Stars Reach and Play Testing Combat, Exploration, and Ranger Skills

Before the big move op in EVE Online kicked off on Saturday Playable Worlds held a two hour play test to let us try out a few new things.  I jumped into the play test at 10:00 Pacific/17:00 UTC, then turned right around at 12:00 Pacific/19:00 UTC to get into the move op.  As such I missed the post test fireside with Carneros… though, just to blur the lines, during the week leading up to Saturday’s move op, I saw him as he was driving a titan that was bridging subcaps toward our destiny at 49-U6U.

Enough of that.

First up, an overall impression of the play test: There was too much going on.

Of course I say this because I used to run the testing team at past companies and it is practically religion to change just one freaking variable at a time, because if you change two and behavior changes you then have to go back and figure out which change had an impact or if it was a combo of the two.

This is harder to control for when you only have user play tests every other week and you make a bunch of changes and updates in between.  So there was reported to be a lot of work done to make things like the AMD problems better… but then also the introduction of combat and other skills.  So when everybody got a client crash that coincided with somebody making a kebab on the cooking station it becomes a complex task to figure out if it was the new stuff, the fixes to the old stuff, or just something that was lurking behind another crash.

Also, we had a lot of client crashes.  I would guess I was hit about 20 times over two hours.  This is fine, that is what we were there to test.

And the crash causes did seem to get tracked down to a source, which is excellent.  But it does tend to break your focus when you’re running after a goal and the client keeps going down.  At least I didn’t have the character corruption issue a few people had, which required them to start fresh.

All that and I haven’t even gotten to what I meant by “too much.”  There was combat and exploration essentially on the menu. Two things.  That doesn’t seem like that much, right?

You even might think, “Oh, cool, combat!  That must have been great!” and you would be wrong.  Combat was fine.  But combat is combat, that mode is essentially first person shooter mode and you had your first couple of weapons.

We started out with the OmniBlaster equipped and ready to go.

We also had the Gravity Gun in our inventory, which we had to equip to try out.

And if this were a combat focused play test I probably would have spent time learning both weapons.

But then they gave us the exploration stuff to work with and, if voice chat was any indication, we all hared off after that because, on top of everything else, there was something for completionists to chase… and we all chased it with vigor.

I know some people were out there playing with combat.  They had the drops to make kebabs and such, which meant they were killing something.  But for me, I shot things only when they were in the way of the exploration tasks.

The main problem was that mobs were spawning in sizable packs.  Raph at one point commented about how we were rather recklessly running around the landscape and straight into mobs.  But it was because many of us were trying to get the exploration task done and the packs of mobs were in the way of our current obsession.

If only I had remembered the gravity gun I could had dispersed them and kept on running.  I ran a lot, used the jet pack flying to get past groups, and at one point ended up hiding up in a tree by accident.

I also used the fortress shield we were given to try and get past mobs.

That saved me a few times… from mobs.  Not good for AOE damage, as we’ll get to.

Basically, it was PvE combat, which even on a good day tends to be a solved problem.  And combat is, according to the design pillars, an opt-in secondary item and not part of the core game play loop.  Go on, look that up here, I quoted it specifically.  We’re about things beyond combat, things that fulfill us, that drive us… and arbitrary numbers that we can achieve.

Alright, I have mentioned exploration a few times, maybe I should elaborate on that.

On that front we were given the Ranger tool.

That let you heat and cool things, like the agitator tool of past tests.  We all set fire to a few trees here and there, though despite being warned that fire spreads, we did not burn down the whole map the way that sort of thing happens in Minecraft.

Cooling things down would put out fires as well as freeze water and all of that.  I tried it just to be sure.

Interesting, and useful as I’ll get to later, but not exactly new.

The ranger tool could also deploy camps, which were like the starting point area in that it was a spot that would heal you up.  You could also dance to restore the lost stamina or hit points of others.

The was also a revive point if set correctly, rather than going back to the spawn, and had some crafting stations.

Among the things your could do there was upgrade your OmniBlaster.

I did almost zero with the crafting.  I opened the UI to look at it, but I wasn’t harvesting mob drops or anything else, so I had nothing to craft with.  I was out chasing things with the survey tool.

When equipped, the survey tool reveals survey points in the world which you then run up to and record.  The plan, as currently explained, is for this to be the basic core of exploring new planets.  The survey points are spread over an area of the planet and recording them is charting the land that will enable the player to build up a map that can then be sold to other players who just want to see the place.

There was some further talk about how this will develop.  Maps will have a date on them and will not auto-update.  If the land is transformed, another survey will need to be done to record the update landscape.  There will also be aspects of this that will branch out into recording resource locations and other possible points of interest that will be advancements in the exploration path.

The survey points pulse to make them visible… especially so at night… and you just have to run up to them and tag them with the survey tool to record them, at which point they turn green and you can move on.

Recording survey points unlocked points in the Ranger skill tree to enable new skills.

I forgot about the combat unlocks. I never played with the drone weapon and, while I eventually unlocked the Gran Gun and equipped it, I never did anything with that either.)

Each survey point gave you ten points… I believe we got waypoints and surveying for free as an opening… which could then be used to enable or skill up things.  I went for placing a camp first, as it was said that people using your camp would earn you skill points… so that busy camp pictured above that I set strategically next to the lava, that earned me most of my points.  It certainly allowed me to unlock the survey map well before I would have been able to do so otherwise.

Ah, the survey map.  It was somewhat primitive in this iteration.

That is basically an 8×8 grid and each square with a question mark in it has a survey point left to be discovered, and you are the X on the map.  Easy peasy, right?

Well, maybe.

First of all, that is your only map.  You don’t get to overlay that on any terrain or anything.  You just get squares.  Yes, it is a work in progress and does not represent a finished product.  And some map is better than no map.

Also, there is, as yet, no compass in the game.  So my X tells me where I am, but how do I move north by northeast to get to the survey node to the upper right on the map?  Well, you can put down a way point and let that be your relative position indicator, though if you’re like me you can still managed to get lost or turned around and you move around terrain.

Then there was simply finding the survey points.  There was one that was inside of a tree that you could only see/collect from certain angles.  There were others that were in ravines or up on a hillside where you needed to be standing… not climbing… in order to collect it.

Anyway, if you cannot see where this is going, let me spell it out for you: Those of us with completionist itch felt that we absolutely had to unlock ALL 64 survey points, that nothing else was more important in the world, and we bent ourselves to that task almost exclusively for most of the two hour duration of the test.

As noted, this was perhaps not helped by the regular client crashes, though those seemed to ebb and flow with your proximity to other players.

I mean, the game announced to everybody online when you made it, how could we not make this a top priority.  Yes, I did stop and help when the call went out to shoot all the things to see if we could cause another crash.  Once that was nailed down the devs turned off respawns and despawned all the mobs so we could carry on towards our collective goal.

Getting there did require some cooperation.  Two of the survey points were in the lava fields, one close by that camp I built.  That group in the camp uses the ranger tool to chill the lava and heated rock in order to create a path to it.

That was the one that was visible in the lava.  I got that one mid way through the test, then went off trying to navigate with the map and my waypoint to try and find the other locations.  But, as I narrowed it down to the last couple, it became clear that there was one out in the lava still.

It was low and very hard to see.  Somebody said you could fly over it and collect it, if you were good and quick.  Being bad and slow, that didn’t seem like an option.  Once more there was a group effort put forth for those of us left unfulfilled to get that lava survey point.

We got out there with the ranger tool and chilled the lava and rocks until we could walk over and collect that survey point.

Even then it was tough to see, as it was low in the lava.

But I got it and was rewarded with the announcement of my completion.

On completion you even got a little thing in your inventory to briefly mark your win.

Also in the winning column, I built up enough points to unlock all the possible skills.  More completion!

Overall, a fun test run.  I hope the devs found the source of the client crash.  As I said above, it felt like there was too much to do because we were handed a task that some of us were absolutely incapable of putting down until it was done.  Combat? Crafting? None of that until I get all my survey points thank you very much!

I suppose this is an indicator of what part of the game might interest me.

Anyway, all of that is just my recollection of the test and what grabbed me and where it took me.  There are a couple of news items over at the Stars Reach site that cover things like the plans for skill and the goals for this play test if you want a more complete view of things.

As always, this is a very early look into the game and its potential.  What you see here and my goofy takes may have little relevance when the project gets closer to fruition.

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