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. 

A Heroic Effort

Hey! That 300% bonus xp thing in EverQuest? And the Heroic Level 115? How's all that working out for you, then?

Yeah, not so good, as it goes. 

So, I thought about it and I decided what I'd do first was take a lowish character and have some fun moloing them up a few levels. Moloing is soloing with a mercenary, in case you didn't know, and it's very quick and easy up to maybe 70 or so, even without a big bonus.

I took a look at the characters on my regular account and the likeliest prospect seemed to be Cassis, a mid-40s druid I sometimes get out to take screenshots for posts. It'd obviously be handy if she had more teleport spells to more places plus I like her, so it wouldn't seem like time wasted, probably.

I logged her in and... she wouldn't log in. I'd left her in North Ro and now the launcher was hanging halfway through Zone Loading. 

After a few minutes the game shut itself down. I tried again. Same thing.

Well, I've seen this before. Corrupted zone file, most likely. I opened the game folder and deleted everything with Nro at the start. Tried again. Same story. Did it a few times, finding more files to delete every time. Still nothing.

Might be Cassis that was corrupted? That's happened before, too. Very annoying because it needs a GM to fix it. Before I got to petitioning I thought I'd run a couple of checks myself.

I logged in someone else to see if they could get to North Ro. Of course, everyone was either in the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or the Bazaar, so I had to run them to the Freeport portal in PoK and then through the Commonlands into the tunnel. 

Halfway down the tunnel I hit the zoneline with the desert and guess what? Now I have two characters I can't log in!

Next step: google it. I found a few threads on similar issues. They're not that uncommon. Most of the suggestions I'd already tried but one possibility was an issue with ports to the server I was trying to access. Apparently some people had had zones become inaccessible for characters on one server but had no issues with the same zone on another.

I have a lot of characters on different servers so I thought I'd test it. Now I have characters I can't log in on two servers. 

Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to the North Ro zone. Best advice is to wait until the next patch, when the servers will all be taken offline, and see if that magically fixes things.

That was it for Cassis for now, anyway. I thought about shifting the plan to someone else but then I remembered the free 115 Heroic. Might as well grab that and maybe do something with it.

When I posted about the Anniversary, I hadn't seen the other Daybreak press release about the Heroic Characters in the store. That tells you all the things you get for your 4,500DBC and it's quite a lot:

 50,000 Platinum  

200 Bayle Marks  

Entrusted Midnight Steed's Saddle  

Two 40-Slot Bags  

Spells  

Thousands of auto-granted Alternate Advancement abilities (AAs)  

Full set of Equipment, including Weapons, Armor, Power Source, Charm, and Augments  

Food, Drink, and Ammo 

I'm not sure 50k in platinum will get you much in the Bazaar these days but two forty slot bags is a hell of a deal. I don't think any of my characters have any that big. A full set of all gear at 115 is very appealing, too, always assuming it's any good.

I had a good think about who I'd like to bump up to 115 from the existing roster and the answer was no-one. It has to be on the account I'm paying for and there's no-one on there that I want to play. That meant making a new character and with the same logic as before, it looked like that was going to be either a Druid or a Wizard. They're the ones that get the ports.

I've never had any luck with Wizards. Can't play them. Druids, though... I know druids. I should. I have several.  

At 115 a druid has a lot of travel options. Not only the ports to all the druid rings but at some point druids got their own version of the Wizard's Translocate line, which means they can point at someone else and teleport them to another zone without having to go themselves.

That could be handy. It'd be a lot quicker to log in two accounts and have my druid on one send my Magician on the other to wherever she wanted to go than it would for the Magician to make her own way there. So much of a session in EQ can be taken up with just getting from one place to another it's enough to put you off even starting, sometimes.

So, I made a wood elf druid and called her Floradelle. Then I selected the upgrade option to make her 115 and logged her in to Greater Faydark, as I'd selected on the drop-down and she appeared in Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone.

Well, eventually. Some time since I was last there they added an introductory slide show. You can see it, too. I took screenshots. They're all in this post. 

What I did wrong, I don't know. Probably didn't press the mouse button hard enough or something. I logged out and went back to Character Select and did it again and this time it worked. Kinda.

Floradelle was 115 alright. She had all her spells. About a hundred and thirty pages of them. She had a mercenary standing next to her. She was in Plane of Knowledge, too, so that was all good. 

Problem was, she was still in her starting gear, wielding a wooden club that looked like she'd torn the leg off a table, back in the kobold mines. 

Where was all her high-level gear? In a bag, maybe? Nope. I opened inventory and apart from an eight-slot backpack with some basic food and a note for her guildmaster there was nothing. No 40-slot bags, either.

I tried Claim in case that was how it worked, It wasn't. I tabbed out and did some googling to see if maybe freeloaders don't get the full kit. They do. So I did what everyone always does when something's not working in EQ; I logged out and logged back in again. 

And that worked. Floradelle came back fully dressed in new armor and carrying two huge bags. In them, for some reason, were her weapons. I got her to put the table-leg away and swap it for something more appropriate but by then I'd had enough. 

The whole thing had taken me more than an hour and anyway I had no real idea what to do with a Level 115 Druid, other than use her as a taxi. All I wanted to do, still, was wreck around some low-level zones with a merc and have some fun.

Maybe I'll do it today.  

AQ3D Has A New Introduction. I Thought I'd Play It. So I did. Except I Didn't.

Artix Entertainment, developer of AdventureQuest 3D, sent me an interesting email at the weekend, with a shortened version of this news item on the website. The game will be ten years old in October and in common with almost all ageing MMORPGs it's finding recruitment difficult. 

Unlike some developers, finding themselves in a similar predicament, however, Artix is perfectly happy to explain the problem in painfully honest terms. Plenty of devs for other games have given interviews over the years complaining how hard it is to get anyone even to complete a tutorial, much less carry on for a while to find out what their game is really about but few have gone on to lay out just what that failure to engage with new customers means for the future of the game as a whole.

"Low completion rates directly affect AQ3D’s ability to promote the game, grow the team, and fund updates."

I mean, it is obvious but how often does anyone come right out and say it? The full news item goes into much more detail, complete with percentages. It's an informative read.

As usual, the problem is deemed to be the Intro. It's always either the Intro or the Tutorial, often but not always one and the same thing, that gets the blame. 

Some games never stop tinkering with the way the game attempts to introduce itself to new players. Wilhelm has written about EVE doing just that and CCP is certainly one of the companies more willing to talk about the problem. Other games, like Guild Wars 2, have quite possibly never changed the introduction since the game was launched. If they changed it in the ten years I was playing, I can't remember it happening.

Most developers probably take a couple of swings and then give it up as a lost cause, which is almost certainly the sensible choice. I suspect the truly honest explanation for the problem, the one few devs will ever admit to, is that new players just don't want to start playing old games. 

It seems as if gamers love to go on playing old games they already play, to the point that getting people to try anything new at all is becoming something of a problem for the MMO genre, if not the gaming industry. They can be cajoled to go back and play games they used to play, too, and a really hot new title can bring gamers on board by the millions. 

Getting people to start playing a game that came out years ago and then keep playing it, though? Yeah, that's not going to happen. Not very often.

Still, you have to try, don't you? Or so some devs believe and Artix would appear to be one of them. Complaining voices on the Steam Discussion pages suggest, this is at least the fourth time they've remade the Intro, possibly the fifth or sixth. I'm hardly a regular player but even I can remember playing through three very different previous versions, all of which are probably reviewed somewhere on this blog, so I can confirm this has to be #4 at the lowest count.

I was curious to see what they'd changed so I played through the whole thing last night and this morning.

Or I thought I did...

I couldn't see any links to the new Intro in either the email or on the website, so I logged into Steam, opened the game and made a new character. Then I played through the Intro and Tutorial I got, which was certainly new to me. It took me just over eighty minutes, last night and this morning. When I'd finished, I came here and wrote the following post. 

I'll tell you now: this is not a review of the New Intro. 

 

The first thing I'd say about is that it's long. According to Steam it took me over 80 minutes. It didn't feel quite that long because it's all action. The email says 

"This intro focuses on less friction, more action, fewer systems at once, and a smoother onboarding experience"

It also explains the new version is

 "Designed for New Players (Not Veterans)" 

 because 

 "Longtime players may find things obvious, but new players often feel overwhelmed or confused" 

My feeling is that players new only to AQ3D, not the MMORPG genre itself, will find it about as confusing as they do any new game of its kind, no more and no less, while players new to the genre itself will be mostly baffled. I must have played through literally hundreds of similar introductions and tutorials and I found myself puzzling over what to do or where to go next at least half a dozen times.

It must be close to impossible to remove all sources of confusion from something like this. The new Intro makes an attempt to guide the player through every interaction, using on-screen pointers and arrows but I had a few minor issues where the way the arrows seemed to be leading was through a solid wall or when there didn't seem to be an obvious indication of which button to press next. 

There were also numerous messages concerning non-tutorial systems like Daily Tasks that wouldn't have made a lot of sense to a real new player and I spotted several spelling errors in the text but as the email is keen to make clear

"This intro is a fast-built concept, not a fully polished final product."

The idea is that current players will run through the new introduction and tutorial and give feedback by way of an in-game survey. I finished the whole thing but no survey popped. Maybe it's not ready yet.

There certainly needs to be some kind of formal finish to the whole thing because at the moment by far the most confusing aspect is the very end. After more than an hour of close guidance and tight hand-holding, the Introduction ends with a portal that dumps the player onto the flagstones of the game's hub city, Battleon, at which point all assistance just... stops.

I looked around for a continuation of the quest I'd been on, someone who might explain what just happened, but there was no-one. Just the regular NPCs and questgivers who always hang around, touting for custom. I checked my quest journal and there was nothing there either. Since no survey appeared, I logged out and came to write this post instead.

While there certainly needs to be a smoother transition into the game itself, I guess it's fair to assume that any new player who's made it through more than an hour of instruction and adventure to get this far is more likely then not to go and have a look around, take some of the available quests and even start playing the game in the regular fashion. 

To that extent it would already have overcome one of the biggest problems with the previous Intro, which was that

"...most newbies dropped off before reaching Battleon."

On the other hand, the gameplay of AQ3D itself is very different from the gameplay of the new Introduction. The Intro is a tightly scripted, linear adventure with lots of action and some quite striking set piece events. The game that follows is a very typical, old-school MMORPG, in which the player is expected to concentrate on gear, levels and any number of progression systems.

It's also much slower. To play through the new Intro I had to make a fresh character. By the end of it, that character was two levels higher than my regular character. When she fell out of the portal into Battleon she was already level 14. 

I get that the idea is to make the game seem exciting. Something is happening all the time in the Intro. There are pop-ups and flashes and messages telling you about your stats and how you're getting more and more powerful. You get a full set of gear, a weapon and a horse.

There's also a solid, if extremely unoriginal story. Seriously, how many games have a "Void" that's threatening to annihilate existence? Sometimes it seems like all of them. But unoriginal though it may be, the story trucks along and holds the interest well enough.

The  problem with all of that is that it could easily set up unreasonable expectations in someone unfamiliar with the genre. An hour of non-stop excitement, action and dopamine hits and then everything goes into what feels, by contrast, like extreme slow motion.

There are only a handful of comments so far on the Steam discussion forum but all of them make much the same point: another new Introduction is a waste of resources because there's little or no chance new players will come into the game no matter how good it is. Instead, efforts should be focused on getting former players to come back.

And that is indeed how many of the more successful older MMORPGs have been handling things for years. After a certain point, the pool of ex-players vastly outnumbers any realistic expectations for potential newcomers and former players really should be a lot easier to reach with marketing and promotions. After all, presumably they liked the game once. Maybe all they need is a reminder of how much.

As for the new Introduction itself, I think it's definitely the best so far, although that isn't saying all that much. The first two were pretty bad. The one this replaces was a lot better but the latest one really zips along. I enjoyed playing it even if it did just seem to come to a sudden, unsatisfying halt just when it was getting interesting.

Will it make any difference to the onboarding issue? Not a chance. I'd be willing to bet the problem is rarely that new players can't understand what to do. It's that they can understand it all too well and don't want anything more to do with it.

Instead of trying to get new players interested in their decade-old game, maybe Artix out to be working on a new one. Failing that, they probably need some kind of Classic or Retro server option, some way to milk the nostalgia market and bring back some of the players who've drifted away.

That, of course, is easier said than done, as many other developers have discovered to their cost, but it probably makes more sense than spending scarce resources on yet another Intro and Tutorial."

 

All of which turns out to be moot because I was, in fact, playing the OLD Intro. Or, rather, the old-new Intro, one I'd never played before because they did indeed make yet another Intro between the real new one and the last one I did play, which I reviewed here five years ago. 

Since I can't figure out how to access the real new Intro without making a whole, new account and since I also don't want to spend any more time on it today, that's going to have to stand as a review of the old one, which is apparently still in play. Good to get that on record I guess, even if all the inferences and conclusions I drew are wrong.

As soon as I can get a hands-on with the real New Intro, I'll be able to make a true comparison and maybe come to some different conclusions.

For today, though, that's all I'm doing!

Stars On Saturday Night

Here's another post about the Stars Reach pre-alpha, which is ongoing, although with the Kickstarter close to revealing its secrets, this already feels like the end of an era. There was a four-hour test for everyone on Saturday, including all the people who got invites off the back of "following" the fundraiser. Naturally, I was barely able to manage even an hour.

I don't want to go on and on about it (No, really...) but it has been very instructive for me to discover exactly how little control I have over my own time these days. The Stars Reach testing program has been almost entirely responsible for making that very clear indeed. Before I signed up and got in, I hadn't really noticed how far gaming had slipped down my list of priorities. 

There's so rarely anything in my gaming schedule that's in any way time-sensitive on a scale beyond "I suppose I'd better log in sometime in the next six weeks", I don't generally notice that it's a lot more difficult than it used to be find a clear hour or two for uninterrupted play. I was aware I'd not been playing as much as I used to but until these tests I'd assumed that was through choice. Now I'm not so sure.

These days, just about everything takes precedence over games, anything from eating meals to writing blog posts to watching broadcast TV shows as they go out, all things that would definitely not have pushed gaming to the back of the queue a few years ago. The biggest change by far, though, is having a dog in the house, particularly one who has her most active, social phase in the evening. It makes sitting down to play an uninterrupted session of any game a very hit or miss prospect.

All of that I've complained about to the point of tedium in previous posts. Even I'm bored with repeating it and I love talking about myself, as must be all too obvious from the long history of this blog. I mention it once again mostly to add weight to the rest of what I have to say about the testing program and my further involvement with it.

We are currently in an extremely early testing phase. It's pre-alpha. There is no permanence and no suggestion that there should be. There is also no game to play although that's less of an issue. Even without my well-documented personal issues over the awkward timing of the tests (It would suit me so much better if they mostly happened on weekday mornings or afternoons.) I'd still have reached the point now where it would be difficult for me to do anything of any great moment or purpose with the time I do have.

When I logged in on Saturday evening, the first thing I had to do was make a new character. My previous one and all the progress I'd made with her had been wiped. As I said, this is entirely proper at this stage of development and no-one, certainly not me, is complaining about it. It's not a question of complaining about having to start over. It's more about what that means in practical terms.

I've written about the opening stages of the game already - the tools you need to learn to use, the skills you need to raise, the materials you need to acquire and the devices you need to make. I've written about the housing possibilities and the combat and the exploration. 

With each new build there are new activities to try and refinements of the existing content to evaluate. The problem is that most of them require going through many of the same stages of progression as before. That in itself requires a certain mindset and personality and I'm not sure I have either. Even if the tests fell at the perfect time for me I'm not convinced I'd be willing to start over from scratch every three or four weeks and work my way back up to where I was before I could start testing whatever had been added.

As things stand, since I can usually only manage an hour or two each week, even if I was willing to go over and over the same ground, I would never be able to catch up. It saves me the worry of having to make a decision over whether I'm willing to try - it's just not possible.

Another odd side effect of these intermittent sessions, separated by days or sometimes weeks, is that I can't always tell with any certainty whether something has changed, not even how things look. On more than one occasion I've logged in and looked around and thought the graphics had improved. 

This Saturday I was convinced there'd been some kind of graphical upgrade. The world looked brighter and somehow fuller, the trees more leafy, the mountains more impressive. After a few minutes, though, I began to think maybe nothing had changed after all.

There's a strange phenomenon I've commented on before, whereby games that I haven't played for a while look much richer and more visually impressive when I come back after a time away. I noticed it most in Guild Wars 2, which I played daily for a decade. The only time I stopped for a while was when I went on holiday and each time I got back after a week or ten days away, when I logged in the whole game seemed to be in stereoscopic 3D. 

Literally. It was freaky!

It was so visually arresting I found it disorienting. I felt dizzy just looking at the screen. It took me a couple of hours to get used to it but when I did I could see that absolutely nothing had changed except my perception. I suspect something similar, albeit less dramatic, happens every time I come back to Stars Reach after a week or more.

It's not just the visuals, either. My memory isn't good enough to remember what I was doing last time I played nor what I need to do next. It's not a case of just picking up and carrying on; I have to start re-learning the whole thing all over again, something made even slower and more difficult because many of the things I need to do may have changed.

That makes sending bug or feedback reports feel a bit iffy. I'm never sure if something's off in the game or whether it's just me. 

What I certainly could do, though, is send feedback about the things that I'm certain have been added or changed or removed. For instance, the new Tutorial. Since that comes right at the start, I had no trouble testing it on Saturday.

I didn't much like it but that was because I took against it from the start, when the game openly insulted me for using it. I very much did not like being addressed from the get-go as "Meatbag". I will be sending feedback on that next time I log in. I didn't do it at the time because I was fuming too much to be civil. 

Seriously, who thought it was a good idea? If it's meant to be funny it isn't. If it's meant to have some in-game lore implication, there'd need to be some actual in-game lore to support it and again there isn't. And even if there was, does anyone really think the opening of a tutorial is the place to start slinging even lore-appropriate insults at the newbies?

That put me in a really bad mood for the rest of the Tutorial, which was otherwise somewhat helpful. I did learn one new thing although two days later I couldn't tell you what it was. I just remember thinking "Oh, I didn't know that.."  The only other thing I can remember about the Tutorial now is that it was short.

Oh, there was one interesting thing that came up in passing. There's a line that begins "We have not yet granted you permission to use starfaring vessels..." Up to now there seems to have been very little space travel in this game about space travel, to the point where I wasn't sure any more if I'd misunderstood the basic concept. I had thought Stars Reach was going to be at least a little like Star Citizen or Elite: Dangerous in that there'd be ships and we'd fly them between stars. 

This one half-sentence doesn't necessarily suggest that's what's going to happen. For all I know the Servitors might just issue us with the equivalent of a space bus pass and we'll trundle around the galaxy in the back seats of some kind of space Greyhound. Even that would be better than clicking a pylon and appearing on an asteroid like we do now, I guess.

There were other changes. I didn't bother to place a camp but I see that now you have to use a consumable so the days of plonking down a camp whenever you feel like it are over. As Wilhelm mentioned in a post a while ago, the Grav Mesh recipe now requires different materials, one of which is a specific Tier 5 metal with anti-gravity properties. 

These and other, similar changes are all logical, for which I support them. In context of a live game with full permanence, they will also contribute to immersion and make the game-world feel more coherent and convincing. In a series of limited-time tests, though, they constitute another step up in how long it takes to get anything done and therefore how much more repetition you have to go through just to get back to where you were.

I stuck it out for just under an hour, almost all of which I spent surveying, mining and defending myself from the voracious wildlife. I am no more enthusiastic now than I ever was about the hyper-aggressive nature of the mobs or the mob density. There are far too many creatures for a starting zone and they're far too keen on attacking when not remotely threatened. Obviously the mechanics need testing but I'd have thought there could be a specific planet for that, not every damn place you ever want to do anything.

Again, I need to send feedback about this stuff in the game itself. Next time I log in for a test session I think I'll start by giving my feedback before I get on with trying to get anything done. I've been leaving it for the end up to now and somehow I never get around to it before either the test ends or I get interrupted and have to stop.

What I'm really looking forward to isn't the next test but the start of the Kickstarter campaign. I want to see what the pledges are and I want to see how the whole thing goes. I hope it goes well and the project funds. I plan on pledging although it won't be at more than a basic level. 

From a purely personal perspective, I would like to see Stars Reach move into a more open form of testing and then Early Access just so I can structure my own time with the game more effectively. As it is now, I spend a lot more time worrying about if and when I'm going to be able to play than I spend actually playing and when I do get to play there's not a lot I can do that I haven't done several times already. 

The wider question, whether Stars Reach is a game I'd want to play with any frequency once it has full persistence and live servers, remains unanswerable. What's available in the pre-alpha is so far from what's projected for the finished game. 

What I am able say is that I can't easily imagine playing any sandbox MMO for all that long or out of much more than curiosity. Most seem to focus on activities that feel too much like work and not even all that interesting work, at that. I think I'd have felt differently twenty or maybe even ten years ago but time moves on and we change. 

As must be evident from my recent posts about other games, I'm in a much more story-oriented phase right now and the stories I want to hear are well-constructed, professionally-written, entertainingly performed narratives, not improvised gestalts. 

Maybe that will change. I'm not closing any doors. Right now, though,I'm content to sit back and watch the show.

Throne And Liberty: First Impressions (Intro and Tutorial)

Another day, another game. Will it never end?

Today's entry in the Big Summer Game Lottery is the long, long awaited Throne and Liberty, the latest spin-off from the Lineage universe, published in the West by Amazon and available for free through Steam. 

The game went into open beta yesterday at six in the evening. Where I live, that is. It was a global launch so it went Live at the same time where you live but your clock said something different. Unless you also live where I live, of course. Are you in my house? You better not be! 

I was eating quiche and watching Pointless at the time (If you ever needed proof of my lack of machismo, which I very much doubt, well there you go.) so I missed the very start but I was in and making my character by seven o' clock.

Steam tells me I played for eighty-five minutes. I'd guess about fifteen of those went on making the character. Could easily have been the whole hour and twenty five and might well have been, had this been an actual launch. For a beta test lasting five days, though, I think even fifteen minutes fiddling with sliders to get the eyebrows just right is probably too much. 

Where's the slider for Windswept?

Here's an idea for a blog. Or a YouTube channel. Or maybe a TikTok... what do they call it on TikTok? A series where you go into character creation in various games and make the same character every time - or try to. Has anyone done that yet? If not, I call dibs.

This time around I actually tried not to make exactly the same character I always make. As you can see from the screenshots, I didn't entirely succeed although I can see the differences. There is a problem with drifting too far from the familiar when creating a character, though, which is that if I make a character that doesn't feel familiar enough, I don't want to play them. 

In this case, I managed to come up with one who felt a little different - more hard-edged around the jaw-line, a little stubborn perhaps - but close enough to what I generally run with that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable playing her. I was particularly pleased with the hairstyle, the kind of fly-away, gamine-inflected, androgynous look you might have seen on the rhythm guitarist in a New Romantic band circa 1984.

Seperated at birth.

And then I played through the tutorial and found I'd basically made the first NPC you meet in the game. Honestly, it was freakishly disturbing how similar they were. They could be sisters, if they were the kind of unnerving siblings who choose to dress alike and do their hair and make-up in the same way.

And of course, my character's "sister" turns out to be the younger, better-looking one. Because of course she does. Oh well. At least I'll know better when the game goes Live in September. Always assuming I'll still be interested in playing it by then.

Finding out whether that's going to happen is kind of the point of joining in on the open beta. I'd say it would generally take more than an hour and a half to decide if I was likely to carry on with the game, although there have been plenty of times where I've made my choice in more like a minute and a half. In the case of Throne and liberty, though, eighty-five minutes has told me pretty much nothing.

You look strangely familiar, old man. Have we met before?

There are two reasons for that. Firstly, the huge majority of time not spent in character creation was taken up with watching melodramatic cut scenes or following an extremely on-rails, narrative-driven tutorial. I know it's pointless to complain about how unoriginal and formulaic these things are and certainly Throne and Liberty doesn't do the whole "introduce the mechanics and set the scene" thing any worse than the rest but coming off the back of one of the better introductions to a game I've seen in quite a while in Once Human, it really did feel like "Oh god, here we go again".

It was interesting to have full cursor control and a clickable hot-bar for a change. The main problem was the hot-bar coming pre-loaded with icons that meant nothing at all. 

Even that might not have been too bad if there'd been some breathing space to go through them all to find out what they did but no chance of that. It's all Go! Go! Go! with people yelling at you about how urgent it all is and things trying to kill you all the time and finally a big boss fight that naturally turns out to be scripted so you lose anyway, at which point you realize there was no hurry and you could have taken your time but now it's too late because the fighting's over and what your hot keys do doesn't matter any more.

At least I didn't have any trouble following the instructions or the plot. Translation at this early stage seems fine, if no better than that, as does the voice acting, although it doesn't give me confidence when the voiceover and the text don't match in the very first cut scene. Either we're Starborn or we're Star Children. Make your mind up!

Every F2P needs a few whales.

Visually, the developers have pulled a clever trick in the introductory sequence, which I'm about to spoil. All the action for a quite a while takes place in a horrible, ugly, red and black hellscape that looks like it was inspired by heavy-metal album covers from the 1980s. It was starting to get on my nerves when everything took a sudden and unexpected turn as my character emerged from the underworld into a vast, open landscape filled with light and color. 

It's a great set-piece moment. There's even a fricken' sky whale taking up most of the field of view. We've moved from Iron Maiden to Magnum with the Rodney Matthews covers. (Is that helping you to picture the scene? No, I thought not.)

From then on the game looks great. I could see a world I was definitely interested in exploring. If only I get there. Which I could not.

The tutorial, as far as I got, takes place in a single-player instance. After about three-quarters of an hour in there, I finally got to the point where it looked as though I was going to be sent into the gameworld proper, the shared space that makes the whole thing an MMORPG. 

This is Helpie. And here was I, thinking post-modernism was dead...

I was standing on top of a cliff with the endearingly geeky NPC my ersatz sister hand had handed me on to a while back, when he asked me to pet his familar on the head. Apparently that was going to make me glide like never before. I'm guessing it's a line that works for him...

It sure didn't work for me. I tried half a dozen times. Mostly the game just hung and then disconnected. Eventually, the cut scene started and I got to see my character throw herself off the cliff and rise up, flying like a superhero with her arms stretched out ahead of her until...

Nothing. Literally nothing. A blank, grey screen. I know there ought to have been more to look at because the voiceover carried on talking, describing things that weren't there. Then, after a minute or two, the server lost conection and dumped me back at login. 

Skip this amazing scene? I don't think so!

I tried once more but the next time I didn't even get off the cliff so I gave up. I'm assuming the servers for the multiplayer part of the game were under such load they'd stopped letting anyone else join. I'd picked one on the US East Coast but my ping had been excellent throughout the instanced part so I'm confident it wasn't anything at my end. 

By then it was time to take Beryl out for her evening walk and when I got back I wanted to play Once Human so that was it for the Throne and Liberty beta for the night. I'll try again today, when everyone's had time to get further into the game and when most of the Americas are still either asleep or at work. 

I feel I owe it to the game to get as far as the starting city, at least. That said, I'm really not feeling the need for yet another MMORPG right now. Maybe by late September, when T&L goes live, I'll be interested. Or maybe when I get into the actual game as opposed to the solo, instanced tutorial, I'll get invested and start counting the days until I can play the game for real. 

Kinda doubting it just now but we'll see...