PAT27 Recruit No More (Crucible)

A few days ago, Stars Reach released it’s oft’ delayed 27th pre-alpha test update. I completely missed that original update, since it happened without any prior announcement. When I went to bed, nothing was yet known about it - when I got up again, it was already over.

That last update prior to this one, was That’s No Moon on the 22nd of January. That’s a whole 7 weeks ago, which is the longest we’ve ever had to wait on a patch so far. Normally, there should be an update every 3 weeks (used to be 2 weeks), but the devs are now talking about changing that to “however many weeks the currently worked on feature needs”.

This update is definitely a big one - but is it really that big, considering how long it took? Let’s find out.

The Hallway

Some readers may want to skip this chapter. The Hallway has garnered an amount of frustration and resentment among testers, that just mentioning the name does upset some people. But it’s broken again, so I have to mention it.

No dice digging

The debris you are supposed to be removing isn’t removable. Apart from that I ran into camera issues, and text boxes not appearing or not appearing at the right time and place. I wouldn’t mind that as much, if the new player experience and with it that hallway hadn’t been the main focus of the last six months or so. The developers desperately need better retention numbers to show to investors - which is why they put this focus on NPE and tutorials in the first place. They already had to let people go, in an attempt to stretch the funds that remain. Despite all that, they still aren’t capable of making the hallway work - it still gets new players stuck, with no other way out than quitting the game. As it always did. Even after all those many revamps, reworks, improvements, upgrades and changes that have been made to it - it still is broken.

Face-planting is an extreme sport in SR

The devs have no current plans of ever removing the hallway - but they can’t seem to get it to work reliably either. Not only does it keep breaking mechanically - it also doesn’t seem able to make players actually read (and retain) the texts in those text-boxes they are presented. Will it ever be able to do enough good to offset the harm it’s already caused?

Haven

Haven did not see any significant changes in this update - but it did see a lot of discussion during those last 7 weeks. Changes are being planned for future updates - and from what I heard, the plan is, to open up Haven a little more, and make the chores it offers to players more optional and a little less on rails.

Just as it was

Opinions on Haven seem pretty mixed overall. To me personally it was a big disappointment. I was hoping for a game that pushes the envelope on social sandbox MMOs, modernizes them, and brings them to a new audience. Instead I found myself playing an outdated, linear themepark, that was stripped of it’s good parts: no main story line, no voice acting, no cut-scenes - just filler quests.

Doom Bloom

Others love it, call it a great example of what the game is going for, and a showcase of the future of Stars Reach, and a great representation of what the future will hold. Reading that sort of comment breaks my heart. The “new direction” is already taking hold among the players. The data now clearly shows, this is the way to go. Stars Reach is no longer a pure sandbox - it’s a hybrid game now, like all the others. Instead of revolutionizing the sandbox, it’s looking towards WoW for inspiration.

The Saucer Shuttle to Crucible

Intermission

Once upon a time, the MMO genre stood at a fork in the road. Two paths into the future opened up before them, and each game had to pick and choose one of these paths to walk along. One of those paths was easy, but led away from that dream of dynamic virtual worlds that people had - the other was more rocky and steeper, but also more promising.

Then Everquest and WoW found a huge pot of gold on the easy path, and the rocky path became blocked off: any game that didn’t choose to go the easy path, now called the “golden” path, would never get their budget greenlit. And thus everyone followed the golden path, and a for while they were happy and prospered.

But then the golden path came to an end. It turned out ot be a dead end. It relied too much on developer made content, which became ever more expensive to make, while players became ever more efficient at rushing through it. Walking this path no longer was sustainable - and thus the part started to rot. Broken road-stones didn’t get repaired, weeds growing through the cracks didn’t get removed. It became dilapidated, and the genre of MMO games declined. Both players and investors moved on, to other genres and types of games entirely.

A few games tried to correct the course, hunting the myth of that other, now long forgotten path. But they couldn’t find their way back. To long had they followed the easy path, which had too far diverged from the other path. Projects that tried to get back, hopelessly got stuck in the mud and swamps in between. Some tried to backtrack the way they came, but got lost in the past and became pure nostalgia projects for the old. Those who still remembered the crossroads.

Others tried to stay on the easy path, but extend it’s length, by adding stretches of what they believed the other path might look like. But it was all fake and illusions - because they didn’t really know what the other path looked like. They had never seen it after all. As the number of travellers dwindled, only a few stalwarts remained. Old and jaded, they held on to a prophecy so old, it had long turned into myth.

One day a bold new game will come - so it goes - a game that disregards the rules, and the assumptions we grown to rely upon. A game that backtracks the path, undoing the progress we made, shedding the baggage we accumulated. A game that breaks free, of the shackles we have created for ourselves. It will find the way back to the crossroads - all the way. But it will resist the lure of the spirits of the past. It will not seek nostalgia, it will not stay. It will rediscover the other path, now overgrown and barely recognizable. It will clear the brush and fight it’s way back, tooth and claws, all the way to modernity.

It will be a different game. It will set trends, not follow them. It will redefine genre boundaries. It will break the molds we formed, crush their pieces into powder, and form something entirely new. It will not be like any other game - but other games will be like it. It will gain it’s own army of clones, all following that new old path it carved. And that will finally usher in the great rennaisance of the MMO genre. Like Phoenix from the ashes shall it rise, and prove wrong the doom-sayers. And the travellers shall return in unprecedented numbers!

Could Stars Reach be the one - fulfilling the old prophecy? The Minecraft of MMOs?

Nope. They aren’t even trying. Nostalgia project for oldtimers - that’s the destination.

Crucible

Crucible is the new planet players go to, right after finishing all chores on Haven. A little flying saucer acts as a shuttle transport, that players can take to travel back and forth between Haven and Crucible.

Crucible is supposed to be that big counter-point to Haven. The moment the game opens up, shows it’s sandbox nature, lets the player loose and allows them to go wild. Haven is one side of the coin - Crucible is the other.

So, how is it? What does it offer?

Mining

Well, it’s just more chores. Pretty meh actually. You go to another NPC, get another chore to do, walk up to another waypoint, do what you’re told, and return to hand in the chore for some “reward”.

Look, don’t get me wrong - there’s some considerable improvements here over Haven. You get some options to choose from (even if choosing might still be a bit clunky, if it’s either interact or don’t interact with the NPC). You don’t have to do combat, if you prefer mining. You don’t have to do surveying, if you prefer harvesting. The game let’s you decide what to do. The planet has some lava, that will just burn you to a crisp if you don’t know how to deal with it - especially since you haven’t got a gravmesh yet. You get to dig into the ground, and if you want, you can now collapse mountains. You can set things on fire. There’s environmental hazards, and further out there’s dangerous creatures.

Flying back and forth is a common theme

You can just stroll around and do whatever you want. Of course, you technically could do that on Haven as well - but this time the option to do so is made more obvious to you, and you are more explicitly being left off the leash. You get more different tools to try, and the planet isn’t locked down and protected against any form of modification. It’s definitely a better Haven, a more open Haven. But.

But you are still doing chores. Checking off boxes. Fulfilling pre-defined objectives, that are handed to you. Crucible looks like a chore, it smells like a chore, it feels like a chore. It is a chore. Sure, the chores do allow you to try out different tools, different professions, play around with different mechanics. They are meant to teach you verbs - but instead of directly teaching the verbs, you are still given objectives that require you to use the verb in a very specific way to fulfill them. The whole loop is still strictly objective-driven and reliant on extrinsic rewards. The whole “teaching” still happens in lengthy text-boxes. See Sandbox Onboarding for more information on why that matters.

New chore-giver NPC

And the “rewards”… you get pieces of your space-suit. That’s a gating mechanic. You cannot leave until you have a full space-suit, so the rest of the game is gated off to you. Collecting the space-suit is what you need to do, to unlock the gate. So, what you are actually doing is checking off boxes on a list of chores, in order to unlock the next gate. You can call it “trite” if you want. But you definitely can not call it “sandbox” - because that it is not. Not at all.

Halfway through Crucible, I took a short break, got my watering can and stilled the thirst of my young tomato plants. That too is a chore. One I do every day. Because I chose to grow my own tomatoes - more tasty than anything in the supermarket which has to be harvested half-ripe to then ripen during transport, in the back of a truck. So why did I do that? I could well have done that later - after playing. I just wanted to feel what doing a satisfying chore feels like.

The floor is lava

I do understand that to a new player this might feel different. Everything is still new, unknown. It’s their first time digging into the ground (at least in this game). Their first time surveying a map. It’s all still fresh and exciting. And the NPCs do give you hints that encourage you to break free of the chore treadmill, ignore what the game mechanically drives you to do, and go experiment on your own. But it’s just words in a text-box, and you still have to break free of the deep ruts the game put you in. I struggle to believe that this is the best possible way to do this.

Some might want to turn fog off, just to get a clearer, more readable image

It does get very hazy

Very, very hazy

I didn’t do all the chores that Crucible offers - yet. It will try to do all of them, eventually. For testing purposes. But… it takes some motivation and discipline to make myself go through with that. It’s not like in the past, when I was glued to the screen, just messing around with sand and water, and had to force myself to stop playing for a while, so that I could write a blog post about the new update. I feel so very little excitement for patch updates these days. Why is it all boring chores now? What happened? Where did all my enthusiasm go? Do my tomatoes maybe need some water?

Killing a Cindral

Other Additions Of This Update

See the official patch notes for a complete overview of all the changes done, but here are a few of the bigger things I wanted to shout out:

• Graphical survey maps - if you do survey now, what used to be a place-holder ASCII maps are now actually colored graphical maps. There’s no real change to functionality yet - it just looks nicer. In the future, those maps are supposed to be share-able and sellable, etc.
• Reduced movement speed - run speed got a bit crazy in the past, with updates and the boosts given by roads, etc. - but now we are back to a more reasonable baseline. Just running up stairs feel a little too sticky now.
• New weapons - grenade launchers have been added to the game. The arc aiming and shooting process still feels a bit wonky - something to do with missing client side predictions I believe.
• Key rebinding is finally in the game - a bit buggy still, but it’s there!
• Also quite a few UI updates, and a list of other things

New Map

Key rebinding

It was definitely a big update - but it also was 7 weeks, and we never before had a patch that took anywhere near this long…

Preview: Item Decay

Item decay is not a part of this patch and not implemented yet. But it is on the roadmap, where it recently went from “next priorities” to “currently being worked on”. And before work on it started, Raph did ask for feedback on Discord. The discussion that ensued was quite interesting, but also long, meandering and going off on many tangents. So here’s a little summary of the more interesting parts of it.

Introduction To Item Decay

Item decay is a huge economic driver and immensely important for a player-driven economy. It’s just like with currency: If you don’t have a balanced amount of both money faucets and money sinks - then things get out of whack, and you end up with hyper-in- or hyper-de-flation. Goods (items, materials, etc.) need faucets and sinks in exactly the same manner. Imagine what would happen, if a game had no money sinks at all - but players could just get new money by killing creatures, selling loot, repeating quests, etc. That wouldn’t end well, right? Well, if a game had no material sinks, things would get just as bad.

But there are plenty games which don’t have item decay - I hear you say. Yes, but even those do have materials sinks. They just take a differnt approach, where it’s a combination of soulbinding, outleveling, deprecation through newly added item tiers, and reliance on player churn, that removes material from circulation. Those still are material sinks - just a different approach to item decay. But since those economies tend to often be rather bare-bones and definitely not fully dynamic and player-driven, I’ll go out on a leg and claim that item decay is rather essential to achieving a working, player-driven economy. If you want an emergent economy, then the soul-binding approach just isn’t gonna cut it.

That being said, as long as the item decay can be balanced, I don’t think how it’s implemented in detail is make-or-break. It’s still super interesting and discussion worthy - but I just don’t think choosing one implementation detail over the other is going to make a huge difference for the economy overall. Therefore I am fairly open towards a number of different implementation approaches.

What We Know So Far

Sources are the Roadmap, the additional info Raph posted in the Discord forum thread, and the dev-answers given later throughout the thread. This is an overview of what is the plan right now - it’s confirmed to be the current plan, but it’s not set in stone and might still undergo changes.

Tools, Weapons and other use-based items

• There is a certain, small chance that these items loose a small amount of durability, every time they are being used. So if you are out mining, for example, then your Terraformer will slowly loose durability over time - we are probably talking hours of mining gameplay here.
• When durability of the item becomes very low (below 15%) it becomes unusable. That makes it immune to further damage, as using the item is the only way to cause further damage to it. (It’s still unknown, if that means that equipped use-based items cannot take combat damage - but seems like it).
• The item can then be repaired. That fills it’s durability up again - but there is chance that a small amount of max durability is lost in the process. That means that slowly over many repair cycles the amount of durability the fully repaired item has, gradually becomes lower and lower.
• At some point, the max durability reaches 15%, at which point the fully repaired item is no longer usable. We don’t yet know what happens then, as the item is supposed to break - not get stuck in this unusable state.
• While not unusable, the item is fully functional. There’s no gradual degradation.
• There is a rare possibility that a “super-nice” repair by highly skilled crafter can restore max durability back up a little. That means that it is theoretically possible to increase max durability again - but it can never be more than it’s original value, when the item was new.
• both current durability and max durability will visible to the player on the item, and will both be shown in % of the original durability, when the item was new

Armor, Turrets, Fortifications and other combat-damage-based items

• There is a certain, small chance that an equipped item looses a small amount of durability, every time the character is hit and takes damage from an attack.
• In-World items like Turrets and Fortifications take durability damage each time they get hit (durability seems to be the “health” of such items, and damaging that seems the only way to destroy them. There are still unanswered questions about how and when these items can be repaired - if they can get just completely destroyed each fight)
• We don’t know yet, if shields will take potential durability damage when hit - or if they are use-based items, taking potential durability damage when activated.
• Clothing (non-stats), was originally planned to take combat damage - but that was later changed, and clothing is use-based now, meaning it just becomes unusable (in which case it’s still visible on the character, and can still be un-equipped, but not re-equipped until repaired)
• unlike use-based items, these items do not become “unusable” and thus can reach a current durability of 0 - at which point they break
• just like use-based items, they stay fully functional until breaking
• just like use-based items they can be repaired at any time before breaking - filling their durability up again, with the same small chance of a reduction of max durability (and the same chance of max durability increase on rare “super-nice” repairs)
• both current durability and max durability are visible on the item, just like with use-based items

Containers: Space-ships, grav-sleds, etc.

• these are considered in-world combat-damage-based items and work exactly like described above
• damaged containers will leak or drop some of their contents into the game world. that will be in the form of doobers (glowy pick-up items), which for a short time are reserved to being picked up only by the player owning them, before they become avilable to all
• it’s still unknown, whether the backpack/inventory is considered a container which can take damage, when the character is hit

Food, Meat, spoilable animal and plant parts and other time-based items

• these items simply loose durability over time (at varying rates)
• unlike other items, these cannot be repaired
• the rate at which they decay can be slowed down through preservation and refridgeration
• putting these items into a statis box can stop their decay entirely (until taken out again), and make them last indefinitely
• when durability reaches 0, some of these will just disappear - others will turn into generic waste items, like “spoiled food” for example - which have crafting uses (like for making fertilizer, for example)
• when stacked together, the stack will always take on the lowest durability of the combined items. if then split apart again, everything will have that new, lower durability. (durability is not tracked individually for each item in the stack, but just for the stack as a whole)
• just like with other items, current durability will be player-visible directly on the item. there’s no max-durability for time-based items, since they can’t be repaired

Item Stacks

• if a stack of items gets damaged, or is subject to container leakage - it will simply loose a few of it’s items, reducing the size of the stack
• items that have individual durability (like use-based or combat-damage based items), are typically not stackable
• food stacks, when damaged, will see an reduction in amount just like other stacks. being damaged does not affect spoil rate

Named durability ranges

• 90-100%: Pristine
• 70-89%: Good
• 40-69%: Worn
• 15-39%: Damaged
• 1-14%: Critical (or for use-based items: Unusable)

These will also be clearly visible, and color-coded for convenience.

Notifications

Right now, the plan is to have lines in chat, every time an item looses durability, or breaks. On top of that, where will also be center-of screen alerts. For damage those will be rate-limited (i.e. if a lot damage is happening, some of these alerts may be skipped) - for item breakage they will not be rate-limited, i.e. every message for every item that breaks has to be shown.

Other than that, durability is visible directly on the items.

I personally think that’s probably not gonna be enough. Especially given how alerts are still buggy and may sometimes be shown for a very, very short time only (way too short to be able to read them, especially if you’re distracted by combat or something).

I’d love to see a permanent warning icon in the UI - showing when one (or more) of your items is below 15%. Bonus points if that “15%” cutoff is a setting that players can adjust in the game options.

Other Stuff That Got Discussed

Clothing

Clothing was originally supposed to work just like armor does - as an item that can take combat damage. But when first questions about that appeared, Raph immediately said that’s gonna be discussed in the team some more - and later came back explaining their decision to change that. That’s how they decided to introduce an “unusable” state for use-based items, and to switch (non-stat) clothing to being used-based instead of combat-damage-based.

I personally feel that change solves all the issues with clothing - but there was a ton more discussion about being naked, clothing layers, being naked, making clothing indestructible, being naked, whether all clothing should have stats and… being naked.

Raph has clearly stated that there are no plans for making clothing indestructible, as tailors do need ongoing markets, just like other crafters. But with the currently planned 15% rule, all use-based items are technically unbreakable, and just end up permanently stuck in an unusable state, at the end of their lifetime.

Cosmetics

Shop cosmetics are supposed to be indestructible, re-usable skins that you can apply and re-apply to your items whenever you want. Thus they obviously don’t decay, and cannot break either. But the items they get applied to can.

In the case of space-ships and armor and other things that do have stats - the base items can even break and disappear. But then you just apply your skin to the next item. The skin is not an ingame item either - so it can’t leak out of a container, or get lost in a bank or anything like that. The skin is something you find directly attached to your account.

In the case of clothing - I’m not sure there even will be that many cosmetic skins for that. Clothing is the domain of the tailor, and during the KS the developers have said, that shop cosmetics and tailor clothing will be for different categories of items each - and not stand in direct competition. The way I understand it, that means, that there will be clothing slots on your character, which are purely, exclusively fillable with tailor items only, and have no purchasable skins available to them.

Obviouly there are a few T-shirts in the KS rewards. I have no idea how T-shirts will work. Maybe those will not be tailor items, but a cash-shop exclusive category, and thus simply indestructible to begin with. Or maybe they will be the one exception, where you can get bot tailor-items and shop-skins for the same category… in which case, yes if you have a skin, you can just buy the cheapest, crappiest tailor t-shirt you can get, and apply your fancy t-shirt skin to that, meaning tailors won’t be able to ever sell you any more fancy t-shirt (unless you really like it). Maybe, I don’t know.

Repairs

We don’t know yet how repairs will work - and there have been heated discussions about making them something that requires the presence of an active crafter who manually has to repairs things - vs. asynchronous methods, like sellable repair kits, or repair-vendors.

There’s also been discussion about whether repairs should be limited to camps only - which of course only makes sense in combination with repair kits. People also have mentioned having combat crafters as part of a fighting group, so that they can do field repairs… but honestly, I don’t think that item degradation will be that fast, and that repairs will be needed often enough that a combat repairman would make any sense. I strongly suspect that if you get all of your stuff fully repaired you’ll then be able to do hours and hours of combat, before anything gets even close to reaching damaged state again. (Unless there’s a death-penalty to durability, and you die a lot).

What everyone did seem to agree upon, is that these rare super-nice repairs should be limited to an actual crafter doing manual repairs. Everything else, repair kits, repair vendors, etc. didn’t see any real consensus.

Breath of the Wild

This game was also mentioned, being infamous for how quickly items break, and how durability is not visible to the player and how items cannot be repaired.

But I feel the comparsion is a bit off, since durablity in BotW is meant to encourage the player to cycle through different items, and use all sorts of weapons and items in parallel to each other. That system is not designed as a material sink meant to balance a player-driven economy, and thus the requirements and goals are very different.

When the goal is to have material sinks, then repair costs (repairs use up materials) can be tweaked such, that they do meet the material sink needs and thus repairing items indefinitely would theoretically be allowable. But in practice that would limit crafters to repairs as their only form of ongoing income - and that would seriously undermine the whole PQRV game. So, items have to at least break sometimes, to give crafters that ongoing market. But all of that asks for a way slower pace of decay, with items lasting a lot longer, and being a lot more repairable.

BotW only did it that fast, because encouraging item cycling was their main goal with the mechanic. But that speed makes absolutely no sense for an MMO that’s trying to balance it’s player-driven economy. So I don’t think that’s an apples-to-apples comparison.

Open Questions

Here’s a number of questions to which we haven’t gotten any answer yet:

• if a player takes damage in combat - can items in their backpack/iventory loose durability from that - or is that limited to equipped items?
• can use-based items still take combat damage - for example if during a fight, there’s a terraformer on a character’s toolbelt?
• will character death cause a hit to durability of equipped items?
• can turrets be repaired in combat - to avoid them getting to 0 durability and exploding?
• if a spaceship reaches 0 durability - will that immediately blow up and be irrepairably lost?
• what’s the explanation for tele-cloned characters getting durability damage on their equipped items? given the “cloning” explanation, why would damage to the cloned items cause your real items to loose durability?
• will use-based items break/be deleted when they reach 15% max durability?

Conclusion

This updates’ big new feature is Crucible, which I found to be rather boring, and didn’t write all that much about. If I wanted to play through checklists of chores like that, I’d rather pick a themepark game that wraps them into a nicely written storyline.

Crucible might actually feel okay, if it was the new hallway - the first thing you start in, where you take your first steps, get your bearings, and are allowed to experiment and mess around a little - if only it was a little less chore-list based. But as of now, it’s roughly one hour into the game, after getting conditioned to just follow the arrow for rewards… and at that point, it doesn’t quite manage to break out of the rut, that the player has been put in.

I ended up writing a lot about item decay - an upcoming feature that will be in one of the next patches added to the game. Item decay is definitely not the most sexy of topics, but I sure find it a lot more exciting than Crucible.

The best advice I can give to a new player, is to think of Haven and Crucible as a bit of a joke, and just go off script and ignore the treadmill. Explore and experiment a bit on your own, and don’t fall into the rut the game presents. It’s not gonna continue on like that - the actual game is going to be rather different. Not based on hand-crafted “content” in the form of NPC quests at all.

Also don’t be surprised or discouraged if you get stuck in the hallway. Happens to everyone.