Yesterday was launch day for Stars Reach, effectively at least.  There are not many games that go into early access that then turn around and get another bite at the launch apple when they decided to exit.  Palworld is the only one I can think of off hand that came out of early access stronger than when it went in, and it went into early access with a fairly complete game.

Stars Reach – Early Access Launch

Stars Reach… is arriving with a little less heft than one might hope.  And that might be fine.  It has a solid building and crafting core and a light quest and exploration game play loop.  No spaceships yet, but at least spaceships have been moved from the bottom of the “maybe some day” section of the roadmap.  For now if you want Stars’ Reach spaceships you might have to look elsewhere.

The difficult bit is that, unlike so many of the recent crafting survival titles like Palword and Enshrouded, Stars Reach is an MMORPG and the baggage that entails.  A shared world for all players means somebody has to pay to keep the server going.  You can’t just yadda yadda past that and let your end users rent their own or figure out a way to manage shared saves.

There won’t be a subscription at the start to cover the server thing, but buying into early access will be steeper than it was for the survival titles I do go on about, with the ask being between $30 and $80, depending on how many cosmetic blow ins you want.

The early access price tiers are:

  • First Light Edition ($29.99) – Includes the game, the in-game title “Founding Explorer,” and the founders flag building item.
  • Voyager Edition ($49.99) – Includes everything in the First Light edition plus another in-game title, “Voyager,” cosmetics item (a Ballhog hat, a groundsuit, and a founders t-shirt), the “Heroic” emote, and a Servitor Head Trophy building item.
  • Cosmonaut Edition ($79.99) –  Includes everything in the previous two bundles plus two more in-game titles, “Galactic Explorer” and “Cosmonaut,” additional character cosmetics (a jumpsuit and a spacesuit), the “To the Stars!” emote, and advanced versions of the grapple and grav mesh craftable tools.

We got those price points back when the early access plan was announced back in June, but now we have the details, summed up in a chart provided by the team.

Stars Reach early access item chart

Less clear is how early access will be run.  Back during the Kickstarter campaign the team promised/threatened repeated server wipes, including a final wipe at the conclusion of early access.  The plan for wipes appears to have been reaffirmed in the license agreement you have to sign off on to play the game.  Section 2.3 says:

Stars Reach may be made available during pre-release phases, including alpha, beta, or Early Access. During these phases, the Game is actively under development and is not a finished product. Features, content, systems, gameplay, performance, balance, and other elements may be added, removed, changed, reset, or otherwise modified as development continues. The Game may contain bugs, errors, incomplete features, service interruptions, or other issues typical of software under active development. Playable Worlds may perform server resets, progress rollbacks, database wipes, or other changes as reasonably necessary for development, testing, operation, or maintenance of the Game.

That makes this less “early access” and more “paid testing” to my mind.  It is also a reminder that the concept of “early access” remains as ill defined as “alpha” and beta” have been since back in the day.

The tension between continuing game wipes and working in a genre that depends heavily on sunk cost fallacy to survive with a game whose current core is focused on building and community is not difficult to see.  So we’ll have to see how those two things coexist.

The game itself, which is only available on Steam, appeared to be available when I got up yesterday morning Pacific time, seemed to get off to a good start.  Steam Charts clocked Stars Reach at just shy of 700 users online in the morning.  That is about 6x the number that showed up for the final server load test.  While that dropped off a bit, it still hovered around 500 users for most of the day.

Bigger numbers meant higher loading and new problems to deal with.  By 11:00 Pacific the team had acknowledged the following known issues:

  • Some of you have spawned as a bundle of sticks. As you might have guessed, we wood not do this on purpose. A fix for this is coming soon!
  • The chat filter requires some additional augmenting. We’re working on this now.
  • We know that some of you are losing your heads. Literally. We’re investigating this and will fix as soon as possible.
  • Stars Reach does have a single shard in the wider universe. However, because Haven is the tutorial zone and we anticipate high player density, we are instancing this part of the game. If you can’t find your friends on Haven, you’ll be able to regroup once you advance past the tutorial.
  • We are aware that quests are breaking if you leave Haven for Crucible. They will not be completable upon return to Haven. For now, please abandon those quests (in the menu) and re-accept them, which will allow you to progress them once more.
  • Skin tone selections will be updated and augmented in a future update. We have added this to the living roadmap.

Par for the course for an online game launch, and probably all the more so that is launching into a state of being publicly tested.

I did log in a bit yesterday, just to see how things were going.

Explore the galaxy, one planetary surface at a time

I’ll save comments on the state of the game until I have some time to play more this weekend.  The team will have some time to file down the worst bumps by then.

I did rather foolishly redeem my in-game code only to be find that the actual cool things I got from the Kickstarter, like the Playable Worlds T-shirt, appear to be listed in the game as being redeemable one time only.  Now I have that shirt on a character I might not like, on a version of the game that will be wiped, so I had best take some screen shots of it because it looks like it will be gone before I know it.

Learn from my mistakes.

The team also has an early access launch trailer.

It leans heavily on what the game might become.  The promised “life among the stars” is mostly being on planets, so technically I already live a life among the stars.  I mean, I can see one out the window right now, and I’ll see more then if goes around the back side of the planet.

Anyway, for a brief moment if you search on Stars Reach you’ll get some actual news results about the game and not quite as many items about how a local team’s sports “stars” managed to “reach” some championship or tournament.

Related:

  • Stars Reach – Official Site
  • Steam – Stars Reach Store Page
  • Massively OP – Raph Koster’s Kickstarted sandbox MMORPG Stars Reach officially enters early access
  • RPG Gamer – MMORPG Stars Reach Released on Early Access
  • MMORPG.com – Stars Reach Launches Into Early Access Today
  • GamesBeat – Stars Reach launches into early access after 8 years of work