Reaching Too Far?

 Well, that was a bit of a surprise. A pleasant one, too. I finally managed to get in and play some Stars Reach and guess what? I quite enjoyed it.

I played for about an hour and a half. Maybe a little more. I didn't time it and I can't remember exactly how long I already had on my Steam counter, which carried over from the pre-alpha.  

As well it might. They can call it Early Access if they like. (They are calling it Early Access.) They can sell expensive Founders Packs (They are selling expensive Founders Packs.) but anyone who was in the pre-alpha test can see it's basically the same build.

Although not exactly. Or at least, not for me. I didn't bother to log in for the last couple of hefty pre-alpha updates so some significant aspects were new to me. 

For a start, there's a proper introductory sequence now. There have been several but none of them really looked like the sort of thing you'd expect to see before a game begins. This one does.

 It has a simple narrative that, for the first time, explains clearly and simply where the game takes place, how your character got there and what's expected of them. It also has a hint of a suggestion, right at the end, that there could even be some kind of plot lurking somewhere in the background. I thought Playable Worlds were above little things like narratives and plotlines but maybe not.

It helps that they've gone with a visual style for the intro that really works for me, a kind of comic book crossed with children's educational publishing aesthetic and it works very well. My compliments to the graphic designer.  

The introduction is over quite quickly and then it's on to Character Creation. Yes, it exists! It's pretty basic by modern standards but it would have looked decent enough fifteen or twenty years ago, which does seem to be the era of gaming Stars Reach is looking to emulate. 

I wanted to be a cat-person, of course, but I couldn't remember the name of the race and when I scanned down the list I missed it so I ended up making one of the demon-types, the ones with the horns. I got mine to a state where I was quite pleased with her before I realised she wasn't, in fact, a cat. They do look pretty similar. Ears, horns, what's the diff?

Since it had only taken a few minutes, I tried again. The cats are at the bottom of the list, it turns out, and they don't have exactly the same options as the demons so there is a bit of variety there. 

Weirdly, I couldn't find any option to change either hair or eye color, which you'd think would be a given in any character creation process. You could pick your hair color in EverQuest almost thirty years ago. Conversely, you can change jaw lines and cheek bones, although not by much. Still, it seems odd you can morph your bone structure that but you can't change your hair color. 

Maybe the option is there, somewhere. I might just have missed it. That'd be a lot easier to believe than that it isn't there at all. In 2026.

After that it's into the Controls Tutorial in the metal tunnels. It's completely arbitrary and pointless in any narrative sense. I think the ship we were in got attacked or something? The whole thing is only there to explain WASD, Crouch and Jump and it's been pared down to an absolute minimum now so if there ever was any story to it, it's long gone. That takes about fifteen seconds and then you're on Haven for the real Tutorial.

I've always had a problem with Haven and it's only gotten worse as they've improved things. The trouble with Haven is that it's precisely what the name suggests: a lovely, comfortable, safe place. They keep tweaking it and it gets nicer and nicer. Why would anyone want to leave?

At some point since I last played, it must have received a substantial makeover. In the current build, it's very impressive visually and also much larger than it used to be. The grass is deep and lush, there are flowers everywhere, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance and to cap it all there are now giant arches of rock soaring over the town. It's spectacular.

What's more, it's entirely explorable. Those impossible ellipses, tens of thousands of tons of rock hanging in the air, suspended by nothing, so terrifying above your head? You can climb them and look down on the city from the clouds. I did and it was the single most interesting thing I've done in Stars Reach since it began.

Haven is the sort of place I'd love to explore in depth and detail. It would make a seriously satisfying zone for any MMORPG. And they've just thrown it away as a one-time only tutorial area. The Mayor makes a point of telling you, as he gives you the Key to Space, that once you leave you can never come back. 

If I was a refugee from a doomed solar system, transported halfway across the galaxy by some Elder Gods and dropped into somewhere like Haven to make the best of things, I wouldn't leave. I'd stay there. They'd fricken' have to drag me out.

There's food on the trees, no aggressive wildlife, buildings to sleep in, even a dance club. Why would you take the risk of flying into space, especially after you've had a glimpse of the alternative on the aptly named "Crucible"?

Crucible, the volcanic planet nearest to Haven, never made any sense and it makes even less now, if that's possible. There used to be a series of missions there but now there's just one and it takes about thirty seconds. They moved the ore you need to mine to within sight of the guy who wants it. All you have to do is walk about fifty paces, blast it with the Terraformer and take the bits back for the hand-in.

 Then it's back to Haven and you never see Crucible again. Obviously the entire planet only exists because you can't mine on Haven and they want to show you how before they let you loose on a real planet. And equally obviously mining is only banned on Haven because Playable Worlds doesn't want you digging up the starting area, griefing newbies with your Terraformer and making the first place they see look like a disaster area.

It's a kludge on a kludge and it's indicative of the underlying problems Stars Reach suffers in so many areas. Too many of the mechanics feel more like temporary fixes than permanent solutions. It's the hallmark of a game still in relatively early development. What they need is to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up, not shifted around and shored up so they kinda-sorta work, for now.

This has always been present in the development process but it's getting harder and harder to pass it off as work in progress. Haven looks so much better than either Crucible, which is just horrible, or the next planet I went to, the name of which escapes me, which is ugly as fuck.

I just don't understand why, if you have an art department and a graphic engine that make somewhere as attractive to look at and spend time in as Haven, you'd want to encourage your players to leave it as quickly as possible to go somewhere very much less pleasant. It just seems calculated to drive people away. Why is so much of the game so damned ugly when clearly they could make it look so much better if they wanted? 

 But then, very little about Stars Reach makes sense, least of all the decision to go to market with what was openly described only a few weeks ago as a "pre-alpha build". I'm all too aware that Early Access is a widely-abused term but this really is pushing the margins of what's generally deemed appropriate.

My feeling on Early Access is that it ought to be somewhere around the equivalent of what we used to call Open Beta. An Early Access build should include the full gameplay loop, sufficiently polished to be fully playable and fun to play.

The "Early Access" descriptor tells you you're getting to see it before it's in a final release state but it does not mean it's still in testing. It doesn't need to be "Feature Complete" but it has to be fully functional. 

There could certainly be more content to come. Additional systems and mechanics. More landmass. An extended narrative. It's fine for there to be more of just about anything on the way but what's there already has to be complete, in and of itself.

This isn't a pipe-dream. It isn't an unreasonable expectation. It's exactly how the games that have been moderately to extremely successful have handled it: Valheim, Palworld, Enshrouded... Do Early Access right and you don't just sell a lot of games, you build trust and loyalty. Do it wrong and everyone except your hardcore loyalists will take a quick look and leave, never to return.

The irony is that this Early Access build does feel like a step forward for Stars Reach. I haven't had this much fun playing since the very early days, when it was all new. It looks a lot prettier and gameplay feels smoother. If this was the latest update to the pre-alpha playtest, I'd say things were moving in the right direction. We might be almost ready for alpha!

But this isn't a playtest. It's Early Access, for which they're asking a minimum of $30 and as much as $80. There's no way to play now other than to buy your way in and once you tell your customers they have to pay to play, you're not in testing any more. You have launched.

I keep drifting on Stars Reach. Do I like it or do I not? I have had some good sessions. I have had some fun. I had a good session today. It was fun. The game looks much better than it used to. My character was much more customiseable and crucially didn't change appearance every time I zoned. Combat was noticeably better. 

Good things are happening but they're small good things and they're happening slowly.

As many, many people have been saying, including most of those whose reviews lean towards the positive, Stars Reach is not ready to be in Early Access. It's a pity because there are signs that it could, eventually, become an interesting and enjoyable game. Unfortunately, as things stand, it seems extremely unlikely it will get the chance. 

Early Access may be the end of the journey for Stars Reach, not the beginning. And that would be a real shame. 

Three Reasons Why This Isn't The Post It Was Going To Be

Thanks to ChatGPT, I don't have time for much of a post today. 

Thanks to time zones I don't have time for much of a post today.

Thanks to hoarding I don't have time for much of a post today.

Take your pick.

Let's start with the AI story. We all hate AI, don't we? Don't we? Except when it's really useful, of course.

Regular readers with absolutely nothing better to do with their time will remember I've been having problems, on and off, with this relatively new PC. First I thought it was conflicts with the graphic card and the onboard graphics. Then I thought it was a hardware issue. Then I thought I'd fixed it. 

I hadn't fixed it. But I have now (Fingers crossed, touch wood.) After a few weeks of behaving itself it started to play up again, even though I wasn't doing anything different and I started to think it was a software issue, probably some corruption of the OS. I reinstalled windows but that didn't help so I figured it might be the drive.

To test that theory, I took the hard drive out of my old PC, connected it to the new one, directed it to boot from the old drive and it worked. As I was playing around with that, I noticed the old drive had Windows 10 on it but in the new PC I could upgrade it to Windows 11. Well, why not?

I know now! I didn't then! 

So I tried that and it didn't work. The upgrade kept hanging, possibly because the drive was almost full. In the end I thought "Why am I even bothering?" and stopped. I decided to get a new drive and install Windows on that, even though disk checks hadn't found any problems.

When I was looking at drives on Amazon, I started to wonder if I could use one of those new-fangled M2s so I checked if my motherboard had a slot and it did. Then I checked if the one I was going to get was compatible and it was. So I bought it.

When it came and I tried to fit it I couldn't find a slot and do you know why? Because I already had an M2 drive and it was using it! It was the faulty one with the OS on it and I never even realised. The one I'd disconnected when I hooked up the old one wasn't even the right one! No wonder disk checks hadn't found anything wrong. I was checking the wrong sodding drive!

 

Anyway, I got all that sorted out, figured out how to fit this weird new drive, stuck the USB with the installation into the slot and let the process run. And to my great surprise it all worked perfectly. Now I have a PC with a clean installation of Windows 11 Home on a 512GB M2 drive with nothing else on it and it runs beautifully. And fast!

Except... there's always an "except", isn't there? Except I can't Activate Windows. I can use Windows, which is all that really matters, but I have an irritating watermark in the lower right corner of the screen now, reminding me I need to "Activate Windows" and there are a few minor personalization tweaks I can't apply until I do. Other than that, I can't see it makes any difference.

But of course I couldn't leave it alone so for the past few days I've been tinkering with it. I found and applied a whole bunch of fixes, none of which worked. I contacted Microsoft and they were very helpful apart from the doing anything about it part. I contacted the company I bought the PC from and they were very helpful. They sent me a couple of new 25 digit keys, neither of which worked. 

They didn't have any other ideas so I thanked them and told them I'd manage. By then, though, I'd noticed  that although I definitely have Windows 11 running, the system thinks I installed it in 2009 so I wondered if by swapping the hard drives I've somehow managed to get the details of the two Windows installations conflated. 

So I thought I'd ask ChatGPT if that was possible.

I only meant to ask a quick question but I ended up having an in depth conversation with ChatGPT for an ahour and a half. The AI asked a series of intelligent questions and made a series of practical suggestions. It was like being on the phone with a really polite, knowledgeable, patient  IT department. If you can imagine such a thing.

We (It's the convention to personalize conversations with AIs, I believe, so I will. I feel like we know each other now, anyway.) narrowed down the issue until I think we're pretty clear on what's happened.  We're down to it being one of four things:

a Windows 10 → Windows 11 licence/edition mismatch,
a digital licence that is attached to the wrong Microsoft-account device record,
an OEM/retail licence issue,
or simply a licence that needs to be re-associated after the clean installation.

Since the original M2 drive won't boot up, I need to get an enclosure to see if we can interrogate the old drive externally and maybe narrow it down even further. I'm dubious we'll ever get to the point where I'll be able to activate the current installation but it's fun trying. 

And that's the thing about working with AIs. They do make it feel like fun. It's almost identical to live chat with customer support (I was doing that with Microsoft today on the same issue, too.) but all the pressure is off. There's no rush to reply, no sense you're holding anyone up or that if you don't answer fast enough they'll terminate the call. I was able to get up and do other things inbetween replies. It all felt very relaxed.

Best of all (Or worst, then best.) because I hadn't logged in to ChatGPT properly at the start, when I'd been chatting for about 45 minutes the session timed out and I had no record of it at all. But when I logged in properly and told ChatGPT what had happened, even though it didn't have the actual record of the conversation, it was able to reconstruct it pretty accurately from my brief summary and we carried on much as before.

So, that was one thing that got in the way of the post I was going to write today. Another was that apparently the 18th of August doesn't start, as I thought, at midnight, but sometime after tea. 

I was going to log into Stars Reach and write something about the EA launch but there turned out to be a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, I didn't have a key. It took me about half an hour of trying different accounts, reading Kickstarter, looking through my Pledge history and generally faffing about until I finally figured out which email and account I needed. They say they make it easy but they really don't. They make it possible, which isn't at all the same thing.

 

I got that sorted eventually and registered my Steam key but then I discovered I was going to have to wait because Playable Worlds' idea of being able to play from 18 August is very different to mine. At time of writing I do, finally, have an "Update" button but using it gets me the peculiar message "No Internet Connection". 

I have an internet connection. Steam has an internet connection. I tested it by starting the download for First Descendant and that's going just fine. I can only assume it's Playable Worlds that's offline. So that post is going to have to wait until tomorrow.

[Edit: Just after I typed that paragraph I received an email from Playable Worlds telling me "Today is the day! Stars Reach is now out in Early Access!" Two of them, in fact. It still won't update.]

[Edit to the Edit: Googled it and found it was a cache problem. Updating now.] 

And finally, when I found out I couldn't write about Stars Reach, I ended up taking four bags of publishers proofs and a huge box of VHS cassettes to recycling. Not even our local recycling. I'm going there tomorrow with a load more stuff but you have to book a slot and they were fully-booked for today.

Instead, I drove a few miles to the really big recycling depot in a nearby town. Publishers proofs are a real pain because you can't legally sell or give them away. They have to be destroyed or recycled. And I have literally hundreds of them. A couple of hundred less as of today, thankfully.

As for VHS cassettes, these were all movies I'd recorded back in the 90s. I've been hanging on to them because I know there are quite a few that aren't easily available on streaming or DVD or BluRay. And I do have a working VHS recorder so I could play them.

But I won't. I know I won't. I've reached that time in life where I can admit to myself there are some things I'd theoretically like to do but that I will never do and watching badly-recorded movies on old VHS tapes is one of them.

So that's why there's no proper post today. If it hadn't been Blaugust I could just have skipped a day but you know how it is. Please don't feel you have to read this nonsense.

Oh. A bit late for that now, I guess, if you've made it this far... 

 

Notes on AI used in this post.

None. Well, except those four possible reasons. I cut and pasted those from the ChatGPT log. So that, I guess... 

How Early It Was, How Early...

I nearly gave myself a day off from blogging today, what with Blaugust just around the corner and my having spent a couple of hours moving the modem and router to a different part of the house, which was a hot, sticky and annoying job. Also, if I was going to post something, it would have been Neverness To Everness again and I thought perhaps three posts in a row might be a bit much.

I have a few things bookmarked to write about so I figured maybe I'd fling together a Grab Bag. I made myself a coffee, sat down at the PC to get started on that (It's working fine after the router move, thank you for asking.), which was when I saw on MassivelyOP that Stars Reach is going into Early Access in a little over two weeks.

Not just Early Access, either, but as MOP puts it in the headline "paid early access". Ohhh boy... Might as well say something about that, then.

Before I get into any editorializing about the wisdom of the decision, let's talk about the important part: how much is it going to cost and what do you get for your money? I can answer the first part of that question but not the second.

There are three tiers, coming in at $30, $50 and $80. Obviously, all of them will get you the game but what else you get for your increasingly substantial investment is yet to be revealed. I just checked the Steam Store and there are no pre-orders up as yet but there is a "Why Early Access?" spiel that I'm guessing is new? It seems to be the trigger for the MOP post, anyway. That's where their attribution link goes.

Most of it seems to be the usual set of reasons/explanations/promises every developer gives when pitching Early Access but there are some interesting specifics, one being that Playable Worlds only anticipates the game remaining in Early Access for six months. 

Okay, what it actually says is:

 "Our current goal is to remain in Early Access for at least 6 months." 

which isn't exactly the same thing but six months is going to be all anyone hears.

The other line that stood out for me was on the future of pricing after launch: 

"We plan to sunset founders packs and transition to free-to-play at 1.0." 

For some reason, I thought there was going to be a subscription when the game went Live. I remember the thing about only subscribers being able to build homes, for one thing. Now its confirmed as F2P, apparently. Presumably that includes all the game, not just parts of it. If not, it won't really be free to play as such. I guess that would qualify as a Freemium offer but who can keep up with the jargon?

Let's assume Stars Reach really will be completely Free to Play when launch day comes. Not even Buy To Play, although it looks as though Early Access is B2P, what with those pack prices. It's a weird quirk of of the Early Access process, they way developers believe players will pay for an unfinished game that they plan on giving away for free when it's done. And players frequently prove them right, too, which is even weirder. 

If the game is F2P, how is that going to affect the way people play? There's been much discussion over the potential for griefing in Stars Reach (Okay, "much" is pushing it. Wilhelm's mentioned it a few times...) due to the way you can terraform planets with few restrictions or comebacks, other whatever's provided by by local, player-run governments. I'd imagine making the game F2P could stretch the boundaries of player governance to their limits and probably far beyond. The cosy SWG fantasy might not survive the barbarian hordes of F2P. Not to mention the bots.

As for the game itself, it seems it'll be much the same in Early Access as it has been in pre-alpha.  There's a description of available content in the announcement:

"The Early Access version of Stars Reach delivers the core experience, including combat, building, government, crafting, and trade. Players will have the opportunity to create their homestead, defend it against hostile creatures, create and participate in galactic commerce, and travel between planets using spaceports and wormholes. Players will also spend time in space, which features the same core experience as terrestrial gameplay"

Seems about right from what I saw during my intermittent visits, although I found very little of it engaging enough for me to hang around long enough to test the depth of any of those features. I found the appeal of all of them wore off in a matter of hours.

My main problem was that, while the basics of a potential game were certainly in place when I played, I couldn't see much that I recognized as a gameplay loop. There were a few things you could do but no real sense of why you'd want to do them for long. But, hey, that's what testing is for, right? Sorting the basics and honing the gameplay

Early Access, though, is not testing. Oh, I know developers think it is but players don't and they're the ones paying the money so what they think is probably more important. 

Players think Early Access is The Game. You can tell them it's not as much as you want but they won't hear you.

All the caveats and provisos in the world won't stop people seeing whatever's there when they log in and start playing as The Game. They may understand that it's not the Finished Game but it's still The Game and it better be fun and engaging and worth the money.  And if it's any kind of Live Service game, let alone an MMORPG that's meant to be played for years at a stretch, it better be consistently engaging.

People generally don't cut EA releases slack for still being in development. They also tend not to hang around when they run out of things to do and they often don't come back when more gets added. That happens with games that launch officially, too. Retention is always hard. But retaining interest in an unfinished game is harder still.

Early Access is always a gamble but it can pay off if there's a gameplay loop people find attractive. If it feels like a finished game, in other words, even if it's obviously not.

Valheim is a shining example. That game came out with the first half of the game effectively complete. It was a little rough around the edges but all the important parts worked and worked well. What's more, there was a linear progression through four biomes, each of which felt complete in itself. You could start at the beginning and play through to the end of what was there and it felt like you'd played a game. Millions did.

That's a good way to approach Early Access. Give players a shortened version of what the whole game will be. Then the rest, when it arrives, will seem more like an expansion or even a series of expansions. Players leave satisfied and come back to see what's new. (Granted Iron Crown screwed that up by making the second half of the game ten times harder than the first but the principle stands.)

Going into Early Access with substantial systems and features unfinished or entirely missing is asking for failure, especially when you're charging the price of a complete game. And $30, $50 and $80 are full game prices in the AA and indie market. 

So what do you get for the money, anyway? Other than access to the game, which you could already have had if you were interested, back when Kickstarter pledges were on sale.  

We don't yet know and I have some difficulty imagining what extras there might be. A quote on MOP, unattributed but presumably from Raph Koster himself (Hi Raph, if you're reading...) mentions “increasing rewards and cosmetics”, which is about as vague as it possible to be and still say anything at all. 

And "cosmetics"? What's that about? In a  game that hasn't even nailed down full customization in character creation yet? I mean, it's there, sure, but it's extremely basic by the standards of almost any modern MMORPG. What cosmetics could there be?

I realize I'm jumping the gun by posting this. Playable Worlds is assiduous in sending out emails filled with detail about what they're doing or what they plan to do. I imagine I'll be seeing three copies of a PR release in my inbox any day now. (I still get three of everything they send, even after the supposed purge of unused IDs.)

I could have waited for that before I wrote this post but this way I get two bites at the Stars Reach Early Access cherry. Or three. Blaugust is coming and I'll be glad to have a new topic to cover. The actual Early Access launch, when it arrives bang in the middle of Blaugust, is going to be very interesting indeed. 

There should be plenty to post about then, not least how many people EA brings in and how long they hang around. Stars Reach is only available through Steam so there won't be any secrecy over the  numbers. It'll all be there on the Steam Charts where, as I write, no-one at all is playing, presumably because the server is down. I can see the 30-day average, though. It's ten people.

Early Access has to bring in a few more, doesn't it? But how many more? 

Not long to wait before we find out.

REVOKED!

So that was a bit of a surprise. Also very dramatic. I just logged in and BOOM! there it was. A big, black window all over everything. 

My immediate thought was that I'd been banned from something for some reason. Not that I could remember doing anything wrong but then I got suspended from Pinterest a few weeks ago for violating some term of service or other and I don't even use Pinterest. 

I mean, it had to be something bad, didn't it? All that black background. The heavy bronze framing. The stern, sans serif font. Put it all together and it spells "You're in trouble". 

The choice of verb strongly reinforces the messaging that the person receiving the notice must have done something wrong. A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you. It must be your fault! You ungrateful little wretch!

Am I being over-sensitive? Oh, no. No, I am not. 

I don't have many areas of expertise but I do know what subtext is. I didn't spend three years on what was, at the time, broadly acknowledged to be the best undergraduate course in English Literature in the world not to be able to read subtext. What do you think all those practical criticism tutorials were for? Just so we could all sit around drinking sherry and eating cake?!

But if you doubt it, here are the examples Miriam Webster chose to use to illustrate the usage of the word "revoke":

"Your driver's license could be revoked after about three convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol; some people's licenses are even revoked for life. You could get your passport revoked if a judge thought you had violated the terms of your bail and suspected you might skip the country. And if you're out of prison on probation and violate the terms of probation, it will probably be revoked and you'll end up back in the slammer. "

See? If you throw around words like "revoke", those are the kinds of mental images you want to put into someone's head. My head. 

Do I sound pissed? (American usage.) I am, a bit, but that doesn't have much to do with Valve's inability to draft a polite, friendly memo. Mostly it's because it's the hottest day of the year and my PC just broke again and this time I don't think I'm going to magically get it working. Luckily I have Ol' Faithful here, which I was able to bring back into service in literally three minutes, thanks to having done it once already, a month ago. I was going to buy a decent gaming desktop and a gaming laptop this year anyway with my inheritance, when I finally get it, and I'm good on security updates for Windows 10 until October so I'm going to manage as I am until then. I'll strip the failing PC for parts, probably. I can't be bothered to send it back.

That should have been a sidebar, shouldn't it? Oh well, opportunity lost.

I'm not really cross about the Steam notice but, as Mrs Bhagpuss is fed up of hearing me say, some people really need to run their stuff past a decent marketing department before they send it out to the public. Any half-competent marketing person could re-draft that notice in five minutes to make it sound helpful and informative instead of passively-aggressive and vaguely threatening, the way it most definitely does.

They might even be able to do something about the confusion it causes too, although I'm not sure that would be within their competence. The whole situation is inherently confusing to begin with. Look at these two screenshots from Steam for a start.  

Both of those are from my one and only Steam account, the one to which the REVOKED notice was sent. The first, with the 13 hour played time, appears in the Steam Library as "Stars Reach". The second, with just three hours played, is listed as "Stars Reach Playtest". 

Since Stars Reach is and has only ever been in pre-alpha testing, they're both playtests of some sort. The first, which I'm assuming is the one to which my Steam key activation has been REVOKED, is the one I used from when the game first went into testing, which I applied for in the old-fashioned way and for which received first an acceptance and soon after an invitation to the creator program. Those 13 hours represent the testing I did and the research that was needed for the several posts I wrote.

At some point I also backed the Kickstarter and got a key for that. I think I may have even received a third key from somewhere, although I never used it. Maybe that's the one that's been REVOKED? 

Later still, Playable Worlds farmed the awkward business of issuing keys and linking accounts to something called firstlook.GG. I got some confusing instructions about linking accounts and registering keys through them, which I did my best to follow, but I was never sure which account had been linked to what.

I always use a separate email account for anything on Kickstarter and never use that email address for anything else, which does cause problems but I thought I'd gotten those sorted out. Maybe that was too optimistic. I can't say for sure if the Kickstarter pledge I made ever got converted into Steam access, as it was supposed to, since I already had access to the testing anyway.

And I still do! The first thing I did after I learned my access had been REVOKED was to go and see if it was true. It was not. Although a key must have been, I guess.

The notice specifically says, down in the small print and in a much more reasonable tone, that a key has been REVOKED because the test has ended. Only half of that can be true, at most. Unless I've missed something, there's only ever been the one testing program and it's still running. I'm still none the wiser as to what's really going on.

The first account up there, the one that says "Purchase" instead of Play looks like it was still working earlier this year. It says "LAST PLAYED Mar 27." I haven't tried it since then, because the last couple of times I played I made new characters to test the new-new player experience and for that I wanted to use a new account. I had a spare so I used it.

And that one still works. As you can see, I logged it in today. Both my new experience characters were there and I briefly logged them in and ran them around. All the in-game screenshots in the post are from that short session.

What I hope is going on is that my Kickstarter pledge key is attached to the account that still works, my creator/tester key has been REVOKED and my mysterious third key has vanished into the void, never to be seen. (I nearly said "never to be seen again" but as far as I can tell, I never saw it in the first place.)

I don't suppose I'll know for sure until the game goes into Early Access, as it's supposed to this summer. We're in summer now, come to think of it... That will presumably require yet more bureaucratic process and maybe it'll all become clear then. Ha!

I was always expecting that to be a problem anyway. I bet I'll end up having to send someone my Kickstarter pledge details to get into EA without paying twice. Always assuming I can find them.

All this for a game I'm pretty much certain I'll never want to play. At this point, the most fun I get out Stars Reach is trying to figure out what the heck is going on with the admin.

Certainly nothing much seems to be going on in the game itself. Once again, when I got in to the game today, I appeared to be the only person there. I probably was. I just checked the Steam charts and there are two people online right now. The 24-hour peak was 18.

The UI looked a bit different and the whole thing felt tidier but that good impression was counteracted by the very awkward character animations and the inordinate time it took to zone through a space portal to a planet. I had time to read nearly a dozen of those not very helpful tips they put up to keep you from being bored while you wait.

Worst of all, when I did finally arrive planet-side, I zoned in dead. Nothing killed me. I was just dead. I re-lifed and reappeared about five meters away. No corpse to retrieve. No clue what had happened. Not the greatest first impression.

Assuming I still have a Steam key that hasn't been REVOKED, I'll take another look when Early Access arrives. It's going to be very interesting to see how many other people turn up. And how long they stay.

EverQuest Legends, Stars Reach And Valheim Battle It Out. GW3 Watches From The Sidelines.

There's been a flurry of announcements concerning Games Of Interest of late and I haven't found time to talk about most of them yet. Today's the day! Here's a Grab Bag of upcoming launches and what-not.

EverQuest Legends

Last to be announced, first to market. We're so used to hype cycles lasting years that a four-month arc from the opening announcement to the game going live seems almost indecent. 

To recap, this is the version of EverQuest you can solo. There's more to it but that's the USP. It was clearly inspired by the success of an unsanctioned, rogue EverQuest server by the name of The Heroes Journey whose USP was... ah, you guessed!

That one was so successful it made the mistake of making money so EG7/Daybreak took the developers to court, where a $3.5m settlement was agreed. The THJ devs toddled off to make their own game, Hollowed Oath, without the borrowed IP and assets and they seem to be doing alright for themselves, having pulled in $166k on a Kickstarter .

Meanwhile, Daybreak farmed the idea out to a company called Game Jawn, which I believe is run by some of the people behind the Officially Sanctioned, Not A Rogue Server At All legacy project, Quarm.  With the whole thing neatly formalized and codified under the catchy, if recycled, title EverQuest Legends, everyone who would have liked to play on The Heroes Journey but felt too uncomfortable about the dubious provenance can now feel happy they're giving their money to the right people. 

EQL, as I'm sure we'll end up calling it, is a bit more than just a retro server. Although it will start back in 1999, the devs, who are entirely different people from those currently running and writing for EQ itself, promise "it will evolve separately with its own lore and timeline...have its own spin on classic zones and will also add never-before-seen content.”

 The game will be on Steam and you can have it for an upfront payment of  $19.99, followed by $10 a month in subs. You do, of course, get the first month in that box fee but sadly, since Game Jawn is entirely separate from Daybreak, your All Access sub won't get you in. 

You can give Game Jawn your money right now, if you want. The game goes live on July 28 but you can pre-order. 

That gets you guaranteed access to the beta "on or about July 1", which puzzles me a little. The beta will close on July 21 so pre-ordering gives you just three weeks to try out the game, after which your character and all your progress will be wiped and you'll have to start over from scratch another week later. 

For regular MMORPGs, where there's some form of competitive raid structure, some people find this sort of thing an attractive prospect so they can learn the strats and get ahead of everyone else come launch day. For a game that's selling itself on its solo-friendliness, though, one where "even a solo player can build a character strong enough to take on the toughest challenges and acquire the most epic gear in the game", those three weeks seem like a bit of a waste of time and effort. 

I guess there will be achievements, maybe? World firsts and that sort of thing. Although it won't be very authentically old-school EQ if there are. Still, it's supposed to be a modern take on the old game...

I'm still undecided about whether to bother with EQL. I don't want to play it. I don't have time to play it. I've already seen just about all there is to see in the first half-dozen expansions so until they start adding new, original zones, there wouldn't be a lot of point. 

On the other hand, I feel I ought at least to check it out and so I can write about it a little. I can't say I'm looking forward to it. Rather the opposite, in fact, for both the playing and the writing. If I do, it'll be more out of a sense of duty than with any enthusiasm, although duty to what or whom, I couldn't say. 

And I very definitely don't want to pay a sub for it, that's for damn sure. A one-off box price of $20 I can rationalize but an ongoing, monthly subscription? I think not. It'll be one month and out, if at all.

Stars Reach

Playable Worlds' sandbox MMORPG set in space is coming to Early Access "this summer". A bit vague, I know, but at least they have a window. They also have a trailer. Want to see it?

It's... alright. Not terrible. The character animations look wonky but it's pretty enough. Doesn't make the game look very exciting, though, does it? Or interesting. Or new. 

It looks as though Early Access will be free to play although you can, of course, buy supporter packs. Or will be able to. Wilhelm has all the details. In fact, he has everything you need to know about the whole thing so I suggest you pop over to his place and get yourself up to speed there, if you need to.

All I'm going to do here is editorialize. I've played some Stars Reach. It's okay if you like that sort of thing although I'm pretty sure there are better options. No Man's Sky gets brought up a lot in conversations but I haven't played that so I can't comment on the similarities.  

What I can say is that Stars Reach is dull. It all works but none of it is much fun. "Worthy" is a word that keeps popping into my head when I try to write about it. "Bored" is the one that pops up when I play. 

There's not much of a game there, that's the biggest problem. It's a fairly pure sandbox so you need to make your own entertainment and the tools for that are limited. It could use some kind of spine like all the crafting/survival games have and it hasn't got one. Without one, it kind of flops around, limply. As it would.

There's been some speculation about why they're going public just now. Money drying up is one obvious possibility but my suspicion is that they just can't get enough people through the doors any other way to maintain a meaningful test population. 

That's not guesswork. HeartlessGamer said in the comments at TAGN that Playable Worlds has admitted as much on reddit. There's numerical evidence, too. The only way you can play the Stars Reach alpha has always been through Steam so we have exact numbers and concurrent population has been in single figures for months. 

The peak player count this year was 32. Average concurrency peaked at 7 in March and now it's less than half that. No-one wants to play any more. Actually, if you look back, hardly anyone ever did. The all-time peak was well below 200 players online at the same time.

I asked yesterday who Neverness To Everness was for. That game had thirty million pre-registrations. Stars Reach has one person online as I write and a 24-hour peak of four. 

Who is Stars Reach for? I guess we'll find out this summer.

Guild Wars 3

Here's an announcement I did find the time to cover. I'm not going over all that again but I will say something about how the news affects the other Guild Wars titles and particularly Guild Wars 2.

ArenaNet, like Daybreak, is in an interesting and somewhat fortunate position. They've been through this before. They've seen what happens to an existing playerbase when you launch a second title in direct competition with yourself. They each have that experience to draw on, now they come to launch a third. (Or in Daybreak's case a fourth. Never forget EQOA.)

First time around, the two companies took very different tacks. ANet mothballed Guild Wars the moment GW2 arrived. They shunted it straight to maintenance mode and stopped developing it at all. Daybreak (Or SOE as it was at the time, of course.) did the exact opposite, running EQ and EQII in tandem, continuing to develop them both pretty much equally.

ANet now seem to believe that was the better choice, although Colin Johansen inexplicably spins the idea that they're going to support new and old titles as "not the norm" whereas I'd say deciding not to was the exception.They've already begun to take GW1 out of mothballs and they're promising development will continue on GW2 as before. They know they need to get out there and assure the people paying their bills right now that it's worth carrying on for the next couple of years because a lot of them, like Azuriel, will be questioning whether it's likely to be worth it. 

Colin Johanson is suggesting it's just a blip. There'll be a short hiatus in new content as they go back and tidy up all the bugs, then everything will get back to normal, with annual  expansions and whatever else it is they've been doing since I last played a few years ago.

I am, to be polite, skeptical. In the decade I played GW2, one of ANet's defining features was a complete inability to establish either a cadence or a pipeline for supplying content. They kept chopping and changing. They rarely stuck to any of their plans long enough to see if they worked although in most cases it was blindingly obvious they weren't going to, so I suppose they should actually get some credit for dropping them as fast as they did. Just none for coming up with them in the first place.

They frequently floated grandiose frameworks for large-scale changes to the game, changes they then discussed literally for years without implementing any of them, during which time most of the key individuals would move departments or leave the company. If and when any of these plans did finally make it to the game, they'd look nothing like the promises and they'd often wither away and be forgotten almost immediately. World vs World suffered particularly badly in this respect but it hit all parts of the game at times.

And yet, somehow, the game muddled along. It rarely prospered but it didn't fail. GW2 players became inured to frequent content droughts combined with constant churn in all kinds of systems and mechanics and learned to put up with it, albeit very grudgingly. Either that or they left. 

If that's what Colin Johanson means by business as usual (Not the phrase he used but it's the implication.) then I'm willing to believe him. The game was always a shambles when I played. I'm sure it can carry on being a shambles for a bit longer.

The idea that the company that struggled so hard to maintain a steady content flow for a single game will somehow now be able to manage it smoothly and efficiently or three titles is fantasy, though. Unless, I guess, they're planing on hugely expanding the workforce. Are they doing that? And even then, I very much doubt it would help. It'd just be more daft ideas and discussion document than ever.

We'll see how it all pans out in a couple of years time, I guess. My feeling is that if GW3 is a success, GW2 will end up being like GW1 is now, a comfortable niche title that people like enough to feel nostalgic about but mostly don't play. It could still get more content but it might not even need it. GW1 pottered along for a decade and more without any and a few people still played it.

If GW3 bombs or just under-performs, though, we might end up with an EQ/EQII scenario, where the older game holds most of its current audience, while the new one fails to attract another. At that point, I suspect ANet's promises of triple-game development might fall apart quite quickly. 

By then, though, I'll be too old to care. 

Valheim

Valheim is my most-played game on Steam at 385 hours but the last time I logged in was over two years ago. When the game finally leaves Early Access on September 9, will I return? Doubtful.

The further we get from the pandemic, the more certain I am that this was one of the artifacts of that strange time. We all had more hours in the day than we knew what to do with and we weren't always even allowed out of the house. Valheim filled a need.

It also introduced me - and many others, I'm sure - to a whole new genre, the crafting/survival game. I've played a few since and most of them have been better in objective terms than Valheim, which is kind of barebones when you look at it hard.

It was my first, though, and you're always still a little bit in love with your first, aren't you? I'd like to get to the end of Valheim but the the last two biomes were so radically un-enjoyable I don't have much hope for the last one, the Deep North. I imagine it'll be a miserable experience for anyone other than gaming masochists.

At most, I might set all the controls to as easy as possible and have a quick tour around the end zone like I did with the Ashlands. At the moment, though, I can't say I'm even motivated to do that. Valheim was a game of its time and that time has gone.

And that's my bag filled for the day, I think. I have a feeling there may have been some other announcements I was going to attend to (Edit: Like this one.) but I can't remember what they were and I didn't bookmark anything so I think we're done. 

For now. 

Don't You Tell Me What To Do! Stars Reach Tries Again.

It seems I was far from alone in my misgivings over the new Introduction and Tutorial added to Stars Reach in the A Recruit No More update back in March. Less than two weeks later, Playable Worlds threw most of it out, revising the whole thing based on "player feedback". Here's part of the official statement:

"Following up on our previous update about the initial game tutorial, we’ve taken a step back to re-evaluate the starting progression based on player feedback.

Concerns were raised that the experience felt too “on the rails.” As a result, we’ve decided to move away from such a linear system..."

To which the obvious response is "Well, duh!" Given SR's supposed sandbox credentials, how the version I played ever got past the discussion stage beats me. I know it's pre-alpha and wild ideas that never go anywhere are part of the process but who thought it was a good idea to add an unskippable, on-rails, theme-park tutorial to a sandbox, let alone one likely to hold new players back for a couple of hours or more before they ever got to see the actual game?

Someone obviously did. Well, they know better now.

Given the quick response, I thought it would only be polite to go back and see what changes they'd made. The new update is called "Open Horizons", which I guess sets the tone. Is it an improvement, though?

Hmm. Yes and no. I prefer the new version but that's not to say I think it's good. It's just not as dreadful as the last one.

On the plus side, they did sort of fix that awful skill tree. And the new Intro/Tutorial goes by a lot faster. I made a new character and played through the full thing this morning [Edit: That was Sunday morning. It's taken me this long to find time to write the post...] and I was on a non-tutorial planet in less than an hour. 

On the minus, it would have been a lot less than that if I hadn't had to keep looking stuff up. The game wasn't holding my hand any more but it wasn't explaining much, either.

And it would have all gone a lot faster if I hadn't ended up dying several times, yet again, mainly because I couldn't see much of anything. Even with the new gamma slider pushed all the way to maximum, the screen was still sometimes too dark to see anything at all. I couldn't even figure out what was killing me so it was hard to know what to avoid.

The tl:dr for the new intro/tutorial is that they've absolutely gutted the old one and put almost nothing in its place. They've just left you to fend for yourself. That's not inappropriate for a sandbox but I suspect it just puts the whole thing back where it was before, when the problem PW was trying to fix was new players not having a clue what to do next. On this evidence, they still won't.

It's an extreme response that I suspect may be the result of having a highly invested and experienced group of testers that doesn't and most likely cannot respond the way a genuine new player would. Even the new testers they're bringing in are likely to be coming from the pool of people who've been following the game for a while, people who applied but didn't get in during a previous wave. They're impatient to get started and think they know everything they need to know already.

When the game goes into Early Access, something that was being talked about for this year at one point, the genuine new players won't have even that level of knowledge or expectation. Or, most likely, enthusiasm. Will they deal well with being handed some tools and told to look stuff up in the in-game help section, even if it is now called "The Galactopedia"?

Honestly, If I hadn't already done all of this many times before, I'd have been lost. Even with prior knowledge, I still had to look up several things. The game tells you next to nothing. Just "Here are your tools.".  Any details about how you should use them are left for you to figure out from tooltips and the Galactopedia. As for all the stuff about how to find someone who's dancing when you need to heal your wounds or how to set your spawn point at a Re-Life station? All gone.

Which is fair enough for a sandbox but it does make Stars Reach look like a pretty hardcore example of the genre. And that's a definite theme here. It's hardcore, even if it looks like a kids' game.

Which it does. Or like a cosy game. On the surface, it looks a lot like Palia, only in space. The character models are cartoonish and goofy. The colors are bright and friendly. All the corners are rounded. It's not Palia, although squint and it might be Palworld, albeit without the slavery motif.

Haven, the first planet you see, doubles down on the hopeful, harmless vibe with its wide, tree-lined avenues and its clean, welcoming buildings, surrounded by immaculate lawns and gardens. It looks like a prosperous campus university. There's even a  friendly mayor, waiting to greet you and telling you to take your time and settle in at your own pace.

 

There's no sign of aggressive wildlife nearby, just some rabbits and deer. The sky is blue, the grass is green, the air is clear. Everything feels about as threatening as afternoon tea at the vicarage. Why not take a stroll around? Enjoy yourself. Bring a picnic.

In the new version, there's not much direction at all. You can wander around Haven, see the sights, pick up a handful of very simple tasks, unironically known now as "Challenges" for some marketing reason. None of them is going to take you longer than a few minutes, unless it's time spent trying to figure out the controls.

Once that's done, it's off to Crucible just like before, only this time with fewer dire warnings of what to expect. The journey seems to have been shortened, too. I only had to wait a few seconds for the shuttle this time, not minutes as before. Once you get there, though, it soon becomes clear any peace you thought you'd found was an illusion.  

Crucible itself remains a hell-hole. The only thing that's been done to ameliorate the misery of being there is to dump most of the missions that used to be required before you could get the hell out. No need to make your own spacesuit now. Just grab five Bauxite, hand them in, then take the space-suit you're given in return and get off Crucible as fast as you can. Why would you want to stay?

The place is on fire. Volcanic eruptions spew lava everywhere. Visibility is terrible. The forests and mountains swarm with aggressive monsters. All the peaceful promise of Haven is gone. And lost forever, as you discover when the game warns you that once you leave, you can never return.

It reminds me a little of Pre-Searing Ascalon in Guild Wars, only there the sudden shift was a set-up for a brilliant twist in the narrative. In Stars Reach, the jarring lurch from Haven to Crucible feels purposeless. If the whole game is so much closer to a survival title, and a fairly extreme one at that, one with corpse recovery and loss of everything except your tools and the clothes your wearing on death, why open with such an idyl at all, especially now there's next to nothing to do there? 

Even with nothing to do, though, I can imagine people choosing to stay in Haven for good, the way they did in Pre-Searing. If you knew what was coming next, you'd be crazy to leave. 

It's not as if it's just a quick trip to hell, then back to somewhere fairly pleasant, either. Once you're done with Crucible, which in my case took about fifteen minutes and three deaths, all of them completely unexplained, it's up into space, which is beautiful but barren, then down to the next planet, which is barren and not beautiful at all.

The new introduction has you in space in maybe twenty or thirty minutes, assuming you know what you're doing and don't get lost underground and killed by things you never saw, which is what happened to me. Once in space, you could jet off to go mining but more likely you'll visit the Mission Board to pick up some "Challenges" that are likely to make you feel about as excited as Tom Sawyer did when Aunt Polly told him to whitewash the fence. Then it's a quick spacewalk to the portal to the planet of your choice (There are four, currently.) and back to earth. Well, someplace solid, anyway.

And when you land? Devastation as far as the eye can see. It's like stepping out into the aftermath of a small war or onto the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine. Mostly because it is the unreconstructed landscape of an abandoned strip mine, except most strip mines don't have packs of flying predators scouring the scree for anything they can kill.

The welcome board that pops up the moment you arrive gives you a hint of the misery to come: no civil administration, no wildlife, just some minerals waiting to be exploited. Grab your pick and start digging. Everyone else sure did. Try not to fall down one of the holes.

The land management problem has been raised as a potential issue by many people ever since the expected gameplay was first posited. The idea is supposed to be that players will build towns and cities, elect representatives and manage the planets in an ecologically responsible manner. Or that they'll use up the resources, leave a gutted husk and move on to the next, a course of action apparently deemed equally acceptable because more planets will spawn to replace the derelict hulks.  

And maybe, when the game is live and players see it as their "forever game",  it could work. I mean, I doubt it, but it's not impossible. Even if it ever does turn out that way, though, it's going to be difficult to persuade newcomers to stick with the program long enough to find out, if all they see after Haven for the first few hours is some new version of hell.

The sustainability of the galaxy is a macro-problem for the long game. The Introduction and Tutorial is a more concise, contained concern that needs to be fixed up front because that's what all new players see first. Get that wrong and you won't have many old players.

In fairly typical MMORPG development fashion, it does look very much as though the reaction to the negative feedback on the last iteration has been to spin a hundred and eighty degrees and slam the hammer down to race off in the opposite direction. You can have On Rails or No Rails. Hand-holding or free-fall. Haven or Crucible. No half-measures! Screw compromise!

It's pre-alpha but even so it needs sorting soon. In Discord I can already see a certain discontent with the constant iteration over the New Player Experience. And it's true that there comes a time when you have to stop fiddling with the controls and just set a course and stick to it. 

Based on the Open Horizons update, though, it really doesn't look like we're there yet. The intro still needs work. 

A lot of work. And the first couple of items on the agenda at the next planning session ought to be to decide what sort of a game Stars Reach is meant to be and who it's meant to be for. 

I couldn't answer either of those questions a year ago and I don't feel like I'm any closer to answering them now. I just hope someone at Playable Reach knows because right now it doesn't really feel like they do.

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.