It has been a bit since I peeked in on Stars Reach.  There is always the problem of the windows of availability needing to correspond with my own free time.

I have seen some headlines about changes in the game and that maybe they are going to be able to go to longer test cycles that the current few open hours every week.  But I will admit, even following the game can be a challenge.  I have a Google Alert setup for “Stars Reach” and 90% of what comes back are links that include some other use of the words “stars reach” in a sentence.

Google Alert finds…

There is a name issue here.

Still I did see that there was going to be some play time available, so I jumped in to see how things had changed in the… well, about four months since I last spent much time with the game.

There were some new things for sure, including a whole intro sequence to get you up on how to… at least move in the game, along with some back story and some setting of tone for the game.

Welcome to Stars Reach

Raph is clearly driving the tone of the game.  This sounds very much like him, as does the whole intro.

Part of the intro involves dealing with death… or how to back yourself up so when you die you have something like a save point… at least for your possessions.

Indeed, I was backed up

You move through a few obstacles, learn how to use the excavator… only that is called something else now… and the grapple.  And you even get a grapple when you move into the world, which is hand.  Not as handy as the gravmesh, but still better than neither for sure.

My primary reaction to the new tutorial is that it reminded me how much I dislike their default control scheme.  Their free cursor mode doesn’t hold the camera over your shoulder the way a lot of MMOs do (WoW being the prime example), but rather lets it sit where ever you leave it, so you have to constantly tend to the camera while moving.

I hate this control scheme and have walked away from a number of titles that have used it.

But they do let you toggle, with the T key, to a more first person shooter style movement mode, similar to Valheim, Minecraft, or Enshrouded.  I can live with that and swap to it immediately.

Except that the tutorial and much of the UI in the game doesn’t work with that mode, so any humor in it was washed out by the aggravation of time and again having to swap modes to deal with a dialog.  If you’re not going to support that other camera mode, then maybe take it out.

That put me in a mood.

I know, it is probably fine for you, and Raph has reasons for why he feels this is the superior control method, but as I explained in a past post, awkwardness aside, having to keep the right mouse button held down constantly starts to build up a mild pain in my right hand in a way that just click… even when playing something with a lot of clicking… does not.  My problem, not yours.

At the end of the controls training you end up having to pick a path for yourself.  Your choices are:

• Brainy Scientist
• Peaceful Settler
• Diligent Crafter
• Intrepid Explorer
• Valiant Soldier

Each of those has a little terminal to tell you about the choice.

Two of the terminals

I went with Intrepid Explorer, that being the thing I have done best at with the game so far.

Intrepid Explorer

What this does is set your initial path by providing you solely with the tools for that vocation.  So you get the OmniBlaster, the basic weapon, the Pathfinder, which lets you see and register exploration nodes, the Xyloslicer, which dices up trees into raw materials, and the Grapple, which is, as noted above, very useful for moving around.

You no longer get all the tools that we were given in earlier days.  So you can’t dig holes, extract mineral, and all of that.  No Terraformer for you!

This means the game is now implementing division of labor.  When you choose one profession you cannot, at least initially, do some of the others.  You want a Terraformer to dig up ore and make holes all over the landscape, you need somebody else to make you one… because you can’t even get the resources to do so.  Anyway, I picked my profession and headed towards the portals to different planets… another new feature.

You start in space rather than a random planet now

I couldn’t make myself a Gravmesh, but at least I had the grapple.  Besides which, it might be better if not so many people could dig holes.  One of the first things I saw on arriving on my first planet, Baracatis III, was the usual moonscape of holes and tailings and water having been drained off.

A couple of puddles left…

This is always a double issue.  First there is the tension between not wanting to drive people crazy by resetting the game constantly, setting fire to the work people have put into things, and the fact that we, as a player base, seem extraordinary in our ability to turn any planet into a desolate moonscape full of holes and the discarded detritus of our excavations.  It feels like Ypres after the war, when weather had softened the outlines of shell holes and trench systems.

This really bodes poorly for the eventual game in my book.  I know Raph says there is effectively an unlimited number of planets, but I assume travel time and distance are going to be a thing when we get spaceships at some future date and it is really going to suck if every planet you land on has been dredged before someone could setup a home owners association to create rules about that sort of thing.

We are demonstrably awful for the environment of pristine worlds.

But I wanted to play my Intrepid Explorer role, so I equipped my Pathfinder and went looking for nodes.  It was the same as last time I played.  You can no longer see those nodes beyond a pretty close radius.

What I did not notice last time, because I had something else playing in my headphones, was that the whole node finding is now an sonar mini-game where, when you have to listen for pings and, as you get closer to a node, the pings start coming faster until you get close enough to the node for it to become visible.

An interesting twist I suppose.  It makes it more challenging.  But no more listening to anything else while doing exploration, and the deaf need not apply for the explorer profession.

Off I went to do that, listening as I tried to find nodes, only to be waylaid by the various wildlife.  The aggro, AOE freeze ray deer… freaking deer… are now on my least favorite list.  I know, you can’t expect safety… but deer.  So I died a few times, but I wasn’t harvesting much, so it was no great loss.

I did have the problem where waypoints didn’t show up now and then, so that is still a thing.

I did manage to collect enough nodes to unlock the map, which is a boon.  While being able to set a waypoint helps with navigation, on broken and changing terrain, where you cannot always keep to a straight path, the lack of a compass means that it is very easy to end up off track or even circling around as you try to avoid obstacles… or if you’ve fallen in a hole in the dark and are trying to climb out.

Once again, the terrain of any world becomes a moonscape within hours of player arrival, while the rapid day/night cycle is oppressive.  My Pathfinder device needs a flashlight or something, because the world spins so fast I found myself saying, “Not night already!” on an all to regular basis.

I was unable to get to all the nodes on the planet I was on.  At least two nodes were buried by other players and at least one was placed too high off the ground to grab.  Easy with a gravmesh likely, but without that or any way to obtain one I was out of luck.

It does feel like the game is now striving for specialization, which requires cooperation with other players, but is also at a point where there are not enough other players that you can depend on somebody being there.  Meanwhile, the mechanisms to support interaction with strangers do not yet exist.  There does appear to be a currency, Klaatus, but I had zero Klaatus.  There was a mention of a “mission board” in the tutorial, but I never found it… and it is unclear, without any sort of market that having any would have done me any good in any case.

I even had trouble finding people who would stop and dance in order to heal up my diminished health and stamina, another mechanic that I know the SWG die hards love, but has run its course with me.

Me doing my Jeb “Please clap” routine…

I also couldn’t make any food.  So my specialization was a hindrance.

Now, I know that we’re still in pre-alpha, a stage of constant change and that the devs need to have people go through all the starting process, over and over if possible, so they can find problems and adjust how things work.

The hazard is that it can cease to be fun, and there is a limit to how much of my free time I am willing to devote to things that feel like work.  Of course, I have that problem elsewhere, with EVE Online being a prime example.  But that is another story.