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 A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you.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. 

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.

 

ADDENDUM: After reading Wilhelm's comment below, I thought I'd try redeeming one of my other keys to see if that made any difference. The terms and conditions state you can only activate one Stars Reach key per Steam Account but it doesn't specify one per person so I just made a new Steam account and completed the registration with that.

Then I downloaded the game and hit Play and guess what? It worked first time!

Well, actually second time because I used the same character name and it was rejected as already being in use, which suggests my previous attempt got at least as far as the database that holds the names and therefore that that version is also in some way "live". Unless someone else is calling themselves Floradelle, of course, but I very much doubt that.

I tweaked the name a little and was able to log in just fine. Well, until I managed to get disconnected, anyway. But after that it was fine! 

I notice that the name of the game in the two accounts is different. The original just says "Stars Reach" whereas the new one says "Stars Reach Playtest". I have two separate installs of the game on the same drive but in different Steam folders. Both accounts show all my games, even though they use different email addresses. It's very confusing...

Anyway, now all I need to do is play through the tutorial and I'll be able to write that post after all. There's something to look forward to!

Black Hole Star? Layoffs Hit Playable Worlds

As you may have seen, either on MassivelyOP or TAGN, Raph Koster's Playable Worlds team has just gotten a bit smaller. How much smaller we don't exactly know yet but presumably it's a significant number or they wouldn't have needed to issue a press release confirming the layoffs.

Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have. 

Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is. 

Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis. 

Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.

As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.

Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.

Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.

People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired  to be one of that few. 

Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.

Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives. 

The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.

 

None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling  the shots.

He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know? 

The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:

"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close." 

How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.

The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.

He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive. 

And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.

It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.

That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!

I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.

Cool Kids Club

Anyone remember when it felt really exciting to get into a beta for an MMORPG? When you had to fill out all kinds of application forms and promise to be a good tester and then you waited and hoped you'd get picked but you knew you probably wouldn't?

I think the first one I ever signed up for must have been Anarchy Online. It was so long ago I had to apply by post. My application was accepted but there was no instant access to testing. They had to mail me the client on CD. I guess I must still have it lying around somewhere, although I haven't seen it for years. No, make that decades.

It was a thrill to make the cut but unfortunately the beta itself was all but unplayable. Then the game launched and I bought it and it was still unplayable. 

It was an infamously bad launch. For a long while, it was the benchmark for how not to launch an MMO but there have been some real stinkers since then so it's probably been forgotten now, if not forgiven.

I was thinking about all this for a couple of reasons. Ashes of Creation and Stars Reach both recently sent me questionnaires to fill out. Short ones mostly asking what I thought of the way the game was going and whether I'd recommend it to friends.

My answers to both were broadly similar, something along the lines of "I think your game is fine. It's just not for me."  The main difference between the two responses was mostly that I told Intrepid Ashes would definitely have been a game I would have played and enjoyed, had it come out seven or eight years ago, when it was supposed to, whereas I told Playable Worlds Stars Reach was most likely never going to be the kind of game I was likely to want to play, or at least not for long.

My motivations for signing up for the two testing programs were very different. I pledged AoC in the Kickstarter because I did want to play it and I picked beta as the earliest affordable entry point. It was going to be the next MMORPG Mrs Bhagpuss and I played together. 

It took so long to arrive, even in a half-finished form, that by the time they opened the doors, neither of us was interested any more. When I was given entry in Early Access, I played it a bit and quite enjoyed it but I couldn't see much point carrying on. So many other games suit my tastes better these days. I haven't really thought about it since.

For Stars Reach, on the other hand, I only applied to join the alpha because I wanted to write some blog posts about it. I got in. I wrote some posts. It was fun for a short while, as a novelty, but it quickly became repetitive to play and I ran out of things I wanted to say about it. If there was any disappointment involved, it was that I didn't find it as blogworthy as I'd expected.

In both cases I didn't - and don't - feel any motivation to keep logging in to see how things might be developing. I wasn't all that interested and neither, it seemed, were many people who follow this blog. It seemed a bit pointless to keep logging in just to write much the same posts that wouldn't be of any great interest to anybody.

Neither do I feel any obligation to keep on testing. In both cases I paid for access through a Kickstarter so there's not even a moral lien on my time. It's true that I did get into the Stars Reach alpha by application and subsequently got added to the Creator program but I did a reasonable amount of testing and reporting in the closed phase, so I feel like I've done my bit.

As for the cachet of getting into a testing phase for an MMORPG, that whole concept feels very dated now. True, there are hot new games in closed testing that a lot of people would love to have access to but anything really special always has an NDA so you can't - or shouldn't - tell anyone you're in, which makes it hard to bask in the reflected glory. 

Stars Reach had a whiff of that but only a whiff. The circle of people who cared was so small it would have been a very humble brag indeed to boast about getting in. 

The last testing program I remember getting into that felt like something genuinely special, something people would be envious of if they knew about it, was the first round of alpha testing for New World. Unfortunately there was a very strict NDA so I couldn't say anything, not even to let anyone know I was in. Technically, I probably still can't.

I found that exhilarating but also very frustrating. The game itself was like nothing I'd played before (And nothing like the game that eventually launched, for that matter.) and I would have loved to blog about it. By the time I was able to talk about it openly, everyone else was playing it too.

If the allure of testing unreleased games has faded, though, and gaining access has become almost trivial, there are exceptions. It's sod's law that when there's a test I'd really like to get into, for a game I'm very excited about, that's the one that won't have me.

I've applied to every round of testing for Neverness To Everness with no success so far. I strongly suspect the reason is my age. I've filled out each of the lengthy application forms with scrupulous accuracy but when I enter my age the form questions it. 

"You have entered your age as 67. Are you sure that's correct?"

The highest age on the drop-down menu is, if I remember correctly, forty. I am very clearly not the target market for the game and I imagine Hotta isn't all that interested in the opinions of pensioners on how their anime-influenced supernatural urban open-world RPG is coming along.

Ah, well. Never mind. They can't stop me playing it when it comes out. And I bet it'll be finished well before either Ashes of Creation or Stars Reach anyway.