By Dave Georgeson

We strongly believe there are three core elements at the heart of a great, massively social MMORPG. Fun and compelling moment-to-moment gameplay, a thriving global economy you’re excited to participate in, and satisfying character advancement. These are all married together and intertwined like ivy branches. Each inseparable from the others, and all operating in mutual support. This is an incredibly hard feat to accomplish, and it’s worth every ounce of the herculean effort required to make it happen.

Together, they’re too big of a subject to tackle in one article, so today we’re going to separate out character advancement and talk about how that works in Stars Reach.

Gain Experience by Being Useful

One of Stars Reach’s core principles is that you learn by doing…but not by just blindly repeating an action over and over again. Instead, you need to do something that’s useful to yourself or others, or incurs risk.

How does that translate into gameplay? Here are a few examples:

  • Let’s say you’re learning to be a Ranger, and you learn the skill to set up temporary camps in the wilderness. Do you get XP for setting up a camp that just sits there idle? No, you don’t. But you do earn XP when that camp is used by you or other players to rest or re-equip.
  • Or maybe you’re becoming a Weaponsmith and you start making weapons. Do you get XP from making weapons? No, but you do get XP when those weapons are actually used by you or other players. The more the weapon is used, the more XP you earn.

The same is true for entertainment (you get XP when your dancing benefits others), leadership (you get XP while actively providing benefits to squad members), xenobiology (you get XP when people use the libraries of information you create) and you gain XP with medical skills when you heal or restore other players.

Of course, some trees are more straightforward. When you train with a weapon, you get XP when you cause damage with it (which incurs risk for your character). If you learn Combat Engineering skills, you get XP when your traps or turrets are effective. 

You can see the pattern here. This is about your relationship to a universe where danger exists, and how your actions impact others both directly and indirectly, all of which are critical elements in our living, thriving sandbox of a game.

Skill Trees and Tools

We have a lot of skill trees in Stars Reach and every skill tree has a tool associated with it. To gain XP in a specific skill tree, you need to use the tool associated with it.

Want to be a better miner? Use the extractor. A better leader? Use the rally banner. Get better with the assault rifle? Then use the rifle in combat.

It’s a simple concept. Of course, you can’t equip everything at once, so you’ll have to pick which trees you’re advancing at the moment by choosing the appropriate tools. And various tools have different quality levels which affect their various abilities, which again plays into economy and crafting, but the basic idea of “use tool, get XP with that tool” is an easy one to understand.

Nearly everything you can do in the game is associated with skill trees (you can do fundamental things like run and jump without unlocking skill nodes, of course), so your loadout choices will influence what your character becomes capable of doing as you play.

Can I Learn Everything?

Yes, and no. 

Yes, you can learn every skill in the game, but no, they cannot be active all at once. There is a maximum number of skills you can keep “in practice” for your character at one time. If you want to continue to learn more skills thereafter, you’ll need to first let some of your previously-learned skills atrophy and fall “out of practice.”

Atrophying a skill doesn’t mean you lose it. You’re just out of practice and can’t use the capabilities at the moment. You do retain benefits from having worked so hard the first time: If you want to dust the atrophied skills off and relearn them, it’s much easier and is really just a matter of time. You don’t need to learn the skill again from scratch.

What Do I Learn in a Skill Tree?

As you unlock nodes in a skill tree, you’ll gain bonuses to your existing abilities and unlock root nodes to other trees that branch off from the one you’re climbing. And you’ll also unlock Specials.

Specials are new abilities that you use with the tool for that skill tree. Some examples:

  • If you’re pursuing the Forestry skill tree, you might learn to force trees to grow so you can replant and replenish more quickly, or automatically de-limb a tree when you cut it, or learn to cure diseases in the trees while they’re growing.
  • If you’re learning Leadership, you can inspire your team by boosting various character stats, create formations for them to use for bonuses, or activate crowd control abilities against foes.
  • If you’re learning to use the Laserwhip (a weapon), you might learn to Lasso an opponent, or Laserstrike at range, or lash out and entangle a foe like a Bola.

And so on! However, there are two caveats with this:

  • You can unlock many Specials on a skill tree, but you can only enable two of them at a time, and;
  • The Specials you have enabled are crafted into the tool that you’re using. So when you want to use different Specials, you’ll need to buy or craft a different version of your tool and use that one instead.

As you can see all of this obviously intertwines with moment-to-moment gameplay as well as the economy. Every item you use in the game was made by a player, so you’ll either need to learn crafting skills of your own, or you’ll need to make friends with someone that has those skills. How that all works together is a much larger discussion for another day.

So Where are We Now?

As with most (if not all!) fundamental gameplay systems in an MMO, we first have to build the supporting infrastructure, which is part of what we were up to when we were running quietly before announcing the game publicly. 

Then we build the systems and interfaces that the gameplay teams will use to fill out the code and data that becomes the trees and abilities.  Finally, the player-facing trees and abilities themselves get created and you’re able to see and test them. 

We’re on that last step right now, and you’ll be able to see the first couple skill trees very soon. Our next set of external tests will let players explore the first couple of simple skill trees, and then we’ll continuously roll out new ones thereafter until we get all the intended functionality for launch into the game.

We’re still pre-Alpha, so we have a good chunk of development still to do, and we’d love to hear your feedback on these core concepts! Join us in our Discord channel so we can discuss!

If you have a friend or guildmate who would enjoy this testing, please give them this link to sign up: https://signup.starsreach.com/email-cohort.