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sonic-spirit · 2 years ago

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OKAY, STAR STABLE, LET’S GOOOO!!!

So a week ago I started playing the MMO Star Stable Online. Which by all accounts is an awful idea, because it’s a clunky, overpriced trainwreck. And I am having so much fun.

Okay, maybe “fun” is a bit strong. I absolutely can’t recommend it. But I’ve got a long history of, “It’s terrible, and I LOVE IT,” with various media, and this is falling firmly into that category.

:readmore:

The premise of Star Stable (or SSO, but I’m gonna be stubborn and call it Star Stable) is that you are a girl (and you can only be a girl) who’s gone out to summer riding camp, because you both really like horses, and because you feel a faint mystical draw. And like, haven’t we all, right? So you’re this girl, you’re assigned a horse that the stable later “sells” to you (your only free horse) because their owners moved far away and don’t really come out to them anymore so it all works out for everyone.

You create your avatar from the super limited stock hairstyles and makeup designs that look like Bratz rejects, pick your horse’s coat color and name, and away you go into a janky World of Warcraft clone of your horse girl dreams! And no joke, apparently the original name of the company that owns Star Stable was “World of Horsecraft”. So yeah, loooots of very WoW game mechanics without some of the quality of life improvements that that game received over the last 10 years.

Cuz yeah, Star Stable Online was initially released in October 2011 (in Sweden, it went worldwide in June 2012). It was also actually a follow-up to the Starshine Legacy, Star Academy, and Star Stable games…but I’m still gonna be stubborn and keep calling it Star Stable.

Like most games targeted at horse girls it’s full of superficialness and jank. But it actually has some interesting story going on and isn’t just about putting bows on vaguely unsettling horse models! It’s a win!

I really like the story so far. There’s some evil industrialists doing shady shit for real estate schemes and environmentally terrible oil drilling, and ALSO the EEEEVIL horse girls with EEEEVIL horses, naturally called the Dark Riders.

And DUDE. So like, I understand that the long-time fanbase is upset about the character re-designs and apparently there were some personality changes too, and that absolutely sucks on characters you know and are attached to. But as someone coming in from the outside?

WHAT a glow-up. Like, new style Sabine has SEVERE dark mommy dom energy. And fuuuuck, those arms, tho. Like, that’s not even usually my thing, and I’m all damn. ^_^ Though I do like pretty boys that can beat me up, so pretty girls that can beat me up is not really a stretch.

And like, LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL CANONICAL LESBIAN! I love her! I love Alex!

So yeah. I do see the charm of the old art style, especially the more of the 2D art I see. But the new 3D models are SOOOO NICE. Just A+

But not all the characters have been updated yet! Or even most!

Ya wanna see Mario next to Ydris?

Because there’s a scene where you ABSOLUTELY do, and it’s hilarious.

^_^ Yeh, Ydris is on his way to Tumblr daddy-itude, if not there already.

Fun fact: The first NPC you meet, Justin Moorland? NOT ONE OF THE UPDATED CHARACTERS YET.

Look at him. Glorious.

So yeah. The player avatars are apparently set to be getting an update soon-ish, like, there’s a closed beta going on, apparently, but yeah. Not there yet.

So here’s my dude:

Yeah. It’s a whole thing.

Sooo, I don’t love that you have to be a girl. Like, there’s just no option, and the game’s writers have stated it’s not gonna change—that the story is about a young girl, and since plenty of games are locked as stories about dudes they don’t see a problem with locking you in on that.

So, if you happen to be a transmasc enby, as a very non-random example, you get to run around a game world with everyone calling you she/her, girl, my darling, that sort of thing. Like, for me it mostly just feels not great, I don’t mind the rapidly over-affectionate endearments people throw out to girls, though I’d rather do that while calling me a boy, but it could def be p triggering to some trans guys. If the game stokes any kind of interest and you’re transfem, though, I could see it really scratching a nice gender place.

But yeah. I don’t see the push-back to games that lock your character in place as a boy being to lock you in place as a girl instead, actually. The real push back is options. Give us options. Let us swim in the wild ocean of gender, adrift in ways only we can imagine. Give us some customization when that’s already the point of the game. We’re not playing as Sally from Stockholm. We’re playing as You, the MC. Hell, I’d honestly be good with the same character model but you can get different (ie flat chest) looks with clothing items and a field to enter in pronouns to be plugged in by the system. Bonus if you let me select endearments I’m okay with. Like, I’m stoked they’re gonna be updated the avatar models, and when that happens I SERIOUSLY hope they include build options, and honestly when they do roll it out I’m gonna have way higher standards than I would about simply making the current models easier for trans and nonbinary players to live with. I’m mostly keeping my requests to NPC interactions, because it’s a lot easier to edit text than character models.

That being said, locking the hair and makeup options behind the “This is the in-game currency you can only get with real, actual money,” is scummy as hell.

Which brings me to the predatory aspects of the game, and why I absolutely shouldn’t be playing it, and why I absolutely will not recommend it, no matter how much I enjoy/end up enjoying it.

Shit costs mad money. And it only gets worse from there.

There’s two ways to play: An $80 lifetime membership, or an $8 per month subscription. There’s subscription bundles, but they still charge you the same $8 per month, just in larger chunks. There is a trial free-play up to level 5, and I got to level 6 on it before running out of anything to do. Because it strangles you down not by kicking you out of the game when you hit the level 5 cap, but by not opening up new parts of the map, and by not generating additional quests in the places you can get to—despite there still being plenty of local quests you’d otherwise have access to, or even by giving you the quests you can’t complete because you’re locked into the first two or so areas. There’s also a one-time-option two-week membership for $4, which is what I’m currently on.

Because although I’ve all but made up my mind…I’m still making up my mind. Money’s tight. Is this worth the $80 to me?

Because I am not giving them a cent after that.

See, the most predatory part of the game is that there’s two currencies: Jorvik shillings, gained through quests and training, and Star Coins, made of real actual dollars (or krona, cuz Sweden). And there’s two ways to get Star Coins. You receive 100 per week in an “allowance” through your paid subscription (this is also true for the lifetime membership), or through buying them.

That’s it. No quest rewards, no ability to transfer Jorvik shillings into Star Coins, nothing. And though some items can be paid for by either Jorvik shillings or Star Coins, many items can’t. And guess where the horses land.

STAR COINS, BAY-BEEEEE! That’s right, you can get more, newer, shiny horses to love and play with. To bond with and ride. To become overly attached to the pixels on the screen cuz roleplay, bay-bee! And all it costs is a mere 900 Star Coins. Sometimes more.

Yeah. And again, you can ONLY use Star Coins to get horses, AND they’ve been releasing new horses every month.

Like, the point of the game’s story is not to collect all the horses…but it’s absolutely where the company wants their players to be looking at and thinking about. They promote and pump out these bright, shiny, beautiful things, and people snatch them up.

It takes 9 weeks to save up for one horse. Nearly 2 months. Unless you buy more Star Coins.

And it’s not just new horses that are locked behind a paywall. Remember how I complained about avatar customization? Well it’s BACK, bay-bee! You can change your avatar’s hair and makeup. You can buy new looks and swap them out. For Star Coins. And only Star Coins. Wanna change your home stable—the place you store the inventory you don’t carry in your bag, and the place you keep your horses, go back to to switch out your character customization, etc? Real Money Coins. Want to expand the number of slots in your stable? I think that’s also Real Money Coins, but I could be misremembering…it’s to their advantage to keep slots costing, but cheaper.

Everything you buy has the Real Money Coin option. Not everything has the shillings option. And again, some of the choicest stuff is behind that meat grinder, and wouldn’t it just be easier to just pay, rather than waiting weeks and weeks?

Yeah. It’s gross.

Holy micro-transactions, Batman! But the hole goes deeper.

So, there’s a mobile app. Well, technically there’s two, cuz the game itself was ported to mobile in 2020. You can do it, but I don’t recommend it. The clunky play is even worse on a touch screen, it’s pretty resource-intensive and suuuper drained my battery, and heated up my phone a significant amount. So yeah, you can. But it’s p bad.

But they also have a mobile app that’s designed to be a mobile app, and not just a 10-year-old game ported over to run on different hardware. It’s Horse Tamagotchi. That’s it. It’s just a Tamagotchi game, but horses.

Changing my thinking from “Horse raising sim” to “Horse Tamagotchi” is how I kept from bouncing right off, by the way.

You get a foal of your choice from the fairly large selection of horse breeds and raise it up to an adult. Once you get it up to level 10, you can use your Real Money Coins to transfer your new baby to the Real Game. As a level one. Of 15.

To be fair, it only takes three days to max level them, and you could probably do it quicker if you really wanted to. But why would you want to unless you already had the coins ready for transfer? Nothing you do after they reach cap is gonna affect them going over. Like, there’s a happiness meter, so theoretically that might transfer, but this is a game that dumps your quest log when you log out, so I doubt it.

Yeah, I didn’t mention that yet. If you have an in-progress quest when you log out or lose connection, no you didn’t, you haven’t accepted it yet, actually. So remember what you were up to, and don’t take more quests than you’ll finish in one session. This is honestly easy to do, most of the quests are short, and often are, running between two places or fetch quests. But it does go against most people’s WoW-taught impulse. I’m just lucky I started the game intending to pick it clean of content, and began with only taking one quest at a time. It’s been more enjoyable than grabbing every quest I encountered ever was, and helped me actually follow the story, unlike some of my WoW playing, but yeah. Not exactly the way you expect to play an MMO.

So back to Horse Tamagotchi. You get your foal, “Play minigames” with it (swipe up-down-left-right, drag and drop, or move your finger slow or fast over it to Do A Thing), level until it gets tired, then stop. There’s a gardening mechanic to get treats you can also sell for coins, and some dress-up and decorate mechanics that mostly cost Real Money. You can have up to 3 stalls for free, after that it’s Real Money. Like I said, there’s a decently wide selection of horse breeds, and some of the coat colors are app exclusives—so the only way to get That Breed in That Color. And different colored horse is what the community is About, soooo. Yeah.

I picked an Appaloosa, a Paso Fino, and a Welsh Pony, cuz there’s pony races only ponies can do, and I want in. My absolute favorite horse breed, cuz I’m basic like that, is the Arabian. And that’s not in the app (or possibly not in the app yet). So I picked my second favorite, a cool gaited breed I was also planning to buy in game eventually, and a pony for those sweet, sweet pony races. And I think all three might have app-exclusive coat colors? So that’s neat.

But that makes 3 more horses I’d like to bring into the main game. That’s 18 weeks of play, plus another 10 to get an Arabian because you bet your ass I’m getting my favorite breed, and Arabs cost 950 Real Monies, cuz they special. So that’s nearly 6 months for all these horses, and for me to either impulsively break down and lay out the money OR(and) get bored and drop the obsession entirely.

Chaos, and all this got kicked off because I learned about Alicia Online, a fully free horse MMO that I can’t play on my computer cuz it’s a Mac, but could totally ask to install on and borrow one of my partners’. I’m very smooth.

And all of this, and I’m over here like, “Damn. I wish I could be a horse trainer.”

#star stable #star stable online #sso #games #mmo #mmorpg #what am i doing with my time #horse video game

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