This week has been a rough week, blog wise. I’ve written five or so posts and have published none of them because I just don’t have it in me to complete a whole post on the topics I selected. So you get the grab bag.

Stars Reach

Stars Reach, love child of Star Wars Galaxies and EverQuest Next, offspring of MMO OG Raph Koster, has entered early access. What does that me for me? Nothing. What does it mean for you? Maybe also nothing, because many of us have had access since alpha sign-ups or backed through the Kickstarter.

Despite the premise and the pedigree, Stars Reach has failed to grab me in any meaningful way. I’m not a massive fan of the art style, and the attempts a humor don’t tickle me either. I do like that there were visible changes between alpha and early access, so the project has momentum, but I’m just not feeling it in it’s current state, and that’s important for a game in early access which needs people to kick tires. I am hoping that as time goes by and the game gels — assuming it lives long enough to gel — my feelings might change. But it’s the Catch-22 reality of modern game development: I don’t like the current state so I’ll wait for it to get better, but it won’t get better unless people like me play it during it’s current state.

MMOS: MMO Simulator

I’m seeing a big uptick in what I’m going to call a “god-level management sim” these days. I don’t know if this genre has a name, but it’s represented by titles such as WorldBox, Fantasy World Manager, Let’s Build a Dungeon, and now MMOS: MMO Simulator. These kinds of games are pretty wild: we get a toolbox, some land, and then we’re told to go have fun. We can use the tools to create world elements like towns and cities, roads, foliage, wildlife, and resources. We then throw down spawners so our citizens can go out and take out their aggression. The real kicker is that we don’t control the people. We only give them things that they respond do and hope they appreciate it.

As the name suggests, MMOS focuses on allowing the player to create an MMO. We take the role of the designer and operator and are tasked with making a world that players enjoy. We have to get the balance correct and have enough content so players don’t get bored.

The coolest part of this “game” is that we have control over pretty much everything. We can create items, weapons, spells, classes, races, and professions. We can build dungeons and fill them with monsters, from trash to boss level, and determine what loot is lying around and what loot is available from enemies. Then we can open the doors and let the masses in to complain about all of the hard work we put into the game. You know, like operating a real MMO.

This is less of a game than it is a sandbox which allows us to create a “game” without programming. We have complete control over all of the numbers: I especially like the mob spawners because we can set “aggro range” to set when mobs attack players, and “leash range” for how far a mob will follow a player before returning to it’s zone. That’s a pretty good conceptualization of the classic MMO mob behavior, so it’s nice that it’s being spelled out and not abstracted in some way. More knobs and levers makes me feel like I have more agency over how “my MMO” performs.

Unfortunately this is currently only available in demo form. There’s a tutorial which explains everything and then lets us play, and a sandbox mode which starts with absolutely nothing but an initial island, but it already has enough features to make downloading the demo worthwhile, in my opinion.

Influence of The Expanse

Too many upcoming games have latched onto The Expanse as their dead horse. If you’re familiar with the TV show (and also the books, of course, but it’s really the show that has the furthest reach) then you’ll know what I’m talking about. The industrial vibe. The lack of sleek starships. The representation of actual interactions between ships in space. How tough it is to navigate in space and how ships would theoretically move over long distances in space. That kind of thing.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m close to the space sim genre or what, but I’m seeing the influence that The Expanse is having on space sim games and I’m already tired of it. It seems like devs are using it as a shortcut to show how gritty and uncompromising their titles are because they have “rEal NeWTonIan PhySICs” in their game. That I’m seeing so many Expanse rip-offs all at once means that there are too many Expanse rip-offs.

Star Citizen

Out of the five unpublished posts, three have been Star Citizen related, specifically about the 4.8/4.9/4.10/4.11 patch quadrilogy. Instead, I’m fitting it all into the usual footer of my grab bag post.

4.8 was a disaster. 4.9 removed a key feature so it could focus on repairing 4.8, but that hasn’t been going so well. 4.10, currently still in testing, introduces instancing which has had a slate of reported issues, and 4.11 has been talked about on the roadmap and includes more heavy features, specifically a new planet, a new planet tech, location distribution, missions, and NPCs.

I’d like to say that it’s not all doom and gloom, and it’s not. Today, @CakedCrusader and I copied and patched up the public test universe. I had already had the copy and had been testing out the Battaglia mining missions, but this time we were going a bit more hardcore by testing the Siege of Orison instanced mission.

This is a massive time-sink, and CC and I went in with just the two of us; the mission is designed for more, maybe three or four, so I’m sure that having just two people slowed things down a bit.

The idea is that the 9Tails pirates have taken over some platforms in the floating city of Orison. Crusader security — Crusader is the corporation who owns the planet and the city — have proven ineffective in shaking the pirates loose, so they contract mercenaries. Two mercenaries. To do something that a whole company of security professions could not do. Peak video game logic, but let’s continue.

CC was rolling with the new heavy assault armor which comes with a chain-gun and superior protection. The downside is that it’s painfully slow and can’t carry much in terms of resources like additional ammo or medical equipment. I was rolling with my usual loadout: ORK-mkX Singularity medium armor and my trusty P4-AR. Eventually, I managed to secure one of the new Hedeby Arlington lever-action rifles which, I have to say, is quite enjoyable to use.

When I say that this mission is massive, I mean it. There are three main platforms we had to clear, and each has several layers which are broken up by hallway interludes which also serve as respawn locations so we’re not corpse-running the entire playfield any time we die (I lost count of how many times I died). After about an hour and a half, CC and I only managed to get through maybe half of the entire mission; we were called away to other real-world duties. We weren’t sure if our progress would save, but considering this is the test server, which receives frequent patches that reset all progress, I’m not sure that’s relevant anyway. Missions themselves do not persist between patches, nor do they persist between log out/in, so it might be moot. I hope that progress will remain when the content releases, or else I’m going to be very salty about it and you’re going to hear it.

I do have to say that aside from the very end of our run, when CC suddenly lost all control over his character, we had practically zero issues. The AI was doing better than the non-instanced AI we normally encounter; I only had an enemy walk by me once without acknowledgement, so it’s a low bar to clear, really. The atmosphere is stellar, with a lot of explosions, debris, and a literal fog of war making things difficult to see. I’m generally not an FPS guy, and the first time I tried the mission on my own I barely made it past the lobby so having CC in the assault armor was necessary for us to make it as far as we did. I was also impressed with a few of the set-pieces, including a landed Cutlass Black and a Drake Ironclad that had crashed into the platform, and was only accessible via the open cargo hangar roof that we had to fight through, exiting through the lowered cargo ramp to the next part of the platform.

Now the downer. Even though things ran really well on the test server, CIG isn’t always successful translating what works on the test server over to the public server. When 4.10 releases, this content could be a complete and total dumpster fire. On the other hand, CIG did keep instancing out of 4.9 specifically because it wasn’t ready for release, which has allowed it to receive more development time. Maybe when it releases it’ll play as well in public as it did behind the testing curtain, but no one who supports this project is holding their breath these days that CIG is going to pull off a Hail Mary with any release. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, I always say.