Stars Reach will welcome its first round of new playtesters this weekend. Raph Koster has a new devblog that looks to answer the question - Who is Stars Reach for?
The team spent time determining what their game is about, and this included consideration of an audience. Now we dive into how the 'who' shaped the game Playable Worlds is developing.
Stars Reach is a sandbox, and building a sandbox also opens up additional opportunities. This means beyond a PvE gear treadmill and a grind up to endgame raiding common in themeparks. This progression path is what players return for and why they stay in those games. If that's fun for you, that's great, but they want to emphasize horizontal progression.
“In many ways, then,” he says, “SR is more about play than it is about advancement”.
Koster reveals several of the ideas the team came up with as to what play might look like. These include exploration, observation, Farming and cross breeding your crops to maybe discover something new, Xenobiologist, pilot, miners, and yes, an adventurer and even someone who likes to pursue advancement.
An example given is the translator, and a subsequent minigame. Maybe you find some aliens communicating in a language using glyphs. you decide to crack the code and if you do, you get something you can use for economic value. you can create a translator module to sell to others so they don't have to do all the work of figuring out the glyphs.
Horizontal progression is at the core of Stars Reach, along with interdependence. The team researched player motivations across different groups. Completion– checking off task lists, collecting sets, and collections--was popular. Destruction skews younger and male. Fantasy, driven by immersion, also has universal appeal. The five motivations that are guiding their development are: community, fantasy, completion, discovery, and design. Story, challenge, and power come along in a way that supports horizontal progression and those other motivating factors.
Koster also shares that they did a number of rounds of market research to see just what audience might Stars Reach appeal to, and they got a lot of positive feedback, including that these details they shared appeal to a wide range of people.
They're still a deep in development, but now we've arrived at the first test this weekend. “We expect to just crash the client over and over,” Which just might prove true but it is a first step.
