Stars (Out Of) Reach

This is going to be a very short post. Although I've said that before...

It's been a long time since I took a look at Stars Reach. I'm pretty sure it will never be a game for me, no matter how much they tart it up and fill it out, but even as a curiosity it was already wearing very thin last time I played.

Still, I haven't forgotten about it completely, not least because Playable Worlds keep on sending me emails about how things are going. I can't fault them for information flow, even if some of their priorities seem a little skewed. Is it really a good use of resources to pump out detailed guides on how to roleplay specific races when the game is still in pre-alpha?

There was a big flag - yellow if not actually red - back in February, when layoffs were announced. The whole industry is struggling as we know, so that wasn't as much of a surprise at is might have been, but having to let people go before you're even out of pre-alpha does seem like it might indicate a more serious problem.

Then this week I received a couple of slightly strange emails. No, that's underselling it. I got five in five days. 

One was a promo for the new update - The Crucible - which looks like a substantial revamp of the starting experience. That's something they've been tweaking for a while but this would seem to be the finished version. Well, the latest finished version, anyway. I'm sure it won't be the last.

The email describes the update as "a big one" and suggests now would be a great time to "jump back in" if you've been away for a while. I think the last time I played was September 2025. I guess six months counts as a while. Seemed like it might be worth taking another look.

I gave it a little thought but I didn't do much about it beyond re-install the client in case the mood took me to log in. Then I got another email, telling me there were a thousand more keys available for new testers. That didn't interest me personally. The last thing I need is another key for Stars Reach. I already have three and it's confusing enough. I only use one and I'm not even sure it's the one I paid for with my Kickstarter pledge.

I did wonder why they were inviting more people, though. In the past, I think key giveaways have been part of a promotional drive of some kind. Or maybe they were short of testers?

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, Stars Reach is one of those rare games in development where you can see how many people are playing. That's because it's only available on Steam, which means a public day-by-day record of activity via the Steam Chart. 

I may be misunderstanding something about the testing process and Steam here, in which case please feel free to correct me in the comments. I certainly hope I've got something wrong because the Steam Chart doesn't make very encouraging reading.

I'm not sure I've looked at the charts for SR before. I certainly don't remember the numbers being so small. Can it really be true that the most players ever online at the same time was fewer than two hundred? 

In a way, that makes a little more sense when you consider the testing schedule of a year ago. The server was only up for a few hours at a time, a few days a week. I certainly found it very inconvenient so I guess others did, too.

For the last few months, though, uptime has been much longer, with the server staying up for days. And yet the numbers have been falling quite dramatically. The average number of players online had barely ever hit double figures and February saw an all-time low.

I'm finding these number very hard to accept. Surely there have to be more people playing than that? I must be missing something.

It would explain the recruitment drive, though. And so would the next email I received, which warned me one of my keys was about to expire. I'd never claimed it and now Playable Worlds was purging unused testing spots and "releasing unused keys on March 31 to make room for new players."

Whether there are any new players waiting to take them up remains to be seen, although I notice there was an uptick in interest with the Crucible update, almost a 50% increase in concurrency. Or fifteen more players, to put it another way.

There's a recent reddit thread that asks "Whatever happened to Stars Reach?", a question Raph Koster dropped by to answer. His comment begins "We are still working away, putting out updates every three weeks like we have been for the last 18 months. The game is open to testers most days of the week." 

As many commenters in the rest of the very well-mannered thread suggest, though, there's a very long way to go. Several make the point that there's no game there yet, nor indeed much sign of what game will ever be there. That was my main reason for dropping back from testing. 

A new player experience, though, a tutorial - that I could test. It's likely to be a relatively directed, coherent, finite sequence of curated events because a tutorial pretty much has to be, even in a sandbox. I thought I'd give it a go and get a post or two out of it.

And I have, in so far as this is a post about my experience of the new update. As I said, it's going to be short - or it would have been, if I hadn't bulked it out with all that background detail.

Here's a screenshot that accurately represents most of my time with the update so far:

That's character creation. All of it, apart from a bunch of meaningless flavor questions and a few "Under Construction" screens. If there's any actual character creation going on, I didn't get to see it.

Even so, it's more of the update than I got to see after I gave my mustard-colored rectangle a name and went to log into the game-world. All I got then was this:

And here's the bug report I submitted after trying multiple times to log in:

The game goes to Character Creation but the only thing it allows is adding a name. All panels are blank. From there it goes to the loading screen with "Attaching Camera" etc. All four items read 0% and stay that way. I left it for fifteen minutes with no change.

I am not using a VPN. I have verified the files, which are correct. I have re-installed on both an SSD and a mechanical HDD. Nothing makes any difference.

I used to play on a different computer with no such issues. This is the first time I've tried on this newish machine, which meets the required specs. I can play any other game I have on Steam with no issues. The problem is just with Stars Reach.

Before sending in the report I did a bit of googling to see if it was a known issue. All I found was one person on Discord with the exact same problem but he fixed it by disabling his VPN. I haven't used a VPN for a long time so that was no help.

If I was really motivated, I'd boot up my old PC, which ran Stars Reach just fine, and see if the same problem happens there. That's what a dedicated tester would do. But I'm not that invested. 

It's a bit annoying, the way it always is when you can't play a game you were thinking of playing, even if it was only an idle thought and you didn't really want to play anyway. It's happened to me countless times over the years. I'll soon forget about it and move on to something that does work.

It would have been nice to check out the new update, all the same. I do like a new tutorial. They're so easy to review.

Maybe after the next patch. It's surprising how often these things fix themselves. And if not, well, I guess it isn't going to matter much. It's likely to be a while before there's a game there, anyway. If there ever is.