Oh, I Love What You've Done To The Place!

I don't know if anyone's noticed but there really hasn't been a lot of commentary on Stars Reach since the Kickstarter ended. Not here, not at TAGN, not anywhere that I've seen. A couple of news items at MassivelyOP, the game's unofficial cheerleader and flag-waver, and that's your lot.

I can't recall even seeing anyone whose blog I follow, or who comments here, mentioning whether they'd backed it or not. Maybe someone did say something about that - I seem to have the vaguest recollection - but if so, they've been keeping quiet about it ever since.

After the dust settled, I wasn't quite sure where things had fallen. I won't re-hash the whole annoying story of how many different emails and Steam accounts I ended up using but when I got an email from Playable Worlds, telling me I needed to do something to register my Pledge with the Steam account I wanted to use, I had no idea which it ought to be. 

In the end, I made a guess and now I'm getting press releases from Playable Worlds to one email address, Kickstarter updates to another and alpha invites from FirstLook.gg, the company PW is using to handle the test program, to a third. Looks like I'm covered.

The most important of the three sources is presumably FirstLook. Without their involvement I don't think you can access the tests. Or maybe you can. I mean, I have the client on Steam and it's getting updates, so maybe all that would happen if I didn't get the emails from FirstLook to tell me about the tests would be that I'd have to check one of the other sources to find out when the servers were open. Like Discord, for example, where there's a whole section dedicated to dates and alerts for exactly that purpose.

Honestly, the whole process feels way, way too complicated. I know I've made it harder for myself by using multiple email addresses but even if I had everything on the same one, I'd still be getting emails from three different sources and I'd probably need to check Discord regularly as well. I miss the days when there was just one department at any company making a game that would handle everything in a terst program directly. (Shakes fist at passing cloud...)

Anyway, communications and logistics aside, it does appear I'm still in the testing program, although I suspect it may be as a former, pre-alpha tester rather than as a bona-fide paying customer. I don't appear to have the in-game title "Reacher" that was part of the pledge, anyway. At some point I might have to do something about that but for now I can get in so I'm not bothered.

And I did indeed "get in" last night, for the first time since the Kickstarter funded on Day One a couple of months ago. I didn't log in once during the campaign and I haven't since, either, not until yesterday. The extensive "testing" that happened during the Kickstarter was really just an opportunity for the undecided to get a hands-on with the game before making up their minds whether to pledge. I'd already made up mine so I left them to it.

After the campaign ended, everything went very quiet for a month until, just this week, it all started up again. There was a big update in which a whole load of stuff changed. I'm not going to go through it all. There's too much. If you're interested, all the details are in the very extensive Patch Notes, which seem to be public, as far as I can tell.

The gist of it is that everything is getting much more complicated, slower and more inter-connected. The glory days of pre-alpha, when there wasn't a lot to do and what there was you could do all on your own are long gone. I suspect this is going to end up being one of those games where I keep harping on about how it was "better in beta", except in this case it'll be "I prefered it in pre-alpha".

All this massive upheaval necessitated a full wipe, of course. Playable Worlds apologized for that although now I can't find their apology, which I'm sure I saw somewhere... it was probably on Discord. I can never find anything on Discord. According to the watermarks on the screenshots, we are still in pre-alpha, though. There are going to be plenty more wipes, I'm sure.

I logged in last night mostly on a whim. I wasn't even sure of the test times but I figured they were usually much the same and I was right. I had to make a new character, something that takes all of five seconds because as yet there are no customization options at all beyond picking a race and gender and giving yourself a name. 

Character creation is one thing I wish they would get on and gussy up a bit. I particularly wish they'd lay off the ridiculous gimmick of making your character completely change appearance every time you go through a portal. I don't know if it's a device for testing something or if it's supposed to stop players becoming too attached to their characters, since they're all going to be wiped soon enough anyway, but whatever it is I find it very irritating.

That said, I do like the character design per se. The character models look attractive and approachable, as befits the game's decidedly cosy aesthetic. The whole game radiates cosiness. There are a lot of warm, vibrant colors, soft surfaces and rounded corners. Very few sharp edges. Everything gently glows and feels friendly.

All of which makes it even more annoying that there are still so many highly aggressive mobs all over the place. They may have been toned down to an extent but all too often it still feels like my character is the mob, trapped in some nightmarish MMO the actual mobs are playing. I died twice last night just minding my own business and had to run away several times to avoid dying some more. 

How anyone at Playable Worlds imagines that's fun beats me. I've played a lot of MMORPGs and even back in the glory days of corpse runs and losing levels I never had a quarter as much trouble just staying alive in a starter zone.

I always thought there was a tonal disconnect beetween what the game looks like and how it plays, though, and now it feels as though that divide is increasing all the time, not least because Stars Reach now looks fricken' gorgeous! That was the biggest suprise when I logged in last night. It's always been a nice-enough-looking game but now it's stunning. I don't know exactly what they've done but whatever it was it really levelled the graphics up.

Unsurprisingly, most of what I did once I saw how they'd smartened the old place up was run around taking screenshots. I took more than forty in under an hour and a half. Props to PW for having good screenshot commands this early in development. Some games don't have a dedicated screenshot key and another for removing the UI even by launch. 

Everywhere I turned there was a spectacular view or a striking piece of scenery. I could have taken twice as many photos but I forced myself to stop and find something else to do.

Mostly, what I found was the same as ever: surveying, harvesting, mining... All the old favorites are still there only now the skill-trees have been separated a bit more and the xp is a bit different. Well, supposedly, according to the patch notes. Didn't seem all that different to me in practice but I was only scrubbing along at the bottom. I imagine the differences become clearer as you clamber up the branches of those skill-trees.

One very big change I couldn't miss is that crafting has been hived off from everything else. It's now completely siloed, meaning you have to actually craft if you want to be a crafter. No more making single items you need, as you need them. Wave goodbye to self-sufficiency. The idea is that crafters will make stuff and everyone else will buy it from them.

Of course, there's no currency yet so for the time being so trade isn't so much buying and selling as swapping. Player-to-player trade is in but only in the most primitive form imaginable. There's a barter system.

You stand next to someone, open a trade window and pass stuff to each other, just like we used to do back in the 90s. Seriously, I think the last time I played a game where it was done that way must have been EverQuest before the Luclin expansion, which added the Bazaar. It seems incredibly primitive more than twenty years on. Presumably it's just a first step towards a real trading system with vendors or an auction house or something. I mean, this is meant to be set in the future, isn't it? Not before the invention of coinage.

I didn't test the proto-trading experience for myself because a) I didn't have anything to trade and b) I barely saw anyone to trade with. I think I might have seen half a dozen other players in the ninety minutes I was online. One of them was obviously AFK at the spawn-in and the others just ran past me on their way somewhere. I never saw anyone twice.

Suits me. I had a pretty good time just messing about on my own. What with the beautiful scenery and the enjoyable survival-lite gameplay, Stars Reach makes for a good noodling game. 

Digging holes, especially, never gets old. That laser is hella fun to operate. I had a great time putting a big hole in a large chert rock. It took ages because different materials now react differently and hard rock is resistant to lasers but when I was done I felt ridiculously pleased with the result. It was like I'd made an abstract sculpture. Pity someone else can just come along and destroy it.

Destruction is a big thing in the game, of course, and I can't claim I'm immune to the urge to tear eveything down just for the fun of watching it fall. There's been a change that means if you dig caves they might collapse on top of you, so when I fell into a huge underground cavern, the first thing I did was try to cut through some of the pillars of rock that were holding the ceiling up. 

I was ready to die just for the experience but nothing dramatic occured. I managed to sever several pillars alright but they immediately self-healed, which was a disappointment. Health and safety gone mad.

After that, I was just about to go looking for some metals so I could start crafting, when Beryl bounced in and suggested I stop and play with her instead. So I did. That's how most of my pre-alpha sessions have ended. Some things just don't change.

I will go back again soon for another run around, though, at which point I might have something more informative to report, although I doubt it. I don't tend to do much of any significance when I get to play. Mostly I just goof around. At least now I'm a Reacher, not just a Tester, I don't have to feel guilty about it.

Even though I like the game, I still find it hard to imagine ever playing Stars Reach with any serious intent. I can't really see why anyone would want to devote the amount of time to it that it's obviously going to require. But then I could say that about most games these days. Like a lot of people, I think I may finally have outgrown the appeal of games that take up as much time as a full-time job and never come to an end.

Still, it's got a lot of potential as something I might pick up and put down for an hour or two, now and then. Give me a nice, quiet planet with no aggressive wildlife, no more wipes and full character customization and I might really be able to get into it.