SWG lead's new MMO, Stars Reach, almost lost me—until I met an animal conservationist mayor

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

Full disclosure, here—Stars Reach is, in my humble opinion, a bit of a mess. It's an MMO headed up by Raph Koster, who knows what he's doing on account of his involvement in Ultima Online and, more relevant to the game at hand, Star Wars: Galaxies, and it released into early access this week to the price point of almost $30 (£28).

Stars Reach tries to follow in SWG's vein of being a socially-driven MMO with a huge array of skills you can train. The vision is a galactic society where being a dancer or a journalist is just as viable a playstyle as, say, going outdoors and gunning some beasties down.

I say the "vision", because Stars Reach isn't quite there yet. In fact, it makes a god-awful first impression, starting with a brief stint in a tutorial zone to get you accustomed to your tools—a terraformer, a scanner, a harvester, a gun, and a deeply janky grappling hook.

By far, the most interesting part of these mechanics is the terraformer—which lets you dig into the fully malleable earth and spit out the terrain you've mined. Everything else is deeply so-so. The scanner's a hot/cold beeping system to help build out your map, and the gunplay is… ah, you shoot things and they die. None of it feels particularly good.

The issue—aside from the raft of crusty UI issues and unfinished icons—is what the game does to you next. You're plonked on a rather bland-looking space station and encouraged to go and grab a few missions, of which you can only snap up a handful. These are randomly-generated and dull as driftwood, but they at least get you used to the core mechanics and how you could feasibly use them.

It's during one of these that I'm given a perfect encapsulation of why Stars Reach and its unfinished state is a problem. The first mission I took to dig my way to a drone was cut short, because I discovered that the ground I was mining was sandy, meaning that any hole I dug was immediately filled in by the small hill next to the area I was mining. To be clear, the terrain simulation going on here is actually really neat—if I was digging harder materials, I wouldn't be having the same problem.

'Cool!' I thought, and then I wondered if I could maybe work on some digging XP to outpace the landslides I was causing—only to find out that entire chunks of the mining tree, including mining speed upgrades, were slapped with a big "WIP" sticker.

This is a major problem for Stars Reach, because a lot of the more interesting skill trees (such as acting, dancing, politics, and journalism—yes, really) are still works in progress. That's not to say the systems underpinning them are absent entirely (more on that later), but in terms of first impressions, having only the brass tacks available for players to explore is a serious problem.

Then there's the way navigation works. If you want to explore other planets—which pop up and are culled based on whether or not anyone's maintaining them—you need to slowly float your space-suited self through a dull void to get there, as spaceships aren't in the game yet. And chances are (especially this early) that there won't be anything on said planets to begin with.

Meet with the Mayor

I was, legitimately, ready to turn up my nose and simply drop Stars Reach with the summation that it was released still in the cradle—and I almost did, were it not for vague recollections of Raph Koster telling me about the societies players had built during playtesting.

I hit up Discord, and eventually found this website from the in-game coalition Galactic Union of Natural Conservation, or GUNC. It pointed me in the direction of their chosen planet, and upon arriving, the actual juice behind Stars Reach unfolded in front of me.

I saw about a dozen players milling around a stack of crates, and—doing something very scary, I decided to walk up and start asking questions. It was then I had discovered that, eager to rebuild their society from earlier playtests, GUNC was laying the groundwork to do just that—ferrying a huge heap of supplies from other planets and allocating tasks to their little community.

This involved zoning a section of the planet and, moreover, organising the work needed to actually do its namesake mission of conserving creatures by electing its mayor—something you can already do in-game with something called a GovBot, despite the politics tree being under construction.

GUNC has to have trained xenobiologists go out and find Makers (which are typically-invisible servitors that spawn wildlife) and then lay claim to the land around them to protect them with the raw power of planet-side bureaucracy. As I needled the duly-elected mayor of planet GUNC with questions, I also noticed an emerging fashion trend of something called hive glasses, which the local tailor (also a player) was supplying them with.

This is where the friction in my heart comes in: Stars Reach is a deeply unfinished game that is, in my humble opinion, charging way too much for the janky first impression it makes—but the unfinished (yet intricate) web of systems that underpins it is clearly compelling, because otherwise GUNC wouldn't be there.

I had to go out of my way to find these people doing cool things—rifling through a Discord, going on a fanmade site—rather than organically being directed to these UGC zones."

I genuinely felt like I'd played two separate games—one of them was an eerily lonely, aimless random mission generator, and the other was a jolly cooperative builder that did legitimately charm me, as the good mayor fielded my questions alongside someone roleplaying an ex-anarchist who just wanted to make friends, and a big, fluffy man in a silly hat who was politely asking where he could set up camp so he didn't interfere with GUNC's zoning plans.

The major issue? I had to go out of my way to find these people doing cool things—rifling through a Discord, going on a fanmade site—rather than organically being directed to these UGC zones through a better overworld system. If anything, the mission boards feel like a flat misstep that give players the wrong idea about what the game is trying to do.

Stars Reach should be doing everything in its power to bring you into contact with other players from the get-go—because that's clearly where its passionate and invested community finds its fun. What it's doing right now is asking you 30 whole bucks for access and punting you towards its least flattering, least finished parts.

I dearly hope it can manage a turnaround, because I want the idealised version of Stars Reach to exist—for the sake of its most invested players, more than anything. But it absolutely needs a ton of work before it gets there. And while there's a detailed and active roadmap on the game's site, right now? It's got too much space to grow.

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