It’s been a little while since I've jumped into a play test of a game. I noticed Stellar Trader was having a test going on. I am looking for a space trading game to jump into at some point. Seems like this game can have a lot going on, but what we could see was on the smaller side of the play test.
There is a lot going on in the character creation screen, with everything on a single page. On the left, you can make a couple of changes to your character, from hair to clothing. The more important stuff is going on in the right.
There are three rather key things going on. First, you have the faction you are joining. Yourself too. This seems to affect your overall tax rate. There also seems to be some kind of bonus each faction offers from lower taxes once your reputation gets high enough to be able to get zero-interest loans.
Next up, you have your Zadik sign. This has an effect on your starting attributes. Along with your personality traits that could be good or bad. There are a lot of stat points, and not many I myself recognized right away. So, it’s worth hovering over each one and checking it out.
Finally, you have 10 points to spend as well. With it being early game and just testing, I went with things that would reduce my taxes or increase my trading profit. Any stats that increase anything to do with station ownership clearly won’t be of any use here.
That last bit is also what really caught my eye. Have your own space station. It, however, seems to go far beyond that. Not much further, you get to pick your own system. The rest of that system and owning your own station is, however, not in the test. It seems they have sunk their hooks in me with that and are going to leave me to dangle like a fish.
The game starts you off by showing some of the usual basics, including how to warp to another station. You then get a couple of missions that are your next idea of what to do. I, however, did not have any of that!
With a very limited amount of starting cash, I put it all down on an item that had high demand at quite a decent distance away. My thinking was that the further the two systems are away, the better the payout has to be. Right? Well, we are getting ahead of ourselves, assuming we are arriving there alive.
It was at least nice that I could hover over different stations around the limited starting map and get to see their abundant and scarce item lists. This made it rather easy, at least to find trades. This is also what got me into some trouble.
I then went out on a very long warp. At least that is what I was hoping. What I did not know was just how often my pilot would have to stop due to space stress and decompress. After it happened over a dozen times on a single trip, I was already kind of over it.
Now, to be fair, your ship can hold two crew members in total. I should have built up some money and a reputation. Then he hired someone and attempted the very long trip. While they would still need to take lots of breaks. It would at least have been less as one would switch out for the other till they both needed the ship to stop for a break.
There are also a lot of random events that can happen. Thankfully, I was on such a long route that I got to experience perhaps most of them all in a short amount of time. From asteroids, EM pulses, to space pirates.
After my third or fourth pirate raid on me, who only had like 3k value of goods in my cargo hold. I kind of felt bad for the pirates. They were so desperate, and I've killed like 20 of them now.
If it was not dealing with the pirates or having to stop to decompress the crew. My ship was breaking down. Yes, this was such a long trip I was taking it broke down three times. Every single time while trying to repair my systems, I was then attacked by pirates.
At this point, it was the voyage of the dammed. I just kept thinking of all the phat profit I was going to make from this one deal. The trip back was going to suck, but at least I'd be rich. My mood could only be dampened by two things. Running out of supplies and death.
The closer and closer I got to my target station, the lower my supplies got. I did the math, and while it was going to be tight, we at least had enough fuel and food to make it. So that ended up not being the issue.
What ended up being the issue was just my ship blowing up. The ship's core got damaged in a space storm. Before I could even stop to repair the ship, I got this message. My ship then went boom.
The good news is I got a new starting ship from the faction I joined. The bad news is they were not willing to give me any more money. I looked through what I could buy and discovered, to my shock, I had enough to buy a single unit of something. I’d, however, spend more worth of fuel and food getting it to another station to sell. I’d also have to do that trade like 30 times to get back on my feet. So, I did the unthinkable: I sold some of the starting food and fuel I was given.
From there, I built myself an empire. Till I got kind of bored. Made it to have 50k money. At that, I was buying more than I could sell at a single station per item. So next, I had a new issue, an overflowing cargo hold of stuff I could not offload.
As far as other parts of the game. You can upgrade to have better engines, weapons, and systems. Since I could easily kill any pirates I ran I did not see much reason for upgrading those kinds of systems. There were also a few, like the cargo hold, that were not available during the play test.
There are some events you can see from the system map. You can even plot routes around any troubled areas. For one trade mission, I ended up needing to do that as I hit a pocket of space that took me out of warp and into sub-light speeds. The engine I had was not powerful enough to go through a certain section of space.
There are also some what is going on areas of the game. As a way to reduce some of the stress from space, I could put hot cups on the back of my character. The only thing more strange than that is that I had to pay some of my hard-earned space money to do so.
Final Thoughts
With this just being a play test, I'm going to assume certain things, like events occur a lot more than they are expected when the game releases. As that seemed to be what the developer was mostly looking to test, at least when I was playing during the test. It seems like other aspects of the game had been turned back down that were being tested in the first week. If things were a bit less of an occurrence, I could see it being more fun. As it stands, it was just way too much going on for the trip. I could not go anywhere without pirates and multiple other events, even when it was a rather short distance.
Information
Screenshots were taken, and content was written by @Enjar about Stellar Trader.
Disclosure: Experiences written about were during early play testing.
