When writing up a post about last week’s Stars Reach dev blog on character movement, I kept thinking one thing: This article needs a video so badly! Describing character movement just can’t hold a candle to showing it. Apparently, Playable Worlds heard my unspoken plea and has uploaded not just a Raph Koster-narrated video but multiple clips of players running, grappling, and screwing around with gravity during the August playtest.
Koster begins with some graybox footage of obstacle courses from the earliest builds from 2021, and you really need to appreciate game design to enjoy that part. The real terrain clips – albeit from last year – begin around the 8-minute mark. Flight in particular has apparently gone through a big transformation to being jetpack-driven, while the grappling hook is fairly new to the build as of this year because it’s just plain fun.
“We had [the grappling hook] working as first as a tool that you could equip,” Koster says. “We only allow you to equip a few tools, and grappling turned out to be so fun that we ended up deciding not to make it a tool and instead make it a default capability for everybody. I won’t lie; it was scope creep, and it has taken a lot of work to get this to work well[.]”
We’re also getting a little peek into swimming and running through grasslands too, in addition to the free vs. fixed reticle (both are in the game). Ultimately, Koster reiterates last week’s mantra: that movement has to feel good or nothing else in the game matters, which is why the team has spent years working out the kinks.
