When Playable Worlds first fully revealed Stars Reach to the public earlier this summer, the one sticking point with a certain segment of MMO gamers was the game’s cartoony visuals. Studio boss Raph Koster assured would-be players that the graphics weren’t finished yet and hadn’t yet ascended to their final form, but it’s still a complaint that’s come up in many threads since.
Well, Koster is back now with his weekly blog on the in-development sandbox MMORPG, and it’s all about those visuals and the team’s ongoing facelift for the game.
“Visual improvements were planned for later in the schedule, starting with this month’s pre-alpha testing,” Koster says. “This gave us a challenge: Our development plan calls for early input from player-testers. Waiting for near-final visuals would have meant player input coming too late in the process to help us scale the servers and improve the game. So we cut a trailer with the imagery we had available, giving players a general sense of what the game was. We did receive some criticism on the visuals of the trailer. Well, we have made great progress and some of that is visible now.”
Specifically, Playable Worlds has tackled the graphics of the world: “We’ve improved the lighting, increased detail levels, added functionality to and enhanced the simulation, and much more.” In the accompanying footage, the foliage and groundcover in particular looks more detailed and more realistic, though it’s still a fairly colorful and stylized game. The before-and-after shots illustrate the point, literally.
However, Koster is blunt that the characters themselves are still lacking and haven’t been addressed yet – so don’t expect that to have changed much since the first reveal.
“[C]haracter customization is well along but not yet visible, and work continues on that,” he says. Have a look yourself:
