Bless me Ralph, for I have sinned. It has been ninety-five days since
my last Stars Reach post. I think. Something like that, anyway.
Which is actually a lot less than I thought. I completely forgot I logged in
at the end of May. I thought I hadn't set foot in the game since before the
Kickstarter.
That's what I told whoever it is that has the fun job of reading all the
surveys and collating the data, anyway. I do like a survey but when I got the
email a few days ago - well, the three emails, since I'm still signed up for
the testing program on multiple accounts - I wasn't going to respond because
what could I have said? I have no clue what Stars Reach is like now, it's been
so long since I've played.
But then curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of the forms, just to
see what they were asking, and it turned out they only wanted to know what
people thought of the first hour of the game.
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Don't bother trying to dodge.
They use death as a teaching aid here.
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I have been keeping Stars Reach patched up, even though I haven't been logging
in and
Playable Worlds is now running a series of lengthy tests as they
gear up for 24/7 testing. This was on Saturday and I had the feeling a test had
just started, which indeed it had. In fact, it started last Thursday and it's
still going as I write.
Why not, then? I could give them an hour of my time and report back on what I
thought about it. I mean, I did kind of sign up to test the thing, not
to mention be in the creator program (Ironic laughter...) although any
responsibility for any of that I ever felt dissipated the moment my credit
card got charged for the Kickstarter pledge. I'm a paying customer now.
First, obviously, I had to make a new character. Well, in a manner of
speaking. There is now some slight semblance of a character creation process
but it's two choices and move on.
There's a bit of flavor text, which I personally find obnoxious and have
already complained about in feedback more than once. Oddly perhaps, I do not
find being repeatedly addressed, sneeringly, as "meatbag" endears me to
the game or makes me want to come back for more.
All you really get to choose at this stage, though, is your name and race.
Everything else is "To be added" or some such excuse. I guess that does
at least tell us we will be able to customize our character, one day.
Most irritatingly of all, the whole "what you look like changes every time you zone" thing is still going. It's disorienting enough to have your character
randomized at the start but to have it re-randomized just when you were
starting to get used to it is infuriating. If that's actually testing
something - still - then fair enough but it seems unlikely. In fact, now I
think about it, maybe it's not even intentional. Could be a bug?
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How come I was allowed to take this picture, then?
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Once that was done, the game let me in and I played through the extremely brief
tutorial, which I quite enjoyed. It's new since I was last there, takes place in
space, and goes through the basic controls quite effectively, although it took
me several goes to get the crawling under the fallen beam part right and the bit
where it gives you a fire extinguisher feels redundant when there turns out to
be no fire to extinguish.
It does a job, though, and the space station looks quite impressive. It's a
much better way to begin than the previous version.
At the end of the tutorial you have to pick a class. They don't call it that,
of course, (They call it a "profession".) because this is a classless
game where anyone can be anything but it damn well is a class all the
same, or at best an archetype. From memory you can be a crafter, an explorer,
a warrior or something I've forgotten. Farmer, maybe?
The game tells you not to worry too much about it because later you can do all
the things but that's like your school-teacher telling you not to complain
about having to learn the boring stuff now because it'll get interesting when
you go to college. Who bloody cares? I want to do something that's interesting
now!
Or fun. I'd take fun.
If I hadn't already played about fifteen hours of various stages of pre-alpha,
back when you really could do what you liked right from the start, even if
there wasn't that much of it to do, I think this time would have been
fun. New stuff generally is. Without the novelty factor and by comparison to
how it used to be , though, it seemed a bit limited. Dull, even.
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Ha bloody ha.
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I picked Explorer, which I was well aware would mean running around, listening
to an echo-locator pinging as I tried to find sixty-four flashing pyramids.
Under the new regime, you only get the tools you need for your designated job,
so it was do that or don't do anything at all. Not like the good old days, when
you could do a bit of this, a bit of that, switch things up to keep it from
getting boring.
The really glaring problem with Exploring as it is now is that it's highly
reliant on players both having good hearing and keeping the in-game
sound on (Unless there's some alternate, visual setting buried in the
controls, somewhere, in which case they should tellyou about it.)
As we all know, most gamers switch the sound off and play either Norwegian
death metal at ear-splitting volume or true-crime podcasts instead, so asking
them to listen to several hours of pinging just seems rude. And as for those
who've already lost most of their hearing from too much Norwegian death metal,
well they have no chance at all.
Except they kind of do because you can just run around and wait for the pink
pyramids to pop as you get close to them, which is all I did. I did that for
about half an hour and found over a dozen, which is more than I expected but
fewer that it would have been if I hadn't had to keep stopping to fight and/or
run from the extremely aggressive wildlife.
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Is this the Down escalator?
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I have been complaining about this design choice since pretty much the first
time I ever played the game and while it has improved it's still very far from
acceptable.
EverQuest's infamous
Gates of Discord expansion should
not be the template for newbie zones in any game.
They do at least give you a gun - an Omniblaster - no matter what class you
pick, so you can try to defend yourself but good luck with that when you get
swarmed, as you inevitably will. By the time I gave up, after my second (Or
was it third?) death, I'd earned more points in combat-related
skills than all the others put together. That seems ridiculous, especially
when I thought I'd picked a non-combat class so I wouldn't need to fight
anything. Can't say I was surprised about it though. It happens every
time.
All of this was very familiar, as was the terrain, hacked up by players and
left full of holes to fall down as it was. The grass does seem to grow over
the piles of debris now. It looked more like a huge field full of mature ants'
nests than the usual abandoned quarry, so that was an improvement, visually
anyway.
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A close look at this picture will prove
I have no observational
skills whatsoever.
Also wow! Gravity is really slimming!
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Speaking of visuals, the one huge leap forward for Stars Reach since I last
played has to be what it
looks like. I always thought it was an
attractive-looking game but now it's positively gorgeous. The graphics are
highly stylized but they really do look beautiful. I took some screenshots and I
would have taken more if the camera controls weren't so goddam awful. Seriously,
you should surely at least be able to 360 around your motionless character
without having to go into the settings to work out how to do it. If it's even
possible. I never did work out how but it may be in there, somewhere.
The whole time I was playing (Okay, it was only three-quarters of an hour...)
the only other players I saw were afk at the revive spot, presumably where
they'd died and wandered off to do something more interesting instead, leaving
their characters idling. I'm sure there's something going on somewhere that's
more engaging than what was happening where I was and that's presumably where
the players are but I know from experience just how much work there is before
you get anywhere near anything like that and I have no intention of going
through all those steps again, or not until I'm confident whatever progress I
make won't be wiped before the next time I log in.
My brief session did gain me enough experience to fill out the survey, so
after I logged out that's what I did. I doubt my answers were very helpful,
consisting as they did of a lot of "None of the Aboves" as a long
list of options seeemed to have no relevance to anything I'd done or
seen.
I did, however, take the opportunity to write a short essay in the "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" section. I had the good sense to copy and past it into a local file, so
here's what I said, word for word:
Before today I hadn't played since before the Kickstarter. I'd pretty much
decided by then, after the earlier tests I was in, that it's not really my
sort of game. No narrative makes it feel directionless and so far there's no
real way to build a character in meaningful ways, by which I mean working on
appearance and personality. Having what your character looks like keep
changing outside of your control is a game-breaker, even in a testing phase.
Even in a test I need to feel some attachment to my character or else it's
just like a job I'm not being paid to do. As for gameplay, it's too heavily
oriented around skill acquisition all of which takes far, FAR too long.
Movement is enervating. I feel physically tired after a few minutes because
of the way I have to drag the camera to see anything. Not being able to
swing the camera 360 degrees with the character remaining still is very
frustrating. Also the combat is deeply irritating. Should be able to play a
non-combat character and not have to fight at all. Aggressive mobs have
absolutely no place in starter areas, let alone in these numbers. Basically,
I find most aspects of the game annoying. It has great potential but the
mechanics appear to be almost intentionally getting in the way of any of it
being fun. Having played for 45 minutes today, I do think it has improved
but I still don't feel like playing again. I would recommend it to others
because I can see how it would appeal to some people but it doesn't do much
for me.
I did kind of bang that out in a bit of a temper because, as often tends to be
the way, I ended my Stars Reach session feeling quite irritable and annoyed.
It's a weird experience. The game seems like it ought to be fun but somehow it
mostly isn't. It's a lot of fuss and bother for not very much reward let
alone entertainment but it feels like it shouldn't be.
In the past I've tended to put that down to it just not being my sort of game
but really it's not all that different, mechanically, to any other
survival-crafting game and I've had great times in several of those. So what
exactly is it about Stars Reach that increasingly seems to rub me up the wrong
way?
Partly, I think, it's that this really is still very early in the development
process. Most of the time, most of what's there works fairly well, which is
great, but also means the game has an unfortunate tendency to feel a lot more
finished than it really is. It does say right there on the loading screen that
it's "pre-alpha". You don't get much earlier than that.
Much of what feels like it's missing feels that way because it really
is missing and for very good reason: it hasn't been done yet. It will
be, one day, and complaining that it's not there now seems silly.
Unfortunately, if you're asking me what the game feels like now, as
surveys tend to do, then without all the stuff that isn't in yet, well, yes,
it probably is going to feel bad. Unavoidable, perhaps, but there it
is.
The other thing that puts me off is much more nebulous. Stars Reach just feels
like it doesn't really want me to be there. It's a hostile environment
with very few amenities and everything is hard work. And there doesn't really
seem to be much of a reason why I should be there, anyway. What am I
actually supposed to be doing?
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| One of those games that looks better when you're there than in screenshots, I think. |
The snarky narrative wrapper that currently offers just about all there is for
context really doesn't help. Apparently I'm an idiot from a race of idiots who
messed everything up, only to survive on charity that's given grudgingly at
best. The game wastes no time in making the player feel positively unwelcome
which is a big risk that for me very much does not pay off.
Having the game insult the player, let alone having that be the only way the
game communicates, seems like asking for pushback, which in the case of a
video game would usually consist of logging out, uninstalling and then
bad-mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. I imagine there are people who find
the "meatbag" routine hilarious. I am not one of them.
But more than that, there's a fug of earnestness surrounding Stars Reach, as
if somehow playing it might be good for you. It reeks of being in the Scouts
or some kind of social program, where everything builds character or community
or is for your own good. Hard to put my finger on why it feels that way
but for me it's there and it's been there from the start.
Again, almost certainly a big positive for some people but not me. I
don't respond to it well at all and the combination of that sensation with
open insults is just weird. And not in a good way.
And yet, as I said in the survey, I would recommend Stars Reach to
others. It has the potential to be a solid experience when it's finished and
it's not too shabby even now. It runs well and it looks good and there's
enough to do to keep you busy for a while, which I'm sure is more than enough
for a lot of people, not to mention more than what a lot of games a lot
further along in development can offer.
So please don't let me put you off if, unlike me, you don't mind being called
a meatbag every five minutes.
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