Vague Impressions And Good Intentions

We need to talk about Stars Reach. 

Well, okay, we don't. But I think I might. This post is going to go over some familiar ground but in the hope that, from here on, most of it won't have to be repeated. Or, rather, that I won't feel the need to keep repeating it to make it clear to myself. 

Think of it as a talking cure.

It's beginning to look very much as if Stars Reach could be turning into one of those games I post about but don't actually play. Which, if I'm honest, is most games at the moment. But this is different in one crucial way. 

Most of the others are games I would like to play but, just at the moment, can't seem to fit in to my self-imposed, over-committed schedule. I have every intention of getting back to many them at some point, even if in a few cases I secretly know that's never going to happen. The intent and the desire is there. 

Not so with Stars Reach. I've never been much more than lukewarm on the prospect of playing the game myself, even while I was highly intrigued by the project itself. I could see it was going to be a big deal, within the niche at least if not so much outside it, and I thought it was sure to be something we'd all be talking about for a good while. 

That's why I applied for the alpha but once I got in I found the whole thing a lot more entertaining than I'd expected, while equally unexpectedly, surprisingly few people in the blogosphere seemed interested after all. I wrote about the game quite a bit but feedback was slight.

There are nearly two dozen posts here tagged "Stars Reach", nearly all of them "What I Did On My Holidays" style posts about the adventures I've had while "testing" the game. Alphas and betas make for good blogging if only because something's always going wrong.

There will almost certainly be more post like those. Having stumped up my $30 during the Kickstarter, I'm flagged for access until the game goes live, although I still can't say for certain that I've done all the registrations and account linkages required. I have now got the requisite Firstlook.gg account and it's linked to my Steam ID but whether it matches the other details about me in the system is anyone's guess.

If not, it might be a problem someday but it doesn't seem to matter too much at the moment. I have the client and I can update it and log in so that's all good. And yet, logging in I am not.

There's the perennial problem of the schedule, of course. The current cadence is still based around three-hour slots, two or three times a week. There was one yesterday, there are two tomorrow and there's another on Saturday. I forgot all about yesterday's and I'm working Saturday, although that test is in the evening so, theoretically, I could make it. 

I won't though. I'll have too much else to do.

There's talk, as always, about extending the length and frequency of testing but as this squib from MassivelyOP explains, it's going to be a while. 

 "Playable Worlds is working toward an ongoing 24/7 test for Stars Reach, although the studio said that getting there will be “complicated.”"

Raph explains exactly what those complications are in this video but the tl:dr is a lot of back-end work to be done and a lot more content to be created before the servers can put up the "Open All Week" notices. 

For a start, the game needs to be able to run safely on its own, without a whole bunch of devs sitting around watching it to make sure it doesn't fall over. Almost as importantly, if players are going to be able to log in whenever they feel like it and stay as long as they want, there has to be enough to keep them busy for all that time. Raph suggests it'll take "months" to get to that point so it sounds like we're looking at the current short, sporadic access windows for the summer at least.

Right now, I can't see myself even wanting to play (I think we can dispense with the fig-leaf of "testing", post-Kickstarter.) either frequently or for long stretches but that could certainly change. These kinds of things always start seeming more attractive when the days get shorter and the rain sets in. 24/7 in November will seem a lot more appealing than it does now.

The real problem for me, though, has nothing to do with access. It doesn't even have all that much to do with persistence. True, the thought of frequent wipes and resets is off-putting and I notice now we have the prospect of partial and specific wipes to contend with, too. 

The latest update includes what PW is framing positively as an "XP Refund System", which sounds great, until you read the follow-on: "When this update begins, all of your XP will be refunded to you, all your skill nodes will be unlearned, and you’ll be able to respend your XP any way you desire." 

I'm sure that reads as "Yay! I get all my points back for a do-over!" to some people but I don't much enjoy spending points on talents or skills even the first time in any game. I mostly see it as a tedious administrative chore that I wish the game would just take off my hands. Having to do it over because of an update doesn't so much strike me as an opportunity as it makes me anxious that I'm going to have to keep on re-doing the damn things whenever anything changes in the future.

Stiill, as I was saying, even that's not the real issue holding me back from wanting to play more, if and when that becomes possible. It's more of an existential problem than a practical one.

Take the current update, amusingly titled "Better Homes and Gardens". There's a lot of good stuff in there, from shared loot and experience to encourage both formal and informal social play to the ability to create bonsai trees on your homestead. Most of the tweaks and snips sound like they're intended to make the game more fun, which is what you'd hope.

But then you get something like this:

"All bushes have collision with players now. They’re going to get in your way and that’s intentional. "

Or this:

"We’ve added thickets to the game. These are very large bushes and they can’t be harvested. If you don’t like them, you’ll need to burn them out."

I don't know... is it just me or do those sound like things you'd want patched out of a game, not in? It's like the constant focus on making mobs even more aggressive and annoying. It's almost as though someone thinks that irritating players is somehow going to make them want to play more. 

And the trouble with that is... they're probably right. It often seems to me that the target audience for Stars Reach is people who actively enjoy being obstructed, delayed and generally messed about with as they play. It's not just that they want to do things the hard way, it's more that "hard" isn't enough. It has to be awkward as well.

None of this is bad as such. It's just bad for me. I read the update notes every time they pop up in my email and every time, there's something in them that makes me think "Well, that makes things worse...). Sometimes it's a small change like the bushes you can't run through any more, sometimes it's a whole systemic upheaval like making Cooking an entirely separate activity, no longer connected to Crafting. (Also in the current update.)

On paper, I think development is progressing very well. The direction of travel is clear now and the game is shaping up. I can see the game Stars Reach intends to be in a way I very much could not, back when testing began. That it's not going to be a game for me isn't really relevant. 

And anyway, it might still be. The way it's heading suggests the finished product will be able to sustain a variety of different playstyles. When it's able to do that, I might be able to find one I enjoy.

For now, though, I suspect most of my commentary is going to come from picking holes in the patch notes. And that's fine. It's an honorable blogging tradition, after all, and one I'm happy to continue.