The Stars Reach Art Style Controversy
Reception of the Announcement Trailer
The Stars Reach Announcement Trailer landed on June 28, 2024. And some of the shown scenes looked like this:
while others looked more like this:
Some people truly didn’t mind. Some people understood that this was very early and final graphics != pre-alpha graphics. But many flooded various comments sections with their outrage. It’s impossible to tell apart, how much of it was directed at the low graphical fidelity, and how much of it was directed at the bright and colorful art-direction (remember the Diablo3 Rainbow meltdown, anyone?).
The Issues at hand
The big problem here probably is, that this trailer and announcement have been massively hyped on social media, with various websites reporting on the count-down, and people growing expectations. A trailer like this might have been okay for some quiet stealth-announcement on a devblog. But when it comes big, splashy, social-media hyped announcement events, players expect to see something considerably more polished. And there was no prior talk of “this is super early, first pass graphics” - to temper expectations.
Now, I personally am not a big fan of most western comic styles. But that’s just personal taste - and weirdly enough, I really like anime art style at the same time… But I would strongly suggest reserving judgement about the visuals until later. What we see is early, pre-alpha, WIP stuff, and not really representative of the final product. There was talk about light+shadows, shaders and animations still needing work, and even the possible addition of Global Illumation was mentioned. That’s gonna change the look and feel drastically. It’s still gonna remain comic style - and if that’s just not your cup of tea: fair enough. But still - give it a second look, after the technical aspects have been improved. You might find it easier to just look past your taste in art-style, when it’s prettier and smoother looking overall.
The other issue is, that the most exciting things about the game are only barely mentioned in the voice-over, and what makes this sort of game special is not that easy to grasp or understand, or even to show in video. The social aspects, the interdependency, the player-driven economy… how do you make that clear to someone who only knows WoW? From what people can actually see in the trailer, this looks just like any other survival crafting game at first glance. And “alive world” is a common marketing slogan - to most people that just means nothing.
What people should be talking about - instead of the graphics
Imagine grouping up with a few good friends, and taking control over your own little planet. You’ll be able to build your houses there. You’ll be able to build farms, crafting stations, vendors, maybe a spaceport or other infrastructure. An entire city, if you are so inclined. You’ll be able to buy player-made blueprints for unique houses and other buildings, or even put up a contract for someone to custom-build a house just for you.
You’ll be able to import and naturalize player-made breeds of plants and animals. You’ll be able to baby-sit the simulation into growing your planet into a place of great natural beauty - or just flatten it, and concrete over everything with impressive brutalist architecture. Or anything inbetween.
You and or some of your friends might make excursions to more dangerous planets, fighting the creatures there in search of rare materials and special ingredients. Or you might just solo-explore dangerous places, relying more on stealth to avoid trouble, in search of ancient artefacts and forgotten knowledge. Or maybe to just map out the place, and then sell the map to others, who’d like to go there to mine the ores you found.
People from other places in the Galaxy might come to visit your planet - maybe just as tourists, enjoying the entertainers in your famous bar - or maybe as customers, buying your special produce or quality crafted items, that can’t be found anywhere else in the galaxy. Or maybe they’ll want to get one of your hand-tamed animals as their loyal, cuddly pet.
Or maybe you are a known fighter, and people will send you contracts to help them fight some creatures that impede their mining efforts, or they hire your entire team of mercenaries to take on some boss-creature that’s messing up their planets. Or maybe you’re more of a space-ship captain, and people will hire you and your space-ship, to escort some transport ships full of valuable goods.
You might also be sort of an ecologist, who planet-owners call in to fix things, when the simulation in their place starts to go south. You might recomment them to first get some exterminators to deal with the creature infestation that’s plagueing them, before you go on restore balance to the planet’s ecosystem, to ensure these creatures do not grow to such dangerous numbers again.
Or maybe you’ll be a trader - transporting (and sometimes smuggling) goods all around the galaxy, with your sturdy little freighter. Buying low, selling high. Knowing the best trade routes, the best markets, and the most profitable goods to pick up. You might also get contracts from planets wanting you to find some specific resources and bring them to their space port.
Or maybe you’ll become the mayor or governor of a planet or a space station - using your politics skills to progress the planet/city/station, grow it and it’s influence, attract more citizens, give them places to build their homes, and earn taxes from them.
And that’s just the tiniest sliver of examples of what might be possible in a game like this! And with amazing potential like that, just waiting to be discussed… instead we quibble about WIP textures and shaders. Because the latter you can see in the trailer - the former, you can’t.
Update Sep 12
The developers at Playable Worlds have reacted to the controversy, by updating some shaders and textures, and improving parts the terrain generation. And the result looks like this: