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:
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!