very odd process if you stop and think about it. I have to assume it's purely for the pre-alpha and forms no part of the eventual plans for travel in the live game. Also, if there's a way of telling which portal goes to which planet, I don't know what it might be. Making the beams of light a different color for each would be a start.

This sort of transport system is exactly the kind of thing that's great fun to discover and come to terms with when it's new but which quickly turns into a complete pain when you have to do it every time you want to get anywhere. It's something many developers have had to come to terms with as players lose patience with the exact, same mechanics that once enthralled and enchanted them. Never has the old saw about familiarity breeding contempt had greater currency than in the life-cycle of an MMORPG.

The reasons I wanted to travel to another planet were twofold: firstly, I'd finally achieved my longstanding goal of mapping all sixty-four out of sixty-four Survey Points. Only took me about half a dozen attempts. And I didn't even use the mapping tool, mostly because I was too mean to spend 400 xp points on it when I only had a handful of points to find.

The second reason I wanted to go somewhere new was to see if anyone was dancing. Stars Reach has a bizarre means of health and stamina recovery, something Raph has carried over from Star Wars Galaxies, where it was both popular and made at least some sort of sense. In Stars Reach it's still popular with ex-SWG players, of whom there are many in the testing program, but to anyone who hasn't drunk from that particular jug of Kool-Aid, it makes absolutely no sense at all.

As I understand it, the way it works is that you stand near another player while they're dancing and that somehow heals you and restores your stamina. In SWG it would have happened in a Cantina or some kind of bar or club and the healing would have been done by a character of the Entertainer class, which definitely has a kind of logic to it. I can imagine someone, getting back to town after a long day of murder-hoboing, kicking back with a beer while watching a little pole-dancing to de-stress and unwind.

In Stars Reach, though, it's just standing next to some random guy in a camp, jigging about on his own. How that's supposed to lighten anyone's load I'm not really sure. Still, whatever gets your HP back, right?

Hit points and stamina recover on their own but only up to the max, which falls every time you die or do other things I'm not entirely clear on. I believe the cap does go back up on its own as well, albeit very slowly, but I'm not a hundred per cent sure about that. The new tutorial was trying to explain it to me when I foolishly closed it to do something else and then found I couldn't open it back up again. I sent a bug report about that because I do think you ought to be able to pause a tutorial at will, not just have the one shot at it.

I needed to go stand next to someone doing the space rhumba for a while because I'd knocked a lot off my health and especially my stamina with all the running away I'd had to do while I was map-making. The change to leashing has very much made running away the preferred means of dealing with unwanted attention from aggressive wildlife. I only died twice this time and both were when I stayed to fight.

You may die less often that way but bouncing across the increasingly rugged landscape like a runaway spacehopper does lead to a certain amount of unavoidable physical trauma all on its own. By the time I got my last Survey Point I was battered, bruised and bleeding but, having covered the entire map, I was also aware there was hardly anyone else there and of the people who were, no-one was holding an impromptu dance party.

I didn't have any more luck on the next planet. There were more people around, for sure, but they all seemed very busy, doing whatever it was they were doing. This building-focused phase of testing seems to be making everyone a lot more intent on leaving their mark on the world, although most of the marks in question seem to come in the form of huge, gaping, jagged holes it's all too easy to fall down. I did that. Several times.

As yet, I haven't made any serious attempts of my own to get to grips with building. I did, by sheer chance, manage to find my Homestead again, the one I placed last time then promptly lost. It was satisfying to find it was still there, a small sign of permanence in a very impermanent world.

I'd also put it in a really stupid place so the moment I found it I tore it down. I haven't found a new place to put it yet. I'm going to have to give that a lot more thought before I go in for any serious home-making.

So far, there's precious little evidence I can see of any major architectural projects in progress. Unlike Landmark in even its very earliest public incarnation, when vastly impressive structures sprouted from the ground almost immediately, construction in Stars Reach seems more a proof-of-concept than a system anyone's going to spend a lot of time with purely for creative reasons. Then again, that might say as much about the current cadre of testers as it does the tools they've been given.

What I did run into, once again, was one of those odd, shrine-like affairs with small, golden statues of animals. I think those are part of the infrastructure, not anything players can make or place, but what they're intended to suggest is beyond me. It's nice to find them, all the same. Evidence of any sort of non-player-made lore or civilization is thin on the ground at this stage of development.

Even though I had no interruptions this time around, I still ended up logging out ten minutes before the server came down. As a player, I felt I'd achieved quite a lot, having mapped one planet and half of a second and used the accrued xp points to fill out quite a large chunk of the skill matrix. I also sent in a few bug reports so I was reasonably comfortable I'd fulfilled my responsibilities as a tester.

Speaking of testing Stars Reach, as opposed to just playing it, the testing process for me seems like it's reaching a kind of plateau. I'm vaguely familiar with the controls, I have reasonable facility with their usage and I'm not running into that many bugs. I suspect the part of the game I'm still entrenched in has been fairly thouroughly tested by now. I'd need to move on to new things to start running into problems.

As a player, I'm in two minds over what to do next. I've explored most of the three planets. I can get around with an approximation of efficiency and do much of what I want to do at the basic survival and exploration level without too much difficulty. That's all good.

To progress further is going to require actual effort and I'm not sure how I feel about that. As I wrote in a previous post, Stars Reach seems to start with a presumption that players (And therefore testers.) will want to create goals for themselves and find much of their motivation and pleasure in working towards achieving them - with the emphasis on the work part. 

That really isn't me or not any more. I don't much like the buckle down and grind it out approach in live games, where there's full persistence and progression, so the appeal of doing it in a testing environment where wipes are frequent isn't at all clear. 

Housing is a great example of my problem. I love building homes in games but once I've done it I tend to enjoy living in them. Otherwise, what was ther point? Even when I run out of space to build or decorate, I'm still more likely to learn to put up with an overstuffed, chaotic home than tear it down and start over. 

The exception to that would be Valheim, where building a base was an integral part of the fast-transit system. That did motivate me sling a string of shacks across the landscape and once I had the walls up, I couldn't leave well alone. It's why I have literally dozens of half-built homes there and also why I logged twice as many hours in the Viking afterlife sim than any other non-MMO I've ever played.

Maybe when Stars Reach goes live in a few years, I'll do the same there. For now, though, while I'd love to explore how the building tools work, I don't have the energy or the commitment to put hours into it, knowing I'll have to start over again in a week or a month or whenever it is the next build lands. 

Similarly, I enjoyed mapping one planet but I can't say I'm getting anything like the same satisfaction out of mapping a second. Things that are fun to do once or twice don't always stay fun forever.

I'm aware this is a test not a game and that having fun isn't the point. Some degree of fun is, however, necessary if I'm going to want to do it at all. At the moment I am still enjoying myself and being able to write posts like this is motivation enough but I'm close to the point of having said most of what I have to say about what there is of the game so far, or at least about the part of it I'm willing to take the time to discover.

That was apparent this time, when I decided to stop before I had to. It won't put me off playing again. I just need to think ahead a bit and have some prepared goals in mind. Paradoxically, while I know I'd have more fun if the servers were up all day, so long as they're only up for a couple of hours, that couple of hours can feel too long, especially when I have no particular purpose in mind.

There are quite a few more things I'd like to fiddle around with other than housing. I'd like to see if filling out the combat tree makes standing my gorund a viable option, for a start. It'd be nice not to have to run away every time.

I'd like to look at the crafting options more closely too, not least because there is an alternative to watching people dance I ought to be making more use of. You can make plasters out of bananas that restore a large amount of health. If I could figure out how to make those it would be a big help. Maybe there's a recipe that restores stamina, too. It's not that I want to be anti-social but you can't always find a dancer when you need one.

So there. Seems like I do have a few attainable goals after all. When's the next test?