Stars Reach - We Can Do This The Easy Way Or The Hard Way

There's good news and there's bad news. Which do you want first?

Ok, let's start with the good news. I managed to get Stars Reach to work. 

And the bad news?

Aww! You guessed it! I managed to get Stars Reach to work!

Alright, that's not entirely fair. Just the set-up for an old joke. But the new tutorial/introduction? Not a fan.

It's almost as though they were trying to weed out every last player who might actually have come looking to have some fun. To be entertained or amused or enjoy themselves in any conceivable way. Only serious players need apply. That's the kind of vibe I was getting.

Since I've gone there first, let me do this out of order. I'll start with the game, not how I got it to run.

Not the choice I made...

I've played two sessions, one yesterday and one today. Each session took around about an hour. 

The first was perfectly fine. Pleasant, even. Nothing special but certainly not off-putting. I was moderately engaged and mildly interested in seeing what came next. Op success for an introduction to a new game, I'd say. That's a game I'd carry on playing to see where it went next.

It began with a brief lore dump. I get why the game calls players "meatbags" now, something I found highly offensive before, when it wasn't contextualized in any way. Now I know its a robot doing the talking, I'm finding the insult considerably easier to take.

Next comes character creation, still extremely basic. Pick a race and that's about it. Fair enough. It's pre-alpha. I'm sure they'll get around to individualization eventually.

After that it's into that same old ultra-low-level tutorial that was there before, the one where the game shows you how to move, interact with objects and generally treats you like you don't know what a video game is. It takes less than five minutes and it's painless enough.

Then it's on to Haven, the old-new tutorial, although it's completely new to me. Haven is a safe(ish) planet with a large(ish) settlement. It has all mod cons including a nightclub that seems to have been lifted directly from the 1990s. Possibly via the 1970s. The only thing missing is a disco ball and a few go-go girls in cages.

The nightclub, bizarrely inappropriate as it is, exists entirely to support the even more outré design choice of dancing-as-healing, a carry-over from Raph's other star-game, Star Wars Galaxies, where it existed mostly to give the Entertainer class a reason for existing. (Is that right? I didn't play SWG until after the NGE and even then only for about five minutes...)

Play that funky music, catboy!

The problem with the mechanic in Stars Reach so far has been that it's been next to impossible to find a player willing to dance for you when you need one. The nightclub has NPC dancers on tap 24/7 (Or whatever the rotational period of Haven might be.) Once you get to point of handing the service off to NPCs, it hardly seems worth the bother of keeping it at all but I guess it is pre-alpha. Maybe when the game goes live there really will be players willing to stand around in town, dancing just on the off-chance some beat-up person stumbles in. 

In Haven you get to talk to the mayor, who sends you to speak to a bunch of other, notable residents, all of whom have some little task they want you to do because of course they do. Again, it makes a bit more sense here than before, now you know you're effectively a refugee, living on the goodwill and largesse of a society of AIs and you're expected to work for your handouts. I mean, I wouldn't have gone for such a self-loathing backstory myself but at least there is one now.

Haven itself is very pretty. I've seen a fair amount of criticism of the graphics in Stars Reach, mostly because they supposedly look childish and remind people of games they don't like or respect, especially Fortnite, but I like the way the game looks. The art direction seems solid, the color palette is restful and the general ambience is relaxing. Well, until you hit one of the many hellscapes, anyway.

I hope you've got a widescreen monitor...

I spent maybe fifty minutes running through all the jobs in Haven, by the end of which I had tools for mapping, harvesting, and shooting things and I knew, vaguely, how to use them. I also knew how to cook and how to spend my xp on new skills plus a load of points to spend. Not that I did. 

Oh. My. God. The skill system! It's terrifying! Let me just take a minute here. You've heard of skill trees? Stars Reach has a skills forest. It could be a parody, it's so extreme. The "tree" is so huge it doesn't even come close to fitting on one screen, even at a resolution so tiny you can't read anything on it. You have to pan across multiple screens and zoom in to see even one small section. 

If anything tells you who this game is designed for, it's the skill tree. Housewives from the '70s who buy everything from catalogs. People who work in the stores departments of hardware wholesalers. Anyone for whom no nitpicking little detail is too small or too tedious.

That was about the only thing that cropped up in haven that would really have put me off the game, though. The rest of it was fine. Everything worked. I didn't run into any bugs, either the coding kind or the aggressive flying ones that made earlier sessions in the game so annoying. The only wildlife near the settlement is non-aggro deer and rabbits, which made a pleasant change.

And then came Crucible...

Anyone bring marshmallows?

 

Crucible is the next planet. It's non-optional. You have to go through it and pass some tests before you can play the game proper, which is a big mistake in my opinion. Gating of that sort always is but this is a particularly bad example.

Where Haven was a calm, lucid introduction, Crucible is a frenzied nightmare. They do warn you it's going to be bad and they are not kidding. Why anyone at Playable Worlds thought it was a good idea to force new players out of a friendly, peaceful environment into a dark and violent one, a hell-hole where every step outside the landing zone is likely either to kill them or leave them hopelessly lost is a puzzle but then developers often do shit like that. It's like they never learn.

To get to Crucible from Haven you have to stand on a platform and wait for a transport "skiff" to pick you up, like it was EverQuest in 2002. I was getting Nexus flashbacks. At least you only have to wait a minute or two for the ride, not twenty, like back in the "good" old days.

There's only one person waiting to give you work and he wants you to mine some Bauxite. To that end he gives you a Terraformer which doesn't entirely connect with your hand when you lug it about. Some work still needed there.

The mining guy tells you to use Tab to select the mineral you want to mine and "E" to ping a search for it. That pops up a crescent of colors that vaguely indicates the direction. As I eventually discovered, that should lead you to a forest uphill from the landing zone. A forest that's not on fire.

Suure it is...

Most of Crucible is on fire. So was I, frequently. For whatever reason, my crescent pointed me straight at the lava. I triangulated many times and it always said the bauxite was across the lava and up in the mountains on the far side. 

I tried to go round but there was no quick route and the distance seemed too great to go looking for one. After I set myself on fire one time too many, I remembered you can set one of the tools to freeze a path. Not any of the tools I had, though. Also, it was a skill I'd have to buy. The skill tree had put me off spending any points at all back when I was in Haven.

To buy skills you have to go to a Skill Terminal, another clunky, old-fashioned mechanic I could do without. Worse, if there's one on Crucible, I couldn't find it. I had to go queue up for a skiff back to Haven.

In Haven, I found the Freeze skill in the Ranger branch of the tree (That took a while.) and bought it. Then it took me another few minutes to figure out it wasn't for any of the tools I had. The Ranger line comes with its own tool, which I ended up buying from a vendor back on Crucible. Lucky I spotted that when I was over there.

None of this did the game explain to me, possibly because it all turned out to be completely unnecessary.  I did manage to cross the lava using the freeze-ray although I still caught on fire half the time. When I was out of the firepit, I climbed the mountain, where I was immediately set upon by hordes of flying mobs throwing fireballs. I ran away from them - they leash a lot sooner now, which is an improvement, at least - and by sheer chance I found a tunnel. Whether natural or player-made, I couldn't tell.

I went down the tunnel looking for Bauxite, still trying to follow the pings. With no light source other than the intermittent glare of the mining laser, I very quickly got lost. I'd still be down there now if something hadn't killed me, allowing me to respawn back at the base. I have no idea what it was. Not a mob. Possibly I fell down a hole? Don't know, don't care. Just happy to get out.

On my third attempt to find Bauxite (Which, I might point out, turns up occasionally when you mine other minerals right next to the base, only that Bauxite doesn't update the mission...) I found my crescent of colors was pointing in a completely different direction. Go figure!

That took me up into the forested hills behind the base, where I was once again immediately attacked by roaming mobs. This time I stood and fought and killed them all although it was a close-run thing. I carried on pinging and the crescent took me to the entrance of another tunnel, whereupon the mission updated to the next stage. That, it seems, was where I was supposed to go all along.

I just hope I don't meet whatever dug this hole.

My trip down the second tunnel was much the same as the first - dark, claustrophobic, not fun in any conceivable way - except that there was Bauxite down there, eventually. There was also another player, clearly on the same mission. We didn't speak.

It took an inordinately long time to find the Bauxite, even with the ping telling me it was right in front of me. It turned out to be in a small cavern deep under the rock. Once I found the lode I had all I needed in a minute or two. The problem was finding my way out, something I managed more by chance than planning. 

I made my way back to the base, did the hand-in and got told to go back to Haven to refine the ore into aluminum. I did that and got sent back to Crucible to ask for more work. I did that and got told I'd need a space-suit to get off the planet and if I wanted one I'd have to work for it by doing jobs for three or four other NPCs.

That was enough. More than enough. I hadn't been having fun since I left Haven the first time and it sure didn't look like fun was going to come any time soon. If Stars Reach had been a new game I'd been trying out, I'd have given up on it half an hour earlier. I only carried on as long as I did for the benefit of this post.

Crucible is an ugly, tedious waste of time and why anyone would think it could make a good introduction to any game beats me. The old beginning, where the game just dumped you on a planet and let you get on with it, might have been vague and confusing but at least it wasn't actively hostile to the very idea of fun. This is. 

If I was still in testing mode, I'd send some blistering feedback but I'm not, so I'll just suck it up and move on. If ever there was a game not made for me, Stars Reach is it, so it seems churlish to complain. I'm sure it's the game for someone and whoever they are, they're welcome to it.

That said, I'll bet stubbornness will lead me to go back and finish the introduction, get my space-suit and get off Crucible. In all the time I've played video games there's only ever been one game where I literally couldn't get through the tutorial. That was the Crew and it still galls me when I think about it. I don't need another of those on my resume but that's not a positive endorsement. Making potential customers so mad at you they swear not to let you beat them might be a winning strategy for a Souls-like but not for the tutorial of an MMORPG.

Maybe there's a job going in Haven? I could live here...

So much for the game. Back to getting the game to run at all. Boy, that was confusing... 

I took Wilhelm's hint from the comments on yesterday's post, where he mentioned having two clients. I activated one of my other keys, which required making a second Steam account. Then I logged in as the new account and installed the game from the prompts, using a different folder.

That gave me two Stars Reach games in my Steam Library, one just called Stars Reach, the other Stars Reach Playtest. I logged into the Playtest version, which at the time was the only game showing on that account, and it worked first time. 

Confusingly, now both accounts show all my games, even though I used different email addresses. I can toggle between them from the Steam login window and they both have the same Wallet, too, so to all intents they're the same account as far as I can see. What the point of having them both might be defeats me. Maybe someone can give me a use case other than getting around the kind of one-per-account restriction I was trying to dodge.

And that's where things stand right now. It's been six months since I last played Stars Reach and it might be another six before I play again. Especially if they don't revamp the introduction to let me skip the Crucible.