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