PAT13 Procedural Creatures

This update featured procedurally generated creatures as is headline feature. For now, this procedural generation is limited to stats, combat abilities and behavior of the creatures - but this is planned to also include visual appearance in the future. For now the visual changes were limited to just colors and names. And the names themselves were color-coded as well, to indicated difficutly/rarity of the enemy.

The Hordemaster split into mulitple Hordelords on death

What this means is, that critters on the planets now come in all sorts of variations. They use different damage types, like fire, ice, poison and electricity. They show variations in herding behavior, aggressiveness, attack patterns, resistancies, and so on. And so, I spent several hours of playtime in this test, just doing PVE combat.

If you look through my previous test reports, you will find that I did not participate in a whole lot of combat so far. Yes, I’d go hunt a few ballhogs/skysharks for some needed gases after almost every reset/data wipe. I also went to checkout (and mostly defeat) a number of different mini-bosses at some point. But when it comes to my blog posts, combat may have gotten less lines of writing, relative to some other topics.

Dance party at the world portal

Reason for that is, that I’m just personally a lot more excited about a lot of other things in Stars Reach than I am about combat. But that’s just because of personal preference, and not because combat in SR isn’t exciting. We know there will be 40+ professions (skill trees) to choose from, and that you’ll be able to master a few of them (current guesses are 2 or 3 maybe) and dabble in as many as you want. We don’t know the full list of professions yet, but we’ve seen enough to be able to tell, that there will be a significant number of combat professions and combat-adjacent ones: ranger, skirmisher, (combat) medic, defender, tactician, berserker, criminal, assassin, combat engineer, etc. That goes to show, that combat will be an important part of the game. (While the list of crafting and other professions proofs that non-combat will play an important role as well).

Leric takes on a green, poison-spitting Gashog

Personally, I am not a fan of your typical tab-target auto-fight MMO combat, and therefore to me, Stars Reach’s very active, action-y combat system actually is something to be excited about. From what I’ve seen from combat so far, you are constantly moving, jumping, dodging, flying/evading, using different abilities, and managing your health and focus bars. It’s totally not that combat (which I don’t like) where your character just stands there, exchanging whacks with an selected/targeted enemy, while you watch cooldowns run out, and click through your “rotation”.

Dancing in the pain, just dancing in the pain

I’m actually so focussed on watching the enemies and keeping the right distance while evading their spray-attacks, that I tend to forget keeping an eye on my status bars below. I’m also impressed with how perfectly playable the combat is, despite it’s fast pace (for an MMO), and my internet not being the most lag-free overall. I do have to rely more on the Omniblaster (with it’s homing shots) then on the Drones (which are harder to hit, when I got lag) - but I’ve been switching between both (to optimize tool battery recharge), and found both usable, once you know how and when to use each.

Everybody was pew-pew fighting, it was a little bit frightening

I also spent a fair amount of time using the Healix. Trying to stick the beam to other players in need of healing, and firing off the mass heal ability whenever surrounded by more players. I stayed on Zaraxis for the entire test, where a loose group of players formed, fighting the makers and destroying Core Pieces while fending off the critters that spawn around them. It was a bit chaotic at times, but it wasn’t desorienting or hard to follow.

Not sure what Blackhart feeds their young, but they grow HUGE

With enemies swarming players, and sometimes spamming area explosions that shields aren’t effective against and can stun or freeze players in place - deaths were sometimes unavoidable. It’s not like players couldn’t avoid death pretty well, if they knew the enemy and how to best counter their attacks (like for example area attacks are always ground based, and can be evaded by simply flying over them with the grav-mesh) - but at larger enemies numbers you’d just end up stunned or frozen sometimes, and often that would mean death before you’d be able to move again.

Short after-battle breaks were used to heal up

Players were very good and diligent at resurrecting each other - but doing that stops you in place for a short while as well, leading in some cases to two downed players right next to each other. It proved to be way more efficient to place a camp nearby, and use the ReLife station there, to be able to quickly respawn right next to the action, rather then relying on resurrections. The camps were also needed to dance away any wounds.

Can’t heal up without a fair dose of party-ing

Overall it was pretty fun, as a group activity. And I feel that the enemy variety significantly contributed to that. Running into different compositions of enemy types and variations, kept things fresh and helped avoid a feeling of repetitiveness. On the less impressive side of things, I have to report that to me, some of the tougher enemies felt a little bit too damage spongy. They’d just take forever to whitle down their health, even with a larger group of players unloading on them.

The cliff provided some meager protection

Of course, that kind of balancing can’t possibly be anywhere near were it should be - with all the combat professions and their abilities still missing from the game. That typically takes until late in beta to get right and properly fine-tuned - and we are only in pre-alpha right now. What worked pretty well though, was how the game client dealt with the action. Despite many players and many effects and explosions filling the screen constantly, and a lot going on - my framerate didn’t really seem to dip below the usual numbers I always get. On a 2080TI that’s roughly 30-ish fps for 4K, solid 60 for 1080p and I believe somewhere around 50-ish for 1440p (didn’t try that resolution this test). Some testers were reporting framerate dips in combat though - so your mileage may vary.

I’m so sneaky - they totally can’t see me

One thing I wanted to try this test, was building some sort of combat fort. Just some quick ‘n’ dirty building, that players could take cover inside, shoot out of, and that would keep critters out. I did build some rough version of that - using horizontal firing slits (as vertical was too hard too fire through). But a server-crash and subsequent rollback deleted my little fort, before I could properly test it. Before that happened, one Ballhog managed to somehow squeeze in though, and then was stuck in the outer ring of the building - which made it a pretty easy target to fight. I might be on to something there.

In the cave

Towards the very last few makers to fight on Zaraxis, our battle group ran into the problem of the surrounding creatures respawning faster than we could take them out. We spent quite a while, unsuccessfully trying to whittle down their numbers. Attempts were made to sneak up to the maker and just take it out, without dealing with all the critters first. Another attempt was to have a few people lure away as many enemies as possible - while the main group could then fight a less guarded maker. Ultimately neither of those worked out.

The hole we came in through

What did work though, was luring the critters over to a place where a hole in the ground lead into a large natural cave below. Due to a cliff somewhat blocking the way around one side of the hole, most enemies weren’t quite able to path-find a way around the hole. And those who did, would jump after you, if you jumped in the hole. You could fly back out again, they couldn’t. We dropped a whole bunch of Heetahs, Sleetahs and Shockuars down the hole, which finally allowed us to take out the last few makers. Then we explored the connected cave-system we had dropped the enemies into, and funnily enough ran into the worldboss Blackhart down there.

Fighting another Blackhart

Overall the combat side of things worked pretty great in this update - but the CASIM side of things seemed to experience some bigger (unrelated) issues. Terrain updates would lag behind by up to a minute or so, making mining a pretty tedious prospect. Especially since another change in this patch - material hardness - generally increased mining times for most hard substances. Crashes were happening as well. I didn’t try mining myself - but feedback about it was mixed, with some testers finding it just plain to slow and tedious now, while others thought it might be an okay speed for a badly equipped newbie player, assuming this was the lower end, and that a skilled miner with good tools would be comparatively faster. A few new plants seem to have been added as well - but I didn’t really look into that.

No-one parties quite like cave-men

And that about sums up my experience with the Pre-Alpha Test 13 - Procedural Creatures. One little addendum: while the screenshots of the desert may appear very reddish - while you are in the game, fullscreen, with your eyes adjusted, the effect does not appear that strong. You can see color and contrast in the world just fine.