Stars Reach is continuing to push onward with playtesting that almost no one is in, but at least we get to hear about it after, eh? MMO players will perk up a bit as no less than Dave Georgeson (yes, if you missed that bit, Playable Worlds picked up the Landmark/EverQuest Next boss as its game director) pens the game’s latest dev blog.
Georgeson says the studio deployed six new tools for this most recent leg of the test: extractors, agitators, terraformers, chronophasers, pavers, and block tools, each with special functions for digging, smooshing, wrecking, and even melting. Then the team “turned 100 players loose on a 1k x 1k test map for two hours” to see what they’d do.
“It was spectacular,” Georgeson says. “As expected, the Agitator was enormously popular right away. It was no surprise that melting and freezing things is fun stuff.” Players also apparently had Fun With Lava, froze a lake to skate on, then dug under a lake so deep that it interacted with the lava mantle and became a murderous geyser. Actually, kind of a lot of these vignettes end in mass death for the folks who dug too greedily and too deep.
“A small group immediately began working to undermine an entire hill, just to see it eventually cave in on itself… which ended up killing everyone in the immediate area,” Georgeson writes. Apparently one of the tools was instant karma.
Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob got a special shoutout in the blog post; he’s one of the lucky dogs to get in to the test, so you can check out his report yourself!