The first players land in Stars Reach
This past weekend was a huge milestone for us — the very first regular players landed on an alien world in Stars Reach and ran around and had some fun!
This was a pre-alpha test aimed mostly at testing our login systems, infrastructure, bug reporting, and a few other plumbing items like that. We turned off most all of the game systems we already have, in favor of getting baseline metrics with only movement and chat enabled.
But our movement and chat are fairly robust, so it turned out that players had fun anyway! We allow players to fly with a gravmesh, to grapple, to climb, dodge roll, and more; and we have a moods system like Star Wars Galaxies, with chat bubbles that change based on how the player expresses themselves. So we saw spontaneous dance parties, people competing to climb the tallest mountain, a few corpses at the bottom of said mountain when they lost their grip, and so on.
…the extensive moods and emotes were a welcome surprise, with actual altered chat bubbles, the movement was very smooth and fun to utilize, no map (yet) allowed us to explore and focus on landmarks to orient ourselves, I even got chased by some of the mobs when they got spawned, and got to see one giant ball hog that i didnt get to screenshot in time, the real time sunrise and sunsets were a treat to watch, and the live showing of digging and simulation gameplay (grass growing, water freezing, clay forming, etc…) was a joy…
–Musse
I was totally impressed. Everything seemed to work as advertised. I absolutely LOVED grapple and gravmesh – what a way to get around. My ability to get lost was strong, but I was guided to the cenote – what an amazing place! And the range of moods and emotes – outstanding! Could have spent the whole time trying them all out.
— Asclepius
Check out the article on the SR website for a selection of anecdotes and screenshots taken by the first testers. We’ll be moving on to re-run this test with some bugs fixed, followed by gradually turning on more and more features and letting more and more players in. If you want to join in, you need to go sign up! And of course, wishlist the game.
I also wanted to mention that there is now a player-created wiki with a ton of info on the game, gleaned from articles and leaks from our Discord and more.
6 Responses to “The first players land in Stars Reach”
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This is great news, and the game looks already pretty good for a Pre-Alpha in my humble opinion.
The way the camera rotates around the player’s avatar is reminiscent of SWG too with the little crosshair.
I wonder if we will get the same CTRL functionality to release the cursor for environment interaction.
In any case, looks all nice, keep it up and cannot wait for the game to open its doors.
Also, I hope that your invitation activities will not be limited to Discord, as many of us including myself are not very Discordy types.
We have come to the realization that Voice communications and hanging out in Discord (TeamSpeak, Vent, etc.) all day randomly chatting about everything really breaks immersion, and somehow impacts the Role Play experience.
On the other hand Discord supports test communication which is reminiscent of the IRC client running side by side with ICQ and Ultima Online.
I guess I should at least Join the Discord Server in name, yet I am not fond of spending the day in Discord at all. For me it is in the game that it happens. and even in UO the IRC and ICQ were really there for offline chatter meetings and long distance emergency pigeons.
Point being here though, not everyone is in discord, so please expand the participants sampling to other bases than only Discord.
Need all kinds of types of people anyways, same as the in game community. 🙂
Cheers!
Whoever the absolute king is that created and helps to maintain that Wiki is a celestial lord amongst us mortal men.
Note that testing participants are now being pulled from registrations on starsreach.com rather than Discord.
Awesome! Seeing speech bubbles pop up in that first early SWG test is one of my core gaming memories. Of course we all immediately started running trying to see how far we could go and what we could get ourselves into in that test. Excited for those forming their own core memories in SR!
And so it begins… ❤
On an aside, Raph – while the SWG influence is obvious, I’m interested to know what lessons from Metaplace made the transition too.
Huge amounts of the backend architecture are inspired by how Metaplace did it.