The Stars Reach early access is something of a “glass half empty/full” story… or maybe it is only a quarter full, if we want to torture the metaphor a bit.  Whatever you choose, the capacity of the glass remains somewhat under utilized.

Stars Reach – Early Access Launch

If you enjoyed what was available immediately before early access, then you will enjoy what is available now.  There have been no fundamental changes to game play since the late stages of the closed testing cycle.

I am not saying there were zero changes.

Some things were clearly tuned up or made better since I last poked my nose in.  The crafting window, as an example, got a thorough rework.  I am not sure why it needs to be a full screen window, but that seems to be a design choice they have made for the game, that all windows need to be full screen.  I suspect that is due to the control scheme that was chosen, which by default does not allow you to move your cursor to do things like window management.

That there are still things that pop up in game where you need to know how to change your control scheme to deal with is just another rough edge in the game that needs to be worked out.  Most things go away with the escape key, but sometimes the UI is doing multiple things and you get a window that is stranded without focus.

There is no obvious way to close this window without a cursor when escape doesn’t work

The opening tutorial was tightened up a bit, though you still have to teleport to another location where, thanks to the quest being to dig stuff up, the ground is a moonscape of craters and tailings.  In a way, this is the most honest piece of the tutorial, but we’ll get to that.

Once out of the short tutorial you are in the space hub in a system where you are encouraged to go run some missions to earn some cash, which is valued in the “I want everybody to know I saw The Day the Earth Stood Still” units called klaatu.  Klaatu barada nikto to you all as well.

I was allowed to choose missions for any of the planets in the system of Letiemopas.

Am I the only one bothered by this sorting?

On grabbing a mission you have to then go out and move through space to a teleporter that will take you to the planet.

Reaching one of the portals

Again, this seems like simply gratuitous travel burden, or maybe just a way to prove the game involves space at this point, but Raph wrote the following when I brought this up in a past post:

I kind of want to move the wormholes *farther* out from the station, not closer! Travel time is crucial to game economy and immersion. Bear in mind that space is the connective tissue between planets — there will quite a lot more of it there (and yes, it will be populated with stuff to do).

So be prepared for a long slog for every early mission because you have to go all the way back to the space station to turn in the mission.  The theory of fun here is that more work and less play makes… I don’t know… Jack more fully invested in the process?

On planet you come through the portal and arrive where everybody else does, so the land surrounding the portal is taken up by claims of those who arrived before you.  We’re going to learn all sorts of lessons about real estate with Stars Reach.

There too you will find the GovBot, which will tell you a bit about the planet and who is running the place.

Letiemopas I GovBot

Ignoring what my momma told me about shopping around, if we’re going to go in for boomer pop culture references, I opted to become a citizen because… why not?

On becoming a citizen I got a bit more detail about the status of the planet and what was going on.

Letiemopas GovBot Update

On the bright side, opening up a mission kiosk on the planet would reduce a lot of the need to slog back and forth to the space station.

On the down side, the need to start strip mining the planet for resources to upgrade the GovBot brings us right back to my usual “have you really thought this through?” objection about player behavior and giving people the tools to destroy environments.

I literally brought this up back when Raph was posting the many pillars of his design philosophy for the game.  I have brought it up time and again in posts since then.  It comes up on the official Discord, though that all scrolls off into the distance almost immediately because Discord is not a substitute for a forum, so when somebody posted a long thread about bad things happening over on Steam, it was a surprisedpikachu.png moment.

Playable Worlds will continue to gloss over the issue with the “we’ll just spawn more planets” response, while the hardcore fans… well, somebody said that the post sounded like AI, and anything AI does is 100% wrong on its face, so the opposite must be true.  Whatever.  Raph has been unwavering on this front since the start, so this is just the way it is going to be.

Anyway, I went back to turn in my mission and decided to check out other planets available.  In doing so I decided that Letiemopas IV was a more interesting place, so decided I’d rather be a citizen there.  To do so, however, I needed to renounce my current citizenship of Letiemopas I, which required me to go back to the GovBot back there.   So off I went to renounce.

Once that was done I felt I had had enough traveling, so I called it for the night.  When I logged in the next day I went to the space station, grabbed a couple missions for Letiemopas IV, because why not, and then followed the little guide marker to the portal, which I found was not there.

Sorry, the portal you are seeking is offline or no longer in service

There is apparently a portal bus schedule somewhere that I am not aware of.  That information is probably buried in a two hour video somewhere or deep in the scroll back on Discord.

It would have been kind of nice to know there was no way to get to the missions when I accepted them.  I feel like the code put portal out of service information on the planet selection panel of the mission kiosk is something even I could write.

Also nice to know would have been how long this outage was expected to last.  The game does seem to flash on the screen at intervals something about this or that connection being unavailable for  some time frame, always measured in hours.

Letiemopas III is also not currently available

Given that I had seen estimates close to five hours in duration for other locations, that seemed like a clear message to go play something else.

I understand that the friction of inconvenience has its uses in game design, but this felt like more of a middle finger.  The flip side of all of the idea that inconvenience is a necessary mechanic is that if it goes too far it comes directly into conflict with the fact that I am here to play a game with my limited free time and if the game blocks me from accomplishing a goal, it is very easy for me to log off and do something else.

Add in that everything I do and any progress I make was going to be wiped away sooner or later anyway, my motivation was sapped.  I moved on to Planet Crafter.  I’ll terraform my own garden planet!

Which isn’t to say nothing is getting better with the game.  We got a message on all channels from “Playable Worlds CEO and Stars Reach Game Director Raph Koster” about things that they had fixed already, which included:

  • We did a day one patch to address the issues with stick bugs and headless avatars.
  • We also solved an issue causing players to get stuck indefinitely in queues — still more to do to improve loading speed, and we’re working on it.
  • On the second day, we put out an update to rescue folks who got trapped on wild wormhole planets.
  • We also pushed an update with a handful of optimizations that reduce CPU load. We’re working on more and will roll them out as they are ready.
  • By popular request, we are testing out GeForceNow; the game should be listed on GFN now.

Some solid fixes there, though I’d like to see them do a little optimization for GPU load.  The game still spins the fans on my RTX4070 up to hovercraft speed, so I reduced the resolution at which I played to calm them down.  Perhaps 3440×1440 is too much of an ask at this point.

I am also a bit curious as to the level required to achieve a “by popular request” response for something like GeForceNow support.  The Steam charts put a bit of a cap on what popular means in the context of Stars Reach.

There are also some things in the works such as:

  • We’ve got an issue that gets worse the longer servers are up, causing stuttering — we’re actively working a fix.
  • A speed up to zone loading that also lowers memory usage should improve performance.
  • Renaming missions: “easy/moderate/challenging” will be “near/mid/far.”
  • To make space easier to navigate, we are making all space wormholes be placed in cardinal directions around the sides of the space area giving them the plain wormhole appearance.
  • Increasing the hit area on them for triggering the travel pop-up Adjusting the movement speeds to solve the issue of overly slow movement through grass and sprint feeling too slow.
  • Skin tones! Starting with Terrans first and then coming to others.

Server problems, a good thing to work on.

Also, the hit area for being able to enter portals is way too small.  I didn’t get into the whole problem of getting the Yes/No enter dialog and then having it go away too quickly to click because you’ve sailed on through the hit box and now have to turn around and take another run at it and you can’t just hit reverse on your momentum like you’re walking.  A big pain in the ass, happy to see if get some attention.

And space navigation in general needs some improvement.

I didn’t mention anything about character creation, but Bhagpuss posted about that in sufficient detail that I think it is covered for the moment.  Skin tone is probably a good first update for Terrans, as skin tone matters so much to us.  It is probably my white male privilege showing, but my first issue was that you could pick a hairstyle but not the color, so now my hair and eyebrows are so different in color that it is clear that I am just dying my hair.

That is where things stand for me for the moment.  I’ll likely just watch for updates and poke my nose back in if something significant changes… or after the next server wipe, whichever comes first.