Hello, Wayfarers!
It has been an eventful week at Playable Worlds, with the launch of Stars Reach into Early Access. This has been a long journey for us, but it is also just the beginning!
As those of you who have already jumped in know, we’re ironing out a number of performance issues, repairing some unexpected behavior, and working toward stabilization so we can begin rolling out additional updates.
Those of you who have been following the game for a while might be wondering what improvements and updates were implemented between the playtest and the Early Access launch. You can find an exhaustive list of everything we added and changed at this link: Early Access Update 8.4.0. Some highlights include a whole new Haven map with new tutorial quests, the introduction of the Corruption (an alien hive mind bent on absorbing all life in the galaxy), alien puzzle boxes found in loot, and of course a huge amount of QoL improvements and bugfixes.
Playable Worlds CEO and Stars Reach game director Raph Koster wanted to share some thoughts about the Early Access launch, some of the fixes that have already gone out, news about the upcoming hotfix, and beyond.
Hello all! First, I want to thank you once more for believing in Playable Worlds and Stars Reach. Our Early Access launch this week brought with it some things we anticipated and some items that we couldn't have known until reaching a critical mass of players in-game. We aren't where we want to be yet in terms of server stability and general game performance… and it doesn't really matter whether the issues were known or not – we need to fix them, so that's what we are doing! We have already released two updates to address immediate problems. On the first day we fixed issues with messed up avatars and released a few performance improvements such as tweaking the size of Haven instances. We also solved an issue that was causing players to be stuck on loading screens. On the second day, we put out another update that included yet more performance optimizations, helped prevent players appearing under terrain on loading, and solved issues with players stranded on the far side of collapsed wormholes. We're currently working on a third update that we hope to get out before the weekend, this one focused more on gameplay blockers. It will fix a whole bunch of data issues in crafting progression, solve missing collections and maps on Haven, deal with non-functional repair kits, and several other things. It hasn't all been bugfixes, either. We had a lot of requests for GeForce Now support, and I'm happy to say that it's available now! There is more to come. We're still working on a fix for the rubberbanding issue that happens the longer a server is up. We have a workaround for now, but the larger fix will take some testing. We also have an assortment of additional changes and fixes coming ranging from skins tones to adjusting movement speeds. We are keeping a close eye on discussions regarding how quickly you should get homesteads, and of course, the big topic of recipe management. We're actively discussing how to alter the systems to be both fun and work well with our player-driven economy. For full details on what we have in testing and in development, please check out the roadmap at starsreach.com/roadmap. We'll be sure to keep you updated on all of our regular channels. These include our Discord server, Steam Discussions, and the Stars Reach subreddit. Additionally, should you encounter any bugs, please report them using our support ticketing system. From all of us here at Playable Worlds, thank you. We're so excited to be out in Early Access. The work continues, and we're moving at full speed to bring you the Stars Reach experience you've been waiting for. ~Raph
Things we have already done
We did a day one patch to address the issues with stick bugs and headless avatars.
We also solved an issue causing players to get stuck indefinitely in queues -- still more to do to improve loading speed, and we're working on it.
On the second day, we put out an update to rescue folks who got trapped on wild wormhole planets.
We also pushed an update with a handful of optimizations that reduce CPU load. We're working on more and will roll them out as they are ready.
By popular request, we are testing out GeForceNow; the game should be listed on GFN now
Things we are currently testing to roll out by the weekend:
The standout items:
Fixing a whole bunch of issues in the crafting progression
Removing govbots from wild wormholes (and fixing up folks who declared citizenship there)
Fixing incomplete collections, missions, and quest lines on Haven caused by instancing
Fixing broken repair kits
Things that we are still working on to roll out ASAP:
We've got an issue that gets worse the longer servers are up, causing stuttering -- we're actively working a fix.
A speed up to zone loading that also lowers memory usage should improve performance
Renaming missions: "easy/moderate/challenging" will be "near/mid/far"
To make space easier to navigate, we are
making all space wormholes be placed in cardinal directions around the sides of the space area
giving them the plain wormhole appearance
increasing the hit area on them for triggering the travel pop-up
Adjusting the movement speeds to solve the issue of overly slow movement through grass and sprint feeling too slow
Skin tones! Starting with Terrans first and then coming to others
Slightly longer term:
Working on ways for friends to find each other faster across Haven instances and across the space map
A grouping system
Digging into the recipes issue: they're piling up, how do you manage them, etc
Solving issues with folks getting to building/homesteads faster