Stars On Saturday Night

Here's another post about the Stars Reach pre-alpha, which is ongoing, although with the Kickstarter close to revealing its secrets, this already feels like the end of an era. There was a four-hour test for everyone on Saturday, including all the people who got invites off the back of "following" the fundraiser. Naturally, I was barely able to manage even an hour.

I don't want to go on and on about it (No, really...) but it has been very instructive for me to discover exactly how little control I have over my own time these days. The Stars Reach testing program has been almost entirely responsible for making that very clear indeed. Before I signed up and got in, I hadn't really noticed how far gaming had slipped down my list of priorities. 

There's so rarely anything in my gaming schedule that's in any way time-sensitive on a scale beyond "I suppose I'd better log in sometime in the next six weeks", I don't generally notice that it's a lot more difficult than it used to be find a clear hour or two for uninterrupted play. I was aware I'd not been playing as much as I used to but until these tests I'd assumed that was through choice. Now I'm not so sure.

These days, just about everything takes precedence over games, anything from eating meals to writing blog posts to watching broadcast TV shows as they go out, all things that would definitely not have pushed gaming to the back of the queue a few years ago. The biggest change by far, though, is having a dog in the house, particularly one who has her most active, social phase in the evening. It makes sitting down to play an uninterrupted session of any game a very hit or miss prospect.

All of that I've complained about to the point of tedium in previous posts. Even I'm bored with repeating it and I love talking about myself, as must be all too obvious from the long history of this blog. I mention it once again mostly to add weight to the rest of what I have to say about the testing program and my further involvement with it.

We are currently in an extremely early testing phase. It's pre-alpha. There is no permanence and no suggestion that there should be. There is also no game to play although that's less of an issue. Even without my well-documented personal issues over the awkward timing of the tests (It would suit me so much better if they mostly happened on weekday mornings or afternoons.) I'd still have reached the point now where it would be difficult for me to do anything of any great moment or purpose with the time I do have.

When I logged in on Saturday evening, the first thing I had to do was make a new character. My previous one and all the progress I'd made with her had been wiped. As I said, this is entirely proper at this stage of development and no-one, certainly not me, is complaining about it. It's not a question of complaining about having to start over. It's more about what that means in practical terms.

I've written about the opening stages of the game already - the tools you need to learn to use, the skills you need to raise, the materials you need to acquire and the devices you need to make. I've written about the housing possibilities and the combat and the exploration. 

With each new build there are new activities to try and refinements of the existing content to evaluate. The problem is that most of them require going through many of the same stages of progression as before. That in itself requires a certain mindset and personality and I'm not sure I have either. Even if the tests fell at the perfect time for me I'm not convinced I'd be willing to start over from scratch every three or four weeks and work my way back up to where I was before I could start testing whatever had been added.

As things stand, since I can usually only manage an hour or two each week, even if I was willing to go over and over the same ground, I would never be able to catch up. It saves me the worry of having to make a decision over whether I'm willing to try - it's just not possible.

Another odd side effect of these intermittent sessions, separated by days or sometimes weeks, is that I can't always tell with any certainty whether something has changed, not even how things look. On more than one occasion I've logged in and looked around and thought the graphics had improved. 

This Saturday I was convinced there'd been some kind of graphical upgrade. The world looked brighter and somehow fuller, the trees more leafy, the mountains more impressive. After a few minutes, though, I began to think maybe nothing had changed after all.

There's a strange phenomenon I've commented on before, whereby games that I haven't played for a while look much richer and more visually impressive when I come back after a time away. I noticed it most in Guild Wars 2, which I played daily for a decade. The only time I stopped for a while was when I went on holiday and each time I got back after a week or ten days away, when I logged in the whole game seemed to be in stereoscopic 3D. 

Literally. It was freaky!

It was so visually arresting I found it disorienting. I felt dizzy just looking at the screen. It took me a couple of hours to get used to it but when I did I could see that absolutely nothing had changed except my perception. I suspect something similar, albeit less dramatic, happens every time I come back to Stars Reach after a week or more.

It's not just the visuals, either. My memory isn't good enough to remember what I was doing last time I played nor what I need to do next. It's not a case of just picking up and carrying on; I have to start re-learning the whole thing all over again, something made even slower and more difficult because many of the things I need to do may have changed.

That makes sending bug or feedback reports feel a bit iffy. I'm never sure if something's off in the game or whether it's just me. 

What I certainly could do, though, is send feedback about the things that I'm certain have been added or changed or removed. For instance, the new Tutorial. Since that comes right at the start, I had no trouble testing it on Saturday.

I didn't much like it but that was because I took against it from the start, when the game openly insulted me for using it. I very much did not like being addressed from the get-go as "Meatbag". I will be sending feedback on that next time I log in. I didn't do it at the time because I was fuming too much to be civil. 

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea? If it's meant to be funny it isn't. If it's meant to have some in-game lore implication, there'd need to be some actual in-game lore to support it and again there isn't. And even if there was, does anyone really think the opening of a tutorial is the place to start slinging even lore-appropriate insults at the newbies?

That put me in a really bad mood for the rest of the Tutorial, which was otherwise somewhat helpful. I did learn one new thing although two days later I couldn't tell you what it was. I just remember thinking "Oh, I didn't know that.."  The only other thing I can remember about the Tutorial now is that it was short.

Oh, there was one interesting thing that came up in passing. There's a line that begins "We have not yet granted you permission to use starfaring vessels..." Up to now there seems to have been very little space travel in this game about space travel, to the point where I wasn't sure any more if I'd misunderstood the basic concept. I had thought Stars Reach was going to be at least a little like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous in that there'd be ships and we'd fly them between stars. 

This one half-sentence doesn't necessarily suggest that's what's going to happen. For all I know the Servitors might just issue us with the equivalent of a space bus pass and we'll trundle around the galaxy in the back seats of some kind of space Greyhound. Even that would be better than clicking a pylon and appearing on an asteroid like we do now, I guess.

There were other changes. I didn't bother to place a camp but I see that now you have to use a consumable so the days of plonking down a camp whenever you feel like it are over. As Wilhelm mentioned in a post a while ago, the Grav Mesh recipe now requires different materials, one of which is a specific Tier 5 metal with anti-gravity properties. 

These and other, similar changes are all logical, for which I support them. In context of a live game with full permanence, they will also contribute to immersion and make the game-world feel more coherent and convincing. In a series of limited-time tests, though, they constitute another step up in how long it takes to get anything done and therefore how much more repetition you have to go through just to get back to where you were.

I stuck it out for just under an hour, almost all of which I spent surveying, mining and defending myself from the voracious wildlife. I am no more enthusiastic now than I ever was about the hyper-aggressive nature of the mobs or the mob density. There are far too many creatures for a starting zone and they're far too keen on attacking when not remotely threatened. Obviously the mechanics need testing but I'd have thought there could be a specific planet for that, not every damn place you ever want to do anything.

Again, I need to send feedback about this stuff in the game itself. Next time I log in for a test session I think I'll start by giving my feedback before I get on with trying to get anything done. I've been leaving it for the end up to now and somehow I never get around to it before either the test ends or I get interrupted and have to stop.

What I'm really looking forward to isn't the next test but the start of the Kickstarter campaign. I want to see what the pledges are and I want to see how the whole thing goes. I hope it goes well and the project funds. I plan on pledging although it won't be at more than a basic level. 

From a purely personal perspective, I would like to see Stars Reach move into a more open form of testing and then Early Access just so I can structure my own time with the game more effectively. As it is now, I spend a lot more time worrying about if and when I'm going to be able to play than I spend actually playing and when I do get to play there's not a lot I can do that I haven't done several times already. 

The wider question, whether Stars Reach is a game I'd want to play with any frequency once it has full persistence and live servers, remains unanswerable. What's available in the pre-alpha is so far from what's projected for the finished game. 

What I am able say is that I can't easily imagine playing any sandbox MMO for all that long or out of much more than curiosity. Most seem to focus on activities that feel too much like work and not even all that interesting work, at that. I think I'd have felt differently twenty or maybe even ten years ago but time moves on and we change. 

As must be evident from my recent posts about other games, I'm in a much more story-oriented phase right now and the stories I want to hear are well-constructed, professionally-written, entertainingly performed narratives, not improvised gestalts. 

Maybe that will change. I'm not closing any doors. Right now, though,I'm content to sit back and watch the show.