Stars Reach playtesting is happening, and the Playable Worlds team is letting us into the experience of the latest round of play testing, and what happened when they let players into their simulation and have access to a number of flexible tools.
A lot of the first playtest focused on movement, where they were letting players run around, grapple, climb, and jump. This next round of testing asked what happens when you give players tools and equipment in this type of simulated world.
“On the design side, we wanted to see how long it takes for a world to look less like a tropical landscape and more like swiss cheese. And on the technical side, how well would the simulation keep up with two hours of constant mayhem all across the map?”
The latest devblog gives us a before and after view, and it didn't take long for playtesters to get in there and start digging. While the terrain that everyone set out in did have caves and dips in the terrain, players started using tools to dig and mine quickly. Some were just holes, but others were tunnels, caves, and even mining resources like veins of silver, sapphire, and marble. Part of the feedback included players that used their mining tool “just to make sure it still works”.
In other words, give people tools and they will use them. But mining wasn't the only thing people did. Some of them turned parts of cliffs into molten stone. Others created icy paths across rivers that made for convenient travel before they melted back into the water. Some of the results in the world were a little more complex. A player that dug a pond accidentally dug into the seabed and created a whirlpool.
The devs explain that not only were people digging or mining, some of them were using terraforming tools to create things in the world, including a marble giant, other statues, and more.
Playable Worlds learned a few things of how players might use tools in this type of virtual world, and from the technical side, tool use stressed the server infrastructure more than expected, and should also help future tests.
