PAT26 That's No Moon (Haven)
Welcome to the 26th pre-alpha test report on Stars Reach, the currently in development new social sandbox MMORPG by Raph Koster!
The newest update patch landed yesterday, on January 22nd and it is called: “That’s No Moon - The Haven Update”. More details on the update can be found in the official patch notes.
Haven
The main new addition of this patch is the new starter moon/town called “Haven”, and all the tutorials found there. The patch notes themselves call the list of changes huge - and while it is definitely true that this is a big update, it also took 7 weeks to come out. With the previous patch having been the graphics update, it’s now been 10 weeks since the last gameplay addition - the GovBot - was released. And while GovBot has some highly interesting future applications, in it’s current first-draft form it’s mostly a boring grind. Which makes it more than a quarter of a year since the last interesting gameplay addition. And before that were the dark times - a quarter of a year of severe bugs, stability issues, server rollbacks and corrupted characters, while patches brought mostly under-the-hood changes only.
The changes that are driving Haven include:
- mission chains (basically quests),
- quest giver NPCs,
- NPC dialogue (well, “monologue” would be the more accurate description),
- quest rewards (klaatus, xp, items),
- a quest log
- support for quest items
- and a bunch of basic “kill X” and “collect X” quests.
Apart from that, there are some very welcome additions affecting the entire game:
- first person camera (together with a camera revamp overall)
- more building tiles and props
- scan function for xyloslicer and harvester, plus a new bioscanner tool
- lots of improvements to chat, emotes and moods
For a new player who goes at a casual pace and does everything they can, Haven will take roughly an hour to complete. Therefore I was easily able to go through it all three times in a row during yesterday’s 3-hour long test (with some time to spare even). Players will not be able to return to Haven after leaving, and at release there will likely be multiple copies/instances of Haven to accommodate player numbers.
I decided it would be fun to document this first version of Haven by doing a humorous look at it, from the perspective of a fictional newbie player “hooby the noob”, who’s playing for the first time. Thus I present to you:
The Misadventures of NOOWBY
Satirical content. Contains exaggerations. To be taken with a grain of salt and a truckload of humor. For information regarding possible side effects, consult your trusted clown or comedian.
Suggestions
In my head, the ESC key is to cancel, exit, go back, or break out of a sequence. “ESC to continue” feels like it’s doing exactly the opposite of what it should… apart from that, there are conflicts, when pressing ESC closes the other window, and not the one that says “press ESC to continue” on it.
My suggestion would be, to use “G” to continue instead. That of course assumes, that while a dialogue is open, “G” is blocked from being used as interact key to open more dialogues.
The escape-key conflicts and priority needs to be looked at regardless. I feel that the chat-window should always be the last to go. But I could also settle for “most recently opened goes first”. (Although in the case of the tutorial boxes, the one with the green “ESC to continue” button should probably always be first. But changing that to ‘G’ would solve that).
There seem to be some pieces of text that still assume that the player is in free cursor mode by default. That probably should be double-checked.
The identity kiosk tells you to use RMB to move the camera around your character - that happens even before you are told about ‘T’ to switch modes.
Arriving on Haven, Mayor Bob tells you to click on Mission indicator in the corner to open the mission log.
At the end of hallway, the portal is labelled “TPL Starbase”, that should probably read “Haven” instead.
There’s also some mixup about whether Haven is a moon or a planet. Several texts seem to suggest it’s a planet, rather than a moon.
My Personal Criticism
I am looking for a player-driven sandbox game, more like UO and SWG, or like Minecraft and Roblox if you will, less than WoW. I’ve grown tired of themepark MMO’s and their quest- and reward-driven “follow the arrow” style of gameplay many years ago. I want a bold and confident sandbox, that knows how to win people over with it’s sandboxy nature.
Themeparks are on their way out. They peaked years ago, and have been fighting over an ever shrinking pie of remaining users ever since. Younger players shun the genre entirely. The imho only way for MMO’s to ever experience a revival, is to do something different, to break free of that mold. It didn’t age well. Either your game is significantly different (like for example sandboxes can be), or you have to compete with WoW, FF14 and SWTOR for what little remains of their old player base.
I further believe, that the purpose of a tutorial is to help the player find the fun in the game as quickly as possible. In the case of a sandbox game, that means helping understand the nature and appeal of sandbox gameplay and of player-driven systems. Check out my post What you need to know about Stars Reach for more detail on what I find really appealing about that. Spoiler: it’s NOT getting quest-rewards.
I bounced off of Wildstar during it’s public beta, because the tutorial was so extremely “follow the quest arrow to get rewards” that I had to force myself to make it through. When then the first thing I saw out in the open world was a “kill 10 rats” style quest promising an item-reward, I rage-quit and uninstalled. After spending roughly two hours with the game, I had not found the fun. Instead the game had convinced me that it is everything I did NOT want.
The entirety of Haven is fully quest-driven, with seemingly zero sandbox features to be found anywhere. It’s all “follow the quest-marker” to get your rewards. A themepark through and through - and not a good one. Compared to modern themeparks, this feels rather clunky, out-dated and sub-standard. Wall-of-text pop-ups with no answer options? There’s two decades old themeparks out there, doing better than that. Themeparks have perfectioned quest-driven gameplay to a level that a sandbox simply can’t compete with.
And why should it? It’s a sandbox. It’s not quest-driven, it’s not reward-driven, and the missions are more of a side-hustle, rather than being the main gameplay driver until max level. “Follow the arrow to get rewards” is not the point. Except… in Haven it is. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Haven puts everything that sandboxes are weak at, front and center. And gates access to the actual strengths and fun parts of the game behind one hour of sub-standard themepark-template style quest-gameplay.
To me, Stars Reach feels like it is suffering an identity crisis. It kinda wants to be a sandbox, but instead of proudly presenting itself as a confident sandbox, it’s all ashamed and tries to hide everything that points at being a sandbox. For the first hour of play it now pretends to be a (weak and clunky) themepark. Because… I have absolutely no clue why! Maybe it suddenly no longer wants to be a sandbox after all? Maybe it’s bending over backwards to please some investors who don’t get it? I don’t know.
All I do know and can tell you, is that it feels wrong to me. You don’t help a player to find the fun of a sandbox, by pretending to be a themepark - only to later pull a bait-and-switch on that.
I’ll end this chapter with a quote of a footnote that I wrote for the “What you need to know about Stars Reach” post back in July 2025:
The “New Game Experience” expansion to Star Wars Galaxies was an ill-fated attempt to add more WoW-like elements to the game. In hindsight, doubling down on their unique strengths might have been a better choice than trying to become a copy of WoW, just worse.
Conclusion and Player Reception
Haven is a big update that adds a lot of themepark elements to the game, and offers around one hour of quest-driven gameplay for new characters. “Follow the quest-marker and get rewards” is the name of the game, and the upcoming Crucible update seems poised to add more of that.
Haven does nothing to display the unique strengths of the game, and hides/gates away it’s sandbox nature until later. The current implementation of quests is a bit clunky and feels old, when compared to modern themeparks.
Player reception has nevertheless been overwhelmingly positive. Testers are starved for new gameplay content, and during the limited 3 hour run of yesterday’s test, they were able to indulge in more new stuff, than we’ve seen in a long time. Only a little bit of that carries over into the main game past Haven though.
This update feels a bit like a return to form. A patch that adds a significant amount of new things to try out. After months of more under-the-hood changes and some really issue-laden patches, it’s very welcome to see a big, gameplay oriented update. Buzz on the ground is good, testers are in high spirits.