Windrose – in Early Access

The other day when I logged in I saw Potshot was online and in game and on the map I could see he was at a location with a fast travel point.  I made sure I was provisioned and my bags were emptied out then went to join him, landing in a rather sizable NPC settlement.

This all looks… somewhat familiar

Honestly, it was the biggest NPC town I had seen so far.  The factions tend to have rather ramshackle little settlements on islands, some shacks clustered around a few key buildings, enough to keep the faction bounty and provisioner NPCs out of the rain, but not much to write home about.

And then Potshot got on voice with me and started talking about how figuring out how to get that boat balcony built out really got him going on this project, at which point I realized two things:

First, this was not an NPC settlement, he built this whole thing.

Looking across to the Port Authority

Then vendors and such you can hire to be in your own base were wandering around, making the place seem like it was an NPC town.

Look at all the storage in the Port Authority building

Second, that it was modeled on Booty Bay… and modeled in some detail.  We went on a tour where he pointed out how the research he had done had led him to place specific things where they ended up and how some things could be recreated while others… like the tunnel that is the path out of town and into Stranglethorn Vale… had to be bypassed.

So you can see who is just tagging along in this scenario.  He might have close to 10x my time in the game according to Steam.

Also, if you wanted some insight into the base building potential of Windrose, there you go.  But Potshot is always the builder.  I tend to be more of an explorer and my structures trend towards the utilitarian side of things.

Me and my level of base building… and Potshot even put up that building!

But tagging along with a builder can be a pretty big force multiplier.  I mean, sure, it doesn’t help when I get myself killed in another boarding action and he has to wait for me to slowly sail back in my bathtub with a sail in order to finish the fight.

Everybody hold on, I am almost back

Once we’re on land however, he always has an eye towards securing the beachhead, putting down a tent and a fire and maybe a workbench so we can have a nearby respawn point for the inevitable death… though I am not dying nearly as often now.

Building things isn’t magic.  He couldn’t help me that one time I fell down and got wedged between some rocks and a beached ship.  Even the NPCs couldn’t get to me there.  I had to suicide my way out of that one.

Uh, could you throw me a rope

But in following the quest lines we have ended up delving into a number of underground puzzles where you have to carry heavy objects, an action that limits you to a slow walk and keeps you from jumping or climbing.  You just have to plod ahead, and if there is a giant obvious spike trap along the path, well that kind of sucks.

What are the odds it is so old that it no longer works?

That sort of thing sends me looking around for alternate paths or other ways to bypass the obvious killing machine.  Potshot, however, just built us a bridge and we got over it.

A structurally unsound cantilever design, but it worked

Likewise, in another temple where we had several heavy urns that we were supposed to put on pressure pads in order to hold open doors that allowed access to some of the deeper chambers, I managed to fall through a hole… granted, falling through holes seemed to be the comic theme of this particular temple, the design of its top floor having been seemingly influenced by an especially epic game of Don’t Break The Ice… which left me wandering around looking for a way to get the urn back up to the level where the pressure pads seemed to be.

After fiddling with several variations of “maybe I can wedge it against a wall high enough that I can reach it from the top” Potshot came along and built a ramp and, viola, there we were.

Up the ramp with the urn

In the end we didn’t need that urn.  They appeared to have given us an extra one just to cover the eventuality of somebody falling through a hole with one.  At least, we never did find an additional pressure pad and we got credit for finishing the site with all chests having been ransacked.

That helped us run down the main quest chain we were on, but once we had cleared that up, the road pointed back to Booty Bay.  Our final destination, our rendezvous with the next boss, turned out to me on the very same island.

The quest objective inland

We girded ourselves, I upgraded my gear once more, capping it out to the current limit for our workbenches, and we headed out the back gate and on the way to the boss.

There was, of course, some entanglements to deal with.  There were a lot of guys waiting outside the door and set to stop us.

Take that you fiend!

With some luck, some running about, some health potions, and a few comedic bomb placements by the defending grenadiers… as Potshot pointed out they seemed to be equal opportunity, sending both us and the defenders flying… we were able to get the best of the group.

We had collected the keys to open the front gate and there were only a few more mobs waiting for us along the way, which we dispatched handily.  Then we were there before the boss.

The final encounter awaits

Having learned from the earlier boss we both made sure to get inside the room lest we find one of us locked out and unable to help.  Though, the counter to that argument is that this fight… felt a lot easier.

I don’t know if the fight wasn’t tuned to be as hard, if my actually upgrading my gear finally helped, or if we just have gotten better, but it seemed to go pretty smoothly.  There were a few tense moments and I used some healing potions.  However, the fight was relatively panic free and we beat the boss down and finished him off.

Boss Done – Israel Hands has fallen

That was also enough to boost me up to level 9.

Welcome to level 9, spend your points wisely

And that set us up for the next biome, resource tier, and associated upgrades.  We will have to dig into that.  I am reliably informed that the next area is swamp based.  How bad could it be?

Fantasy Critic League – Like Fantasy Football, but for Video Games

With that on the line, we need to stop for a second a review where things left off last time.

Week 27 Scores

While we had three titles set to go it seemed possible that we might see scores start piling up early on.  As it was, we got a release before anything even got reviews.

Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations has released!
[Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]

Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations landed without any reviews and went immediately into third place on the “Most Wanted Reviews” page, behind Deltarune Chapter 5 and Ghost of Yotei: Legends.

Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations

It was starting to feel like we might have another no score result.  The pattern starting to form is that not all DLC seems to get reviews, or enough reviews, which means they do not get a score in the league.

Of course, in writing that I then need to follow on with how Deltarune Chapter 5 started to see some traction this week as well.  Over at Open Critic it now has six reviews, four of which are unscored.  Of the remaining two, only one is from a “top critic,” and you need three top critics for a score to register.  That top critic gave it a 96 out of 100.

There was also a sudden rush of posts over on Blue Sky about it, causing the game to top the trending list for a few hours.

Blue Sky Trending

That was something, topping the corruption of Ken Paxton, the passing of Bonnie Tyler, and the campaign of Count Binface.

Meanwhile, we got a score the next day for another of the week’s titles, EA Sports College Football 27.

• EA Sports College Football 27
  • [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
  • Now has a score of 78.3

A decent, if not great, score to open with on early reviews.

EA Sports College Football 27

And then the real play began as Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced got enough reviews to start getting scores reported.

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced

It opened up pretty strong at nearly 86.

• Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • [Counter Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Now has a score of 85.7

That was starting to look like a poor counter pick, and it got worse as more reviews came in.

• Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • [Counter Picked by Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)]
  • Score has gone UP from 85.7 to 86.8

While that was going up, EA Sports College Football 27 was starting to sag.

• EA Sports College Football 27
  • [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 78.3 to 76.2

Its reviews seemed to be dogged by technical glitches and monetization gripes.  Some sites liked it… or didn’t dig into the game very deeply… while others seemed keen to call it out, with review scores ranging from 60 to 90.

But come Thursday they both released and their scores hit the rankings.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Score has gone UP from 36.3 to 52.1
    • Moved from 7th place to 5th place
  • Green River Gaming (Nimgimli)
    • Moved from 5th place to 6th place
  • Pretty Blue Fox Games (Bhagpuss)
    • Moved from 6th place to 7th place
  • Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)
    • Moved from 11th place to 10th place
  • Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey)
    • Moved from 12th place to 11th place
  • Hidalgo Trading Company (Pallais)
    • Moved from 13th place to 12th place
  • Crash and Burn Games (Shawn)
    • Score has gone DOWN from 22.5 to 6.7
    • Moved from 10th place to 13th place

That was a big boost for Arhanta, who has suffered from a series of picks that ended up being pushed out of 2026, while Shawn paid the price of a risky counter pick.

Then, out of nowhere, weeks after its launch, we had this score update pop.

• Jay and Silent Bob: Chronic Blunt Punch
  • [Picked by Rusty Shackleford (Shilgrod)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 62.1 to 59.4

As I said on Discord, that was an unexpected chronic blunt punch in the nuts as a Slovakian gaming site posted a 4 out of 10 review for the game.  That pushed Shilgrod down, but not enough to drop in the rankings.

Then the reviews came for Cyanbane again.

• EA Sports College Football 27
  • [Picked by Neutical Publishing (Cyanbane)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 76.2 to 75

Not enough to unseat him, but not helping.

Then we had an update for a title nobody picked, but which was near the top of the best scoring list for the season overall.

• Schrödinger’s Call
  • [Unpublished]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 92.3 to 90.6

Weeks since launch and suddenly three more reviews rolled in, enough to knock it down a bit, though it remains the sixth highest score title so far this season.  Dave the Diver – In The Jungle remains at the top of the list.

Then, as I thought we might have seen all the updates for the week Doom finally came rolling in with a strong position.

• Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Now has a score of 91.7

That score pulled it off the most wanted review list and put it at the second highest scoring title this season so far.  Granted, that score was based on five reviews so if somebody came along and hated it that could change real fast.  But it is also from the storied Id Software group which just got slashed with layoffs as part of the XBox bloodletting last week, so I am going to bet nobody is feeling the need to shit all over it.

That put Arhanta in the catbird seat with a vault up into third place.

• Publisher Score Updates
  • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)
    • Score has gone UP from 51.6 to 74.9
    • Moved from 5th place to 3rd place
  • Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar)
    • Moved from 3rd place to 4th place
  • Corr’s Creative Collective (Corr)
    • Moved from 4th place to 5th place

An, sure enough, that couldn’t hold once more reviews came in.

• Doom: The Dark Ages – Revelations
  • [Picked by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)]
  • Score has gone DOWN from 91.7 to 90

But still an extremely solid pick that puts Arhanta in the hunt at the top of the league.

That wrapped up the releases for the week leaving the scoreboard looking like this.

Week 28 Scores

That made Arhanta the big winner of the week, moving up from 7th to 3rd place and getting a boost in the league projection as well.

Then we had some bids in action.

• Bids in TAGN League
  • The Incident at Galley House
    • Won by Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta) with a bid of $2
  • Pokémon Pokopia: Bubbly Basin
    • Won by Play Forever Mwahahaha (Shintar) with a bid of $6
    • Rodent Entertainment (Arhanta)’s bid of $2 did not succeed: Publisher was outbid.
  • Nocturne
    • Won by Frabjous Day Enterprises (Archey) with a bid of $5
    • Dropped game ‘Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls’ conditionally

Arhanta grabbed one new title, The Incident at Galley House, but was outbid by Shintar for Pokrmon Pokopia: Bubbly Basin.  I feel like DLC has been a bit risky this season, but we shall see.  Then Archey picked up Nocturne, dropping Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls on the win.

That leaves the next ten titles looking like this.

Week 29 Coming Up

The bids put another title in play next week, so we will have two releases to watch.  Arhanta could jump to first if Incident at Gallery House scores big.

Related:

• TAGN Fantasy Critic League
• TAGN Discord Server
• Fantasy Critic Site
• Fantasy Critic How to Play
• Fantasy Critic FAQ
• Fantasy Critic Most Desired Reviews
• Open Critic Review Site

Pokemon Go – Since 2016

Launched during the year that the Pokemon franchise was celebrating its 20th year, the mobile title, a rare departure for Nintendo, which prefers to keep such titles exclusively on its own hardware, was an immediate run away success in the summer of 2016.

Pokemon 20

Nintendo had a lot going on for the 20th anniversary.  Pokemon was still on the DS series of devices and there were download events at GameStop and we had a new pair of titles, Pokemon Sun & Moon set to arrive later in the year.

Sun and Moon coming in November 2016

But that summer Pokemon Go stole the show.  It was a phenomena, largely due to it capturing the essence of the core Pokemon RPG series by sending you out into the real world to roam around and catch Pokemon.

Suddenly, we were all Ash Ketchum.  Or we could be, if we had a smart phone.

At that moment in time my wife was the only one in the family that had an iPhone, so my daughter and I got Pokemon Go setup on her phone and then proceeded to drain her battery constantly while trying to play.

In something I am sure was purely a coincidence, both my daughter and I ended up having iPhones before summer was done.

And the game wasn’t just good for smart phone sales.  In the frenzy of that first summer, a business that had a Pokestop close by was seen to have an economic advantage, and some sought to promote that, as this restaurant in Chicago did.

Kick’s Chicken in Naiperville

You get a free fountain drink with purchase AND they will keep tossing lures on the local Pokestop.

It wasn’t just ad hoc things like that either.  Starbucks made a deal with Niantic and, to this day, there is a Pokestop at every Starbucks.  And they all have the Starbucks logo as their photo disc, making them the most boring Pokestops ever.  I’ll literally NOT spin a Starbucks Pokestop because who wants that boring ass gift in their bag?

But that might just be me.  I prefer the gifts from stops that reflect some quirk of local flavor.

The fever of those first few months died down to the point that the haters, sick of hearing about the game, declared it dead and did performative dances on its virtual grave.

However, Pokemon Go never died.  It remains enormously popular to this day, the sort of success that makes it hard for the companies behind it to be serious about other titles.

Niantic built the game on top of the infrastructure for its quirky cult classic title Ingress, but Pokemon Go quickly eclipsed that in popularity, making the original title’s revenue into something close to a rounding error for what Pikachu was bringing in.

Niantic, seeing the riches brought by marrying their play style to a popular franchise attempted to recreate success with Harry Potter: Wizards Unite.  And it felt very much like an asset swap, with Pokestop locations becoming wizard towers or some such in the new title.

This doesn’t even look like my neighborhood

I played it for maybe an hour, making it to level 5… and I think you got that far just doing the intro.  As I summed up on its last day, while Pokemon Go made me feel like a Pokemon trainer from the RPG, nothing HPWU did made me feel like anything from the Harry Potter world… except maybe a muggle, staring at my iPhone… and I would feel like that every day anyway.

Likewise, Nintendo has never produced… or paid others to produce while they collected the licensing fee… anything nearly as popular, successful, or profitable on mobile.  However, Nintendo keeps trying… and then keeps shutting those titles down.

Niantic, or the other hand, simply gave up.  After a couple of bites at the apple after Pokemon Go, they sold the company to the Saudi owned Scopely and took all the data they had been collecting on its players to form a dystopian surveillance focused AI business to help authoritarian governments around the world spy on their subjects.

As always, the people who work at these companies might care about making video games, but the investors would invest in a flesh eating virus project if the promised rate of return was high enough.  The world is owned by the laziest Bond villains imaginable.  As long as the torment vortex looks profitable, they’re in.  Marc Andreesen doesn’t even dress funny or have a cat.  He is whiny Ernst Stavro Blofeld without charm or vision.

Meanwhile, the new owners have been basically trying to milk the game harder than ever because, as always, the line must go up.  That is at the core of everything these days.  Niantic sold because they felt the line could only keep going up with a transition to the AI bubble, and Scopely saw buying a successful title as a way to make their own line go up.

And, against that backdrop, my wife and I still play Pokemon Go daily.  It is something we do together and so we’re both willing to put up with Scopley and its transparent cash grabs because having something like this that we both enjoy doing together is the more important goal.

We have tried, now and then, to find a replacement.  However, nothing quite scratches that itch.  The real world part of it means that we can go for a walk or find Pokestops while we’re on a trip, or go downtown and sit outside at one of our local places and catch Pokemon while we have a nice late breakfast or lunch.

It is also kind of hilarious how my wife, who is not at all a gamer and who would rather watch TikTok than play Stardew Valley on the TV with me, hones right on to every bullshit cash grab that gets injected into the game.  She is practically a sanity check for me on whether I am just being some sort of elitist gamer snob or whether this new thing that annoys me is really an issue.

My wife, for example, detests max battles.  From my point of view max battles were put in the game behind a limited resource as a way to force cash shop purchases.  It was an obvious cash grab.  She doesn’t expend the mental energy on thinking through what is going on as that does not interest her, but she knows at a gut level that this was a bullshit mechanic.

She also has the oldest account between us, as her start date in her profile is July 7, 2016.  She is a day one player.  My own account only started on August 16, 2016.  And we’re likely to keep on going so long as we have some goal in the game.  Currently we’re just climbing the ladder to level 80 and trying to “catch ’em all,” which is enough.  Not that Scopely couldn’t screw things up enough to get us to drop the game, but I count on them having at least some minimal sense of self-preservation.

So it goes.  I’ll wrap up this anniversary minute with the Honest Game Trailers video from back in 2016, which captures some of the comedy of the early days of the game.

Now the game has been taken over by old people and parents with children.  When we go down to the community center for a raid day we can see who is out playing… or who is sitting parked in their cars at strategic points with access to multiple gyms and a bit of shade.

And it isn’t ALL old people.  We watch as groups of people who may not have hit middle age yet walk around the community center so they can get in all the raids with every cycle.  We’re happy to join in when they hit the four near us.

Stars Reach

But since they announced that early access was coming soon the team has been on a tear to make the game… well, a game.  Way back, when Raph was trotting out his design philosophy pillars he said that there had to be a game.  While he has been out on a PR tour touting how being a sandbox is the way out of the content problems of the genre… a bunch of hand waving generalizations that the gaming press fell over itself to praise… there still has to be a structure and some guidance and at least a hint of a raison d’etre for players on their journey.

But I am just a player, so what do I know of these things?  I just want to enjoy myself, something Stars Reach had fallen out of doing for quite a stretch.

However they have been posting about big changes and were planning to have a big stress test on Friday, during which we were invited to “break the servers” or whatever.  I didn’t make it because at 10am Pacific time on Friday I was still at work and dealing with a network outage.

But I got around to logging in on Sunday.  The servers… or server… or whatever… were still up, so in I went, finding a different vibe had been chosen for the game.

Logging in to Stars Reach

On starting a fresh character gone are the “meatbag” intro and its Kingdom of Loathing vibe, replaced by an escape from a doomed planet tale where all the things destroyed us, from war to pollution to AI to leaving the toilet seat up just once too often to tolerate.

We tribes just do that, its our thing I guess

I am not sure what home “worlds” is implying there… just how far had we gotten that we ruined a plural number of worlds?

Anyway, the servitors came to our rescue.

From interstellar space, which means they are from Jupiter at least

They brought us… or some genetic material of us sufficient to make some new versions of us… to some distant space of terraformed planets they call The Garden.  So why that means we have to start off orbiting an unstable planet called Crucible… I don’t know, I’m just repeating what I saw.

Wait, what kind of garden is this?

I can’t tell if they are inviting skepticism around the capabilities and intentions of the Servitors or just can’t stick to a consistent story through half a dozen screens.  Anyway, there you are, they’ve created you and you have a choice of bodies you can become.

The usual suspects

All of those are the same as before, though given the new backstory I feel like we skipped over a bit about how the tribes of humanity ended up quite so diverse.  Was genetic engineering on the list of things that led to our downfall?  Anyway, whoever on the art team decided that humanoid females need to wear black, knee-high boots, I appreciate you.

So you pick that, but are then no longer required to lock in a profession in a UI that failed to explain the trade offs and how stuck you would be if you picked the wrong thing.   Instead, you get to pick attributes!  Sort of!  There is now this screen.

Welcome to stat slider city!

As usual, asking people to commit to something without them fully realizing what impact it will actually have on their game play is always dicey.  I mean, I see that each thing has a little description about what the generic, high level impact will be.  But if I want to kill Ballhogs all day long, should I favor health, stamina, or focus?  How do any of those affect my shooting ability?

(Also, in a lot of games health and stamina are, if not the same thing, often interconnected and not two distinct attributes, so… uh?)

Then there are those buttons down the right side, which are pre-sets for… things.  How do “powerful,” “durable,” and “unyielding” compare… or even mean?  Also, when you choose one they seem to favor certain stats in a visually alarming way.  Do I want to go all in that much?

Give me all the Constitution!

Except, then you look at the numbers and realize that the visual is not representing reality.  That big green swath in the large triangle looks to be covering 90% of the area, but the numbers indicate that the balance is 40% green, and 30% each for the other too.  That is a pretty minor range of flexibility and, given how little a new player is going to know at this point… and you can put me in that bucket… I am hard pressed to be able to justify anything besides balanced because, once again, there is no indication as to what impact this choice will have.

Once done with that you are dropped out into the first world where you have an immediate option to customize your look.  However, whatever character customization might have meant to you on the game’s road map, what it means here is that you can choose from a set of pre-defined looks.

I’ll take whichever Terran Male resolves to nebbish

Fine, at least you have some choice in the matter.  And maybe we’ll get more options later.

It is about here where I started noticing problems with the game trying to tell me things.

It would ask me to open up a window, such as inventory, then would pop up a couple more windows on top of that window, one front and center covering information on the main window, then another off to the lower left that contained details about whatever it was I was being asked to do.  The in the middle blocking other text window says to hit escape to acknowledge, so I would hit escape to get it out of the way once I read it, but escape would inevitably dismiss the informational window at the lower left, which I had not yet read, and which I would apparently never read.

And one bit of information obscuring another seemed to be a recurring theme as I went along.

Discovered 30 XP Anne’s Lace!

Most of it was probably not essential.  Actual game play was not impaired.  But it is one of those things that starts to send a message after a while.  It feels sloppy.

Whatever Gahgrum was saying probably wasn’t important

The UI also likes to flash messages up at the top of the screen that last for half a second and go away, and I cannot tell if they are so brief because they were put up in error or if that is just the way the UI is setup because they aren’t up long enough for me to actually read more that the first word or three.  Something about needing a license and something else about personal belongings.  It was annoying.

That aside, the updated new player experience does take some time to guide you and, if you keep your hands off the keyboard and read everything before you hit the escape key, you’ll figure out what is going on.

First you get sent out to do some exploration.  This is the old “find the location nodes” game, which requires you to equip the pathfinder device, but now you get the map grid up front rather than having to unlock half the nodes on the map to be able to unlock it.  And, on finding the exploration node, the map has some terrain filled in.  This is a considerable improvement from the early iteration where maps were not things for peons and you had to commit to the explorers path to have one.

One grid square explored

The nodes still only guide you to them through an audio sonar-like experience, without an visual indicator on the screen for those with hearing problems or who simply don’t have their headphones on and volume cranked up, but I guess each square is small enough that you can just wander around until you get close enough for the node to become visible.

The first node I ended up seeing was on top of a building in the starting area, but your stating tools are the pathfinder, the harvester, the terrain muncher, the gun, and the grapple, that last being key as it will haul your ass up steep and rugged terrain.  So I was able to get to the top of the building.  It isn’t the grav mesh, but it is much better than nothing at all.

After doing the first task of locating three nodes, you get sent on to another planet where you need to dig out some specific ore.  This is where you start to really appreciate the grapple as the day one pre-alpha testing problem of “people have destroyed the terrain” is absolutely still a thing.  Also, this is an MMORPG so you don’t get your own sanitized little starter area, you have to put up with whatever people did before you got there.

The ground was torn up enough that I started to wonder at how many people they must have had for the server test.  But over at Steam DB the chart for the Stars Reach Playtest, now the only available client since they revoked our access to the other client, showed a peak concurrency of 38 players.

So… yeah… it doesn’t take much to just mess up a planet, does it?  I was using the grapple to get over some of the worse divots in my path and tried to use the tailings from my own excavation to fill in a couple nearby holes, but it feels like shit is just going to get wrecked every time they let us loose on some planetary surface.

Also, as a side note, in running back to turn in my excavated materials I ran under the elevated platform with the exit teleporter just as it went off and got yoinked back to the place from which I had come and had to go teleport back, waiting to load zones both directions.  A minor annoyance, but maybe warn a guy that any proximity to the teleporter can send you places.

Then, when I did turn in my materials, I went back to that pad and back to the starting point, where my final task was to hunt some game and harvest some mushrooms in order to make some kebobs and mushroom skewers.   Both tasks clearly indicated that I needed to get the same kind of meat or mushrooms for them to count, but it seemed like one mushroom was as good as another for the quest itself.

That done, I was sent back to the mayor who then told me the most outrageous lie I had seen in the game so far.

A starship key? There are no starships Margo!

Hey man, I’ve seen the roadmap for the game.  Starships… technically “spaceships” on the roadmap… are way down at the bottom of the list of long term roadmap.

Spaceships are not currently a thing

So I would appreciate the company not pissing on my leg and telling me it is raining.  That is most emphatically NOT a “starship key,” that is a “portal pass.”  The literal use is to access portals.

Anyway, that particular gripe aside, once you go through the portal you in a space station and directed towards the mission consoles where you are prompted to pick a mission.  There are four planets on which to run missions.  You choose one, choose a mission, and you are on your way.

Mission selection

The portals to the planets where you are going to run the missions are outside of the space station and you have to fly to them, which is kind of neat and gets you a vision of space in the game.

Heading out to a portal

On the other hand it does impose a bit of travel time on you and, after having had the teleport pads so close to hand in the tutorial zone you might wonder why they couldn’t be a bit more convenient now.

Through the portal and onto the planet I could tell that the containment unit was buried in a location where others had been doing quests… maybe even the same one… because the landscape was pockmarked and ragged from people using their excavators.  I don’t necessarily want to keep harping on that, but also this feels like a problem that isn’t going to get better with more people.  Every planet will be a ruined moonscape of craters and dumped tailings if there isn’t something done to curb us.  I mean, have you met us?  We destroyed our home worlds and you’re handing us a tool to get right to work doing it again?

The, on finding my containment unit, it was back to the portal and back to deep space.

Deep space through here

Then you are floating back from the portal to the space station.

Back to find the missions area

It might be better if the way into the space station was marked or highlighted.  It is a rather sizable and generic sort of structure, such that I couldn’t tell immediately that I was underneath it in that image above.

Then it was back through the station to turn in the mission and claim my reward.  I now had 144 Klaatus, allowing me to engage in the economy of the game… once it gets running.

So there is now a more coherent character creation to tutorial to game play loop available in Stars Reach.  It adds up to something of a game there now beyond building in the sandbox.  I was somewhat limited in my time so logged off after that, then couldn’t get back into the game later that afternoon.  Or the next day.  I guess the server still has limited hours or was down.  When I can log back in I’ll have to see if there is more beyond that.

Steam Summer Sale 2026

In the midst of industry upheaval, with XBox laying off thousands… again… while charting an almost surreal path for growth, and Sony announcing that they will no longer be supporting physical media even as they yoink digital content from PlayStation users who thought they owned something, and Tim Sweeney declaring that the only way to survive is to link your game to Fortnite, Steam remains solid and predictable, sales coming and going with the literal regularity of the seasons.

When Tim Sweeney pitches a fit online about the dominance of Steam, he never seems to take in any of the lessons of how they got there.  A self-aggrandizing billionaire alternating between claiming he is the selfless hero ready to save the industry and whining like a little bitch the moment he faces an ounce of push back is not the winning strategy he seems to think it is.

Somehow Sony managed to make everybody angry about the turn to digital media on its consoles while Steam has placidly made that the norm on PC.  Seems like the normally competent Sony has kind of fumbled the messaging ball.

And XBox… well, Gabe may have bought himself a mega yacht, but he hasn’t been dumping all of Valve’s money into AI and data centers, or buying game studios for Steam exclusives, or losing money by trying to be Spotify for video games, and then squeezing the Steam storefront to make up for constantly botching every get rich quick scheme.  I mean, give it a few years and some restoration to sanity in the hardware market and the Steam Box might supplant the XBox as a viable family room console… because Valve is okay building up over time.

Don’t get me wrong.  Steam is far from perfect, and there are many legitimate gripes one could lodge, but against the background of dysfunction that plagues this industry Steam is a kind of normalcy to which some of those big players might aspire.

The problem is that the billionaire class wants to get paid NOW dammit.  You cannot build a business over time, you need to create it fully formed, popular, and profitable on day one.

“So, is it going to be all editorializing today?” I can hear you asking from across the network.

No, but I feel like I have to say SOMETHING because the Summer Sale doesn’t have the nice annual awards and sales charts and such.  So you get a bit of that.  Deal.

BUT… I did actually buy a game.  Two games!  Go me… or something.

I did not grab anything from my wishlist however.  I try to keep that pared down, so it is just 16 titles deep, 9 of which are in early early access so I am not going there, 5 of which are to be launched at a later date, and the remaining 2 are not marked down yet.  I like the look of the new LEGO Batman, but not enough to put down $70 for it.  Maybe by the Winter Sale.

My first of my two purchases was R.E.P.O., and interesting looking title I picked up for $6.49 because Liore and the cats crew are having a group game time featuring it and I was invited.

R.E.P.O. on Steam

So, if nothing else, I am almost guaranteed to at least PLAY this purchase.

Then the other title I grabbed was Outworld Station.

Outworld Station

This came up through my recommendations queue… so I guess that is a positive feedback loop for Valve… which $16.14.  I picked this up because, somewhere within me there is the need to have something like a “Valheim in space” and, unlike the other options on my wishlist, this title had successfully left early access and had “Very Positive” reviews.

Granted, not a ton of reviews, but it was enough to sway me in a moment of weakness later in the evening, likely proving once again that video game purchase decisions made after 8pm are likely a mistake.

Will this be any different from Astro Colony, Empyrion: Galactic Survival, Space Engineers, or probably a few other titles already in my library, we shall see… if I get around to playing it.

Oh, hey, there is a Space Engineers 2 now.  Might put that on my wishlist to watch until it gets out of early access.

Anyway, that leaves my Steam DB calculator total looking like this.

230 games owned, 148 actually played

Just to tally that up in text, since not everything fit nicely on that image:

• Total games: 230
• Total played: 148 (64%)
• Hours on record: 3,466h
• Average playtime: 23.4h
• Lowest prices: $1,121
• Today’s prices: $1,610
• Average price: $8.04
• Average price per hour: $0.34

Given that I haven’t even played a third of the games in my library… though I will again bring up that I bought Peggle as part of an “All the PopCap games!” package of something like 20 titles and only ever played Peggle… also, remember Peggle back before EA bought PopCap and destroyed them like they destroy everything… that seems like a reasonable price per hour.

We shall see what else the summer bring.