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 A product code you registered has been REVOKED! Your Steam key has been REVOKED, by the people who gave it to you.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

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 (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.

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

Bless me Ralph, for I have sinned. It has been ninety-five days since my last Stars Reach post. I think. Something like that, anyway.

Which is actually a lot less than I thought. I completely forgot I logged in at the end of May. I thought I hadn't set foot in the game since before the Kickstarter. 

That's what I told whoever it is that has the fun job of reading all the surveys and collating the data, anyway. I do like a survey but when I got the email a few days ago - well, the three emails, since I'm still signed up for the testing program on multiple accounts - I wasn't going to respond because what could I have said? I have no clue what Stars Reach is like now, it's been so long since I've played.

But then curiosity got the better of me and I opened one of the forms, just to see what they were asking, and it turned out they only wanted to know what people thought of the first hour of the game. 

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

I have been keeping Stars Reach patched up, even though I haven't been logging in and Playable Worlds is now running a series of lengthy tests as they gear up for 24/7 testing. This was on Saturday and I had the feeling a test had just started, which indeed it had. In fact, it started last Thursday and it's still going as I write. 

Why not, then? I could give them an hour of my time and report back on what I thought about it. I mean, I did kind of sign up to test the thing, not to mention be in the creator program (Ironic laughter...) although any responsibility for any of that I ever felt dissipated the moment my credit card got charged for the Kickstarter pledge. I'm a paying customer now.

First, obviously, I had to make a new character. Well, in a manner of speaking. There is now some slight semblance of a character creation process but it's two choices and move on. 

There's a bit of flavor text, which I personally find obnoxious and have already complained about in feedback more than once. Oddly perhaps, I do not find being repeatedly addressed, sneeringly, as "meatbag" endears me to the game or makes me want to come back for more. 

All you really get to choose at this stage, though, is your name and race. Everything else is "To be added" or some such excuse. I guess that does at least tell us we will be able to customize our character, one day.

Most irritatingly of all, the whole "what you look like changes every time you zone" thing is still going. It's disorienting enough to have your character randomized at the start but to have it re-randomized just when you were starting to get used to it is infuriating. If that's actually testing something - still - then fair enough but it seems unlikely. In fact, now I think about it, maybe it's not even intentional. Could be a bug?

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

Once that was done, the game let me in and I played through the extremely brief tutorial, which I quite enjoyed. It's new since I was last there, takes place in space, and goes through the basic controls quite effectively, although it took me several goes to get the crawling under the fallen beam part right and the bit where it gives you a fire extinguisher feels redundant when there turns out to be no fire to extinguish.

It does a job, though, and the space station looks quite impressive. It's a much better way to begin than the previous version. 

At the end of the tutorial you have to pick a class. They don't call it that, of course, (They call it a "profession".) because this is a classless game where anyone can be anything but it damn well is a class all the same, or at best an archetype. From memory you can be a crafter, an explorer, a warrior or something I've forgotten. Farmer, maybe?

The game tells you not to worry too much about it because later you can do all the things but that's like your school-teacher telling you not to complain about having to learn the boring stuff now because it'll get interesting when you go to college. Who bloody cares? I want to do something that's interesting now!

Or fun. I'd take fun.

If I hadn't already played about fifteen hours of various stages of pre-alpha, back when you really could do what you liked right from the start, even if there wasn't that much of it to do, I think this time would have been fun. New stuff generally is. Without the novelty factor and by comparison to how it used to be , though, it seemed a bit limited. Dull, even.

Ha bloody ha.

I picked Explorer, which I was well aware would mean running around, listening to an echo-locator pinging as I tried to find sixty-four flashing pyramids. Under the new regime, you only get the tools you need for your designated job, so it was do that or don't do anything at all. Not like the good old days, when you could do a bit of this, a bit of that, switch things up to keep it from getting boring.

The really glaring problem with Exploring as it is now is that it's highly reliant on players both having good hearing and keeping the in-game sound on (Unless there's some alternate, visual setting buried in the controls, somewhere, in which case they should tellyou about it.)

As we all know, most gamers switch the sound off and play either Norwegian death metal at ear-splitting volume or true-crime podcasts instead, so asking them to listen to several hours of pinging just seems rude. And as for those who've already lost most of their hearing from too much Norwegian death metal, well they have no chance at all.

Except they kind of do because you can just run around and wait for the pink pyramids to pop as you get close to them, which is all I did. I did that for about half an hour and found over a dozen, which is more than I expected but fewer that it would have been if I hadn't had to keep stopping to fight and/or run from the extremely aggressive wildlife.

Is this the Down escalator?

I have been complaining about this design choice since pretty much the first time I ever played the game and while it has improved it's still very far from acceptable. EverQuest's infamous Gates of Discord expansion should not be the template for newbie zones in any game. 

They do at least give you a gun - an Omniblaster - no matter what class you pick, so you can try to defend yourself but good luck with that when you get swarmed, as you inevitably will. By the time I gave up, after my second (Or was it third?) death, I'd earned more points in combat-related skills than all the others put together. That seems ridiculous, especially when I thought I'd picked a non-combat class so I wouldn't need to fight anything. Can't say I was surprised about it though. It happens every time. 

All of this was very familiar, as was the terrain, hacked up by players and left full of holes to fall down as it was. The grass does seem to grow over the piles of debris now. It looked more like a huge field full of mature ants' nests than the usual abandoned quarry, so that was an improvement, visually anyway.

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

Speaking of visuals, the one huge leap forward for Stars Reach since I last played has to be what it
looks like. I always thought it was an attractive-looking game but now it's positively gorgeous. The graphics are highly stylized but they really do look beautiful. I took some screenshots and I would have taken more if the camera controls weren't so goddam awful. Seriously, you should surely at least be able to 360 around your motionless character without having to go into the settings to work out how to do it. If it's even possible. I never did work out how but it may be in there, somewhere.

The whole time I was playing (Okay, it was only three-quarters of an hour...) the only other players I saw were afk at the revive spot, presumably where they'd died and wandered off to do something more interesting instead, leaving their characters idling. I'm sure there's something going on somewhere that's more engaging than what was happening where I was and that's presumably where the players are but I know from experience just how much work there is before you get anywhere near anything like that and I have no intention of going through all those steps again, or not until I'm confident whatever progress I make won't be wiped before the next time I log in.

My brief session did gain me enough experience to fill out the survey, so after I logged out that's what I did. I doubt my answers were very helpful, consisting as they did of  a lot of "None of the Aboves" as a long list of options seeemed to have no relevance to anything I'd done or seen. 

I did, however, take the opportunity to write a short essay in the "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?" section. I had the good sense to copy and past it into a local file, so here's what I said, word for word: 

Before today I hadn't played since before the Kickstarter. I'd pretty much decided by then, after the earlier tests I was in, that it's not really my sort of game. No narrative makes it feel directionless and so far there's no real way to build a character in meaningful ways, by which I mean working on appearance and personality. Having what your character looks like keep changing outside of your control is a game-breaker, even in a testing phase. Even in a test I need to feel some attachment to my character or else it's just like a job I'm not being paid to do. As for gameplay, it's too heavily oriented around skill acquisition all of which takes far, FAR too long. Movement is enervating. I feel physically tired after a few minutes because of the way I have to drag the camera to see anything. Not being able to swing the camera 360 degrees with the character remaining still is very frustrating. Also the combat is deeply irritating. Should be able to play a non-combat character and not have to fight at all. Aggressive mobs have absolutely no place in starter areas, let alone in these numbers. Basically, I find most aspects of the game annoying. It has great potential but the mechanics appear to be almost intentionally getting in the way of any of it being fun. Having played for 45 minutes today, I do think it has improved but I still don't feel like playing again. I would recommend it to others because I can see how it would appeal to some people but it doesn't do much for me.

I did kind of bang that out in a bit of a temper because, as often tends to be the way, I ended my Stars Reach session feeling quite irritable and annoyed. It's a weird experience. The game seems like it ought to be fun but somehow it mostly isn't. It's a lot of fuss and bother for not very much  reward let alone entertainment but it feels like it shouldn't be.

In the past I've tended to put that down to it just not being my sort of game but really it's not all that different, mechanically, to any other survival-crafting game and I've had great times in several of those. So what exactly is it about Stars Reach that increasingly seems to rub me up the wrong way?

Partly, I think, it's that this really is still very early in the development process. Most of the time, most of what's there works fairly well, which is great, but also means the game has an unfortunate tendency to feel a lot more finished than it really is. It does say right there on the loading screen that it's "pre-alpha". You don't get much earlier than that. 

Much of what feels like it's missing feels that way because it really is missing and for very good reason: it hasn't been done yet. It will be, one day, and complaining that it's not there now seems silly. Unfortunately, if you're asking me what the game feels like now, as surveys tend to do, then without all the stuff that isn't in yet, well, yes, it probably is going to feel bad. Unavoidable, perhaps, but there it is.

The other thing that puts me off is much more nebulous. Stars Reach just feels like it doesn't really want me to be there. It's a hostile environment with very few amenities and everything is hard work. And there doesn't really seem to be much of a reason why I should be there, anyway. What am I actually supposed to be doing? 

One of those games that looks better when you're there than in screenshots, I think.

The snarky narrative wrapper that currently offers just about all there is for context really doesn't help. Apparently I'm an idiot from a race of idiots who messed everything up, only to survive on charity that's given grudgingly at best. The game wastes no time in making the player feel positively unwelcome which is a big risk that for me very much does not pay off. 

Having the game insult the player, let alone having that be the only way the game communicates, seems like asking for pushback, which in the case of a video game would usually consist of logging out, uninstalling and then bad-mouthing it to anyone who'll listen. I imagine there are people who find the "meatbag" routine hilarious. I am not one of them.

But more than that, there's a fug of earnestness surrounding Stars Reach, as if somehow playing it might be good for you. It reeks of being in the Scouts or some kind of social program, where everything builds character or community or is for your own good. Hard to put my finger on why it feels that way  but for me it's there and it's been there from the start. 

Again, almost certainly a big positive for some people but not me. I don't respond to it well at all and the combination of that sensation with open insults is just weird. And not in a good way.

And yet, as I said in the survey, I would recommend Stars Reach to others. It has the potential to be a solid experience when it's finished and it's not too shabby even now. It runs well and it looks good and there's enough to do to keep you busy for a while, which I'm sure is more than enough for a lot of people, not to mention more than what a lot of games a lot further along in development can offer.

So please don't let me put you off if, unlike me, you don't mind being called a meatbag every five minutes. 

Vague Impressions And Good Intentions

We need to talk about Stars Reach. 

Well, okay, we don't. But I think I might. This post is going to go over some familiar ground but in the hope that, from here on, most of it won't have to be repeated. Or, rather, that I won't feel the need to keep repeating it to make it clear to myself. 

Think of it as a talking cure.

It's beginning to look very much as if Stars Reach could be turning into one of those games I post about but don't actually play. Which, if I'm honest, is most games at the moment. But this is different in one crucial way. 

Most of the others are games I would like to play but, just at the moment, can't seem to fit in to my self-imposed, over-committed schedule. I have every intention of getting back to many them at some point, even if in a few cases I secretly know that's never going to happen. The intent and the desire is there. 

Not so with Stars Reach. I've never been much more than lukewarm on the prospect of playing the game myself, even while I was highly intrigued by the project itself. I could see it was going to be a big deal, within the niche at least if not so much outside it, and I thought it was sure to be something we'd all be talking about for a good while. 

That's why I applied for the alpha but once I got in I found the whole thing a lot more entertaining than I'd expected, while equally unexpectedly, surprisingly few people in the blogosphere seemed interested after all. I wrote about the game quite a bit but feedback was slight.

There are nearly two dozen posts here tagged "Stars Reach", nearly all of them "What I Did On My Holidays" style posts about the adventures I've had while "testing" the game. Alphas and betas make for good blogging if only because something's always going wrong.

There will almost certainly be more post like those. Having stumped up my $30 during the Kickstarter, I'm flagged for access until the game goes live, although I still can't say for certain that I've done all the registrations and account linkages required. I have now got the requisite Firstlook.gg account and it's linked to my Steam ID but whether it matches the other details about me in the system is anyone's guess.

If not, it might be a problem someday but it doesn't seem to matter too much at the moment. I have the client and I can update it and log in so that's all good. And yet, logging in I am not.

There's the perennial problem of the schedule, of course. The current cadence is still based around three-hour slots, two or three times a week. There was one yesterday, there are two tomorrow and there's another on Saturday. I forgot all about yesterday's and I'm working Saturday, although that test is in the evening so, theoretically, I could make it. 

I won't though. I'll have too much else to do.

There's talk, as always, about extending the length and frequency of testing but as this squib from MassivelyOP explains, it's going to be a while. 

 "Playable Worlds is working toward an ongoing 24/7 test for Stars Reach, although the studio said that getting there will be “complicated.”"

Raph explains exactly what those complications are in this video but the tl:dr is a lot of back-end work to be done and a lot more content to be created before the servers can put up the "Open All Week" notices. 

For a start, the game needs to be able to run safely on its own, without a whole bunch of devs sitting around watching it to make sure it doesn't fall over. Almost as importantly, if players are going to be able to log in whenever they feel like it and stay as long as they want, there has to be enough to keep them busy for all that time. Raph suggests it'll take "months" to get to that point so it sounds like we're looking at the current short, sporadic access windows for the summer at least.

Right now, I can't see myself even wanting to play (I think we can dispense with the fig-leaf of "testing", post-Kickstarter.) either frequently or for long stretches but that could certainly change. These kinds of things always start seeming more attractive when the days get shorter and the rain sets in. 24/7 in November will seem a lot more appealing than it does now.

The real problem for me, though, has nothing to do with access. It doesn't even have all that much to do with persistence. True, the thought of frequent wipes and resets is off-putting and I notice now we have the prospect of partial and specific wipes to contend with, too. 

The latest update includes what PW is framing positively as an "XP Refund System", which sounds great, until you read the follow-on: "When this update begins, all of your XP will be refunded to you, all your skill nodes will be unlearned, and you’ll be able to respend your XP any way you desire." 

I'm sure that reads as "Yay! I get all my points back for a do-over!" to some people but I don't much enjoy spending points on talents or skills even the first time in any game. I mostly see it as a tedious administrative chore that I wish the game would just take off my hands. Having to do it over because of an update doesn't so much strike me as an opportunity as it makes me anxious that I'm going to have to keep on re-doing the damn things whenever anything changes in the future.

Stiill, as I was saying, even that's not the real issue holding me back from wanting to play more, if and when that becomes possible. It's more of an existential problem than a practical one.

Take the current update, amusingly titled "Better Homes and Gardens". There's a lot of good stuff in there, from shared loot and experience to encourage both formal and informal social play to the ability to create bonsai trees on your homestead. Most of the tweaks and snips sound like they're intended to make the game more fun, which is what you'd hope.

But then you get something like this:

"All bushes have collision with players now. They’re going to get in your way and that’s intentional. "

Or this:

"We’ve added thickets to the game. These are very large bushes and they can’t be harvested. If you don’t like them, you’ll need to burn them out."

I don't know... is it just me or do those sound like things you'd want patched out of a game, not in? It's like the constant focus on making mobs even more aggressive and annoying. It's almost as though someone thinks that irritating players is somehow going to make them want to play more. 

And the trouble with that is... they're probably right. It often seems to me that the target audience for Stars Reach is people who actively enjoy being obstructed, delayed and generally messed about with as they play. It's not just that they want to do things the hard way, it's more that "hard" isn't enough. It has to be awkward as well.

None of this is bad as such. It's just bad for me. I read the update notes every time they pop up in my email and every time, there's something in them that makes me think "Well, that makes things worse...). Sometimes it's a small change like the bushes you can't run through any more, sometimes it's a whole systemic upheaval like making Cooking an entirely separate activity, no longer connected to Crafting. (Also in the current update.)

On paper, I think development is progressing very well. The direction of travel is clear now and the game is shaping up. I can see the game Stars Reach intends to be in a way I very much could not, back when testing began. That it's not going to be a game for me isn't really relevant. 

And anyway, it might still be. The way it's heading suggests the finished product will be able to sustain a variety of different playstyles. When it's able to do that, I might be able to find one I enjoy.

For now, though, I suspect most of my commentary is going to come from picking holes in the patch notes. And that's fine. It's an honorable blogging tradition, after all, and one I'm happy to continue.

Oh, I Love What You've Done To The Place!

I don't know if anyone's noticed but there really hasn't been a lot of commentary on Stars Reach since the Kickstarter ended. Not here, not at TAGN, not anywhere that I've seen. A couple of news items at MassivelyOP, the game's unofficial cheerleader and flag-waver, and that's your lot.

I can't recall even seeing anyone whose blog I follow, or who comments here, mentioning whether they'd backed it or not. Maybe someone did say something about that - I seem to have the vaguest recollection - but if so, they've been keeping quiet about it ever since.

After the dust settled, I wasn't quite sure where things had fallen. I won't re-hash the whole annoying story of how many different emails and Steam accounts I ended up using but when I got an email from Playable Worlds, telling me I needed to do something to register my Pledge with the Steam account I wanted to use, I had no idea which it ought to be. 

In the end, I made a guess and now I'm getting press releases from Playable Worlds to one email address, Kickstarter updates to another and alpha invites from FirstLook.gg, the company PW is using to handle the test program, to a third. Looks like I'm covered.

The most important of the three sources is presumably FirstLook. Without their involvement I don't think you can access the tests. Or maybe you can. I mean, I have the client on Steam and it's getting updates, so maybe all that would happen if I didn't get the emails from FirstLook to tell me about the tests would be that I'd have to check one of the other sources to find out when the servers were open. Like Discord, for example, where there's a whole section dedicated to dates and alerts for exactly that purpose.

Honestly, the whole process feels way, way too complicated. I know I've made it harder for myself by using multiple email addresses but even if I had everything on the same one, I'd still be getting emails from three different sources and I'd probably need to check Discord regularly as well. I miss the days when there was just one department at any company making a game that would handle everything in a terst program directly. (Shakes fist at passing cloud...)

Anyway, communications and logistics aside, it does appear I'm still in the testing program, although I suspect it may be as a former, pre-alpha tester rather than as a bona-fide paying customer. I don't appear to have the in-game title "Reacher" that was part of the pledge, anyway. At some point I might have to do something about that but for now I can get in so I'm not bothered.

And I did indeed "get in" last night, for the first time since the Kickstarter funded on Day One a couple of months ago. I didn't log in once during the campaign and I haven't since, either, not until yesterday. The extensive "testing" that happened during the Kickstarter was really just an opportunity for the undecided to get a hands-on with the game before making up their minds whether to pledge. I'd already made up mine so I left them to it.

After the campaign ended, everything went very quiet for a month until, just this week, it all started up again. There was a big update in which a whole load of stuff changed. I'm not going to go through it all. There's too much. If you're interested, all the details are in the very extensive Patch Notes, which seem to be public, as far as I can tell.

The gist of it is that everything is getting much more complicated, slower and more inter-connected. The glory days of pre-alpha, when there wasn't a lot to do and what there was you could do all on your own are long gone. I suspect this is going to end up being one of those games where I keep harping on about how it was "better in beta", except in this case it'll be "I prefered it in pre-alpha".

All this massive upheaval necessitated a full wipe, of course. Playable Worlds apologized for that although now I can't find their apology, which I'm sure I saw somewhere... it was probably on Discord. I can never find anything on Discord. According to the watermarks on the screenshots, we are still in pre-alpha, though. There are going to be plenty more wipes, I'm sure.

I logged in last night mostly on a whim. I wasn't even sure of the test times but I figured they were usually much the same and I was right. I had to make a new character, something that takes all of five seconds because as yet there are no customization options at all beyond picking a race and gender and giving yourself a name. 

Character creation is one thing I wish they would get on and gussy up a bit. I particularly wish they'd lay off the ridiculous gimmick of making your character completely change appearance every time you go through a portal. I don't know if it's a device for testing something or if it's supposed to stop players becoming too attached to their characters, since they're all going to be wiped soon enough anyway, but whatever it is I find it very irritating.

That said, I do like the character design per se. The character models look attractive and approachable, as befits the game's decidedly cosy aesthetic. The whole game radiates cosiness. There are a lot of warm, vibrant colors, soft surfaces and rounded corners. Very few sharp edges. Everything gently glows and feels friendly.

All of which makes it even more annoying that there are still so many highly aggressive mobs all over the place. They may have been toned down to an extent but all too often it still feels like my character is the mob, trapped in some nightmarish MMO the actual mobs are playing. I died twice last night just minding my own business and had to run away several times to avoid dying some more. 

How anyone at Playable Worlds imagines that's fun beats me. I've played a lot of MMORPGs and even back in the glory days of corpse runs and losing levels I never had a quarter as much trouble just staying alive in a starter zone.

I always thought there was a tonal disconnect beetween what the game looks like and how it plays, though, and now it feels as though that divide is increasing all the time, not least because Stars Reach now looks fricken' gorgeous! That was the biggest suprise when I logged in last night. It's always been a nice-enough-looking game but now it's stunning. I don't know exactly what they've done but whatever it was it really levelled the graphics up.

Unsurprisingly, most of what I did once I saw how they'd smartened the old place up was run around taking screenshots. I took more than forty in under an hour and a half. Props to PW for having good screenshot commands this early in development. Some games don't have a dedicated screenshot key and another for removing the UI even by launch. 

Everywhere I turned there was a spectacular view or a striking piece of scenery. I could have taken twice as many photos but I forced myself to stop and find something else to do.

Mostly, what I found was the same as ever: surveying, harvesting, mining... All the old favorites are still there only now the skill-trees have been separated a bit more and the xp is a bit different. Well, supposedly, according to the patch notes. Didn't seem all that different to me in practice but I was only scrubbing along at the bottom. I imagine the differences become clearer as you clamber up the branches of those skill-trees.

One very big change I couldn't miss is that crafting has been hived off from everything else. It's now completely siloed, meaning you have to actually craft if you want to be a crafter. No more making single items you need, as you need them. Wave goodbye to self-sufficiency. The idea is that crafters will make stuff and everyone else will buy it from them.

Of course, there's no currency yet so for the time being so trade isn't so much buying and selling as swapping. Player-to-player trade is in but only in the most primitive form imaginable. There's a barter system.

You stand next to someone, open a trade window and pass stuff to each other, just like we used to do back in the 90s. Seriously, I think the last time I played a game where it was done that way must have been EverQuest before the Luclin expansion, which added the Bazaar. It seems incredibly primitive more than twenty years on. Presumably it's just a first step towards a real trading system with vendors or an auction house or something. I mean, this is meant to be set in the future, isn't it? Not before the invention of coinage.

I didn't test the proto-trading experience for myself because a) I didn't have anything to trade and b) I barely saw anyone to trade with. I think I might have seen half a dozen other players in the ninety minutes I was online. One of them was obviously AFK at the spawn-in and the others just ran past me on their way somewhere. I never saw anyone twice.

Suits me. I had a pretty good time just messing about on my own. What with the beautiful scenery and the enjoyable survival-lite gameplay, Stars Reach makes for a good noodling game. 

Digging holes, especially, never gets old. That laser is hella fun to operate. I had a great time putting a big hole in a large chert rock. It took ages because different materials now react differently and hard rock is resistant to lasers but when I was done I felt ridiculously pleased with the result. It was like I'd made an abstract sculpture. Pity someone else can just come along and destroy it.

Destruction is a big thing in the game, of course, and I can't claim I'm immune to the urge to tear eveything down just for the fun of watching it fall. There's been a change that means if you dig caves they might collapse on top of you, so when I fell into a huge underground cavern, the first thing I did was try to cut through some of the pillars of rock that were holding the ceiling up. 

I was ready to die just for the experience but nothing dramatic occured. I managed to sever several pillars alright but they immediately self-healed, which was a disappointment. Health and safety gone mad.

After that, I was just about to go looking for some metals so I could start crafting, when Beryl bounced in and suggested I stop and play with her instead. So I did. That's how most of my pre-alpha sessions have ended. Some things just don't change.

I will go back again soon for another run around, though, at which point I might have something more informative to report, although I doubt it. I don't tend to do much of any significance when I get to play. Mostly I just goof around. At least now I'm a Reacher, not just a Tester, I don't have to feel guilty about it.

Even though I like the game, I still find it hard to imagine ever playing Stars Reach with any serious intent. I can't really see why anyone would want to devote the amount of time to it that it's obviously going to require. But then I could say that about most games these days. Like a lot of people, I think I may finally have outgrown the appeal of games that take up as much time as a full-time job and never come to an end.

Still, it's got a lot of potential as something I might pick up and put down for an hour or two, now and then. Give me a nice, quiet planet with no aggressive wildlife, no more wipes and full character customization and I might really be able to get into it.