Stars Reach Gets a New Trailer

There have been a couple of play tests this week in Stars Reach, though they have been at times when I haven’t been available, so I have not been able to peek in.  Still, there are more coming.  I know they have let in another range of testers, including Bhagpuss, and we’ve been divided up into blue and green teams.  It looks like the green team got a play test Friday night for a couple of hours.

So far it has all been short, controlled tests, which is understandable.  You build, test, learn, adapt, then test again.  I am impatient for longer tests, events that will range over a weekend or longer that will feel less rushed.  Time limits always make me feel like I need to focus and accomplish something specific and ignore the general wandering about I often do.

But there has also been some new information coming out to promote the game.

There was a news piece on the Stars Reach site promoting a video featuring Raph explaining how the game’s cloud architecture is structures and some of the technologies being used that I found pretty interesting.

I shared this with one of the devs on my team who is also a gamer in part because the client end technologies mentioned in the video are the same things we use to develop our apps.  We chatted about it for a bit, though he had been warned in college about the vagaries of the video game industry.

There was also a video put out with Raph describing the goals and technologies of the game and their vision for it.

Again, some interesting stuff in that, though I will say that whoever produced the video could have dialed down the music track by about half and it would have made it easier to follow what Raph was on about.

Finally, the team also put out a new trailer to promote the game and its vision to a wider audience.

This was made with in-game footage, some of which I recognize from earlier tests.  There is a segment when several players are freezing molten rock to be able to walk out on it… to collect a survey point… that was very familiar.  I was in that play test.  That may not have been the group I was working with, but I was doing that very thing in one of the past tests.

The new trailer also gives a sense of how many paths forward the team is trying to wrangle into the game in the form of professions.

What they all add up to remains to be seen as we’ve really only be able to play with the ranger profession so far.

They do keep emphasizing their desire for people to wishlist the game on Steam.  That is good feedback for the team about how far their message is going, but might also be a metric for whoever is behind their funding is using to gauge their investment.  If you can’t get… I don’t know… 10,000 people to wishlist your upcoming title on the most popular PC gaming distribution platform, are you worth the dough?

Finally, those of us let into the pre-Alpha testing were given an opportunity to buy a bit of merch to display our support.  The choice was a hoodie or a T-shirt, and I opted for the T-shirt, which arrived yesterday.  The back is adorned by a large graphic.

And around on the front breast of the shirt there is a bit of a status claim.

So things roll on with Stars Reach.  We’ll have to wait and see how the testing ramps up during the holiday season.