PAT12 Seasons, Skies and Public Events

The stress surrounding the Kickstarter caused a little delay on this, but we are finally seeing a new build with new updates ready for testing. And it’s not farming - again. Developers said in the chat, that what players were doing with the very basic tree and bush planting abilities from previous tests, made them change their plans. They liked what the players were doing more, than what they had originally planned for farming - so they are now changing things around a bit. And that’s why we still don’t have farming. (Although a few non-functional skills slipped into the update anyway).

I had a glitch at first, where the new skybox didn’t fill the entire screen

Instead, the new stuff for this build are seasons, skies and public events. And a long list of bugfixes and smaller improvements on top of that. Seasons ran at massively sped up schedules, even more so than planned - meaning a whole cycle (year) of seasons went by in just three ingame days (24 minutes). Of course this is going to be much slower in the final game - but now, for testing purposes, time is flying by like crazy.

Sadly, the public events seemed to cause some server crashes at times. And I was unlucky enough to have all my character progress reset back to zero three times in a row, because of that. As a result, I didn’t really do much of anything this test, that would require any skills to be spent, and mostly spent my time just travelling from planet to planet, and watch the new sky effects throughout the seasons. As a result, this report is gonna come with a lot of pretty pictures!

One other thing that was changed in this update, is surveying. In the past, the red survey points were visible at infinite distance - so you could see all of them, which weren’t somehow blocked by scenery. That’s no longer the case. Now you can only see survey points that you are very, very close to. Which means you have to rely on the beeping sound (which get’s faster when you get nearer), to locate them.

There was a small bug with this, in that the camera position, not the character position was used to decide which survey points to show. So it became really, really hard to find any points at all, if you had your camera zoomed out. But with fully zoomed in camera, it worked well, and felt a lot more interesting and fun to me, than previously. The developers said that it’s not going to stay sound only - but that in addition to the beeping there will also be some sort visual indicator of distance and/or direction to the next survey point - for accessibility reasons.

The other big topic right now is the Kickstarter of course. Launching on February 25th it hit it’s original funding goal of $200,000 within the first hour of the campaign, and has gone on to reach over $560,000 by now, nearly halfway through.

Reactions to the KS seem to be mixed though. There’s a lot of positivity within the games core fan community. Some people have been asking and hoping for a chance to throw money at the game for a long time now - and are ecstatic to be able to finally do so. Others have been burned by other MMOs on Kickstarter ultimately not delivering what they had promised and aren’t going to touch anything Kickstarter ever again.

Press response is mixed as well. Many do point out that this might be the furthest along MMO to do a Kickstarter ever - with a LOT to show (and play for yourself). Where others sell dreams and concept art, Stars Reach has actually already gotten around $38m of investor funding, and overcome all the greater technical hurdles and challenges that came with the innovation approach to world simulation they are taking. They now have a working and very solid foundation to built the game upon - and with a good foundation like that, progress is amazingly fast. I’m still sceptical they can get everything done and polished by the planned release date - but it does merely feel ambitious, rather than unrealistic.

But there’s also been articles concerned that having to do a Kickstarter at all, does not paint a great picture. The devs have been honest and straight-forward about this not being something they had planned to do. They didn’t actually want to go to Kickstarter, because they know very well that MMO + Kickstarter has not been a winning combo so far, and that many people have been burned in the past.

But the gaming industry is going through a phase of contraction righ now. Lay-offs, studio closures, project cancellations. Investors would rather wait until the down-turn is over, and the phase of recovery is starting - then investing now, when all trends are pointing downwards. The Kickstarter seems to be a “signal”, the investors are demanding, and how much more investment money Stars Reach will receive from existing investors, seems to be dependent on the success of the Kickstarter campaign. And various MMO-related subreddits were overflowing with negativity, hate and doomsaying - as usual. Those are the true lovers of the genre.

But the KS campaign is doing very well. The reward tiers are well received (after some last minute changes based on player feedback), and the stretch goals aren’t making any crazy promises that’ll come back to bite them later. There’s regular updates and developer videos - and they’ve even added a new reward tier, that people were wishing for. And the numbers keep climbing, even during the KS-typical mid-campaign lull. The only thing I could have wished for, would be some concept art for the different rewards, just something visual to fall in love with.

A steady stream of new people is showing up on the Discord and in the tests - and there is lots of questions of course. But as someone who’s been trying to help answer those questions, I have to say, that like 90% of them are actually answered on the KS startpage or FAQs. There are also some very valid questions though, which are really hard to answer at this stage of development. And probably can’t be solidly answered until the game is at least in beta. But at that point, you have Early Access sales and don’t need a Kickstarter anymore.

And there’s of course the old issue of this game not being a carbon copy of WoW - but something that’s a lot more difficult to explain, especially to people who’ve never played SWG or UO before. Explaining what makes this kind of player-driven social sandbox feel special to someone who never felt that before, is difficult in the same way that explaining color to a blind person is.

There actually was a discussion once about how to make a trailer that tries to explain interdependency in a player driven economy. Here’s what I came up with:

Imagine a british nature documentary. The voice of David Attenborough softly explaining to the viewer what they actually see happening on the screen. A time lapse of a planet forming. Mountains grow and erode, water collects in rivers that carve valleys into the landscape, plants grow and evolve, animals start appearing. Time slows down, you see a few seasons pass, then the video continues in realtime. A little spaceship lands - and player hops out. They pull out a survey tool, a worn and beaten up looking thing, that flickers and makes noise and only starts working after being hit a few times. The player runs around, using stealth to avoid monsters and animals, und using shields and gravmesh to flee when stealth fails. They scan the survey points and return to their ship, where they create a planetary map, using the collected data. The map is put into the ship, which takes off and flies through a few wormholes, before landing on a planet that has large, bustling city at it’s center. The player takes their map, walks up to a mission terminal and hands in the map, fulfilling a contract they had taken on. The terminal spews out a bunch of credits.

Another player - the one who created the contract - arrives, and takes the map out of the mission terminal. Looking at the map he seems delighted. Runs over to a guild mate of his, who is a miner. They talk a little, the miner takes the map, and takes off in his own space ship. The player who created the contract meanwhile walks into the next bar, to round up a few more guild mates - and have them all get buffed up by an entertainer. The miner flies through a few wormholes, just barely evading an encounter with some deadly space spiders trying to ambush his ship. They land on the planet, pull out the map, and notice the hostile creatures roaming about. They setup a beacon, take out their communicator and make a call back to headquarters. Moments later, clones of the contract-creator and a few well-armed guild mates materialize out of thin air next to the miners ship. They set down a camp, and set out to pacify the wildlife.

While you hear blaster fire in the background, the miner finds a promising spot and starts to dig. The camera pulls underground, showing a cross section of the planet, homing in on a rich vein of shimmery ore. The mining tunnel comes down, and the miner starts collecting the ore. Later he return to the surface. Corpses of dead critters are strewn about and his guild-mates have already left. The ore is loaded onto the ship, and the miner returns to the bustling hub town, where he sells the ore for a nice price on the market place.

A crafter shows up, buys the ore, and ships it over their own home planet. Inside the workshop of their cozy little house, they melt the ore into ingots and alloyes, and refines the ore’s natural attributes to the best of their abilities. Mixing in other metals from their storage as needed. Then they sell the ingots to a tools crafter. The tools crafter takes the ingots and some other parts and compontents, to create a brand new, shiny, survey tool. The ranger we saw surveying the planet at the very start of the video shows up, and happily buys the brand new survey tool. Their old one was starting to give out after all.

The ranger flies off in their space ship, and makes a short stop at the planet we saw being generated right at the start. The miner’s beacon is still there, and a group of colonists is busy trying to start up a brand new town around it. They happily take over the materials the ranger was transporting. But to the ranger this was just a little side-hustle. They are out to find a brand-new planet, one that hasn’t even been generated yet, to repeat the cycle all over again. And so, brand-new survey tool in hand, they set off into the sunset.

Special surprise: CATS!!!