Stars Reach News

Exploring the deep dark deadly woods…

If you read our last blog post, you heard about the features we plan to test this weekend.

To date, we have been unlocking only specific features in each test, and trying them out in isolation, rather than letting testers play with all the systems we have done work on. Probably most notably, testers have had combat used on them, but they haven’t been able to really fight back with weapons yet.

That’s because until now, we have been doing mostly scalability and stability testing. Testing features in isolation lets us measure their performance more accurately, and reduces the number of variables as we isolate issues. This lets us iterate on them as quickly as possible.

But now that we have a good sense of what to tackle on the performance side, we’re ready to start letting players try out gameplay features! This time around, we are going to have more than one game system turned on, so that we can start to test out how they interlock.

In Stars Reach, each gameplay system is dependent on others in various ways, so we have to plan carefully what we turn on at each test.

As one example of that, crafting was mostly not available in the earlier tests, but we did give players the Paver tool. Normally, that would have required skills from the Civil Engineering profession. To enable the test of world manipulation without dragging in all of crafting, we just made it so that you didn’t need to actually craft paving stones or pavement, and instead just spawned the pavement directly in the world. The paving also all came from just one material, even though in the actual game you’d need to harvest the right materials to make a given pavement type.

This time, testers are going to try out a pretty important pair of systems, one oriented around exploration, and the other, excitingly, combat.

[h3]BEING A RANGER[/h3]
Remember, Stars Reach does not have classes. Instead, you can start learning any given skill tree, which we call a profession. Sometimes, one profession unlocks another. This means changing our mindset a little bit when we design special abilities.

As developers, we might have a natural inclination to say “learning knives plays well with stealth abilities, so I’m going to put some stealth powers in the knives skill tree.” In a system like ours, it’s better to think of stealth as a profession in its own right, that might pair up with knives, but also might pair up with mining, botany, or xenobiology because players want to avoid combat while hunting for rare samples.

We end up grouping together these “ways to play” into the professions, and testers are going to get to try out two parts of the overall Ranger tree in the test this weekend.

Rangering is big! It’s actually made up of five separate professions arranged like this diagram. Each of these bubbles specializes into different activities.

Ranger Figure 1.

The base skill to start out as a Ranger offers up just one ability: marking waypoints. This is a basic navigation aid that helps you navigate the world. You have a datapad where you can collect these waypoints, and eventually trade them with others.

From that basic ability, you then branch out.

• If you want to keep exploring what is possible with waypoints, you will want to head toward surveying and cartography. You can learn how to have more and more waypoints, how to set them from a distance, how to collect survey points in the world and craft planetary maps, and more. In Stars Reach, you do not have a minimap until you make one, or obtain one from someone who has crafted one!
• Orienteering is more about learning to hike and navigate. Until now, everyone has had the ability to fly with the gravmesh, and to use grappling. Everyone has been slowed down the same amount by slopes and everyone was equally good at climbing sheer cliffs. This profession is all about unlocking these things and about getting better at them. Hanging on a cliff is going to cost stamina, until you learn how to use pitons, for example.
• Camping is about the ability to create forward bases. In SR, when you die, you pop back to the last save point – a ReLife Station. Rangers who know camping can create these camps and they automatically come with a ReLife Station. Otherwise, you’ll be rewinding back to the start point on the planet. Camps also can have crafting stations and defenses, and they count as a “safe area” for the purposes of healing wounds and using entertainment skills.
• Being sneaky is fun, of course. Learning how to mask your scent from roving creatures, how to hide and sneak about, and even engage in sneak attacks for extra damage regardless of which weapon you use – these are all the province of the Concealment profession.
• Lastly, there’s an advanced profession for truly hardcore explorers. Someone adept at Wilderness Survival can train building up heat and cold resistances for extreme weather and climates, can learn how to resist poisons, and so on.

[h3]ENOUGH PROFESSIONS, WHAT ABOUT SKILLS?[/h3]
Even this diagram does not show the systems in real detail. You don’t need to master both Concealment and Orienteering to unlock Wilderness Survival. Professions can be unlocked and branch off midway through a tree.

In fact, even though I am about to share what the trees currently look like with you here, I’ll warn you that we expect to add, drop, and rearrange skills from these as a result of testing. Our skill system is very data-driven and it’s easy for us to do that, so we will take advantage of that capability to keep iterating! So don’t rely on this diagram much! 🙂

Ranger figure 2

Some things you might notice about this: bolded circles unlock an ability, like a new special move, or a new passive ability. Ones with the thinner ring are generally about making stats on the ability better. So once you unlock camping, you can make camps of larger size or duration by earning your way further up those progression tracks. We’ve currently settled on around three upgrade tiers as a number that felt good in terms of each new box feeling really consequential.

These trees can also crosslink into other professions. And dotted ones are ones that we aren’t quite ready to talk about or promise yet. Lastly, there are master skills that “sum up” a portion of the tree and can grant titles to players.

[h3]IN THIS UPCOMING TEST[/h3]
Players in the next test will only be playing with camping and some amount of surveying. And surveying is not all of the Cartography tree this time. We’re still keeping to the plan of unlocking features a bit at a time. The goal is for each player to try mapping the planet – no sharing of survey points yet. If you had guessed by now that this test is also about evaluating Exploration as a playstyle of its own, you’re right! That’s exactly what we hope to do here.

Players will notice that some of the abilities they’ve gotten used to seeing on other tools have moved around. Being able to clearcut underbrush like a machete, use a low-powered flamethrower, and freeze a path across liquid or hot terrain are things that a Ranger needs to do; previously, some of this capability was on a generic Agitator tool. Our goal is that abilities like that fall into the professions where they make sense. You won’t find the flamethrower melting any rock, for example. It’s just not that hot.

Camping enters the picture because you will find you probably want camps in order to succeed at mapping the planet. Get used to dying, because the creatures in this test are aggressive and fairly tough. Most of the camping skills are present.

Similarly, in this test we are going to let players experience combat. Combat has plenty of work left to do on it, especially around client prediction and networking. But this test is all about mapping a dangerous planet. We figured, you need a chance to fight back. Please don’t judge this as the final form of combat – though it should give you a decent taste of the action-oriented arcadey feel we are going for.

All in all, this should feel like “a game” more than previous tests. You have a clear goal: map the world. The world is resisting. Can’t wait to see how it goes!

Want to help shape the future of Stars Reach? Register now to join our playtest pool! While signing up doesn’t guarantee an invite to the next playtest, you’ll be in the queue for future opportunities to experience new features and gameplay. Be among the first to explore, fight, and influence the game’s direction. [Sign up here]!

In the last test we ran on Oct 2, we let players rip up the world, experimenting with a ton of world manipulation tools.

This next test, we’re going a completely different direction, removing all of those terrain deformation capabilities and concentrating instead on some of our core game loops: combat, progression and (just a bit of) crafting.

This one is a complete change of pace.

Players are Rangers that have landed on a world deep within a dense pine forest on a twilit planet. They’ll each have a basic weapon (Omniblaster), a survey tool, and a ranger tool. Their objectives will be to a) survive, and b) complete a survey of the entire planet.

With that, they’ll venture out into the forest…and those woods will be fraught with peril. Creatures abound within the forest, and most of them are more than a match for a single player.

“It’s dangerous to go alone.” There will be deaths!

New features for this test:

• Combat: Players start with just a single weapon, the Omniblaster, but there are ways to gain others as they adventure. Some notes:
  • This is a long way from the final form of combat. This is an early test.
  • Weapons are not yet client-predicted, so you’ll see some lag effects, depending on the latency of your connection.
• Creatures: There are six types of creatures on the map: Deer, Jackalopes, Skysharks, Ballhogs, Owldeer, and Ballhives. They all have differing characteristics and behaviors, they drop different types of loot, and they are varying degrees of risk. Their AI is still somewhat basic, but they have some nasty surprises in store for players.
• Skill Trees: The first basic skill trees are in the game, allowing players to advance as Rangers, gaining XP and advancing along the Scout and Surveyor skill tree branches.
  • Scout: This tree branch uses the Ranger Tool and is all about forward base camps. As you unlock nodes you’ll be able to establish larger and more elaborate base camps for your friends to use that include ReLife stations and crafting stations including the Stove, Toolmaker, and Lathe. Additionally, the Ranger Tool lets you use a flamethrower to burn away underbrush (and trees) and a freezing tool that you can use to bridge waterways…and put out fires.
  • Surveyor: This tree branch explores setting waypoints and gathering nav nodes from the world, allowing you to (eventually) map a planet’s surface and make that information available to other players. For now, it’s a simplified version letting you map the nav node network for the planet and succeed in your mission.

• Crafting: You can use the Stove (once you gain access) to create consumables to restore stats while you fight, and there may be a few things you can do with the other stations also…if we have time to sneak in some other stuff before the test.

• Flora Burning: Only you can prevent forest fires. But you can also start them. Be warned…fire spreads!

Additionally, there’s a host of bug fixes from previous tests (including better support for AMD video cards and fewer crashes) as well as performance improvements.

We’re really looking forward to players trying these new systems and continuing to grow the game beyond. Soon!

Want to Join the Next Playtest?

Don’t miss out on the next round of chaos and creativity! Make sure to [register for the playtest here] and be part of the action. Your feedback and creations will help shape the future of the game!

By Dave Georgeson

We recently ran a wild-and-wooly external test where we gave our players a whole host of voxel manipulation tools and absolutely no guardrails. The ensuing chaos was both a) enormously entertaining, and b) extremely valuable feedback on both performance and giving us indications of what the players would do with that level of power.

We gave our players six different tools they hadn’t used previously:

• Extractor: A mining cannon that’s used to dig through soil and stone, extracting minerals and making tunnels.
• Agitator: A device that can apply enormous heat or cold to different areas so that players can melt stone, freeze water, and everything in between.
• Terraformer: This tool lets you place any material you’ve gathered (usually with the Extractor) back into the world. You can select from the materials in your inventory and sculpt away to your heart’s content. (Especially in conjunction with careful application of the extractor.)

• Chronophaser: This beam weapon allows you to increase, or even reverse, entropy so that materials either break down into their components (as they would with erosion) or merge back together into fewer elements (like lithification).

• Paver: Use materials you’ve gathered to pave areas and make parking lots or roads.

• Block Tool: We let testers experiment with a very rough, brand-new feature, allowing them to build with materials similar to what’s available in the world. This was still VERY early in development, but the players were able to do a lot with it anyway.

Then we turned 100 players loose on a 1k x 1k test map for two hours…and watched. No rules. Just mayhem.

It was spectacular.

As expected, the Agitator was enormously popular right away. It was no surprise that melting and freezing things is fun stuff. But the other tools were all attractive in their own ways and a bunch of stuff happened all at once.

• Players created enormous lava flows, melting entire sides of mountains to create immense “dragon spines” of melted and re-solidified rock.
• They froze huge sections of lake, making impromptu ice skating parks and playing on them extensively.
• A small group immediately began working to undermine an entire hill, just to see it eventually cave in on itself…which ended up killing everyone in the immediate area.
• One group went underwater and dug a vertical shaft down into the bedrock, eventually draining part of the lake into the lava mantle far below, which flashed the water into steam, creating a geyser that rushed back up the tunnel and so high into the sky that the cold there started freezing it and dropping ice chunks back down to the ground, killing anyone that was under them.
• Another player dug a shaft down below the lake, creating a drain for lake water. They then froze the resulting whirlpool that occurred, creating an ice funnel they could slide down and up, flinging them into the sky.

People didn’t spend a bunch of time making roads (that’ll probably be more popular as we start allowing persistent building efforts), but they did take the really rough Block Tool and start experimenting with it, making crude log cabins and many signs (including our own game logos).

They built bridges across the sky, set each other on fire, froze one another in place, and generally had a great time. In the process, they absolutely wrecked a world in short order.

The Ancient Gaming Noob wrote up more detailed reports of how the test went! Links to his articles are posted below:

Scenes from a Stars Reach New Tools Playtest

Stars Reach and the Terrain Modification Playtest

And here’s some pics from the test, below:
A ravaged map after a two-hour test

Players building structures and then melting them with judicious application of heat beams

Building Stars Reach logos with the prototype block tool

Some quick log cabins made in a few minutes during the test

Are players going to be able to do all this in the launched game? The answer is “yes and no”. All the features we let the players experiment with will definitely be in the game, but all of them are gated by skill trees and may not be quite as powerful as what was seen in this test. The tools we gave them are not the final form of those tools and not every player will be able to do all of these things at once.

Additionally, block building will be heavily improved soon and they’ll also have the ability to utilize building tiles and props, but that sort of building will be relegated to homesteads and colony plots, not just everywhere in the world.

But will players be able to do all of this in the launch game? You bet they will…and a lot more.

Stay tuned for details of our next test, which will unleash players into a world with a completely different set of abilities. There’s so much to come, and all of it is near term!

PLAYER FEEDBACK:

[h3]Want to Join the Next Playtest?[/h3]
Don’t miss out on the next round of chaos and creativity! Make sure to [register for the playtest here] and be part of the action. Your feedback and creations will help shape the future of the game!

Stars Reach by Playable Worlds is about fulfilling the promise of what online worlds can be. In this video, you’ll learn about upcoming innovations for both MMOG and virtual worlds and Unity’s advantages. This thought-provoking experience draws you into a single shardless galaxy with thousands of living planets and space zones that you can explore, settle, and rule with your friends.

Via Unity

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h3]Register to participate in the Pre-Alpha Playtest HERE[/h3]

By Dave Georgeson

We strongly believe there are three core elements at the heart of a great, massively social MMORPG. Fun and compelling moment-to-moment gameplay, a thriving global economy you’re excited to participate in, and satisfying character advancement. These are all married together and intertwined like ivy branches. Each inseparable from the others, and all operating in mutual support. This is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish, and it’s worth every ounce of the herculean effort required to make it happen.

Together, they’re too big of a subject to tackle in one article, so today we’re going to separate out character advancement and talk about how that works in Stars Reach.

[h2]GAIN EXPERIENCE BY BEING USEFUL[/h2]
One of Stars Reach’s core principles is that you learn by doing…but not by just blindly repeating an action over and over again. Instead, you need to do something that’s useful to yourself or others, or incurs risk.

How does that translate into gameplay? Here are a few examples:

• Let’s say you’re learning to be a Ranger, and you learn the skill to set up temporary camps in the wilderness. Do you get XP for setting up a camp that just sits there idle? No, you don’t. But you do earn XP when that camp is used by you or other players to rest or re-equip.
  
• Or maybe you’re becoming a Weaponsmith and you start making weapons. Do you get XP from making weapons? No, but you do get XP when those weapons are actually used by you or other players. The more the weapon is used, the more XP you earn.
  

The same is true for entertainment (you get XP when your dancing benefits others), leadership (you get XP while actively providing benefits to squad members), xenobiology (you get XP when people use the libraries of information you create) and you gain XP with medical skills when you heal or restore other players.

Of course, some trees are more straightforward. When you train with a weapon, you get XP when you cause damage with it (which incurs risk for your character). If you learn Combat Engineering skills, you get XP when your traps or turrets are effective.

You can see the pattern here. This is about your relationship to a universe where danger exists, and how your actions impact others both directly and indirectly, all of which are critical elements in our living, thriving sandbox of a game.

[h2]SKILL TREES AND TOOLS[/h2]
We have a lot of skill trees in Stars Reach and every skill tree has a tool associated with it. To gain XP in a specific skill tree, you need to use the tool associated with it.

Want to be a better miner? Use the extractor. A better leader? Use the rally banner. Get better with the assault rifle? Then use the rifle in combat.

It’s a simple concept. Of course, you can’t equip everything at once, so you’ll have to pick which trees you’re advancing at the moment by choosing the appropriate tools. And various tools have different quality levels which affect their various abilities, which again plays into economy and crafting, but the basic idea of “use tool, get XP with that tool” is an easy one to understand.

Nearly everything you can do in the game is associated with skill trees (you can do fundamental things like run and jump without unlocking skill nodes, of course), so your loadout choices will influence what your character becomes capable of doing as you play.

[h2]CAN I LEARN EVERYTHING?[/h2]
Yes, and no.

Yes, you can learn every skill in the game, but no, they cannot be active all at once. There is a maximum number of skills you can keep “in practice” for your character at one time. If you want to continue to learn more skills thereafter, you’ll need to first let some of your previously-learned skills atrophy and fall “out of practice.”

Atrophying a skill doesn’t mean you lose it. You’re just out of practice and can’t use the capabilities at the moment. You do retain benefits from having worked so hard the first time: If you want to dust the atrophied skills off and relearn them, it’s much easier and is really just a matter of time. You don’t need to learn the skill again from scratch.

WHAT DO I LEARN IN A SKILL TREE?
As you unlock nodes in a skill tree, you’ll gain bonuses to your existing abilities and unlock root nodes to other trees that branch off from the one you’re climbing. And you’ll also unlock Specials.

Specials are new abilities that you use with the tool for that skill tree. Some examples:

• If you’re pursuing the Forestry skill tree, you might learn to force trees to grow so you can replant and replenish more quickly, or automatically de-limb a tree when you cut it, or learn to cure diseases in the trees while they’re growing.
  
• If you’re learning Leadership, you can inspire your team by boosting various character stats, create formations for them to use for bonuses, or activate crowd control abilities against foes.
  
• If you’re learning to use the Laserwhip (a weapon), you might learn to Lasso an opponent, or Laserstrike at range, or lash out and entangle a foe like a Bola.
  

And so on! However, there are two caveats with this:

• You can unlock many Specials on a skill tree, but you can only enable two of them at a time, and;
  
• The Specials you have enabled are crafted into the tool that you’re using. So when you want to use different Specials, you’ll need to buy or craft a different version of your tool and use that one instead.
  

As you can see all of this obviously intertwines with moment-to-moment gameplay as well as the economy. Every item you use in the game was made by a player, so you’ll either need to learn crafting skills of your own, or you’ll need to make friends with someone that has those skills. How that all works together is a much larger discussion for another day.

[h2]SO WHERE ARE WE NOW?[/h2]
As with most (if not all!) fundamental gameplay systems in an MMO, we first have to build the supporting infrastructure, which is part of what we were up to when we were running quietly before announcing the game publicly.

Then we build the systems and interfaces that the gameplay teams will use to fill out the code and data that becomes the trees and abilities. Finally, the player-facing trees and abilities themselves get created and you’re able to see and test them.

We’re on that last step right now, and you’ll be able to see the first couple skill trees very soon. Our next set of external tests will let players explore the first couple of simple skill trees, and then we’ll continuously roll out new ones thereafter until we get all the intended functionality for launch into the game.

We’re still pre-Alpha, so we have a good chunk of development still to do, and we’d love to hear your feedback on these core concepts! Join us in our Discord channel so we can discuss!

If you have a friend or guildmate who would enjoy this testing, please give them this link to sign up: https://signup.starsreach.com/email-cohort.