Whether or not – and it’s probably not – you’re in Stars Reach’s upcoming playtest, this week’s blog post will be of interest to you, and that’s because what Raph Koster’s Playable Worlds is testing this round isn’t just scalability and testing and terrain tinkery. It’s skills. Or at least one of the skills.
Readers will recall that like OG Star Wars Galaxies, Stars Reach’s character progression will revolve around a sprawling skill tree from which players can choose professions and abilities.
“Stars Reach does not have classes,” Koster explains. “Instead, you can start learning any given skill tree, which we call a profession. Sometimes, one profession unlocks another. This means changing our mindset a little bit when we design special abilities. As developers, we might have a natural inclination to say ‘learning knives plays well with stealth abilities, so I’m going to put some stealth powers in the knives skill tree.’ In a system like ours, it’s better to think of stealth as a profession in its own right, that might pair up with knives, but also might pair up with mining, botany, or xenobiology because players want to avoid combat while hunting for rare samples.”
It really does look a lot like the vanilla SWG system; for the ranger, the tree starts with the base ranger profession, with four branching specialized professions (camping, concealment, orienteering, and cartography), and then an advanced profession that builds on the others (wilderness survival). But of course, another layer in and you’re looking at the skills each profession unlocks. For example, the camping line contains skills governing the size, duration, and features of the camp, while the concealment line covers hiding, sneaking, scent-masking, and detecting other hidden people.
“We’ve currently settled on around three upgrade tiers as a number that felt good in terms of each new box feeling really consequential,” Koster says. “These trees can also crosslink into other professions. And dotted ones are ones that we aren’t quite ready to talk about or promise yet.” Oh yeah, and it all culminates with the “master ranger” capstone, just as it did in SWG. (I even had a master ranger at one point over there thanks to holocrons!)
But don’t get too excited yet; this weekend’s test doesn’t have the entire tree, just a few of the skills: camping and some surveying, plus some combat, though not remotely the final form of the mode.
“All in all, this should feel like ‘a game’ more than previous tests. You have a clear goal: map the world,” Koster concludes. “Get used to dying, because the creatures in this test are aggressive and fairly tough.”
