Hey, Stars Reach! It's Been A While! How's It Going?

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. 

Don't bother trying to dodge.
They use death as a teaching aid here.

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?

How come I was allowed to take this picture, then?

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.

Ha bloody ha.

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.

Is this the Down escalator?

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.

A close look at this picture will prove
I have no observational skills whatsoever.
Also wow! Gravity is really slimming!

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? 

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.